Here’s my top ten overbearing mothers in film for Grolsch Film Works, and what a grizzly bunch they are! The wonderful Maysles’ brothers documentary Grey Gardens didn’t make the top ten, but I figure any excuse to post some stills is good by me.
This first feature by Lena Dunham is a frank and hilarious look at the self-promotion and solipsism of Gen-Y as it graduates and tries to find An Occupation. Tiny Furniture (2010) follows Aura (played by then fresh out of college Lena Dunham), a 22 year-old recent film graduate who breaks up with her “male feminist” college boyfriend, moves back to the Tribeca loft she shares with her artist mother Siri (played by her actual artist/photographer mother Laurie Simmons) and precocious sister (again actual sister Grace Dunham), and falls into a “post-graduate delirium” of crap jobs and crappier relationships. This may be the film’s problem – if the thought of watching the quarter-life crisis of a small group of ultra-liberal New York narcissists has you reaching for your gun, this may not be your chai latte. However, Dunham is as aware of the minutiae of Aura’s problems as you are, as evidenced by the comically honest send-up of so many hipster fads, and the title Tiny Furniture, which describes Siri’s occupation of photographing miniatures, but also works as a metaphor to suggest that this is not a film about big or serious problems. If Tiny Furniture were a hashtag, it would be #whitegirlproblems.
What Tiny Furniture so wonderfully sends up is the shallowness of online fame, and the anonymity of online eyes quick to critique; when Aura falls for Youtube sensation Jed the “Nietschian [sic] Cowboy” (played in a hilariously slimy manner by Alex Karpovsky), Aura notes that “he’s a little bit famous”, which Ashlynn (Amy Seimetz) undercuts with “in a, like, internet kind of way”. Dunham’s knowingness reveals elements of youthful paranoia. Everything is parodied, most obviously in playing a version of herself as the lead character, but also by using her own family and liberal background, and in pastiching her own short films. Dunham achieved online notoriety on Youtube through her 2007 short film The Fountain in which she strips off and brushes her teeth in a fountain at liberal arts college Oberlin in Ohio. “I saw that your dyslexic-stripper video got, like, 400 hits!” drawls the irritating “monologist” (Amy Seimetz) at a party, itself a send-up of Dunham’s 2007 short called Hooker on Campus. The motto, which Dunham may or may not be critiquing, comes from fucked-up and vulnerable arts brat Charlotte (Jemima Kirby): “You’re just so concerned with having things polished and perfect… Any exposure is good exposure”.
The film (and we) exist in a world where displays of taste and style represent yet another form of hyper-mediated capitalism. As such, the cultural landscape of this film is one where W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz is referenced as easily as Cormac McCarthy, YouTube and Nietzche. This is a world of loft spaces, exuberant tattoos, performance art (“she’s a monologist”), and prescription meds. A potential love-interest is critiqued as “a little speck of granola on a home-made yoghurt” (who’d have thought dairy products and YouTube would come to define a generation?). Dunham both references and gently ironizes this world from the maturing eye of someone getting to grips with understanding it.
Tiny Furniture, much like the mumblecore movement it bears some similarities to in its use of non-actors and real settings is representative of a certain type of film, something Mark Grief would describe in his analysis of hipster culture as “works of art where the tensions of the work revolve around the very old dyad of knowingness and naiveté, adulthood and a child-centred world – but with a radical or vertiginous alternation between the two”. In between revealing all in skimpy underwear, using her own home, friends and family, and pastiching the New York hipster art world where one can seemingly curate a trendy exhibition at the flick of a switch, Dunham alternates between the two polarities which Grief describes: knowingness and naiveté, adulthood and a child-like innocence.
In bandying about references to hipster sociology and liberal arts wankers, I may be risking the danger of making the film sound even more unpleasant than it may already seem. Actually, in Tiny Furniture, the contents of the tin are far better than the label. Though the film’s characters are narcissistic, they are also warm and often likeable, or at least likably dislikable. 90210-by-way-of-Williamsburg’s Charlotte is particularly engaging as ‘Rich Girl with Problems’, and raffish pseudo-intellectual sous-chef Keith is incisively but subtly played by David Call – watching this in the cinema, I was mentally wagging my finger at the screen frantically thinking “yes, oh my god, he is such a type of twat – AHH!!”.
