C/D LENA DUNHAM (THE DEFINITIVE POLL)

whiney trolls so hard it's like oh my GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWW

it's painful how out of the loop whiney is w/ contemporary culture

It's hard for me to imagine that what she does couldn't be done better by someone else, but thus far she seems to be the winner by default at ultra-realistically portraying her little millieux. I guess the ability to get out of the way of reality is a kind of talent. I don't love what she does but I don't hate it either. Wish there was a third voting button.

― has important things to say about gangnam style (Hurting 2), Friday, October 5, 2012 6:20 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is otm. to a certain extent she won the lottery, i don't think there's much of anything to distinguish her as a unique talent, comedically or artistically or whatever.

whiney, i think there's a lot of trolling yet to be done regarding lena dunham, and i think you may even be up to doing it. but if you want to troll w/ the big boys + girls you have to stop trying to troll ppl w/ these college-level 'lol you know about X,' 'lol you don't know about X' zings. i believe in u!!!

Yeah, I'm the king of butthurt on ILX.

whineys too confrontational to be a really good troll

can't still be standing at the door when it opens saying "yes, i'm the person who brought the flaming bag of dogshit that's here on your doorstep right now, you got a problem with that?"

Lol

It's hard for me to imagine that what she does couldn't be done better by someone else, but thus far she seems to be the winner by default at ultra-realistically portraying her little millieux. I guess the ability to get out of the way of reality is a kind of talent.

― has important things to say about gangnam style (Hurting 2), Friday, October 5, 2012 6:20 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is otm

― some dude, Saturday, October 6, 2012 11:22 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sorry but that... is really not otm post. imo she does not ultra-realistically portray her milieu, even if she did i think it takes a partic crude brand of, like, nerd misanthrope to dismiss that as, like, something 1 could just do, like "tolstoy was just the first person to ultra-realistically portray 19th c russian bourgeoisie all he had to do was get out of the way of reality"

if the world could write by itself, it'd write like lena dunham

flopson otm

dunham > tolstoy

thank god my generation finally has its tolstoy

*phew*

yeah because that was the point of that comparison

it's just funny that you went to tolstoy. happy hipsters are all alike.

her writing just seems like some rando's tumblr afaict but I feel like I have to support anyone on team millennial and her book deal is basically a $4m aid package for the brooklyn artisan economy...this will employ thousands of people really

i mean whether GIRLS is 'realistic' is kind of moot, there's a whole long-winded ~what is realism~ thing i could go into here but i don't really want to. but each episode of the three i can be bothered to watch, because i hate the experience of watching tv, demonstrates a really fucking remarkable grasp of how to set up and structure a thirty-minute script -- she has really high-level screenwriting chops, plus she's a pretty gifted comic actress

her writing on the internet is not very good but then nor is anyone's

mordy cant tell flopson and thomp apart, flopson cant tell dunhan and tolstoy apart, all melenials look the same to iatee, the falcon cannot hear the falconer

flopson + thompson

detective chars in tintin iirc?

Dunham is this generation's Maude Apatow

maybe this generation's douglas coupland

i guess i was just (mis?)reading hurting's post less as saying that realism is her stock in trade (Girls has a good amount of heightened reality in its more comedic moments imo) than that her appeal is a certain fidelity to a generational/cultural aesthetic or zeitgeist that, really, a lot of people are trying to capture right now but i dunno if it's such a big accomplishment to be the first to get there on the scale she has. like, being the first TV show to have an "agonizing over the word choice of a tweet" scene, that's more of a stupid flag-planting than a creative achievement.

i think that's otm. w/out getting into realism or whatever, i haven't seen anything from her that i think stands apart from the milieu + community she is writing about. we don't read tolstoy in 2012 bc he really captured what it's like to be 19th c russian bourg, but he wrote beautifully about being a human that happened to be situated in his own historical context. i don't feel the same way about dunham's work. i don't begrudge anyone who does feel that way, but i wonder if any of this material will resonate in 20-40 years the way it happens to do now in this hyper-zeitgesty way.

feel like the zeitgeisty stuff is just window dressing, does she having anything particularly to say abt how people really live in the 2012

no, we read tolstoy in 2012 because we like long descriptions of farming or because we're teenage girls who wear too much eyeliner

so here are the things 'all adventurous women do' does to set up and contextualise the climactic moment in which hannah horvath tweets something she heard one friend report that another friend say:

