TheBoyWhoBuiltWalls: On Lena Dunham and the "Girls" craze
I have realized what it is about “Girls” that irks me so much. Lena Dunham’s show is so transparently an attempt to actualize the fantasies of young, neurotic American girls that are roughly Dunham’s age, that it has the potential to be a truly thought-provoking show, were it to be…
I apologize if it sounded as if I were conflating Lena Dunham the Person and Lena Dunham the Writer. That may have been ambiguous and I did not intend for that discrepancy to be lost. I am not judging her worth or her private goals as a person; what I take serious issue with is the stridency with which she builds the personalities of her characters. Whether or not she is as needy in person as she is on the screen is irrelevant. What she preaches is a superficial sort of dogmatic freedom that to me is selfish and profoundly uninteresting.
I do think that the show upholds Hannah (who is, ultimately, a tool of LD’s creative imagination, a product of Lena Dunham the Writer) as a model from which viewers are to extract comfort and reinforcement in the form of her humorous foibles. This is the main issue I have with “Girls.” The show rests on an implicit agreement that the viewer finds Hannah’s life relatable and, to an extent, definitive, an idea that many, many women I know find insulting and assumptive. Although it may not intend to do so, I think the show does advertise Hannah’s situations as paradigmatic of metropolitan female experience, and in the process marginalizes the experiences of others.
Lena Dunham writes for a very specific audience. As I said before, her show is designed to cater towards “young, neurotic American girls that are roughly Dunham’s age” (and not “all ‘real women’ in the world”). What angers me specifically, not only as a friend to women but also as a watcher of television, is that after decades (literally) of watching shows about middle and upper-middle class white relationships, our culture still finds it new, innovative and revolutionary to have more shows about spoiled white men and women with unstable love lives. I’m not saying that the issues — the abstract, sexual issues — brought up in “Girls” are not legitimate; what I am saying is that these are problems that affect many different types of women, and are received and dealt with by those many different types of women in a myriad of ways.
There have been several instances where Dunham has responded to these exact points of criticism. However, she responds with a passive-aggressive immaturity that only reinforces the idea that this show is more of a self-indulgent freak-show than anything else. In response to inquiries about the homogeneity of the cast, she included Donald Glover a black actor, in the show’s second season, only to have them break up. The details are, I’m sure, familiar to you. These choices do not reflect a racist impulse, but rather a smarmy “don’t make me write about people who aren’t relevant to my experience” sort of response. Perhaps the show is not an autobiography, but it is, without a doubt, a show whose plot is limited by the homogenous experiences of its writer.
On Lena Dunham and the “Girls” craze
I have realized what it is about “Girls” that irks me so much. Lena Dunham’s show is so transparently an attempt to actualize the fantasies of young, neurotic American girls that are roughly Dunham’s age, that it has the potential to be a truly thought-provoking show, were it to be played up as such (this is the very reason why “Sex and the City” was so pivotal and important for television). However, Dunham instead insists on treating her show as a form of popular muckraking, an excavation into the “real lives” of “real women” dealing with “real problems” in “real America,” and instead of ringing true it simply falls flat.
People are so quick to level insults at Dunham’s figure because they are afraid to admit that it is not the artifice of the show (a fairly believable portrayal of white-collar New York City) which is completely baseless, but more the insipidity of Dunham’s character, cadence and all-around style. I would argue 100% that Patrick Wilson would never attach himself to Dunham’s Hannah Havorath because he could do better, but not because (like Wilson’s actual wife) Hannah is a size 10, but because her personality is that of a twelve-year old Sandra Dee. Lena Dunham is so shamelessly confident in her ability to channel the pressing issues of women that she doesn’t stop to consider that maybe she is too self-involved, too blinded by her own narrow mind, to speak for other women.
Her snarky tone is adorable for all of five seconds, but by the time she delivers her infamous “I may be the voice of my generation” spiel to her parents, we all know that this is not Hannah talking, but Lena. It’s painfully obvious. This is what she wants, and her show is proof that this is what she intends to do: insinuate herself into the social consciousness as a voice for the size 10’s. However, the sad truth is that women need not — should not — look to her as a role model, because the brand of woman she is selling is self-absorbed and dismissive of anything that is not in line with her own conception of beauty, intelligence or sensibility. She is, in all honesty, as shallow as her own critics, who rip apart her chunky, tattooed torso and mosquito breasts. Yes, there is more to the average girl than flesh and blood (a message her show tries to communicate), but in the case of Lena Dunham, the little else of her there is will not last.
