Revisiting Tiny Furniture, on the Eve of my Tiny Furniture Period

Since I’ve been home, I’ve avoided watching two particular movies that continue to pop up on HBO, I think because they’re chasing me down. One is Noah Baumbach’s first film, Kicking and Screaming (not the one with Will Farrell and the tracksuit), which features a group of college grads who stand around in their apartment and do little else. The other is Tiny Furniture, a movie I first watched when I was 17 after reading a New Yorker profile of Lena Dunham.

For those who are unfamiliar, Tiny Furniture is Lena Dunham’s precursor to her HBO series Girls, which is slated to end in 2017. The protagonist Aura (played by Dunham) returns home after graduating from Oberlin with little planned for her future. She begins hanging out with her free-spirited and egotistical childhood friend (Jemima Kirke), welcomes a nihilistic YouTube star into her home as a platonic bedmate (Alex Karpovsky), gets a job as a restaurant hostess and not-so-quietly panics as she approaches the rest of her life.

Most of the film takes place in Dunham’s actual environment, shot in her mother’s apartment in Tribeca, with most of the characters played by actual figures in her life. Her mother and sister play Aura’s mother and sister, and Jemima Kirke was Dunham’s childhood friend. The plot itself borrows heavily from Dunham’s early twenties. Overall, the film feels personal, a peek into the neuroses of a young woman on the verge of falling apart or becoming herself, maybe both.

In one of the film’s last scenes, Aura climbs in bed with her mother and tells her about life, about how scared she is, about her shame. It’s one of the first times Aura allows herself to be truly vulnerable with the only person with whom she hadn’t been. Her mother, with complete calm, tells Aura that she will be far more successful than she ever was. You can feel her relief, and more importantly, even though you hate Aura at certain moments, you believe her mother.

I remember watching Tiny Furniture, turning off the TV, and crying because I felt that someone had spoken to my experience: simultaneously screaming for attention and apologizing for your behavior.

I watched Kicking and Screaming after a podcaster compared the film to Tiny Furniture; I notice men tend to compare Dunham to successful, maladjusted male filmmakers (Noah Baumbach, Woody Allen), maybe because the field is dominated by men, or maybe because they need a frame of reference that fits within their diet of media-that-concerns-them. I love Noah Baumbach movies and I continue to love Woody Allen movies against my better judgment.

Still, it seems unfair to pass off a woman’s identity as an artist as a replica of a male predecessor. It fits a trend of disregarding the so-called self-involved white feminists I call peers and idols. We’re hated by pretty much everyone at this point, so we at least have each other and our tiny internet following.

Since my first viewing of Tiny Furniture, I became a quiet devotee, so thankful for a voice that resonated as an awkward, neurotic, somewhat overweight artist that hadn’t quite decided on a medium. I was a young woman who still climbed in bed with her mother, who paradoxically became the vocal feminist doormat for East Coast egotists, who often attributed too much to a “sensitive” nature I rarely addressed in a serious way. Overall, I took comfort in the fact this woman understood the humor in her seriousness, the entitlement of her self-proclaimed catastrophe; not having everything together was nowhere near the crisis she thought it was. I needed that reality check as I agreed to attend my “safety” school, feeling like a failure for no good reason. (I should note that my four years at BU were unbelievably rewarding, and I resent 18-year-old-me for being such a snob.)

This December, almost four years after that first viewing, I was a senior again, about to take a step into a blurry unknown with frustration and no “next steps” in sight. I was at home for the break, spending my days on the leather couch of my parent’s house, trying to focus on anything other than what to do now.

And there was Tiny Furniture, popping up again and again in my cable guide as I spent my evenings shooting the shit with insomnia, laughing as I continued to change the channel.

I watched it again; of course I did. It resonated as much as it always had, perhaps more now. I could put my own names to characters, heard my mother’s voice echo lines recited by Lena’s mother, and overall, could see myself sitting in a pile of my own unfinished projects and The Bell Jar’s rotting figs of life paths, feeling stereotypically Sylvia Plath and Lena Dunham, and not very Noah Baumbach at all.

I did notice one particularly satisfying detail, however — Alex Karpovsky’s Nihilistic Cowboy sitting next to Lena Dunham in bed reading a paperback by Woody Allen.

I think this is important for the same reason Kicking and Screaming is a different film from Tiny Furniture, for the same reason I can’t seem to watch the former and continue to love the latter, for the same reason Noah Baumbach receives so little claims of self-involvement or entitlement or privilege compared to Dunham. The filmmaker and writer speaks to me not only as a millennial, not only as a young adult with post-collegiate malaise, not only as an obnoxious privileged kid. Lena Dunham speaks to me as a woman, which is still a profound experience that dramatically alters the experience of not knowing what you’re doing. I cling to Tiny Furniture as a promise.

When you’re a young adult woman, being lost isn’t being a solipsist. You could perhaps call it being an artist, but that’s often prefaced with “pretentious” or “talentless” or “self-important.” When you’re a young adult woman, being lost is considered a character flaw, or worse: a predetermined characteristic of your gender. Finding something artistically valuable in this period of directionless angst is seen as sentimental by men and whiny by everyone else. Being a young adult woman is a particular type of hell, because if you hate yourself, you’re loathed by everyone else, but if you’re successful… well I don’t know, I guess everyone loves you. But how hard is it to be a successful young woman these days? And if you are, how quickly do faceless voices tell you to get humble fast.

Woody Allen wasn’t humble. Neither was Noah Baumbach.

Thank you, Lena Dunham, for being a voice of a gender and a generation. Thank you for continuing to leave pieces of art like breadcrumbs for those of us drinking opium tea in the dark a few miles back. Thank you for not listening to everyone who tells you to stop. Thank you for your relentless humanity — sometimes, it’s hard to remember there are others out there.

And thank you for picking up a camera at 24, and telling everyone you know that you didn’t necessarily have it together. I’m trying to do that myself, and I’m crossing my fingers it’s an investment that pans out.

I’m the one lying next to you in bed, the way you did with your mother, and I’m dying for you to tell me that I’ll be successful. I’m using your art as stepping stones to a point where maybe I’ll kind of figure it out.