As the credits rolls, Hannah is jumping around her bedroom, in her slightly-too-tight, slightly-too-short plaid dress, to Robyn’s euphorically sad Europop anthem “Dancing on My Own.” You are allowed to feel both sorry for Hannah—and oddly proud of her. The ambiguity in Girls is the thrill. It constantly makes you feel two things at once. This comes to its visual exegesis in Dunham’s face. As Hannah, the majority of her big reaction shots show her looking—ambiguous. Hannah’s only twenty-five. She doesn’t know. We don’t know. This is not a show shouting out answers but throwing out question marks, instead.
Because of this rawness, there is a pirate swagger to all this stuff—an outlaw edge, made all the more interesting by the fact it’s “just” a sitcom about middle-class girls, where nothing much happens (“It’s not like, this week, the gang go to a spa! Next week, the gang go to the moon!”).
In a world full of “television that looks like television,” the absolute sticky, honest ordinariness of it makes it revolutionary. I don’t know a woman who has seen it and not immediately texted all her friends, going, “There is a show about all the things we do, but don’t say! This is a show about all the secret things of being a woman! It shows the confusion! This show will make you feel like you are normal.”
We are in Dunham’s trailer, in her lunch break. She, obviously, looks a lot like Hannah from Girls—but more upright than Hannah; less slouchy, brighter, and not in the least petulant. She looks, in fact, like the show runner of a flagship HBO show—albeit one wrapped in a rather filthy looking fleece, covered in CND symbols.
“It’s my Snuggie,” she says. “I once didn’t wash it for nine months. I wore it while I was sick, I wore it while I was working. In the end, they had to tell me straight out it smelled terrible. It had the smell of my anxiety on it.”
Dunham’s lack of confidence belies her background—she is the daughter of wealthy, middle-class, boho artists (her mother, Laurie Simmons, is a photographer and designer; her father, Carroll Dunham, a painter), whose self-financed 2010 film, Tiny Furniture, shot for just $43,000, won Best Narrative Feature at the South by Southwest Film Festival.
Tiny Furniture is about a self-obsessed artist, Aura (Dunham), who still lives with her parents, has experimental, uncommitted sex, and runs with a close group of friends who are equally as confused about life as she is. In the film, Aura’s mother was played by Dunham’s real-life mother, and Aura’s sister by Dunham’s real-life sister. At the time, Dunham was still living with her parents.
Girls, commissioned the same year, under the aegis of executive producer and Tiny Furniture fan Judd Apatow, is, essentially, Tiny Furniture: The Dramedy. In Hannah Horvath, Dunham plays, again, a confused middle-class, solipsistic NYC girl, running with half the cast of Tiny Furniture in barely rebooted roles, still having experimental sex, and still overly dependent on her parents.
Given that Dunham has been dealing with roughly the same material, and characters, for three years, over two projects, it’s interesting how controversial Girls has still been. For a show in which there are no fight scenes, robots, time travel, espionage, explosions, spaceships, dragons, guns, or vampires, Girls has had two incongruous charges repeatedly leveled at it. Firstly, that it sets out to be deliberately controversial. And secondly, that it is not realistic. That this—disgusting, ambiguous, venal, oddly innocent, walking around in their knickers, with small potbellies, dancing—is not how women are. That Dunham is doing all this solely to provoke.
“I find it all odd,” Dunham says, sitting on the sofa. “Take the abortion episode. In my life, my mum’s had three abortions, my friends have all gone through it without asking a lot of questions. I live in a pro-choice world. So I didn’t even understand that it would be a debate—because it was so obvious to me that what we were doing wasn’t scandalous. You know? And yet it’s ‘the abortion episode’—in which, ironically, no one even gets a fucking abortion in the end, so . . .”
She raises her hands.
What about that sex scene with Hannah and her on/off boyfriend, Adam—where he wants her to pretend she’s a child, and then ejaculates on her breasts?
“Well, this is a show about the kinds of situations women will put themselves in. In that scene, that is one girl with a complicated relationship to sex. It’s not every woman. Lots of people were like, ‘Really? Girls your age let boys come on their chests?’ And I’m like, well, I don’t know, because I haven’t had them all check a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ box—but I guarantee it’s at least 60 percent more than are admitting to it.”
