KAROLINA WISNIEWSKI
<Opinions Editor>
There is no shortage of articles berating HBO’s Girls for being racist, elitist, whiney, smug and generally exemplifying all that is wrong with Generation Y. Unsurprisingly enough, many critiques of the series are interwoven with personal attacks on Lena Dunham. As the show’s creator, writer, director and also one of the actors, its difficult to argue with the idea that Girls is thoroughly permeated with all things Lena. In fact, she’s said many times that the series is largely autobiographical. On one hand, this is a remarkable feat for someone so young and generally speaking, inexperienced in the industry. On the other hand, it renders most attempts to watch the show (for me at least) mildly infuriating. Why should we be subjected to all the mundane trivialities of Dunham’s life as she navigates her way through quasi-adulthood in as egotistical, self-centered and immature a way as she can manage? Why is the world her soapbox?
For all the show’s strengths (and I do think, contrary to appearances, that there are some), much of its focus is on the irrelevant and self-indulgent lives of distinctly unlikeable twenty-something year olds. Though the protagonist, Hannah (played by Dunham herself) is portrayed as the most irrational, erratic and insufferably self-centered of all the characters, she is also the most complex. The mastery with which Dunham plays her, and the accuracy with which she conveys every nuance of Hannah’s disposition makes me wonder how much of her role as Hannah is acting and how much of it is an unbridled exposition of Dunham’s id. The very fact that Dunham has congratulated herself by taking on the role of the main character brings to mind all of the cringe-worthy “writing themselves in” that directors tend to do, pushing into their films in a gratuitous and completely unnecessary way a la Quentin Tarantino (which is, all things considered, ultimately excusable because, well, he’s Quentin Tarantino. When you direct the next Pulp Fiction, Dunham, I’ll cut you some slack too).
But as I see it, many of the attacks on the show tend to miss the point. Fundamentally, Girls isn’t problematic because it focuses on the lives of privileged or because it fails to include characters who aren’t Caucasian. Many shows currently on television are guilty of the same charges, except for maybe Glee. But while Glee fulfills an important void on television, Girls sets out on an equally important, yet drastically different project. Perhaps the reason we aren’t quite as incensed by other series who commit the same mistakes as Girls because those other shows are presented as highly stylized, unrealistic and anecdotal projects. Dunham’s vision for Girls is much more lofty: to present not only a realistic account of everyday life that is meant to speak to our generation, but to communicate something inherently poignant and perhaps even profound about the seemingly unremarkable lives of people like Hannah – or as Dunham would have it, people like us.
If Dunham didn’t succeed at this to some degree, we probably wouldn’t be so bothered by all of Girls’ missteps (and just to be clear, I do indeed consider the racist and elitist criticisms raised against it to be valid). At least, not anymore than we are when we consider the general depravity to be found on the television screen. But it is because Dunham’s efforts are, at least in part, successful, that the show’s missteps become all the more glaring.
Dunham’s aesthetic and her on-point writing render Girls to bear such similarity (albeit, I think, in very brief snapshots) to our everyday life, that it ceases to be a merely descriptive account of her life, and takes on rather a prescriptive nature, that is, a quasi-aspirational quality. The relatability of Girls renders it all the more effective as an account of how the life of a hip, artsy and liberal young woman should look. This plays into our societal obsession with sincerity and authenticity, which in turn, is mirrored in the most interesting subcultural figure: the hipster.
Hipster culture has the odd quality of ephemerality: those who aspire to it find that just as they approach it, their self-awareness and calculated attempts as mimicking various aspects of the alternative lifestyle nullify their efforts. In a very natural way, Girls builds on this framework. It is precisely the series’ efforts to combat artifice and to portray the “real” lives of “real” people that one-ups the hipster in the most important sense: it succeeds at building its own culture of cool that rejects the status quo, and in doing so, carries more authenticity and integrity than hipster culture, which is itself grounded in a decisive rejection of all things artificial and “commercialized”.
This brings me to the difficulty I fundamentally have with Girls, a difficulty which is skimmed over by many of its critics. The problem is that, for all its efforts, the series undermines its own sincerity and earnestness in a plethora of ways. For example, the series strives to portray de-glamourized attempts to survive in New York without a clear career path or the dedication to create one. But frustratingly enough, all the actresses come from varying degrees of privilege which, if they have not allowed them to live entirely off of their family fortune, have allowed them to operate in elite and esoteric circles that most of us will never have access to. Consequently, much of the time, they’re only playing the part of poor, struggling writers or actors without ever having experienced such a lifestyle. This isn’t problematic in itself, but considering that it is Dunham’s goal to show how “down with it” she is, and how much she can relate to the everywoman, I question the degree to which she is able to do that. Furthermore, Dunham’s dedication to representing “reality”, though perhaps successful in fleeting moments, often gives way to unrealistic and highly contrived plot turns and dialogue. As before, this becomes problematic when a series is marketed as an earnest reflection of everyday life.
Since comparisons between our everyday experiences and those depicted on Girls seem to come so easily and so readily, the show is, in effect, a slightly funnier, more interesting and more exciting version of the lives most twenty-something women are actually leading. In this sense, Girls takes on the problematic role that it originally set out to combat. I don’t fault Dunham for taking artistic license and departing from reality, nor do I take issue with the series’ failure to replicate genuine, everyday life (let’s be honest: who would want to watch that?). But what I do take issue with is the series being marketed as a “finding a place for all the women who felt they never had one” (to paraphrase Dunham’s acceptance speech at the Golden Globes), and thereby playing on the latent insecurities of is audience. Fundamentally, though I find Girls entertaining, I don’t see Dunham as “part of the solution” (which she has been quoted as saying), but rather as creating a slightly different and more eccentric but nonetheless carefully marketed and highly contrived alternate reality.