GIRLS talk (the Lena Dunham thread)

role models iirc

even people who hated everything about sex & the city watched every episode. it was hypnotizing. like oprah. fairy princess porn. i can relate. i love oprah & sex & the city too. and yet so much to hate if you really think about it...

Aside from the appeal of having (arguably) a female perspective on sex, relationships, life, etc, as well as a funny, charming representation of a group of female friends, you had a legimitization of a number of approaches to being an independent female. It's incredibly problematic, of course, but about ten years ago there was a kind of push in the film/tv studies department i was studying in where women liked this "post-feminist" (ugh, i know i know) idea of being able to enjoy the "girly" things (shopping, fashion, etc) while not letting it define you. I think seeing this reflected on television made some women feel liberated about options and choices, where having multiple sexual partners and no interest in monogamy was perfect acceptable, as well as a more traditional view on romance.

I'm not saying that the show achieved that, or there wasn't a degree of misreading, or that the text wasn't highly problematic, but I think that's a very general (probably reductive) summation.

I think a lot of those fans (well, the thinking, critical ones) were really thrown off by the second movie, which was so absurdly offensive, which in hindsight felt like an inevitability once they had to deal with a different culture.

i unabashedly hate sex and the city and all it stands for. I dated a girl who was into it so i watched like three seasons under duress. not a good or a healthy-for-the-world show.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2056366/

not a good or a healthy-for-the-world show.

I think it was a mixed bag, though probably more towards the side of bad than good.

xp yeah, reboot

So weird. From my perspective it's sole legacy has been the ubiquity of the Cosmopolitan and fancy shoes. I would have though we'd moved well beyond the need for it's so called post feminism. But then, it's being cited as an inspiration for a show about vapid, stupid narcissists as well as the generation they're meant to reflect, so...shoes and drinks it is

Sorry for it's/its. I blame phone.

There's a lot of that Cosmo/fancy shoes thing, and certainly I know a number of fans who only like that aspect. At the time (and the discussion has moved far beyond this now), it was a highly problematic text because there was always an aspect, I felt, of rationalising the enjoyment. It's a lot different now than in the late 90s landscape, but SATC was doing a lot of things that pretty much every other television show wasn't doing. Maybe it was one step forward, two steps back, but I think a lot of people latched onto that step forward.

am i crazy or were cosmos not a thing until sex and the city made them so
i know cupcakes werent

dynasty did it too.

feel like fancy lady shows started with reagan. at least rosanne held down the fort. until she went insane under the pressure of being the last sane woman alive.

she didn't go insane. that was all a dream.

the government had to drive rosanne insane for reminding people what they had fought for in the 70's.

Sex and the city single handedly popularized cosmos, yes. In fact, it's probably cocktail canon because of it.

wait, cupcakes were a satc thing?? goddamn it, I have been blaming hipsters

i knew a lot of girls who did the 'sex and the city' nyc bus tour when i moved there for college and magnolia bakery/ugg boots/manolo blahniks were most def a big thing then

it's being cited as an inspiration for a show about vapid, stupid narcissists as well as the generation they're meant to reflect,

see, this kind of 'criticism' makes me pretty angry because neither of these shows (sex & the city, GIRLS) is fully about that - the shows are about women's lives, however dramatized - and in fact both shows (GIRLS moreso) criticizes, to some degree vapid, stupid narcissists. i mean, imo, most shows on tv are about vapid, stupid narcissists and said shows have no critical content whatsoever!

they go way overboard on the icing on their cupcakes, not sure how anyone could make even a semi-regular thing out of eating them

I only know one girl who cops to having watched SATC at all.

and in fact both shows (GIRLS moreso) criticizes, to some degree vapid, stupid narcissists

well...

rrrobyn otm.

I don't know why people want to watch some paragon of humanity be awesome all the time. Girls is very specifically critical of its characters, and certainly Hannah (who views herself different from how the show views her, notably with the room service/tip stealing).

why this also makes me angry is that it feels like a full-on dismissal of both shows as nothing more than vapid and stupid, when in fact they are two of the only shows i've seen on tv in which women talk to women in frank ways about things other than men (at least sometimes)
xps

SATC is certainly less self-aware, which I think is its big problem.

