What I Think about When I Think about "Girls"

Over the last few weeks, I, along with some of my closest friends and some of my favorite strangers, have been trying to understand the magnetic field that is “Girls”.  How can I justify being pulled into the point of view of Hannah Horvath, a character so entitled and self-indulgent that she steals the tip her parents had intended for the hotel housekeeper?  What gives, exactly, when I watch in anticipation as Hannah’s friend, Jessa, so willfully, flagrantly, triumphantly misses her abortion appointment, and opts, instead, to blow a good boy’s brain with elicit bathroom sex?  Is my willingness to bear Shoshanna – the “Sex and the City”-obsessed coed, tormenting herself over her virginity at every possible opportunity and at every possible venue (from her frilly bedroom to rock clubs to, yes, waiting rooms) – borne of a deep sense of nostalgia for a past that simultaneously embarrasses, delights, and haunts me?  How to tolerate the bitter arrows that Marnie, a perfectly coifed gallerina, constantly slings at her inherently good boyfriend, whether it’s because he’s just shorn his locks for a colleague who’s contracted leukemia, or simply because he’s so squishily eager to please?  And why, for goodness’ sake, did I experience such relief knowing that Adam, Hannah’s repellent fuck buddy who ignores her and dominates her and does such a mean air-bicycle, would be sticking around? 

Part of the answer seems to lie with the high bar of specificity that Dunham has set for the show.  This means that its most tender moments – Hannah dancing in her bedroom, first by herself, and then with Marnie, to Robyn’s hypnotic single; Shoshanna basking in sexual possibility as a former camp friend insists that he wants to hang out tonight – and its most wounding – when, on the verge of telling her ex that she has HPV, Hannah finds out that he’s gay; Charlie performing Hannah’s somewhat poetic diary – cut so deep.  It’s strange and thrilling to see a world of flaws, stains, and flesh work so well.  These are pain’s more effortless varieties and life’s quieter delights. 

That the show blemishes perfection: this is why it’s such excellent television and also why it’s become such a lightning rod.  Some critics have taken up the cause of narrative plausibility, pointing out with good reason that a few key characters seem too outlandish for their own good.  Does Jessa, our resident rebel without a cause, really have nothing to offer but Rhianna’s ass and the face of Bridgette Bardot?  And what, besides the convenience of extended family, has appended Shoshanna, a mere undergraduate, to this trio of more experienced ladies (just a little more experienced, but more experienced nonetheless)?  Others wonder why there isn’t anything new that we’re learning from this portrait of Brooklyn.  Even though these nubile women face a set of age-specific trials, they simply seem to reinforce the Brooklyn stereotypes embodied by, say, the Humphreys of “Gossip Girl”.  And a few have issued grievances over these characters’ lack of likeability.  When will someone who isn’t set up to be a loser on this show do something nice for someone else? 

But the hot topic remains the show’s lack of diversity.  For all of Dunham’s commitment to realistic experience, it’s a rather curious choice to portray a group of liberal arts-educated, upper-middle class twentysomethings, living in Brooklyn, interacting so rarely with anyone who looks different.  I appreciate – and applaud – Dunham’s refusal to check the race box.  But it’s unnerving that everything but white has gotten swept to the fringes.  Given the decades-long efforts to diversify American education (especially its upper-echelons), the progressive values cultivated by most of the workplaces in which these characters find themselves gainfully employed, the number of industry parties in New York or Los Angeles that don’t merely bow to such criteria but are simply constituted by a wide array of appearances and voices, and, really, just keeping in mind the striking heterogeneity of a metropolis as big as New York and all its boroughs, it seems like more of an effort can be made than the caricatural running-into on the street and the superficial interaction at work.  The homeless black man in Times Square was perhaps one of the more egregious, cringe-inducing moments in a series that has otherwise felt so smooth.  But there have been other less obvious instances when Dunham and her staff could have done so much more when it comes to difference.  The only skills possessed by the Asian-American intern-turned-employee at the publishing house that forsakes Hannah were her yes-man attitude and expertise with PhotoShop.  The only gay man to appear is an ex-boyfriend who, after coming out to Hannah, shows his true, bitchy colors and is soon dispensed with.  The more middle-class women with whom Hannah now works are a bit better drawn: they tolerate their boss’s “touchy-feely-ness” because they need to pay the bills; they give her the excellent advice to drop Adam’s sorry, squirrel-attracting nether regions.  But as they fill out her eyebrows and dole out advice about just how supple sugar will make her skin, they intervene only to deform and denature Hannah’s face.  Adam’s avid response to her new look – “You look like a Mexican teenager!” – was so biting because it spoke to the extraordinary license that ironic othering and, by extension, ironic racism have been given to a show that’s ordinarily so thoughtful.

