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Say Yes! to M!ch!gan!

Image Credit: HBO
Image Credit: HBO

Girls did not start out particularly well this week. Hannah doesn’t own a suitcase? Really? If she’s a middle-class girl from Michigan, her parents own approximately 22,000 suitcases. Every piece of luggage I own is a hand-me-down from my father, who incidentally went to Michigan State, which leads me to my second point. This episode hit a little too close to home. I grew up outside a college town in Michigan. I am trying to make it as a writer in Brooklyn. In my early twenties, I often considered how much easier living in Michigan would be only to realize I couldn’t exist outside of New York for more than a few months. Also, my name rhymes with banana. It was a little freaky.

In the past few episodes, especially in the handsy boss storyline, Hannah’s self destruction was not so much funny as unbelievable and pathetic for the sake of being pathetic. Girls has been termed “inventive” and “daring” because it showcases the type of acerbic, normal looking, awkward girl we never see on screen. However, if this girl is incapable of eliciting desire or achieving even a modicum of happiness, then the show isn’t doing much more than reinforcing the female fear that existing outside of conventional gender norms will lead to a lifetime of unanswered texts and uncomfortable attempts to sleep with your sixty-year-old boss. Hannah may still be a mess in East Lansing, but in the tree-lined and strip-mall filled Midwest, she finally reveals herself to be the kind of maturing mess we can root for back in Greenpoint. Continue reading “Say Yes! to M!ch!gan!”

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Smart Girls Get Health Insurance

Image Credit: Three Rivers Press
Image Credit: Three Rivers Press

You will likely come across Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) when purchasing Tina Fey’s Bossypants on Amazon. Amazon’s algorithm will helpfully suggest that you add this second title to your basket. Amazon may be an evil empire that will one day put all publishers out of business, but you should probably take their advice just this once. Continue reading “Smart Girls Get Health Insurance”

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Race: Even More Awkward than Sex

Image Credit: Michael Buckner/Getty Images North America
Image Credit: Michael Buckner/Getty Images North America

In an office of twenty people, I’ve encountered at least four women recently discussing Lena Dunham’s “Fresh Air” interview with Terry Gross. Clearly, we all listen to a lot of NPR, which puts us solidly in the white, educated, privileged demographic Girls is geared toward, but the primary reason we listened to the interview was to hear Dunham discuss race. Even though Dunham’s Hannah may claim that she is only “a voice of a generation,” the title of the show suggests that this comedy is supposed to be representative of more than just Dunham and her hipster friends. Obviously, Privileged, White, Straight, Liberal, Agnostic, East Coast Girls would have been a less pithy title and sound far too much like an undergraduate honors thesis, but I found it disheartening that Dunham, so hyperconscious of her class privilege, did not immediately recognize the attendant privilege of white skin.

Dunham did sound genuinely troubled by the criticism of the show’s lack of diversity, and she did not try to belittle it like her pal Leslie Arfin (who defines hipster racism). She argued that she was writing about the specific experience of a half Jew/half WASP living in Brooklyn and that she felt uncomfortable writing about the life of a black or hispanic character without having access to this cultural experience. Obviously, the best solution would be to have fewer Arfin-type co-writers and instead hire a more diverse crew of writers who could narrate the lives of privileged young women of color who might also date douchy guys and still expect their parents to pay their cell phone bills. Continue reading “Race: Even More Awkward than Sex”

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When Rory Gilmore Slept with Pete Campbell

Image Credit: AMC
Image Credit: AMC

This interview in Slate may not exactly win Alexis Bledel any points as a literary critic, but it does offer insight into the self-destructive femininity her Mad Men character represents, a character diametrically opposed to the supremely positive Rory Gilmore. Gilmore Girls was characterized by a female-centered universe where women controlled their destinies with relative ease. Rory—intelligent, assertive, kind—embodied the ideal daughter most parents could only dream of raising. I can’t help but wonder if her casting as Beth Dawes—a woman whose only form of protest is self harm—was meant not only to highlight the limitations of an earlier era but also to suggest that the ghost of Beth may still haunt today’s liberated young women.

Rory represents a form of progressive womanhood that would have been unthinkable for Beth, but Beth’s brand of self-defeating femininity has not exactly disappeared despite the myriad cultural advances made by women. While we may have an easier time getting a job or a divorce today, we often still express inner turmoil through cutting, anorexia, or other less obvious forms of self harm. These associations are fitting in an episode titled “Lady Lazarus.” Sylvia Plath could only conceive of creative action through self annihilation, which is best embodied in this ode to the art of suicide. Why cast an actress as the Lady Lazarus proxy when she is so commonly associated with the ideal of self-actualized young womanhood? Perhaps Bledel was just a bit of hipster stunt casting, but I’d like to believe Weiner used this pop cultural disconnect to imply that, unfortunately, self-destructive young women incapable of escaping rigid models of femininity are still alive and well in the age of Rory Gilmore.

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Are All Men Gay?

Image Credit: HBO
Image Credit: HBO

If you went to a college like New York University or have lived in New York for even a brief period of time, you have likely asked yourself this question. Not only does NYC have a higher than average gay population but even the straight men seem a little too willing to wear scarves. Girls is located within this confusing sexual landscape as it explores the eternal dichotomy between the nice, effeminate guy you should like and the sexy douche you keep sleeping with even though you know you shouldn’t. Although Dunham described this conundrum using the Brian Krakow/Jordan Catelano analogy, you know she really wanted to reference the Aidan/Big dilemma but felt it would be uncool to do so.

The show keeps inserting sly, visual references to Sex and the City (e.g., the girls sitting on a park bench eating ice cream or Hannah typing on her computer late at night), but the literal hue of the composition is darker. Where S&TC was awash with bright colors and streaming sunlight, Girls is NYC viewed through a dim brown lens. Similarly, Girls focuses on the dark underbelly of modern sexual politics, which S&TC hinted at in its first three seasons but then discarded in favor of more shoes and an emasculated Big. Girls complicates the linear nice guy/asshole dichotomy not by turning all of the men into unthreatening rom-com ken dolls but by simultaneously reiterating and troubling this formula. Masculinity, like everything else in this amber-colored Brooklyn, is decidedly in flux. Continue reading “Are All Men Gay?”