BOOKS AND ARTS JANUARY 9, 2013
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The backlash to season one of HBO’s “Girls” erupted as soon as the wunderkind glow around Lena Dunham had dimmed. On The Hairpin, Jenna Wortham lamented Dunham’s failure “to weave a main black character” into the show. The blog Racialicious posted a piece titled “Dear Lena Dunham: I exist.” And Dunham leapt to apologize. “If we have the opportunity to do a second season, I’ll address that,” she told The Huffington Post. Soon after season two began shooting, news was leaked that “Girls” had put out casting notices seeking “hipster types” of “all ethnicities.”
But the racial critique of “Girls,” while understandable, felt mostly beside the point. The world of the show was small because the world of its characters was small. It was not so farfetched to imagine that the small posse of Oberlin grads on the show had a mostly white social circle. (A massive new coffee table book about Oberlin, apparently released to capitalize on Dunham-mania, describes the way the school’s “glorious isolation and self-containment creates a sense of special-ness, a benign bubble.”) The girls’ narrowness of context, their inflated sense of the daily catastrophe of post-college life: all this was crucial to the show’s specific angle on coming-of-age in New York. So it was easy to worry that Dunham would try to overcorrect, either by suddenly recasting Hannah Horvath’s Brooklyn as a post-racial fantasy or by feeding her characters clunky apologias. Now season two has arrived—it premieres Sunday—and Dunham has indeed taken the criticism of her show to heart. But so far, Dunham’s response to the racial critique of her show has actually been among the best parts of the new season.
The main addition to the cast is the excellent Donald Glover, a comedian and actor on “Community,” who plays Hannah Horvath’s new boyfriend Sandy, a black Republican. The relationship is in full swing by the time season two begins. We first meet Sandy as he and Hannah are having energetic sex on somebody’s couch. They canoodle in bookstores, chasing each other around the shelves. Meanwhile Hannah’s relationship with Adam—he was hit by a truck at the end of season one, and she is nursing him back to health while fending off his requests to date her—continues to chug pitifully along, in sad juxtaposition. Sandy is the confident and sexy alternative, teaching her new ways to be appreciated. “I love how weird you are,” he says.
But the dynamic between them complicates by the second episode, in an especially satisfying scene. Hannah and Sandy are sitting on his couch, and that early adrenaline rush has started to wane. She is hurt that he has not yet read an essay she sent him. Sandy admits that he did read it, but didn’t like it. “It wasn’t for me,” he tells her. “It’s for everyone,” she says. The obliviousness of this reply is a jab at the idea that one work of art should be saddled with the responsibility to be “for everyone,” the question that has dogged Dunham so persistently: whether “Girls” is about all girls or about four girls’ very particular bubble. Hannah’s rant segues to Sandy’s political beliefs, blasting his views on gay marriage and gun control. “I would also love to know how you feel that two out of three people on death row are black,” she says, and you can feel a new gulf open up between them.
It’s a strange feature of TV criticism that, once a specific complaint reaches a certain cultural decibel level, it can seep into the universe of the show itself. “Friends” was for years pelted with complaints about the whiteness of its cast and eventually added two black female guest stars, Gabrielle Union and Aisha Tyler, both great comic actresses. Tyler had a longer run on “Friends” than Union, but neither made for especially memorable characters, and the show dealt them nearly identical storylines, embroiling each in a love triangle with Joey and Ross. The pasted-in plots felt like a cheap kind of appeasement, a cursory nod to the world outside the show.
Other TV writers have been more direct: Aaron Sorkin staged arguments about feminism between Sam and Ainsley to fend off charges of sexism in “The West Wing.” “Modern Family” tried to explain away complaints that gay couple Cameron and Mitchell never kissed onscreen by devoting an episode to discussing Mitchell’s fear of public displays of affection. But a week later, Cam and Mitchell were as chaste as ever. That’s the problem with subplots designed to quash criticism: they tend to feel parenthetical, a quickly-dispensed-with detour from a protagonist’s main emotional arc. And it can be intrusive to be reminded that a show is so explicitly aware of its audience.
