oh yeah. i'm on the same page as you, i think. re. fame and pressure, a close analogue came up in my TV viewing today (he fouled out with :56 to play). i'm gonna type out some more ideas below since
girls is interesting and i've gotta at some point start my own big book about why i hate new york city and everything it stands for. ANYWAY:
when lebron lets the criticism get to him, the result is a dumb heat welcoming party or at worst a blown championship. creative people's cognitive biases color every part of their work to a greater extent than lebron's do his, though, and so i think we gotta hold ourselves to a higher standard. i'm not saying 'be a role model' or anything -- au contraire mr. barkley! -- nor am i saying that depicting fucking up is bad, or that it even advocates fucking up. my argument is more that not knowing what you like will result in repetitiveness, staleness, making the same mistakes over and over again, and little growth (cf.
mad men, lots of
mtg players, new york city.) that brings us to the issue of 'wasted talent.' no, not all of
girls is wasted talent, only some, and i'm so glad it's around, but it could be so much better (my chief complaint with
mtg, another easy analogue -- and it's a complaint i wouldn't make if i didn't think there was both something there already as well as greater potential).
to wit: check out this twitter thing:
Happy Memorial Day! I've already peed in two different Starbucks bathrooms!
hilarious! but then the point was evidently some lame moral, viz.
Just an FYI to conservative dudes tweeting hate at me: "I hope you get breast cancer" is way more offensive than anything I've ever written.
droll and light, followed by platitudinous and dull. note how lena defines herself in opposition to "conservative dudes" while also maintaining superiority over them. then there is the term "offensive," which doesn't mean anything.
Okay, I wracked my brain to articulate why I can't just laugh off a porn parody of Girls and here are 3 reasons:
1. Because Girls is, at its core, a feminist action while Hustler is a company that markets and monetizes a male's idea of female sexuality
2. Because a big reason I engage in (simulated) onscreen sex is to counteract a skewed idea of that act created by the proliferation of porn
3. Because it grosses me out.
good god, girl, you know the whole point was to get a rise out of you, yes? she
probably did, but then rose to the bait (fell to the bait?) anyway -- which is
mainly what the whole memorial day thing was about, humor and entertainment being ancillary. you see there the danger of defining yourself in opposition to something -- lena dunham needs knuckle-dragging conservatives as much as knuckle-dragging conservatives need lena dunham, or ayn rand needs commies, or all utopians need flawed societies etc. this is what i mean by 'falling in love with unhappiness' -- without these enemies, who are not entirely dissimilar to her, and whose ideas are not very interesting, she'd be out of a job; it's sort of an excuse for not examining her own flaws (which syllogistically are also not very interesting).
let me bring this back into the realm of entertainment and my own emotions lest i fall into the same trap. a lack of insight into the self is a moral failing, but i don't know lena dunham and i don't give a fuck about that as my favorite author was a huge racist and an even huger classist and a catholic besides. however (as morals are ancillary to art --
not vice versa) it does result in artistic failings. the twitter feed and the show
feel preachy. there is an obsession with the viewer -- the famous line (when the doctor tells hannah-lena she's got it goin on) is 'that's not the feedback i've been getting.' three ideas from this line: 1. a sane person doesn't base self-esteem on appearance, that's even a contradiction in terms -- it's there for other people's enjoyment. 2. that this is coming to mind as much other than a joke during a wish-fulfillment fantasy suggests that anxiety is just around the corner (it would sound ludicrous if a dude said it). 3. the 'feedback' thing is a (probably self-conscious) jibe at the viewership at large, which sees hannah-lena nearly naked all the time.
it follows that the reason for these nude scenes is less to make women more confident but to make them feel more valid about their insecurities. i think lena is good-looking but, who knows, maybe she'd rather i take her up on her dare to be called fat. the easy comparison is to the strains of feminism you encounter in slate (ugh, amanda marcotte), which doggedly defend
girls and take a grim pleasure in ripping to shreds the most retrograde of critical responses. if these bitter, insecure, horny people were male you'd call them 'nice guys,' which of course is marcotte & co.'s favorite target. they love themselves but they hate their doubles. that's the definition of narcissism -- more profoundly than the creator-god that makes herself in her own image, then views (like the leering conservative men) the reflection in the television screen and (like the leering conservative men) pretends not to be both titillated and repulsed.
