The post-grad vacuum in TINY FURNITURE

Tiny Furniture is a movie about a 22-year-old woman (Aura) returning home to live with her mother and younger sister in New York after graduating from college with a degree in film studies. Aura’s biggest life accomplishment is a stupid YouTube video with a couple hundred hits that becomes, almost mockingly, part of someone’s art installation. Her college boyfriend has dumped her. She is aimless and completely unmotivated.

I graduated with my film degree in 2008, spent a year at home desperately hoping to escape my post-graduate life, settled for going back to school in 2009 and have since returned home for the second time to ostensibly find a job so I can move away from home and be where I want to be. Aura doesn’t have as much experience with post-grad misery as I’d like to think I have–throughout Tiny Furniture, she’s experiencing the most terrible part of it, which perversely feels not so bad because of the complete absence of things like goals to not achieve, friends to disappoint, anything really meaningful to desecrate. The vacuum of her existence is reflected on the clean white surfaces that consume her artist mother’s loft apartment/work studio.

Throughout the film, Aura doesn’t so much try to fill this vacuum as she does merely wallow in it–a nothing job as a hostess, superficial friendships with other vacuums…no harm, no foul, nothing. Aura never wants to feel inspired because to feel inspired would mean feeling connected to something, and meaningful connection, even the kind that scars you indelibly, is something Aura  just couldn’t stand. She is so privately humiliated by her post-grad life that she keeps the humiliation away from even her lowest level of consciousness, but it’s plainly there for the audience and those who really care about her–her family–to see.

It could just be that Aura and 2008 me were not adequately prepared for the realities of a life disconnected from school. In a way, it’s like being ripped away from a placenta, albeit one that doesn’t nourish you so much as poison you with the idea that one “good” thing (education, a relationship, a YouTube video with a couple hundred hits) logically leads to the next good thing, the one that is really good. This kind of film is often described as being about a person searching for definition in his/her life, but I think that Aura is rather confronted with definition and meaning and just refuses to rise to its challenge, instead becoming a black hole to suck it all away. It wasn’t until the second time I had to come back home that I realized I wasn’t the one in need definition; rather, it was all of those god-damned clean white surfaces that were screaming to be filled in.