Tiny Furniture · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A length of construction pipe sits on a street, the way pipe does before it goes into the ground. Aura climbs inside it with Keith, the chef from the restaurant where she has just started hosting, and they have sex in it. Nothing on the soundtrack tells you how to take this. The film plays dry for long stretches, and no music arrives to sort the sweet from the sordid. What is left is the address: two people in their twenties conducting their private life inside city infrastructure, because between them they do not have a room.

Rooms, and whose they are, is the actual subject of Tiny Furniture. Aura comes back from film school to her mother's TriBeCa loft with a degree, a YouTube video of herself in a fountain, and no plan. She loses her bedroom to her sister, sleeps on the sofa, and ends the film in her mother's bed. Every space she occupies was composed by somebody else.

Deleuze's two cinema books turn on a single break. For decades movies ran a circuit he called the movement-image: someone perceives a situation, acts on it, the situation changes, and the cutting exists to keep that chain tight. After the war the circuit slackened. Characters kept landing in situations they could see perfectly well and do nothing about. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image, and it is the exact condition of this film. Aura acts constantly. She takes the job. She lets Jed sleep on her sofa. She goes into the pipe. None of it converts into consequence. The people around her never assemble into a plot either: Charlotte, Jed, Keith, her sister, her mother, each one a weak link that leads nowhere.

This is worth insisting on, because the standard complaint about the film (nothing happens, she's passive, she's unlikable) is written in the grammar of the older regime, where a protagonist earns her screen time by changing something. Deleuze's postwar name for what replaces plot is the voyage-balade, the trip or stroll that transforms nothing. The episodes here are joined with almost no connective tissue, which reads as shapelessness the first time and as a truthful account of an unemployed summer the second. Lance Edmands lets scenes run past their dramatic usefulness into embarrassment, holding the seconds after a line lands badly and nobody rescues it. Deleuze's word for that held remainder is dead time, temps mort. It isn't slack cutting. It's where the film keeps its meaning. And because there is little shot/reverse-shot, with conversations playing out in sustained two-shots and wides, you are never handed a cutting rhythm to hide inside. You watch at the same distance she does. She has become what Deleuze called a seer: someone who registers her situation accurately and cannot act on it.

Bazin's defense of neorealism rested on the uncut frame. Let a scene run whole and deep and you keep the ambiguity of the real intact instead of instructing the audience. Dunham and cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes inherit that contract and aim it somewhere Bazin didn't: not at a street, at a designed interior. What their long frames preserve is not raw life. It's an arrangement.

Because the loft is an artwork. Lipes shoots it as a white gallery box: locked-off tripod frames, clean horizontals, doorways used to frame rooms inside rooms, figures placed small in large volumes of empty architecture. Two debts are specific here. From Jeanne Dielman, the frontal camera locked at a fixed height, holding domestic action long past narrative need, with figures seen through doorways into the next room. Akerman used that grammar to measure a woman's labor; Dunham uses it to measure a woman with nothing to do. From Interiors, Gordon Willis's treatment of a monochrome designed apartment as a composed gallery, bodies blocked against blank wall so the décor carries the family's status and its chill. Deleuze has a name for a space that has stopped functioning as a setting for action: the any-space-whatever. It arrives here in two flavors. The loft is the empty kind, white and hard-surfaced, gorgeous to photograph and comforting to no one. The pipe is the disconnected kind, a fragment of street torn loose from its use and pressed into service as a bedroom. Nobody in this film says the word class. It's in the walls.

The title is hanging on those walls. Laurie Simmons's photographs of miniature furniture, dolls posed in domestic dioramas, appear as objects in the loft: perfectly composed little rooms, behind a daughter who cannot arrange her own. That is what Deleuze means by a symbol, the one object in which a film's organizing relation condenses. And watch where Aura sleeps, because the film tracks her decline as a furniture problem rather than a psychological one. Bedroom, sofa, mother's bed. Deleuze called a posture that exposes a social relation rather than a feeling a gest. Aura in her mother's bed is not a scene about love. It's a housing outcome.

Then the strangest thing about the film, which is also the cheapest: the mother is Dunham's mother, the sister is her sister, the loft is their loft. The performances land a half-beat off, and you cannot decide whether that flatness is the real social register of this milieu or non-actors concentrating. The film never settles it. Deleuze called that kind of undecidability crystalline, the actual thing and its played double reflecting each other with no way to say which came first. He also had a word, fabulation, for people caught in the act of legending themselves, which is what the fountain video is and what this whole household is doing on camera. He meant it for peoples with no representation, and there is a live argument about whether a TriBeCa loft qualifies. Fair enough. The film's own answer is to make the loft the joke.

What it did afterward is out of all proportion to its size. Shot on a Canon 7D for a reported sixty-five thousand dollars, it became one of the proofs that DSLR was a real acquisition format, and it did that by refusing the format's temptations: stopped down, mostly locked off, whole rooms legible, none of the shallow-focus blur that marked amateur work in 2010. IFC put it out day-and-date. Criterion inducted it in 2012. Judd Apatow saw it, and Girls followed; it is, in effect, the pilot that got made as a feature. The craft scattered outward too, Lipes carrying that framing to Martha Marcy May Marlene and Manchester by the Sea, Edmands to Bluebird.

The older claim, running from Funny Ha Ha back through Walking and Talking, Kicking and Screaming and Metropolitan, was that the drifting, articulate, unemployed young person deserved a camera and no judgment. Dunham's addition was to turn the camera on the room and let the room do the accusing.

So watch it again, and watch the walls. The question it leaves open is whether anyone gets to compose a life inside a frame they inherited. The film doesn't know. It just holds the shot until you notice the furniture.