By: Roman Conrad
Special to General Narrator
I’m a huge fan of HBO’s Girls, and I’m slowly becoming a fan of Lena Dunham, which is important because it allows a needed distinction between the person and the character she created and portrays on the show. As far as the person is concerned, there is no one in pop culture (save Kanye West maybe) who is more polarizing or targeted.
No doubt, Dunham does her fair share of drumming up fodder for the attacks. Deciding not to pay performers scheduled to work her book tour (a decision she quickly reversed, to her credit) didn’t help. And, most recently, recounting scenes from her childhood in that aforementioned book which include staring into her baby sister’s vagina at age seven and masturbating as a teenager while that same sister was next to her in bed don’t help either.
These snippets from her collection of essays have caused a backlash from mainly right-wing media outlets who argue that what she engaged in was sexual abuse. That she used a cheeky simile involving a “sexual predator” when discussing that moment with her sister’s vagina made the abuse accusations all the easier to suggest.
But the attacks, at least the ones I’m familiar with, always seem to start or include, either directly or in passing, a lambasting of the persona she portrays on-screen as though that persona is, in fact, Lena Dunham herself. There is no separation, which is convenient for her detractors since her character on Girls, Hannah Hovarth, is so wildly attackable.
This indifference to any kind of separation between character and creator is important though because it speaks volumes to where we are as a society hellbent on literalism and reality. We live in a world where video games are marketed solely for the realistic depictions of their subject matter (which has to be stifling to the artistic minds working within that industry), reality TV still dominates the ratings, documentary-style action films replete with nauseatingly shaky camera movements win big at the box office, and on-screen personalities like that of Stephen Colbert’s or Nick Offerman’s are lauded by many to be anything but an act. Everything is taken at face value and with knee-jerk rapidity. Why? It’s simply easier to look at things that way as opposed to applying even the tiniest bit of critical thought to a situation, person, or piece of art. This is also why it’s easier to scan Buzzfeed articles as though they are news as opposed to reading actual journalism.
But anyway, what I want you to do is think back for a second, if you’ve seen it, to Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979) because in it you’ll find a subverting of the upper-echelon of social class by way of infiltration into that class not unlike what much of Girls is about. If you don’t agree, think about the reasons why a character like Ray exists in the narrative of Dunham’s show. In both Manhattan and Girls the subversion isn’t exactly obvious because the characters are so entrenched in their moneyed social standings, but it is there.
In Manhattan, Allen plays an affluent writer named Isaac Davis who cares about and discuss art, and wears his sexual insecurities on his shirtsleeves. But look more closely and you begin to notice that Allen’s Davis is used as a tool (by Woody Allen the writer and filmmaker) to poke fun at the affluent lifestyle enjoyed by Davis and his comrades. The Marx brothers achieved the same subversion—though in a more obvious way—in 1933 when they made Duck Soup, a film Allen later referenced in Hannah and Her Sisters.
Allen’s film and Dunham’s Girls brim with other similarities, but above all they are both concerned with affluent white people living out their days in a big, expensive city. So why is it that the former is praised as a “love letter” to New York and its inhabitants (which it is not) while the latter is chastised for being selfish, pretentious, juvenile, and ill-informed (which it is not)?
The answer lies in how each actor’s portrayal is perceived. Allen’s Isaac Davis is simply less brash and more endearing thanks to his neuroses. We forgive his affluence because his insecurities remind us of our own. In short, he’s relatable. Dunham’s Hannah Hovarth, on the other hand, is openly naive, unapologetic, egotistical, and (lest we forget) female, which automatically renders her faults unappealing and grievous because women, especially celebrity women, are still not allowed to own imperfection they way men do.
The result is a woman who is incapable of escaping the character she created. Lena Dunham is nothing more than Hannah Hovarth within the literal eye of the media and public, and as a result she must atone for Hannah’s sins.
But it doesn’t end there, and this is why the cult of literalism is dangerous to all. Because our entertainment-meets-reality interpretation of movies, games, and television is an extension of our social media obsession. Because it’s fun to friend famous people on Facebook or add them to our Twitter feeds and pretend like we know them personally as we stare at pictures of their dinners or see what they look like when they get out of bed in the morning. The glamorized veil of celebrity has been lifted by the power of social media.
That veil is just as easily liftable on “normal” people though. Companies, whether they say they do or not, use these outlets to eliminate prospective job candidates on a daily basis. We preoccupy ourselves with the apparent fun everyone else is having based on the statuses they post. But, like Dunham in Girls, none of us are really those people we portray online; they’re all creations. Let’s take a quick poll to vaguely example this. By a show of hands, how many of our Facebook profile pictures accurately represent what we look like on a daily basis? My hand isn’t up. Is yours? Well, it shouldn’t be—especially if you live in California. The fact that social media is not reality, however, stops no one from blurring lines based on a few liked pages, pictures posted in a drunken stupor, or 140-character opinions. Basically, we’re all susceptible to the backlash Lena Dunham faces, only on a less ridiculously grandiose scale.
