GIRLS talk (the Lena Dunham thread)

watched two episodes of this on the plane, otherwise have never seen this

never not happy to see becky ann baker, she was predictably good in this

first ep was the "ocd reveal," second was the season 2 finale, which functions -- for someone who has not been watching the show -- as a portrait of a sick, basically bad character who is trying her best to drag everyone around her down with her into the hole. but based on what i read here i don't think hanna reads this way as a whole?

also, a book publisher would never sue an author for not turning the first batches in on time! people are routinely YEARS LATE with manuscripts and they never pay back their advance. last year one of the houses, i forget which, did actually sue some authors for advances, incl. elizabeth wurtzel, but this was for stuff that was literally seven years past due with no pages turned in

Actually that very much depends on who is writing the book - a mid-list first-timer might well be told to pay back the signing advance if deadlines are missed. Wurtzel, not so much.

Yeah but when you're 23 and it's your first deal ever you don't know that

"Hannah's OCD also feels like something forced into the show, and I also feel like she tried to make the parents seem worse than they did in the past in order to make her character more sympathetic, like "see, she actually has it just as bad as Jessa.""

This is ridiculous

I don't think her parents come off badly at all

Becky Ann Baker may be a little harsh but imagine how annoying a child Hannah would be

im totally behind on the debates around this show but i finally saw the first two seasons. the last episode was enjoyably sweet/irritatingly rom-com-ish.

am dissapointed that charlie wont be returning in season 3 but from watching the 'boys of girls' roundtable, he obv looked pretty pissed off being there. am guessing dunham being in some sort of awe over the adam character and belittling charlie (at one point she basically says that charlie is a pussy) had something to do with that, or it might just be down to chris abbott tired of playing a guy who everyone seems to think is a pushover (which i think is a bit too easy a charge to make, but then when the shows creator is reducing men to binaries herself, you cant really blame everyone else for doing it).

that aside, i find it hard to really like any of the girls in girls (i feel like the ray character). compelling, sure, but not really likeable. the only one who i find funny at least is hannah.

but then i am a man.

The show is much easier to enjoy when you accept they're all assholes.

assumed that was a given....? Ray seems the least horrible.

yeah, as I think I said upthread, Jessa is actually the most likeable of the female characters, which says a lot. Ray is ok I guess because at least he's the kind of jerk who's upfront about being a jerk.

Or acts the most openly like a jerk and yet has better intentions usually than the other characters. But he's also supposed to be like 10 years older than them.

The series, aside from the jokes (and there gen are good ones), has this aura of Dunham doling out life lessons which (given her age) I suspect she learned five months ago.

The OCD definitely seemed to come out of nowhere in the season 2 premiere as a new focal point of the story/character -- Dunham's performance seemed a little over-the-top too, to the point that I was wondering whether we were supposed to think Hannah was contriving a mental illness or if it was supposed to be legit and the storytelling itself was contrived.

having watched both seasons recently there are hints of the OCD earlier in season 1 when she goes to the gynecologist, which makes me a little more forgiving of its abrupt reintroduction at the end of S2. but only a little.

I think the show has a callowness that veers awfully close to smugness at times--but I have to admit that watching LD attempt to work through and against her own youth is pretty fascinating art, the ultimate value of it aside.

haha love all the assholes going 'OBV RAY'S THE MOST SYMPATHETIC CHARACTER!'

well really my favorite is Shoshona but I have hard time considering someone so priveleged and naive as sympathetic

The series, aside from the jokes (and there gen are good ones), has this aura of Dunham doling out life lessons which (given her age) I suspect she learned five months ago.

― eclectic husbandry (Dr Morbius), Thursday, January 9, 2014 12:08 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

maybe I'm not giving her enough credit, but when Terry Gross interviewed her during the first season, Terry said something about how the characters were not very likeable, with a little bit of a laugh, and I could swear Dunham did this awkward laugh-along thing with a trace of "Right, yeah, haha, they're unlikeable (wait, they are?)"

shows with unlikeable characters are the best shows tho

I mean I don't wanna hang out with Tony Soprano or Kenny Powers or Larry David etc

curb is hard to watch in large doses precisely because the characters are so unlikeable

rather sweeping xxp

what about the MTM crew? Dr Hartley's analysands?