This film may appear to deal in tiny emotional furniture, but the reality is an acutely perceptive look at an admittedly privileged generational sub-strata trying to find its feet, and coming to terms with a changing landscape. In one of the most sharply observed aspects of the film, Aura anxiously compares herself to her mother’s artistic fame. Finding some of her mum’s journals in their comically minimalist white shelving unit, she hopes to find meaning in her mother’s journey at the same age, but instead raids the journal for material for her next YouTube video, in a seemingly symbolic comment on how one generation has adapted from the last. Aura’s desire to create films is believable, but her fluctuation between desire and boredom is frustrating. It is not just feelings of oppression from the past that Aura seems to be reacting to, but a sense of generational indeterminacy. The ‘minutiae’ of this film’s themes have something current to say about what it means to want to create art now, and how the prevalence of ‘hipster culture’ both asserts difference while being a homogenizing force.
This review is featured on Permanent Plastic Helmet film blog.
My “non fulminating, non Daily Mail” review of Nima Nourizadeh’s ‘Project: X’ (2012) for Permanent Plastic Helmet is here. OH MY GOD, BEER PONG!!
Mavis Gary. Any film character who is described by the Daily Mail as a “cold-hearted, scheming sociopath with an unwarranted superiority complex” must have something going for them. And Jason Reitman’s latest anti-hero(ine) in “Young Adult” (2011), played perfectly by a skeletal and snarling Charlize Theron, is a breath of fresh gin. ‘Young Adult’ is the story of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Failing teen ghostwriter, divorcee ex-prom queen and pseudo-alcoholic Mavis Gary decides to return home to small-town Minnesota for a baby shower, in an effort to win back her old flame (Patrick Wilson). The only problem – it’s the old flame’s baby shower, and he’s happily, blissfully married, not that Mavis cares.
The film starts with her slumped frontward on the bed, an empty bottle of wine perched jauntily nearby, while the Kendra Show drones on in the background. Kendra, a young blonde glamour model and notoriously one of Hugh Hefner’s three girlfriends, berates her looks in a high-pitched American monotone. Mavis, who is by all accounts anything but ugly, is shown throughout the film going to great lengths with her beauty regime. Fake wigs, false eyelashes, incredibly painful-looking mani-pedi’s, and eye make up and face slap of Essex-like proportions, are the arsenal to her arse-kicking. So she’s a feminist in falsies? Not quite, not really, well… yes!
Mavis may be a bitch beyond belief, may be entirely narcissistic, is willing to break up a happy marriage and a new family, and uses feminine whiles and chicken fillets (somewhat along the lines of what the dreaded Catherine Hakim argues in her theory of Erotic Capital) to get what she wants. BUT – and here’s where I bat away all the reasons for why she isn’t ready to be nominated for Feminist of the Year: she is a brilliant, truth-speaking, and hilarious kick-ass cow of the greatest order, and what’s more, she does it in a lead role. Mavis tells it like it is – to the surly teenage hotel receptionist, to Buddy’s wife (Elizabeth Reaser), to her mother. She doesn’t take no shit from no one. Just one glacial snare of the lip is enough to freeze oceans of small-town ennui. She is that child-woman that’s never been shown on screen in a world of Adam Sandlers and Mathew McConaugheys. She sleeps around! She drinks buckets! She doesn’t want kids! She says, eats and does what the hell she wants! And often at the detriment of others! She’s a failed writer, a dislikeable gin-soddled wreck, and she’s bloody hilarious. Hell, shouldn’t there be more women on screen farting, eating rubbish and acting like adolescent buffoons who never grew up?
Diablo Cody is one of few people in Hollywood who can truly write a funny female lead (Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo are two others with “Bridesmaids” , which similarly features women screwing up, swearing, drinking and talking about sex (in a way that doesn’t align the act of love with a pair of Manolo Blahniks)). Okay, okay, there was the questionable abortion morality of so-twee-you-could-choke ”Juno”, but aside from the burger phones and anti-folk, Cody gaves us a teenage heroine, sharp as tack, with deadpan humour, high-grade pop culture references, and a guilt-free baby. Diablo, speaking to feminist blog “Women and Hollywood”, said:
“The idea of a cold, unlikeable woman or a woman who is not in control of herself is genuinely frightening to people because it threatens civilization itself or threatens the American family. But I don’t know why people are always willing to accept and even like flawed male characters. We’ve seen so many lovable anti-heroes who are curmudgeons or addicts or bad fathers and a lot of those characters have become beloved icons and I don’t see women allowed to play the same parts. So it was really important to me to try and turn that around”.