My first groans and increasing impatience with the whiteness of “Girls” have caused me to wonder why, not so long ago, I seemed to have had so few complaints about shows like “Sex and the City” or “Seinfeld” or the enormous ensemble set piece that was “Friends”.  Week after week, these machines of culture did little to foreground people who look like me and my friends.  I admit that my high school and early collegiate selves didn’t have as much of an investment in racial plurality (and feminism, for that matter) as the one who stands on the soapbox today, so, in part, I was simply ignorant that anything insidious was going on.  But there’s also the question of absurdism and fantasy versus realism that, I think, sets “Girls” apart from any of its chums-in-New York forbearers.  This is not to say that we can’t point out that “Friends” was a ludicrous vision of economic viability in Manhattan.  This isn’t to say that a black Miranda would have been an empty gesture.  But while these shows’ suspension from reality far from excuses the social conditions that informed the fantasies they offered, their weekly baubles announced the artificiality of the worlds they constructed.  These comedies worked at the time because they afforded so many flashes of recognition as their characters discussed conversations about nothing, sexual underperformers, and a longing to be loved.  But in peering into Carrie’s closet or wondering what the hell Kramer did all day, we could always comfort ourselves by asking: Who the hell lives like that?  

Dunham’s insistence on “gut-level”, lived experience, however, stacks the deck.  She wants to give us a funny kind of realism, one that, in its best moments, is more akin to Nicole Holofcener’s than Whit Stillman’s.  But whereas Holofcener’s most recent film, “Please Give” (2010), centers on the guilt of her privileged characters and, thereby, draws out a fragile web of tense (economic) relationships and their effects, Dunham’s characters are unknowingly – and, as a friend observed, uncritically – restricted to themselves.  Writing in The Hairpin, Jenna Wortham regretted that, indeed, it’s the potential of the show that makes this absence so grating.  “Girls” has delivered on so many of its promises that when Dunham says that she has only been writing to mimic herself and her closest friends, the absence feels all the more profound.  How can a show this smart, that takes so many risks about female desire, sexual compromise, about being young, and trying to find your way in the world be undergirded by such a lack of curiosity about the experiences of others?  Are they really living inside such a hermetically sealed few blocks?

It’s true that restrictions can very often generate vibrant creativity.  Think of Morandi’s trembling still lives; much of De Stijl; Agnes Martin’s grids; or Ad Reinhardt’s perfectly calibrated abstractions, which, he claimed, brought painting to its logical end. Dunham, by contrast, has ensured that we’re playing with a different set of conventions, not just a couple of bottles and geometric abstractions.  Hannah Horvath tweets, googles, texts, heeds booty calls, goes to the doctor’s office, and has job interviews, all in a densely packed city that (sometimes justifiably) thinks its melting pot is like nowhere else on earth.  Her allusion to potentially being the voice of a generation speaks to a willingness to engage in a social enterprise – in which proficiency in the following is required: reading social codes, detailing how her peers relate to one another, and trying to pinpoint what makes people who they are now.  Even if she’s just “a voice… of a generation”, Dunham has been careful to place Hannah in a very particular historical moment that feels much more interconnected, and less racially polarized than any before.1  And since there are lots of people, especially urbanites, who have friends with a plurality of differences, this homogeneity strikes me as a relic of an old world. 

And, yet, the question of just how old that world is and whether or not it is gone is perhaps why the criticism about “Girls” and race has been so fervent.  If “Girls” is but a pastiche of real-life situations lived by a very fortunate Dunham and the fortunate few around her, we are led to a rather disheartening question: is that world of white privilege, of a casual unwillingness to engage with racism’s persistent traces, really as old as we think?

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Footnote (!)
1) And, while I don’t want to get too far off the beaten path, shows like “Lost” and “Parks and Recreation” have demonstrated how rich a world can become when a multitude of difference is the rule rather than the exception.  Of course, the situations in both those series were/are different: one threw everyone together in a plane crash, and the other is a diverse workplace that has fostered friendships.  But their very existence gives writers of all stripes something tangible to work with.