i haven't sufficiently formulated a kinda ouroboros-motif metaphor that's watertight enough to use itt yet, but: i feel like how far ahead of contemporary discourse dunham was - in foregrounding all of her concerns about youth & introducing them on her show - should kinda insulate her from a lot of criticism about its value. like the portrayals of sex & money & work, that get lazily talked down as if they're incorporated uncritically, are just so fucking advanced from a landscape of shitty kate hudson romcoms & unreal Anne Hathaway As New York Adult movies & dumb male novelists striving for joseph hellerism, that to rip into this thing for lack of nuance, as if we were all there before her, just feels so ungenerous.

ps i love shoshana so much

pps anyone introducing the idea of 'likeability' itt should be banned from all future physical & digital interpersonal interaction with others from now on, & forever, it's like criticising people in faulkner novels for not behaving admirably, it's art, jesus h fuck

I never got the impression that they were incorporated "uncritically," I just don't if the criticism is sharp or knowing enough. I mean maybe I'm just reading in what I know, but it very much feels like a sardonic look at spoiled 23-year-olds from the POV of a spoiled 25-year-old, albeit a very sharp and witty one.

I get that Dunham isn't Hannah Horvath, and I agree that it's a little stupid to conflate them.

gen speaking, the demands of/compact with the audience differ btwn a sitcom and Absalom, Absalom

sure. but there's a degree to which watching hannah horvath be a brat during an hiv test & understanding the show as indulgent, rather than laceratingly critical, of bratty rich white kids is like foregrounding good behaviour throughout as important in any other artistic medium. her generational critique is searing & deep, i think, maybe in tiny furniture more directly than girls, & so much criticism of this show is just wasted on deciding whether or not she knows that. i love the talk - iirc itt - about how good she is with just things like clothes; neither a million miles from what she might be like but also incredibly well observed.

see that's the thing though. not sure if im ok with the options being "indulgent" or "laceratingly critical"--i mean, i def sense there's satire at work, but i dont get the sense that there's all that much teeth in it so far. i mean, take the last shot of the first episode and the last shot of the first season and tell me there's not some weird self-regard going on there. or is that my mis-reading? i dunno. this can be a tough show to get a handle on, which is to its credit.

and yeah of course who cares how "conscious" she is about any critique in her work. it doesn't need to be that cut and dried. and she's under no more obligation to curb indulgence than anyone else.

Likability is a thing with TV characters. We choose to spend 30-60 minutes with them a week (or in this era, perhaps three hour blocks for weeks on end) - there's a level of grating that can be hard to look past.

Tony Soprano and Stringer Bell were vicious sociopaths - but they were also charming and had enough depth that the show made you forget that you were watching someone you wouldn't want to be alone with IRL. No one on Girls (except Shoshanna) has shown much in the way of redemptive qualities as either a (fictional) human being or as a character.

what's wrong with Ray? you got something against homeless guys?

i feel like i am okay with that binary. i don't know if it's blog fatigue, resistance to just the collective noise of like pedantic independent takedowns of imperfect but conversationally catalystic art. i remember thinking that brokeback mountain was somewhat reductive in its portrayal of gay relationships amongst cowboys; the couple separate, quickly, into a traditional-gender-role-seeming dynamic, one partner needy, the other aloof. but guess what it's a gay cowboy movie & probably had enough of an uphill climb without being able to round off its last five percent into nuanced perfection. girls is obviously imperfect, in so many ways - mainly, actually, the kinda apolitical stuff, like how syrupy & dawsons creekish & involved with its characters emotionality it got in the second season, which i'm not addressing here - but i think as a text that does like a lot - ie it puts new angles on stuff that was pretty much disenfranchised from discourse before, it provides weird modern brooklyny character archetypes, it works as a syrupy show for teenagers, &c - it should be kinda "accepted", at some level, rather than just flogged for the shortsightedness of its every failure. i don't mean not criticised; i just mean not criticised as if its failure to absolutely transcend limitations is a weakness rather than a formal inevitability. there's total self-regard throughout (sorry, i forget the shots you talk about, but i believe you), there are failings, but it's just frustrating that they're kinda laid on the doorstep of ld as if she's sleepwalking, or as if it isn't valuable as a stimulus as much as as an exemplar.

xxxxp @ ryan

Likability is a thing with TV characters. We choose to spend 30-60 minutes with them a week (or in this era, perhaps three hour blocks for weeks on end) - there's a level of grating that can be hard to look past.