But in the case of “Girls,” some amped-up self-awareness was just what the show needed. Season one, at its best, mixed quiet internal drama with a nagging sense of the absurd. The party scene in Bushwick was a great episode because it captured the genuine exuberance and anxiety of this corner of twentysomethingdom with a certain loopy surrealness: think Zosia Mamet’s Shoshanna, stoned on crack, streaking pantsless across the screen. But the first season of the show, like Dunham’s film Tiny Furniture, could also feel somewhat slight—all that trudging from unsatisfying part-time job to part-time job, the hooking up with people you half-hate, rendered with such diary-like naturalness that the depiction of urban hipster life could seem a bit too fond and close to its subject. Hannah’s self-indulgence at times felt suspiciously like Dunham’s.
So far the biggest change in season two, though, is a new engagement with the question of what we should think about these people. Dunham uses the Sandy plot line as an opportunity to skewer both the complaints of her critics—Hannah herself echoes them with the misguided assumption that her essays are “for everyone”—and her characters’ blinkered worldview. Glover’s arc on the show is brief, but he is key to illustrating the limited scope of Hannah’s experience. “This always happens,” Sandy tells Hannah during their fight. “I’m a white girl and I moved to New York and I’m having a great time and oh I’ve got a fixed gear bike and I’m gonna date a black guy and we’re gonna go to a dangerous part of town. All that bullshit. I’ve seen it happen. And then they can’t deal with who I am.” Hannah responds with an explosion of goofy knee-jerk progressivism: “You know what, honestly maybe you should think about the fact that you could be fetishizing me. Because how many white women have you dated? Maybe you think of us as one big white blobby mass with stupid ideas. So why don’t you lay this thing down, flip it, and reverse it.” “You just said a Missy Elliot lyric,” Sandy says wearily.
It is wholly unsubtle, but it is still “Girls” at its best, at once affectionate and credible and lightly parodic. There is Hannah: impulsive, oblivious, tangled up in her own sloppy self-justifications. And then there is Lena Dunham, the wary third eye hovering above the action. “The joke’s on you because you know what? I never thought about the fact that you were black once,” Hannah tells Sandy. “I don’t live in a world where there are divisions like this,” she says. His simple reply: “You do.”
7 comments
I will watch the show with an open mind, but there's a part of me that thinks, "Really?" I'm African-American, and I had issues with the show last season, but it wasn't because I thought Dunham's character needed to date a black guy. The larger issue is that the first season had an almost suffocating lack of social context (which the author of this article plausibly argues is intentional). Lena Dunham may want to emphasize more than anything the bubble in which her privileged characters live. That could be her central, satirical aim. But I think what the show loses sometimes is the sense of a real world with real struggles and concerns bearing down on its characters. Dunham's characters inhabit a world without gravity. For example, in the first episode, when a black character finally appears, it is a homeless guy telling Dunham's character to smile. Now, it's not that he's black that's most disconcerting; it's the fact that he's a homeless guy essentially patting her on the back for her privileged life, and having no other bearing upon or relevance to her existence. Hannah's parents cut her off financially in the first episode, right? But what negative consequences did her character have to suffer afterward? She neither faced eviction, nor spent more than an episode actually seeking out a job. By the end of season one, the viewer isn't even thinking about such real world concerns because they're immaterial to the story. Meanwhile, in real life, many recent college graduates are saddled with debt, while also lacking any meaningful job prospects. My friends and I are in Dunham's age group and went to college in New York; most of us had to move back home, or take multiple, terrible jobs--unless we had wealthy parents bankrolling us. I guess that's what I think Girls needs: it needs to own the fact that it could only really happen to people in New York with wealthy parents--people like Lena Dunham and her co-stars. For whatever reason, the show tries to play that reality down. Why not embrace it, instead of trying to pretend that a character like Hannah comes from modest suburban beginnings (as they did last season)? But anyway, like I said, I'll check it out with an open mind. I admire the fact that Lena Dunham is a young auteur with an uncompromising vision--even if I don't necessarily enjoy her work.