Charlotte's failed marriage and fertility issues were like the exact opposite of vapid and stupid

ditto Miranda's trust issues with Steve

hell, Samantha had an escalating series of meltdowns when she discovered she had cancer

Carrie was the only one whose character arc was most reliably vapid and undeservedly self-involved, and the further she went down that rabbit hole, the more the show punished her for it

I thought the big trick SATC managed to pull off before it ventured onto the big screen was alternating deftly between caricature and empathy; IMO detractors seem to only have noticed the former and completely gloss over the latter

people have character flaws in sitcoms for laughs or for one-episode plots, whereas in HBO series characters may actually have flaws because they're a better reflection of real people?

like no one calls out charlie sheen's character on his sitcom other than as a plot device, whereas in real life people question his sanity and bizarre objectification of women and substance abuse.

SATC was was it was, a drama-comedy that followed a fairly typical tv-show pattern - but there was some reflection going on and the characters did openly struggle with their identities throughout - there was thinking, if not intellectualizing.
i maintain that GIRLS is a satire couched in a drama-comedy (or maybe the other way around) and therefore critical.
xps
yes x2!

I really liked the way they dealt with the abortion issue, and the various ways in which characters thought about it. Hannah was great in her "It's not that big of a deal" and then realising that might sound insenstive, "I mean, it's a big deal...but...". Also the way she some how argued her fear of HIV into a possible subconscious desire to want HIV as a relief from the pressures of reality until the doctor steps in with "that's silly."

I wouldn't say it's a satire, but I do think it's slightly exaggerated for comedy purposes.

so did the one character kind of "luck out" (urgh) into a miscarriage when she got way nervous about abortion and blew it off to go have shots and try to smash the dude in the bar?

There were real issues in satc,, just like there are real issues in girls. It's how they're packaged and presented that chafe. Their glimmers of reality are undone by artifice and attitude. Which is why (and the movies don't help) satc lives on as a curious paragon of materialism and little more. Imo. Girls seems to be taking the materialism out of the equation, at least, and I imagine it is more than possible my inability to connect with its immaturity has much to do with my disconnect with that generation. Which I see as navel gazers ad extremum.

I think I'd agree with that (those are my issues with a lot of mumblecore, actually) if I felt the show as trying to say these are awesome people and look at how cool they are. By not treating it positively, it doesn't become about needing to identify with every aspect of the characters, but rather recognising a certain type of person and exploring their facets. That's one of the BIG reasons why Entourage was terrible and I don't think that criticism works here - at least in the 2 episodes I've seen. If I didn't watch people I didn't identify with or even like, I'd probably watch very little TV and even fewer films.

satc lives on as a curious paragon of materialism and little more.
i know many many people who would beg to differ

i think Girls has a different kind of materialism. i also think that most people under age 30 are navel gazers regardless of what generation they're a part of. being young is ridiculous.

Prolly right there

i know and work with a lot of super smart, motivated young people and i respect them and am amazed by what some of them are doing in their lives, while i also see their ridiculousness and kind of love it, i mean, it's a rite of passage

is "mumblecore" the new post-Gen-X version of "slackers"

not the Linklater version necessarily, but the navel-gazing kind of frumpy people who live semi-bohemian lifestyles and while in entry-level or menial jobs while they either pretend to work on some sort of art or spend time drinking coffee and beers while navel-gazing

yes, though infinitely more self-obsessed.

I mean most of that explanation fits me, but I'm a bit older now and have some quote-unquote goals and kind of would be tired after being around these girls for too long

and i'm a fan of the less smart, less motivated young people too. as long as no one's being a hurtful jerk (and there are those in all age groups) i'm cool.
xps

so mh, you are saying you find these girls... annoying

i'm a fair number of years older than these people and I mostly just think "omg you have a one year internship under your belt that shit is like GOLD right now"

btw re: british girl "lucking out" - we don't really know yet whether she miscarried or her period was just late. she seemed pretty happy about it at any rate.

x-post haha yeah some of them. In the way I would chill with them or find some of them attractive but to the point where living in their apartment or crashing there like that one dude would probably drive me insane.

yeah brit girl and one of the others are way cute

even people who hated everything about sex & the city watched every episode

No we didn't

yeah you did

i hate satc and i've seen almost every episode

me too, for a show i "never watched' for some reason every time i see a re-run it's an episode i've already seen

I watched a few early episodes, they were fairly different from what it ended up like iirc. Carrie's voiceover where she starts to wonder.... became like nails down a blackboard for me so I have no idea how other people continued watching.