Tony Soprano and Stringer Bell were vicious sociopaths - but they were also charming and had enough depth that the show made you forget that you were watching someone you wouldn't want to be alone with IRL. No one on Girls (except Shoshanna) has shown much in the way of redemptive qualities as either a (fictional) human being or as a character.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Thursday, January 9, 2014 5:36 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh god this is just so awful you can not watch it
seriously they made friends for you

you can just not watch it

seriously i demand that a depiction of somebody be at some point passed to a Sweetening Committee - perhaps some people from the midwest with experience of redemptive everyday niceness - and be at a minimum 10% sweetened, removing vulgarities, adding acts of general american generosity, so that i might avoid too deeply contemplating actual human behaviour

even if you set aside all the "why are we telling stories about these people" stuff (these people = white, non-impoverished, young etc.) then i still think you're left with a kind of narcissism that feeds into itself rather than exposed as such. the politics of the show, such as they are, are more about a kind of banal consciousness raising from within rather than any kind of genuine clash with anything other. (forgive the abstractions). that may be intentional and pointed but it's also really limited.

xp: very well said, schlump. and yeah i dont wanna hit this show over the head for failing to transcend its inherent limitations. but maybe LD's potential is such that I'm gonna go ahead and do that anyway! i think you're probably right and I'm wrong.

ps these people should be more like tony soprano is just like the ninth symphony of terrible responses to art

ps: i think hannah is kinda likable and wkiw.

seriously i demand that a depiction of somebody be at some point passed to a Sweetening Committee - perhaps some people from the midwest with experience of redemptive everyday niceness - and be at a minimum 10% sweetened, removing vulgarities, adding acts of general american generosity, so that i might avoid too deeply contemplating actual human behaviour

ps these people should be more like tony soprano is just like the ninth symphony of terrible responses to art

You build lovely strawmen - do you handcraft them while watching Girls?

we talked about this upthread, but the ep where hannah tries and mightily fails to write about "death" struck me as a high point of the show--it was an auto-critique but at the same time i think it was LD's nod to the fact that the show (and her POV as a writer) is limited but that limitation gives it a specificity of time/place/character that make it worth paying attention to. writing about "death" (or anything "meaningful") in the abstract, or divorced from particularities, would rob her of an ability to SPEAK at all. so it was sort of an empowering acknowledging of necessary limitations. hope that make sense.

naw ryan i feel you - my post is littered with this is beyond criticism while using lazy caveats to stem a response mentioning that criticism is vital, as was demonstrated by the various race discussions coming from this show. i really liked that lou reed review of yeezus that loved part of a record & didn't give a fuck about the things it didn't like; it brushes aside like half of the record as like, yeah it has the basic failings of a rapper on autopilot uninventively celebrating wealth but who cares. & i think i just feel like a million thinkpieces is too much in the face of something pretty innovative, even though a bunch of those specific thinkpieces - ie the race thing - are necessary & the 'why are we telling stories' thing is an appropriate macro lens for it all. i also feel sorta defensive of that kinda internal critique. i remember reading miranda july talk about her movies & say like ... should i make them .. about .. prisoners? so it's more real?, because there's this sorta ... protesting-too-much intolerance for introspection from viewers whose demographic is being portrayed too closely for comfort. like i am white & occupy coffee-drinking internship-pursuing metropolitan-city situations that it would be gross to pretend are significantly different from girls, & i feel like some rejection of the show can be from an impulse of disliking seeing my demographic portrayed with a self-important focus, like the introspection is gauche. i think the big leap she took in really interrogating her scene from within, & writing scenes like the hiv one i mentioned, or foregrounding dissatisfing sex to i think such kinda societally-reassuring-ends, is such an achievement, & the rejection of it as marginal on account of the obvious privilege of its protagonists is frustrating.

In choosing long-longform narrative (whether it's a novel or a television show or a latter-day Martin Scorsese film), everyone has a decision tree regarding "is this worth spending my limited amount of free time" on reading/watching/etc. Is it funny, is it moving, is it well-made, am I going to get something great from it so on down to "do I want to be able to talk about this with my friends" and yeah, how you feel about the people you'll be watching/reading is part of that.