from here the rest of my reaction falls into place. most of it is related to the old catch-22 'those who can take criticism don't need it, and those who need criticism can't take it.' if critics treated
girls the way
girls treated critics, then they'd hate each other forever. i think you're right to point out the 'me vs. the world' delusion above, as it's an essential feature of the new york mindset -- in that city, as one becomes more successful, one becomes more paranoid, working hard and playing hard in a macabre and suicidal one-woman waltz. (how do i know this? i once lived there -- but i was another person then.) paranoid cases crave loyalty above all else, which might be why lena harps on so shrilly the word 'feminist' -- any self-applied ism is never descriptive, it's just an excuse for getting away with whatever because whatever. viewers become not respected guests and interlocutors who ought to be loved as equals, but pew-bound congregants whose sycophancy determines their virtue.
girls simplifies itself in the worst way by pushing real life through the agenda "at its core" instead of having the two engage each other; everything, the characters, the dialogue, the subplots, the whole arc, suffers. outright propaganda is not something that i think art is much good for -- then you have to hold yourself to an even higher standard than before, but if you did you wouldn't subordinate art to such low ends, wouldn't live life from conclusion to argument. if one of the major themes of
girls is 'growing up' then the hypocrisy of an essentially fixed and simplistic worldview makes it less fun to watch than i'd like it to be. when the creator of a show tries to make viewers into apostles, it is her own richness she destroys.
so what
is lena dunham into, personally? check out this tweet:
Followed @jasoncollins34 so twitter is suggesting that I follow all these sporty type athletes. Hey twitter, not into sports: into progress
as a self-parody this tweet is tremendous; as something serious it freaks me the fuck out. 'yo lets talk about sports.' / 'nah, i'm not into sports, let's talk about
progress' -- what the hell? only someone successful could get away with being so absurd. also sports are beautiful and it's weird when artists brag about being philistines. lotsa the people into
girls fit this philistine mold, i've noticed, and since lena dunham is fucking smart, she must have noticed as well; she's smart enough to know that her fans suck and her critics (the ones she ignores) are awesome. so what to do about it? it's a terrible trap. if you're wondering why working at wizards is rough, or why borges says that 'fame is a form of incomprehension', or how religions get started, it's all here. you try to be true to yourself. commercial success follows, but then you're stuck in the genre of yourself and cannot change lest you lose that success. you wriggle out of it and try to write something older and wiser, but you find you've been typecast and must write a pallid sequel with the same old mistakes, not new and exciting ones. you convince yourself that you'll be truer to yourself by obliquely approaching your ideals and that you'll be and do what you want to some day, but then that happens over and over again to you and then your kids. this is pretty much the best-case scenario for new yorkers. you could apply it to wizards employees too and it wouldn't be too inaccurate.
i've mentioned my hatred of new york a few times, and i'd be a hypocrite if i didn't acknowledge some more of my own biases. the brand of feminism in
girls is, as i've written above, not in favor of women kicking ass all over the place -- it would prefer women act poorly and get treated well; it demands respect instead of earning it; it is not mary jacobson but the 'lady planeswalker society' (which is something i can write about somewhere else). i find the whole 'want it both ways' thing to be little more than intellectualizing insecurity and i consider it and the women and men who are into it misogynists. this is why i call myself an 'anti-feminist feminist,' though i'm sure i too am a misogynist in some profound and perhaps insidious ways. for example, the other day i realized that i was hating on my ex (who also lives in new york and who i presume hates
girls) for doing the same high-powered business thing as one of my good male friends here. in this case, i think i've been cloaking my tyranny and own unhappiness (mild and fleeting as it is) under the guise of good intentions and high expectations. some of the more incisive critics about
girls i'm sure are guilty of the same. anyway, i've been a bit of an asshole about it to my ex. on one hand, i ought not to have been. on the other, what use is there in pretending i wasn't? and when she got mad about it -- does that mean she's sensitive to the criticism because i'm right?
so this is my assessment of
girls: on one hand, it's a brilliant evocation of new york as it exists for young adults; on the other, it doesn't hate new york nearly as much as it ought to -- but if it did, then it wouldn't be so brilliant; just as lena is a compelling character, but for different reasons than (i imagine) she thinks,
girls entertains me, but for different reasons than it's 'supposed to'; there's more to it than its fans could ever know. the classic hitch line goes 'feminists can't take a joke, and comedians can't take criticism,' but it's all pretty complex, more complex than that -- and
girls sells itself short by not further exploring these complexities -- though, whatever it is, it's not just 'a piece of shit' like
sex in the city or nora ephron films that use love as a metaphor for everything and thereby render that word meaningless. it's a relatively subtle critique i'm trying to make, and though that does underscore your first point i wonder if lena would prefer that i write something less thoughtful so i could be labeled, pilloried, and excommunicated.