It’s noticeable that those leveling these charges at Girls are always men, or older women. Dunham’s own generation, by way of contrast, fell on it voraciously, with cries of self-recognition. It seemed odd that other generations and sexes wanted to just . . . deny what younger women are up to.
“That was always so shocking to me—because I prepared myself for almost every argument somebody could have except for the one where someone goes, ‘This isn’t real—this isn’t your world.’ The one thing I guarantee I do know is about being middle-class, a half Jew, half WASP in New York in 2012.”
The sex scenes in Girls—all different, all unusual, in some way or another—are an important part of the show. They’re not ever there in the happily-ever-after, “they have sex THE END” way you see in most shows—something that happens at the end of an episode, as a resolution. In Girls, each sex scene is like a number in a musical—moving things on, revealing things about characters. You are never in the same place you started after a sex scene in Girls.
“That musical analogy is very gratifying to me,” Dunham says. “I don’t want to see anyone sensually engaging for the sake of it. That’s how we move the ball forward, emotionally. That’s where we see the characters more deeply.”
Certainly, Dunham seems to view sex in an oddly complicated way: as a thing to be theoretically prized, or enjoyed, certainly—but also like a puzzle to be solved, something inherently mysterious, and perhaps slightly worrying, in a way that, again, reminds me of Woody Allen. Dunham’s characters are constantly trying to work out why people want to have sex with them, and how they feel about that—both before and after. Sex is a question, not an answer, in Girls. Do I like bondage? Is this a bad idea? Should we split up? Who wants who more? What does this sex, with this person, mean? What does it say about me? Can we have sex in a bunk bed? What about if we have sex in a huge, disused pipe, in an alleyway? It’s almost like having sex is like filling in one of those “Your Personality Type Revealed!” questionnaires in Cosmopolitan.
“I feel like I started thinking about it really early,” Dunham says, snuggling deeper under her fleece. “Not in a ‘I’m a horny child, I’ll hump the armchair’ way, but more, ‘Isn’t this so crazy—that this is where we all come from, and this is what we’re going to do?’ I feel like my whole life from when I found out about sex, to when I finally had sex, was like a terrified countdown, to when this would . . . befall me.”
She laughs.
“I remember sitting in my house as a kid and being like, ‘In ten years, I might have to have sex.’ I saw an episode of My So-Called Life where her best friend goes, ‘It’s terrible once you have sex—because you can’t just try it once. You’ve got to keep on doing it.’ I was worried about sex before any of my physical instincts or desires had kicked in. It just seemed like . . . a problem.”
The way Dunham found out about sex may well have contributed to this:
“My friend Amanda told me, and it was terrible! Because she didn’t just tell me, she kind of . . . acted it out on me, like she was the guy. We were in a little house in kindergarten, and she held an invisible penis and said, ‘It’s in your vagina.’ So I was sitting there, horrified. I went home going, ‘Amanda put her invisible penis in my vagina!’”
Dunham’s boyfriend appears to be a kindred spirit when it comes to this bemusedly uncomfortable view on sex and procreation.
“On our first date, he said he was
really upset by the fact that babies come from, in his words, ‘sexy fucking,’ and that he’d like to get his baby at a business meeting, and do sex separately. To not have sex have anything to do with his child at any point. He said he’s come to terms with the fact he’s going to have to do it, because he wants a child—but he’s upset those two things are connected.”
It’s tempting to use this as an opportunity to talk about the nudity in Girls, by saying, “Aside from sex, the other issue of note in Girls is Dunham’s nudity”—but the truth is, every aspect of Girls is an issue of note. She’s called it for a whole generation—for there are boys in Girls, too. A lot of them—impressively early. If it took thirty years from the coining of the term “Generation X” to Douglas Coupland writing a book about it, then Dunham has defined her generation, brought it to the screen, and been nominated for three Emmys for it—all in less than two years.