What you don't seem to understand is that likability, here, is a reflection of storytelling. No one said Hannah needed to be more like Tony Soprano - what I said was that Tony Soprano was a monster but a fascinating, charming monster. Hannah isn't interesting or likable in and of herself - nor is she a great character in the narrative sense.

I don't think the "likeability" thing is just about "privilege" either. I mean I found the main character in Frances Ha to be full of pathos, and on paper she could be a Girls character. She wasn't "likeable" in the sense of someone I want to hang out with, but I felt empathy for her. You could say her problems were "first world problems," and yet I felt genuinely sad for her. I think that's more what people mean, or at least what I mean, not "these people would be no fun at parties" but "I feel like I am watching cardboard cutouts talk to themselves in a mirror." I guess the way Dunham writes her characters leaves me a little cold. It's not that their problems aren't "real," it's that they seem like they don't even know what it means to feel like a problem is real, like they're just imitating the way they think people with problems act.

You build lovely strawmen - do you handcraft them while watching Girls?

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Thursday, January 9, 2014 5:42 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

c'mon man! you are saying:

Likability is a thing with TV characters. We choose to spend 30-60 minutes with them a week (or in this era, perhaps three hour blocks for weeks on end) - there's a level of grating that can be hard to look past.

& then

No one on Girls (except Shoshanna) has shown much in the way of redemptive qualities as either a (fictional) human being or as a character.

i don't think i'm excising anything that modifies these in between.

should these people not be portrayed at all? should their portrayal be softened so as to make it more bearable? or is it okay to attempt to capture a grim likeness of some particular subculture just for the value of exploring it? it's like saying take the swearing out of movies or something, that's ... okay, i guess, but the fact that swearing happens in the real world gives us reason to portray things that way. there shouldn't be a concession to include fucking 'redemptive qualities', why should that be imposed for television?

I think milo's criticism thus far can be summed up as "These characters aren't sociopaths... so I don't like them! What a terrible show."

Just kidding milo! Haha. A gaff

And again, I really like a lot of Dunham's writing, I think she's very witty and funny, and I will keep watching girls. I just find myself ultimately not giving a shit whether Hannah gets back with Adam, whether Marnie ever snaps out of her pathetic need to be needed by a guy she never loved, whether Ray and Shoshana's completely nonsensical relationship "works out," whether Adam relapses into his unconvincing teen alcoholism, whether Hannah's "writing" takes off, etc. The one time in the show I have felt otherwise was in the episode where Jessa visited her dad, which I found genuinely moving and real.

What you don't seem to understand is that likability, here, is a reflection of storytelling. No one said Hannah needed to be more like Tony Soprano - what I said was that Tony Soprano was a monster but a fascinating, charming monster. Hannah isn't interesting or likable in and of herself - nor is she a great character in the narrative sense.

do you not think that there's value to representation beyond the construction of satisfying, literary characters? i'm thinking of films like paranoid park or hou's cafe lumiere that are like nature shows about humans; nobody is explained, nobody's life conforms to a satisfying arc, but they're engrossing because we just get to watch people make decisions and behave and act and that's enough. watching hannah as a dexturous, varied, rich human - or watching shoshanna as somebody who's in some ways timid, in some ways really socially fluent & who throughout seems to grow into adulthood & to accumulate control - these are really beautiful, valuable things. i guess they are not delivering some particular thing that we're used to as a kind of cumulative narrative quality of tv & books but they aren't failing for that; they are clearly usefully socially, as landmarks or representations of what it means to be alive now for some people. "hannah isn't interesting", idk, i think she is?, i think it's interesting thinking about being in her place?, i'm comforted by voice being given to conversations that are happening elsewhere on a big stage, idk what to tell you. gonna remind you that you have the option upon careful consideration of how much you like this ~not to watch this~.

frances ha is kind of a defanged, spoonfed girls remix, to me, with a bunch of redeeming qualities but standing very much in its shadow.

The one time in the show I have felt otherwise was in the episode where Jessa visited her dad, which I found genuinely moving and real.

agree with this, it was a strange interlude that really worked. Jessa's "but I'M the child" speech to her dad.