Global warming autumns are now so common that I no longer find it odd to be wearing a tank top and shorts on a September afternoon (whether it is appropriate for a 29-year-old to don such an outfit is another question entirely). Apparently, television and film are mirroring this climate trend because we are still mired in the late-summer pop cultural doldrums despite having already celebrated Labor Day. Now is, therefore, the perfect time to delve into those books, films, and lesser known television shows that can sustain us until Mad Men returns and the Oscar season officially begins. Continue reading “Weekly Girl Crushes: When You Can’t Watch Mad Men…”
If all you had to do to get a male New Yorker to commit was ask him to be your boyfriend, NPR wouldn’t have just run a story about the ever increasing number of never-married females populating the five boroughs. Which is to say, I don’t buy Girls’ transformation of Adam from a never-returns-a-text canoe builder to the fantasy boyfriend who professes his loves and wants to cohabitate after three weeks. I dated the canoe builders when I was younger (in my case, it was a potato farmer), and they didn’t magically become commitment enthusiasts after spending a few weeks having sex and listening to my gender studies theories. They transformed into ex-boyfriends.
Adam Driver demonstrates great comedic timing and a unique ability to use his body to delineate character, and I’m glad Dunham is giving him material beyond amateur porn monologues. But where did the douchey, shirtless Adam go? When did he grow a vagina? Why so much plaid? Even though I appreciate the climactic Bushwick scene in which Adam slams Hannah for her self-absorption (after she slams her own nose into the pavement), I don’t believe the show earns their final brawl. Hannah obviously needs to end the season pushing away a man so Dunham can highlight Hannah’s inability to view individuals as more than creative fodder, but she elides the arc of the Hannah/Adam relationship to arrive at this conclusion. So I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it any more than I buy the surprise wedding between Jessa and that guy from Bridesmaids. Continue reading “The Taming of the Douche”
When most sitcoms depict women fighting, it goes a little something like this: cue the laugh track as the girls grab each other’s hair and spin around in circles before realizing they are girls and, thus, must always get along and will subsequently be shaving each other’s legs by the end of the episode. There will have been no hints of anger before this episode, and there will be no repercussions. Girls do not fight this way. Men fight this way, absent the hair pulling. In an, albeit clichéd, gender analysis of fighting, I would argue that when girls get angry, they tend to procrastinate. We seethe, turn passive aggressive, talk behind our friend’s back, and then return to seething for approximately six months until some minor issue breaks open the dam of crazy. There are obviously exceptions to this rule (e.g., drunk fights or fights with strangers in grocery stores), but most women are socialized to be nice, compromising, and agreeable. Even though we are encouraged to cry, we are not encouraged to become angry or confrontational even when the offending party deserves it. I don’t believe women are biologically programmed to act this way. We are sentient beings who become angry just like our male counterparts; however, we are forced to express it with a smile, so when the crazy dam does burst, it does so with a frantic, gesticulating, screaming flood. It’s at this point when we begin throwing toothbrushes and screaming about pubescent masturbation practices because of a poorly written book about a twenty-three-year-old’s dead boyfriend. Thank you, Lena Dunham. Thank you for writing a girl fight without a single strand of pulled hair and an abundance of seething. Continue reading “Girl Fight!”
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!”
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”