Her generation, then, is roughly seventeen to thirty: their childhood TV riding the currents between the overanalytical comedy/drama tropes of Sex and the City, Dawson’s Creek, and My So-Called Life box sets and the no-holds-barred, bare-everything, your-life-is-currency atmosphere engendered by Facebook, Big Brother, Twitter, and the Kardashians. It’s an age where everyone is an expert on themselves (“The thing about me is . . .”), and vaguely feels like their life is a movie, or a reality TV show, or a blog. It is a generation constantly set to “broadcast.”
But, of course, since the economic downturn and the recession, the only news they have to broadcast is bad. They can’t get jobs; they’re broke. As they came into adulthood, all the usual markers of growing up—employment, social progress, the chance of owning your own property and doing better than your parents—have caved in under their feet. There’s the sense they don’t know what to do with themselves—they are big personalities, raised in a time of expansion, boom, and comfort, now dealing with a shrinking, bony world.
As Dunham is the first to chronicle their lives, everything that happens to the men and women in Girls is of note: Their casual preference for prescription drugs over alcohol. A reliance on their parents previous generations would find shaming, and bewildering. An idea of sex as something both theatrical, and theoretical. The normality of anal sex. Everyone being massively in debt. The proliferation of unpaid internships. All the women greeting each other, habitually, with “You look beautiful!”—an automatic, oddly loaded salutation: “looks” are being monitored. The pecking order of online social networks—when the cool one Jessa, explains that she’s not on Facebook, the others are blown away: guileless Shoshanna gasps, “Oh my God, you’re so classy.”
Perhaps the most obvious novelty in Girls, however, is Dunham herself, and how she looks.
In a world of pointy-faced, orange ladies with thin, hard legs, she is round-faced, pale, and soft.
The first publicity stills for Girls showed her on a park bench with her gang—thick tights, skirt riding up over her thighs, belly gently rounding up to a cheap belt. Fetishably real. The confidence she had for this to be the publicity shot going out to thousands of journalists extends to the show—in Girls, Dunham is regularly semidressed, or naked: talking to people while pulling a skirt up over Spanx, sitting in a bath eating cupcakes, having terrible sex with a man who grabs her belly and wobbles it in his hands, telling her he knows how she could lose seven pounds. In a “Circle of Shame” world, where the greatest crime a female celebrity can commit is to put on weight or wear an unflattering outfit, unembarrassed, casual nudity is Dunham’s “thing”—along with her frequently looking disheveled, or sprinkled with acne. Her lack of fear, and vanity, is bracing. What does it mean to her?
“Hahaha!” she laughs, slightly awkwardly. “It’s funny, because it didn’t come out exactly the way I saw it in my head. When I imagine myself walking down the street, and then see footage of myself walking down the street, it doesn’t look the same. In my brain, I’ve always been maybe ten notches more classically beautiful than I am. In my brain, I’ve always been really gorgeous—and they just don’t get it yet. There was a certain amount of . . . deluding myself.”
The first time Dunham appeared naked on camera, it was with a film she made at university, in which she climbed into the campus fountain in a bikini and pretended to shower and clean her teeth, before being moved on by a security guard. When she put it on YouTube, it went viral and got fifty thousand hits. However, it also sparked a debate, in the comments underneath, about the size of Dunham’s thighs, and whether she was fat or not. What she had just seen as a jokey film had turned into a debate about her fuckability, and she eventually deleted it.
This level of debate continued when Girls broadcast.
“There is hostility—people saying, ‘Why do you think I want to see you naked?’” She sighs. “It’s like, you put on the television and watched it! It’s like when you’re on Twitter and someone goes, ‘I’m really shocked you said that, you should be apologizing.’ You chose to listen to me! YOU ARE FOLLOWING ME!”
One line from a review of Tiny Furniture, from critic Amy Taubin, still makes Dunham reel: “She [Dunham] courts our rejection by walking around the house in nothing more than a T-shirt, flaunting her ass and thighs for anyone who’s looking—and we can’t help but look—as if daring us to pass judgment on her body.”
For women, the public reaction to another woman’s body is always interesting.