Diablo Cody’s prom queen bitch isn’t anything we haven’t seen before. The American prom bitch has ruled over teen flicks for years, most famously in the likes of “Clueless” (1995), “Mean Girls” (2004), and “Jawbreaker” (1999) and is captured in all her bitchy bulimic glory in “Heathers” (1988) – arguably one of the darkest, most surreal, and most hilarious teen films ever, and a heavy influence on Mark Waters’ bitch group The Plastics in “Mean Girls”. Nothing before or since has matched Heathers for its scathing critique of teen angst, American high-school hierarchy and meaningless consumerism. And it is infinitely quotable: “Well, fuck me gently with a chainsaw. Do I look like Mother Theresa?” and “Dear Diary, my teen-angst bullshit now has a body count” – I could go on.
So Mavis Garey is basically Heathers Chandler, but 20 years on, with an escalating drink problem, and a chihuahua. She is what happened to the prom queen who never left high school, reliving old feuds and romantic successes through her career as a ghost-writer for teen fiction series “Waverley Prep” and fantasizing about the romance that was with high-school hunk Buddy Slade. Though the college hicks she mocks haven’t moved on from small-town Minnesota, they have – if Buddy Slade is anything to go by – moved on from high school, forging a new life for themselves, while she remains trapped in the role of perpetual adolescence. The only one who hasn’t – Matt Freehauf (the brilliant Patton Oswalt)– becomes her sidekick. Flawed but loveable, he is both physically handicapped, after a gay hate crime from high school leaves him paralysed and with a bent cock, and psychologically handicapped, unable to get over an accident that happened twenty years ago, and still living with his geeky sister, listening to heavy metal and making bootleg whisky in his garage. I say the last two like they’re bad things: Matt is the ultimate cool geek, revealing impeccable taste in rock t shirts, one-liners and bootleg booze. Mavis and he are the perfect antidote to small-town America and the flawed ideal of the American dream. In Matt’s garage and Mavis’ whisky glass, they are able to transcend all the bullshit, even if, in the case of both, it may not bring lasting happiness.
As the saying goes, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Mavis may be an ex prom queen with a more than questionable morality, but the film suggests, as I see it, that she is just the victim of a bullshit consumer culture where people like the Kardashians and Kendra – a double whammy of krap – are hailed as modern-day icons. It’s no accident that Mavis in down-time dresses like Paris Hilton, with pink trackies, pink hangbags and a yapping dog foetus thing that she carts around along with all that emotional baggage. She’s equally inseparable from her Mac, her gallon of Diet Coke and Kentucky Fried Kendra, and her Iphone. She self-medicates on a diet of junk food, junk shows, and the biggest and most damaging legal drug of all – alcohol. Mavis may be the Big Plastic Bitch, but society around her isn’t doing better.
A shortened version of this review is on The Harker website.
I wrote an article on 50s film “The Best of Everything”, Don Draper’s bookshelves and the “Mad Men Effect” in publishing for The Spectator arts blog. Czech it!
Posted in Comedy, Fashion, Film, Photography
Friend and comedian (in the same sketch comedy group as meself last year), Lawrence has made a brilliant comedy video about the perils of being an arts graduate. Check it out, its brilliant!
Posted in Comedy
One of my favourite Youtube finds, to be watched repeatedly when in need of a comedy pick me up… the background music is spectacular!
Posted in Comedy
I absolutely love this last one, which is a 1966 tourist advertisement for the Bahamas! These images are mainly from my favourite blog Art Skool Damage by Christian Montone. Christian also has a fabulous collection of Flickr photo sets of vintage advertisements, stickers and graphics. The cartoons are from a recently discovered blog Vagabond Sister, and Pammy’s just Pam.
