For a brief moment I felt wary about
Merete Mueller and Christopher Smith's TINY: A Story About Living
Small. I was fearing the worst case scenario. The set-up of the
documentary involves Christopher and his girlfriend Merete attempting
to create their own tiny house. A tiny house/small house is a
dwelling of about 100 to 200 square feet that contains all the
necessities to live. Christopher admits that he's never attempted
anything like this before, but he's a little too confident about his
abilities at the start. It usually takes people a year or two to make
their own tiny house, but he thinks he can do it in a summer. The
early stages of construction that are caught on film reveal the
difficulty of the whole endeavor. The worst case scenario I feared
was this: that TINY would devolve into a vanity project by and
about well-meaning bumblers who've glommed on to a popular movement
for simple living.
Thankfully TINY avoided that
trap. There's very little (if anything) that's vain about the
documentary or its makers. At heart, both Christopher and Merete
believe in the larger ideas espoused by those in the tiny house
movement and they take their project seriously. What seemed at first
like misplaced hubris was really just a kind of barely contained
enthusiasm, sort of like a kid who can't wait to finish building a
toy so he or she can finally have fun with it.
Much of the tiny house movement has its
intellectual roots in Henry David Thoreau's Walden, that
seminal transcendentalist work about connecting with nature and the
idea of simple living. Regardless Thoreau's actual circumstances
while at Walden Pond (e.g., he routinely dropped off his laundry at
his mom's place a mile or two up the road), there's something to be
said about the joy of simple living and being able to disconnect from
too much stuff and too much clutter. There's also the ability to
reconnect with the land. Christopher bought a huge plot of open space
where he wants to eventually settle this tiny house, though since it's
on wheels, it can technically be hitched to a truck and taken wherever zoning laws permit.
What interesting about this idea of
simplifying life is the kind of sophisticated innovations that tiny
house adherents have applied to the design of their homes. Merete and
Christopher interview a number of people who live in tiny houses, and
all of them have smartly made the most out of the space they have.
Tables and other sorts of furniture can be modified or stowed away,
surfaces serve multiple purposes, rooms (or really, room) are
multi-function. The movement is as much about thinking simple as it
is thinking smart. There may be a connection between the way
constrained writing techniques lead to greater literary creativity
(e.g., the Oulipo crowd) and how limited space and materials leads to
a more creative use of available space and materials.
As we watch Christopher and Merete
struggle with building their own tiny house, there's a dawning
understanding about the work they're doing. On the surface, they're
just getting better at working with their hands. How many of us
really know basic carpentry? And how many of us are motivated enough
to try to learn and risk the failure? If TINY had been a
vanity project, there would be no sense of growth in these sorts of
actions or the risk of having to learn anything. What comes through
in the film is that in making a tiny house, the builders aren't just
creating a compact and functional living space; they're also
exploring ideas of home and place, and what space means and what
space can be, and also what materials are and where they come from.
In the end, TINY is about the
various forms that informed ownership and informed action can take. I
couldn't help but think I was watching people in the process of
discovering a better way of living, and it didn't necessarily have to
do with limited space so much as improving the quality of available
space. To really engage with a dwelling like the people in the film
have done opens up ways to live a little bit wiser and more
responsibly than before.
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