Duplass & Duplass: The Puffy Chair (2005)

Road trips often have an expansive, panoramic vibe, which might not seem to sync with the micro-indie aspirations of mumblecore. Yet that’s exactly what occurs in the Duplass brothers’ first feature, which follows Josh (Mark Duplass), his girlfriend Emily (Katie Aselton) and his brother Rhett (Rhett Wilkins) from New York to Georgia. Although that’s a somewhat epic scope, the point of the trip is to pick up an old chair that they’ve bought on eBay for their father’s birthday – in other words, a typical mumblecore fetish, one of the numberless discarded, kitsch objects that leach anything like expansive time or space out of the genre’s mise-en-scenes. As an epic of microscopic proportions, then, it’s more interested in the characters’ movement around minute spaces than in the romantic vistas of the road, if only because the film stock tends to be most resolved in close-ups or extreme close-ups, in something like Sherman’s March reimagined for the digital camcorder. Not only are the trio indefinitely delayed in the small town en route to Atlanta where they pick up the chair, but the film’s full of their micro-explorations of transitory or disposable spaces, most memorably in an extended set piece that sees them trying to hide in the back of their van in a motel carpark. In that sense, the road is more something that moves by them, stranding them at motels and gas stations, part of the vast slipstream that floods mumblecore whiteness with white noise. And, perhaps because it’s so heavily improvised, the film moves further than any previous mumblecore outing into something like a white sociolect, somewhere between an impoverished hippy lexicon and washed-out faux-bromanticism, until there’s hardly a conversation that’s not liberally punctuated by “dude” or “man.” At one level, there’s something cloyingly insular about that – it’s almost predictable that the only non-white characters are a pair of illegal Honduran workers that Josh barters to get his precious chair reupholstered – but, then again, it’s such a minor cinema that it inevitably concedes the decline of whiteness, if only by offering it as a subcultural boutique niche. Bleached by all the voices that aren’t there, it ends as incidentally and abruptly as it begins – like most road trips, really – haunting precisely because it does so little to assuage its own fragility, or to ensure any kind of survival for posterity.