GIRLS talk (the Lena Dunham thread)

hands up if youve never done that before

*raises hand*

*raises hand*

if the show was called boys and the actor who played adam directed it, no one would comment on this stuff in a negative way except extreme squares. i guess i should just readjust my definition of squares to include ppl who write shit like that onion piece

are u seriously scandalized by someone peeing on the side of railroad tracks

i dont get the phone call mattering. its not like she skyped them and got her pissing urethra in the frame

I have totally talked to my parents on the phone while taking a leak by the side of a road. Also, robotripping once. Don't know if that figures into the Girls thing. Just thought I'd throw that out there.

I think that's usually not very good for the phone, or so I hear.

xpost

I see what you're getting at, and you def have a point; but successfully or not I think the onion piece was more making fun of the idea that LD pissing by railroad tracks is construed my some as "raw and brave and real" as the piece puts it. yes it's making fun of certain feminist celebrations of the show but I don't think this is really at odds with feminism or celebrating the show as feminist, ultimately. It's just the sort of funhouse mirror version of things that's valuable I think!

as if an overweight girl eating, going to the gyno, and shitting everywhere on national tv wouldnt be raw, brave or real. lol

i mean that would, tbh, be very gangster

yeah that's def true!

um

*braces self

... to poop

"Bottom 10 percent of last year's graduating class ready to take on Saddam"

that's p awesome, missed that one.

lol

i appeciated marnie's description of the party as a "celebration of their premature success"

she's a master of the put-down compliment

I just brought up that railroad track thing cos it was the first thing that came to mind. I sort of remember one recent episode (the last one?) opening with a close shot of LD fidgeting with an ass wedgie. It's not my imagination that purposeful ugliness/'scandalizing' content is part of her message. "Here's some stuff you NEVER see women do on TV, here's some real life." Scooting on the floor she gets a splinter on her ass. Later she injures her ear with a cotton swap.

who among us has not put a q-tip through our eardrum though

I have never. I was scandalized.

ugh whenever I visited one of my friends in highschool, EVERY time her Mom would call out from the other room and then emerge at her bedroom door with a qtip sticking out of her ear saying 'it got stuck again', and my friend would have to lead her to the bathroom to help remove it. no idea why she kept doing it. she was a seemingly normal, sensible lady in every other aspect of life.

so gross

maybe it was her cute way of pulling her daughter aside to conduct a private conversation

'that vegemite grrl is bad news, find a way to make her leave'

seen this a few times, think it's not v good - pretty uninspiring characterisations, everything seeming to hail from the world of awkward selfobsessed cliche, no surprises, no poetry, no crushing insight

jenna marbles >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> lena dunham in the nupopfeminismcomedy stakes

Jenna Marbles would be funnier if her voice wasn't nails on a chalkboard

if the show was called boys and the actor who played adam directed it, no one would comment on this stuff in a negative way except extreme squares.

It's not my imagination that purposeful ugliness/'scandalizing' content is part of her message. "Here's some stuff you NEVER see women do on TV, here's some real life."

there is a huge gulf between 'here's some stuff you never see women do on tv' - a pretty broad category of stuff considering the until-now paper-thin definition of women on tv - & some kind of cynical or provocative calculation to blow people's minds wide open. you are talking about her adjusting a wedgie as part of a sequence about compulsive behaviour; it's not really front-&-centre shocking behaviour, it's just novel to have some level of plausible, gestural realism incorporated into portrayals of women. it pretty successfully maps onto how mundane it would be to see all male sitcom characters of the past twenty years a guy scratch his ass on tv. given how benign this kinda thing is, & how much it's a part of her mandate to get into texturally realer territory occupied by a certain strata of people in their twenties, it just seems ultra reductive & shortsighted to see it as provocation or some next wave of arbitrary taboo-busting.

ps imago watch more episodes of girls

to the benighted of this world, awkward selfobsessed cliche is their nearest approach to poetry. forgive them, imago, for they know not what they goggle at and guffaw over.

last ep & it's date nite chronicle of its roguish & enigmatic lead a pretty good example of absence of cliche/venture into surprising territory/p crushing insight

I also can't think of a show that's 'like' Girls in its content or cult of personality around the creator/star.

Schlump otm

Jenna Marbles?? Not very funny (maybe that was your point---to illustrate how unfunny you find Dunham) & not much of a feminist iirc (see: questions for sluts)

wtf is Jenna Marbles

youtube chick

lena dunham speaks for her generation, louie ck speaks for humanity

tbf, louis speaks for the generation in front of lena's

question that came to mind during some evidently v profound daydreaming - when a couple of weeks back Jessa said that her stepbrother had camel toe, was she referring to some male take on the standard version at work in his jorts, or is that a term used for centre-parted hair?

You obv weren't looking at his shorts

I thought camel toe was called moose knuckle for men.

cameltoe can still apply to a dude even if the description isn't anatomically 'accurate'.

100% his shorts

schlump otm

Saying you don't like this show is one thing, Imago, but saying it has 'no surprises' is just not the truth.

Hm. When I saw John Cameron Mitchell in this I thought "yay Hedwig", but then I realized there was a lot of common ground between his reclamation-of-body in "Shortbus" and what Dunham in doing in "Girls". I wonder if there's a connection there? I realize "Shortbus" isn't exactly a hugely popular film but the similarities in intent are pretty striking

I've only seen three or four episodes, maybe I keep miraculously missing the good ones. My wife likes it. I'm not against its existence but I do feel its extremely worthy message (that not enough cultural discourse is sculpted from a female perspective) could have ridden a more impressive vehicle, and could have more seamlessly inhabited its world without resorting to writ-large power-relationships. Jane Austen it ain't, but I could yet be convinced of its excellence, or rather its importance. To be really transgressive it would need to have more to it than its own message - its own big-capital-letters GIRLS, the whole point neatly encapsulated and barely elaborated-upon. It's too simple, in other words, from what I've seen. Too reductive.

I guess transgression isn't the point - it's designed as meat-and-drink TV fare but with a female twist - and that's fair, because not enough meat-and-drink TV has been female in perspective - and the fact that popular meat-and-drink TV is female-written is in itself a minor transgression of sorts - but it's a transgression within a carefully-controlled cultural paradigm (popular TV) whose grasp of ambiguity usually extends about as far as a way-overplayed cops-against-drug-dealers narrative and doesn't take into account the multiplicity and unpredictability of the world it seeks to reduce.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that Lena Dunham could drop so many bombs right now from her elevated position, but she's still making a formulaic TV show. The episode I saw most recently? Peeing in public is embarrassing (sheesh)! Vagrant British dad is an arty flake (ooh)! Hippies with dead rabbits and their silly bumpkin ways (eww)! Slow virgin kid is bad at sex and mega-awkward (awkward)! I mean come ooooonnnnnnn, show me the fucking cosmos

You should watch more episodes, that particular episode was one of two so far that deliberately contrast the normal pace of the show with something bucolic

certainly, you seem to have developed a quite elaborate take on it that would be unrecognisable to anyone who watches regularly.

ok well next time I'll watch along. open to it improving. so far, feels like an opportunity somewhat spurned.

Vagrant British dad

FP'd you for this

Lol this whole thread was saying the same thing when we'd all only watched 3 or 4 episodes