- maxhencke
January 10, 2013 at 4:41pm
Maxhencke I liked your thoughtful post. I watched the show last year and liked it a lot and will watch it this year too, and am looking forward to it. I have mixed feelings about the narrow social context of the show. And I think there is a dimension of its meaning that is satirical about how insular the lives and concerns of these girls are. But that, at least as far as last season went, was what the show was about--the insular lives and world of a certain set of characters. It has no real need to be anything else, if that's what it's intent on exploring. Dunham is under no artistic necessity to show, as you seem to want her to, "a real world with real struggles and concerns bearing down on its characters." It's just not about that in the sense you mean. One might imagine an iteration of your criticism made, and it has been, against the insular fictional worlds and characters of Jane Austen. But her consummate talent within the worlds and characters she depicts carry her to the heights she rightfully enjoys. Within the terms of her art Dunham ought rise or fall likewise and not by criteria deriving from what she had, last year at least, decided not to deal with.
- basman
January 10, 2013 at 6:41pm
basman, You make a totally legitimate point. I struggled with that idea while writing my critique. Personally, I'm a fan of Whit Stillman's films, like Metropolitan (1990) for example. And the social milieu depicted in his films is extremely insular. I also know for a fact that Stillman influenced Lena Dunham. I'll now say something which may seemingly contradict my above post: I actually think that Dunham needs to make her show even more insular and specific. If she went all-in with the Hannah character, and made her a trust-fund baby who writes thinly-veiled autobiographies and obsesses over minor slights and self-manufactured dramas, the show would work for me (at least more than it does now). It's purely anecdotal on my part, but because I lived in New York and knew people like those depicted on the show (I even met a few people involved with the actual series), it's a glaring flaw to me that Girls suggests that its characters are struggling financially. You simply cannot work in a cafe as your primary source of income and also hope to live in a nice Brooklyn apartment with only one other roommate. It doesn't happen. You'd have to work at two or three cafes--maybe. And at that point, you'd be so tired that all you would do at night is collapse in your loft space in the overpriced warehouse-like apartment you share with three other people. In contrast, if Hannah and her friends all had well-off artist parents who constantly supported them (much like all the principal actors starring on the show), their entitlement and insularity would be justified. Does that make sense? Granted, I'm not really the intended demographic for the show, and I'm probably too fixated on what are ultimately minor issues in a work of fiction.
- maxhencke
January 10, 2013 at 9:21pm
Max, if I may, good criticisms of the show. I don't think you're being inconsistent. You're showing up the limits of the show and what Dunham has done, so far, which is good , though not great, sometimes even compelling tv within its own terms. It's not the high art of the The Wire, or Deadwood. Works of genius standing up along side anything ever done. I really like Stillman and my only complaint about him is that he doesn't make more movies. His that stands out for me is Last Days of Disco, where he puts it all together re great characters, tremendous social context largely through talk, capturing a great slice of American life at a particular time and place, creating emotional resonance, and then all the fabulous talking itself so revelatory of that world. I think it's an amazing movie. (I don't remember Metropolitan clearly though I saw it a longish time ago. Remember thinking it and Barcelona weren't as good as Last Days of Disco. In The Company Of Men was shattering.) But just to get back to my slight point, I didn't know Stillman influenced Dunham but am not surprised to hear it, given the talkiness. Richard Linklater also excellent, is of that genre. I know Whit Stillman. Whit Stillman is a friend of mine--not really oc--Lena Dunham is no Whit Stillman, not yet at any rate.
- basman
January 11, 2013 at 12:26pm
Funny how many things pale compared to The Wire, huh? Best show ever on television (in my opinion). Last Days is a great movie, too. I prefer Metropolitan, but Last Days is probably a better executed movie on the whole. I really enjoy Barcelona, too. I believe Neil LaBute did In The Company of Men--but it's also quite good! No, I don't really get the impression that Dunham aims to make broad social statements in the manner of Whit Stillman. During Metropolitan, Stillman argues in favor of a pro-aristocratic, conservative worldview--which I incidentally don't share. For example, he loathes The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (a movie I love), and he even has one of his characters act as a mouthpiece to voice this opinion. I think he actually seeks to humanize the upper-class and to lend them another dimension--whether or not he succeeds at that. Dunham definitely comments on the lives of twenty-something Brooklyn hipsters, but I also think a lot of her stories seek to achieve the sort of self-analysis or self-exhibition that Louis CK's does. Her family literally acted alongside her in Tiny Furniture.
- maxhencke
January 11, 2013 at 1:04pm
An Labute, my mistake
- basman
January 11, 2013 at 4:14pm
Louis CK self exhibition yes, self analysis not so much?
- basman
January 11, 2013 at 4:57pm