“I think my motives are varied. There’s a part of me that goes, ‘You think I’m chubby? Well, LOOK AT ME NAKED.’ Then there’s also sometimes some feeling of rage. Where it would be fine for you to do it if you had a more traditional body—but you don’t, so you shouldn’t. Like fat girls should know to keep their clothes on? And [as a woman], you’re not allowed to be fine with yourself. There’s one day, in seventh grade—when you’re like twelve—when it stops being okay to say nice things about yourself. When you’re little you can be, ‘I love my dress! I’m beautiful!’ Then a day comes where all your friends are like, ‘Don’t you know that’s not okay?’ When you get a compliment now, you must be like, ‘No! I’m so fat and hideous!’”
But the fabulous thing about Dunham is her air of not caring. Yes, she has days of freaking out (“I lose my voice. I think it’s a physicalization that I just need to . . . stop answering people’s questions”), and times where, exhausted, she must rewrite scripts overnight (“I collapsed in a little pile. It was hot, impotent, sad crying. But I did it. And the crying helped me get there”).
But when talk turns to the then still-forthcoming Emmys, you see, again, how guilelessly swashbuckling she is about the whole thing. Big award ceremonies are, for women, their princess moment: however much of a schlump you play on screen, at the Emmys, or the Golden Globes, or the Oscars, you lose the weight, get the stylist, put on the shoes, and have your duckling-to-swan makeover.
Dunham, however, plans no such thing.
“I never imagine my wedding—but I’ve always loved to imagine holding hands with a faceless guy on the red carpet. And I want to wear a cape. When I told my publicist that, she said, ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’ But it would be cool! You’d just feel like a . . . superperson. And my red carpet pose will be either a peace sign, or star jumps. I might star-jump down the red carpet.”
In the event, when Dunham attends the Emmys six weeks later, she does not wear a cape, or do star jumps, on the red carpet. She wears a pretty blue lace dress, and stands quite still, being normal. She also loses in all her categories—best actress goes to Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Veep, best director goes to Modern Family, and best writer to the modish Louis C.K. Has some fear overcome Dunham in the month and a half between? Did the pressure of shooting the second season of Girls get to her? Even this early on, is she going to bottle it?
The answer comes in the prerecorded sequence which opens the ceremony. The camera roams around backstage—and finally finds Dunham, in a restroom stall, sitting on the toilet, naked, cheerfully eating cake. Breasts exposed, belly gently rolling
, hair cropped short, like a pirate girl. University tattoos still diaried on her arms and back. She does not look like anyone you’ve ever seen nominated for three Emmys before. This film projects on a screen, twenty feet high, in front of all of Dunham’s peers, and to an audience of 13.2 million people.
All the headlines the next day are about her.
All this pressure, in the tiny eye of the storm—but still she holds steadfast, naked, eating cake. She has absolute mastery of the laughter.
When the Oscars Won’t Be Evil
Lena Dunham at an awards ceremony is always a joy. I have, of course, spent years preparing for how I would attend a major awards ceremony. After much deliberation, I’ve decided I shall dress in a Ghostbusters jumpsuit. One with the Venkman badge on, obviously. Everyone wants to be Venkman. All my family have Venkman badges. Except my brother, who is niche, and has one that reads “Janine.”
So it’s the Oscars tomorrow—the biggest prize-giving ceremony on the planet. Everyone has had an idle thought about winning an Oscar—whatever their actual job may be. The dress, the hair. The epic, barnstorming, score-settling speech—“And, now, so we turn to Nemesis Number Fourteen, Rachel Whitmore—who, in Year Five, said I looked like a Moomin. WHO’S LAUGHING NOW, RACHEL?”—until the orchestra has to pointedly play you off.
For years, I couldn’t work out why an awards ceremony for the film industry was the totemic prize-giving event. Surely awards for international diplomacy, medical advances, or technology should be bigger?
But then it struck me: of course the awards ceremony for the film industry would be the biggest award ceremony—because it’s the film industry, duh. The one thing they know is how to put on a show—lighting, costumes, music, stories, stars. These are experts in narrative, and sell. And on Oscar night they sell themselves to the world.
Moranifesto Page 18
