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As we approach the first anniversary of the creation of this blog�the most popular octopus-centric movie blog on the whole of the internet�I look back with nostalgia on the circumstances that led me to launch it in April of 2012. I had only been out of college for a few months and I didn�t know what to do with myself (I considered teaching English abroad, like so many before me, but when I went to the Teach Abroad section of the Study Abroad center at the University of Minnesota, the �advisor� there directed me to their website and didn�t have much else to say). Now, around this time, there was a great deal of buzz around up-and-coming wunderkind Lena Dunham, who is about my age, and whose second directorial/scriptorial (to coin a word) outing, Tiny Furniture, had just been released on Criterion Collection DVD and who was about to launch her own show on HBO, Girls, which has since given birth to a thousand post-structuralist dissertations.
I should admit right off the bat that I haven�t actually seen Girls. I don�t watch much TV�I don�t mean that to sound smug, it�s just a fact that I�m stating�and when I do watch TV programs, I prefer to watch them online. Now, shows of which I�m quite fond, like Archerand Portlandia, are both streaming on Netflix. Girls, alas, is not. It is available on Amazon, for two dollars an episode, but it would pain me to spend that kind of money on it. Also, I could get it on DVD from Netflix, but then it would clog up my queue and I�d feel compelled to watch it in a rush so as to could un-clog the queue, and that wouldn�t be fun. When I watch Archer, for instance, I typically watch one episode in an evening, after watching a movie. This is just a matter of personal preference.
Ok, so that�s why I haven�t watched Girls. But let�s get back to April of 2012 and to Tiny Furniture, which seems to have been eclipsed in the popular discourse by the cultural supremacy of Dunham�s TV show. I watched Tiny Furniture at just the right (or perhaps wrong) time in my life. Allow me to elaborate. The film follows a recent college graduate name of Aura (Dunham), who returns to her mother�s house after getting a useless liberal arts degree at Oberlin (I too have a useless liberal arts degree; we have so much in common!) And she rapidly realizes that her degree is shit, and that the only jobs available to her are the kinds of jobs that Iwent to college for the express purpose of avoiding. And all her dreams of artistic achievement and eventual glory look like they�re going to drown in a flood of day-to-day practicality and banality. And she becomes depressed. As she should.
In retrospect, the liberal arts college experience is largely a waste of time. In a stagnant economy in a dying empire, a degree that provides you with no practical skills is going to leave you woefully ill-equipped for worldly pursuits (I don�t say real worldpursuits, because college is plenty �real�). But at least college gives you a sense of purpose. When you�re in college, you�re constantly meeting artificial deadlines and accomplishing assigned tasks, all in pursuit of the concrete goal of graduation. The college student has a sense of direction and her/his life has a meaning. Upon graduation, you are faced with the existentialist dilemma of how to make your own meanings and your own goals.
So I watched Tiny Furniture and I saw poor, unworldly Aura flail about in sea of directionless despair, with her worthless degree and her friends with their equally worthless degrees and their pursuits of menial employment for which they�re over-qualified, but no one gives a shit. And I wept and I thought, �Jesus Christ, I need to get out of here!� And thank Christ, Tiny Furniture does provide a glimmer of hope. Aura is not completely fucked; we know that she made short, conceptual art films in college, and near the end of Tiny Furniture, one of these short films gets included in a local gallery show. So it�s quite possible that Aura will, in spite of everything, make it in the world of art, just as Lena Dunham has achieved levels of success that are almost obscene, and that are the envy of ever other liberal arts major (and she was even kind enough to provide acting careers to the daughters of Brian Williams and David Mamet, although I�m sure their parentage had nothing to do with their success, just as Dunham�s parents, who are both prominent artists, had no role in her rise to fame. Forgive me, that�s just the bitterness talking, I actually really do love and admire Lena Dunham).
But back to the �Jesus Christ!� moment. I saw Aura creating things, trivial though they may have been in their own right (a video from Dunham�s actual college career, in which she approached a fountain on the Oberlin campus clad only in her underwear and proceeded to brush her teeth; Yoko Ono would have been proud). And I said to myself, �Well shit, I can create things. And I needto create things. Now.� And I wrote what can best be described as an ur-Octopus essay, in which I held forth on Tiny Furniture and what it says about contemporary American youth, and I talked about the opportunities available to us, and how, back in the 1930�s, a young man could go off to join the Lincoln Brigade and fight in the Spanish Civil War, and how nowadays the only internationalist movements are distinctly Islamist in character, and how various Salafist groups may be fighting in Syria, but there is, alas, no modern-day equivalent of the Lincoln Brigade, etc, etc, I said some other things, it was like all the blog posts to come. But it didn�t seem printable, it was more a sketch than a finished product. Luckily, I had a finished product on hand: my review of Ali Reza Raisian�s film The Deserted Station, which I had seen a few weeks previously and for which I had written a review for experimental purposes, because I had never written a film review before. And so I created the blog (I�d had the title Say a Prayer for the Octopus in mind already, I just needed something to apply it to) and I posted the Raisian review, and now we come full circle (like the Ouroborus serpent devouring its own tail) and we can celebrate one year of Say a Prayer for the Octopus. Forgive me for indulging in personal reminiscences like this, but I am prey to nostalgia, as I suspect most of us are.