- 'yeah, go tweet that'
- 'sorry i passed you an std but i enjoy your quirky web presence'
- shoshana's line "jessa has hpv ... like a couple strains of it. she says that all adventurous women do"
- the dialogue with the gay ex -- he claims it's horvath's adventurousness that has given him the courage to realise he is gay; horvath's reply that yeah she's adventurous, and as an example of how adventurous she is she's gotten into a sexual relationship she's really uncomfortable with
- the climactic tweet

it seems tbh pretty clear that the show's perspective is 'it's pretty sad that the best and clearest route to solace this person has is fucking tweeting something her flakiest friend said'

and like it's totally fine to say 'yes but it's still a show which made a climactic moment of someone tweeting something and i can't descend to watching a show that does that', it's just that that's not really saying anything about the way the show constructs that moment or how it succeeds as art or at least as television: it's saying something about the kinds of person you don't like and can't bear to spend time with even in a fictional context. which is fair enough! but anyone i hear it from on ilx i'm pretty comfortable with putting it down to narcissism of small differences

and i don't think the dancing afterwards signifies that the show is endorsing horvath. there's a dance sequence at the end of inland empire iirc but i don't think that movie is endorsing being stabbed by a homeless person

thats where youre wrong

it's pretty sad that the best and clearest route to solace this person has is fucking tweeting something her flakiest friend said

this is kinda my take on the entire dunham phenomenon. there's a paucity of feeling + idk going on in her work. it all reads to me like someone tweeting something their falkiest friend said.

falkiest

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4e/Falkland_Islands_topographic_map-en.svg/300px-Falkland_Islands_topographic_map-en.svg.png

sad girl dancing to lcd soundsystem in the city

sad girl editing tweets

u guys i was quoting the nerd misanthrope strawman i had created in the previous sentence itp not my own opinion of tolstoy

also forgot 2 say this: lol @ the idea that there is any shortage of people "portraying her little millieux" (of brooklyn) u read ilx you KNOW how much stuff of this ilk already exists dont front

p.s. everyone's posts itt are terrible & not just the usual suspects

no way my posts itt r transcendent

it's saying something about the kinds of person you don't like and can't bear to spend time with even in a fictional context. which is fair enough! but anyone i hear it from on ilx i'm pretty comfortable with putting it down to narcissism of small differences

― set the controls for the heart of the congos (thomp), Saturday, October 6, 2012 7:33 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's not like i'm like "grrr people who tweet!", i have a twitter. but sure, this show has been under attack for so many stupid reasons that i can't blame you for assuming that's where i'm coming from.

p.s. everyone's posts itt are terrible & not just the usual suspects

fu i am going to post in depth readings of every episode now

so here are the things 'all adventurous women do' does to set up and contextualise the climactic moment in which hannah horvath tweets something she heard one friend report that another friend say

the climactic moment of that episode is where her roommate frantically masturbates to the thought of one of the lonely island guys fyi

yeah i am less interested in writing a lengthy defense of that

it seems tbh pretty clear that the show's perspective is 'it's pretty sad that the best and clearest route to solace this person has is fucking tweeting something her flakiest friend said'

that would be otm except for the sad part, the scene plays triumphantly, she dances her damn buns off to a damn robyn song.

people don't/can't dance immediately after having a 'crisis' or being in a bad mood or having sad thoughts? Sometimes people associate a song with dancing and hear it and want to dance, as somebody who really doesn't dance ever I can't believe I'm having to explain this to another human.

you know it's not a documentary, right?

I think I was coming into the show with the notion that she was some young person who didn't deserve to have a show and at best it was a zeitgeisty flash in the pan thing, but it turned out to be really funny so fair play to her.

do u honestly think the takeaway from that scene is meant to be 'hanna is so awesome for tweeting this'?

classic, but I couldn't remember who she was when I clicked on this thread

its not the tweet im focused on, its the dancing

do u honestly think the takeaway from that scene is meant to be 'hanna is so awesome for tweeting this'?

― set the controls for the heart of the congos (thomp), Saturday, October 6, 2012 9:43 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

do u honestly think the takeaway is meant to be 'shes so sad/pathetic'?

no i think it is ~multi-leveled~ and ~complex~

ok... good!!!

yeah!!!