The original Lena Dunham.
(You don’t think watching Chantal Akerman films will be easy, but once you get started, you can’t stop for days.)
Some Lazy Thoughts on the Season 2 Premiere of Girls
This morning, I’m all riled up about Girls, the season premiere of which I watched last night. In the break between seasons, I chalked up the furor I feel over the show to jealousy. But what I realized last night was that I’m not jealous at all—in fact, a large part of me wants to root for Lena Dunham, who is a young, talented woman who made a good film named Tiny Furniture.
I hopefully will have something more articulate to say about the matter in the future, but all I can post now is what I just wrote to a friend on GChat:
me: it’s just so mediocre
and it’s infuriating
it is such bad messaging for girls
i think
in terms of sex
and the way that guys treat these girls
sex is completely joyless and awful
not only for lena dunahm
but also for allison williams, all of them
they’re bad people
they don’t do anything good for the world, or for anyone else
there’s no kindness or love or joy
it’s like more soulless than the real housewives, seriously
i almost can’t articulate it
the show is not particularly well written
it’s funny like once in a while
mostly because of zosia mamet and the gay dude
the thing is, it’s not like Lena’s PURPOSEFULLY writing a selfish brat
that’s really what she is
that’s the character
no introspection
no commentary
To which my friend responded that people want, and need to like the show, because everyone is looking for a weathervane to understand young people. But the show’s not a weathervane, or even anything noteworthy. The marketing people driving that message home are fooling us all into thinking that, however. Especially me, given that I get so worked up about it.
GIRLS Season 1: A Review
By Bianca Ozeri
When Brie asked me to write a post on GIRLS, I got nervous because she hates the show and I love the show and sometimes I mistake disagreeing with Brie for cultural ineptitude. Which, she tells me, really is a mistake given that she still listens to Lana Del Rey. So, yes, I love GIRLS. Lena Dunham has, to me, hit the proverbial nail right on the head.
More than a voluntary choice, this adoration feels the only option in order to maintain my dignity. For every Sunday, during HBO’s shit slot, I watch a simulation of my life. I have three primary girlfriends who compositely exhibit qualities of comical ignorance, serious priggishness, and chic wisdom (myself included). We’ve had dance parties to Robyn. We’ve lived together when we shouldn’t. Virginity still looms for one of us. We’ve dealt with death together (not that of an unborn fetus, but still). And now that I’ve written out what I thought an uncanny likeness, I realize that it’s pretty cookie-cutter, and you, if you’re a girl, probably (hopefully!) draw the same parallels.
(Clara, absent, takes a brilliant photo)
Girls: The Last Episode
It was posed to me, last week, that the reason why I don’t like Girls is because I’m jealous of Lena Dunham, who, unlike me, is a successful writer who makes real money. “That is definitely part of it,” I admitted outright.
But it’s not the only reason, I tried to argue, to a chorus of people proclaiming that it directly mirrors their own lives. “I can relate to it,” they intoned. “I am LenaDunham. Her best friends. I know the dudes they date. I live in her apartment in Greenpoint. I have HPV. Do you like my tattoos? My generation.”
“Does no one else watch this tv show?” I asked them. “Because it’s really not that good.”
But my protests fell on deaf ears. After the backlash that ensued after the first episode, which was as ridiculous as the florid praise that came before it, anyone who watches it is weary of having an individual opinion. If you hate it, you might disagree with real cultural critics. And if you love it, then you encounter people like me, who want to argue with you about it until you cry.
The 2012 MET Gala: The Amazing
Last night, I was sitting watching Bethenny Ever After when I got a press release in my inbox. “For images of Emma Stone’s Lanvin dress at 2012 MET Gala earlier this evening, please contact me,” said the publicist who sent it.
“Are my eyes fooling me?” I asked myself. “Or was the gala really this evening?”
Because there I was, sitting in an old pair of velour sweatpants that sag in the ass, Caleb’s wife beater, and a Uniqlo cashmere sweater. If I had known that the Costume Institute Gala was taking place, I at least would have put on a pair of leggings and a bra.
Where’s The Masturbation At? Girls, Episode 2: A Review
I don’t have very much to say about the second episode of Girls, because I didn’t hate it as much as I did the first one, and I also am having trouble remembering what even happened. These are the notes that I wrote to myself while watching the episode:
Jobs that are boring
Happy with these lives??
Take abuse
Whatever they want!
50 Shades of Gray
So cute at interviews. Oh my god!!
Which basically just reads like a summary of any given New York Magazine cover article.
My main take-away was that the way sex is portrayed is irritating, because the show makes it seem like “girls” don’t enjoy it. They just have it because they know they’re supposed to be sexually active, in the same way they know that they should probably get jobs. Having sex seems like nothing more than a penance for being fucking alive.
(Please don’t continue to read this post if you’re related to me.)
GIRLS: A Review
I was wondering why Lena Dunham’s new show on HBO, “GIRLS,” got the bitch slot (10:30pm) on the Sunday night line-up, despite all of the glowing reviews in the media. Or at least the New York-centric, witty pop culture media that defines my worldview.
After watching it last night, I think I know why. Despite the fact that New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum describes herself as “a goner, a convert” for the show, and even though writers like Frank Bruni seem to think that it defines the way that the rising generation of women feel about sex, the network executives aren’t sure it’s that good.
And, if the first episode is any indication, it’s not. I say this with a twinge of envy-relief—and also with disappointment, because I find Lena Dunham to be really endearing, the kind of girl you’d immediately want to be friends with—but the show was dull, confusing, and myopic. “This is what middle-aged well-educated white people WANT to think 24-year-olds are like today!” I thought, as I continually checked the clock from 10:33pm until 11:04pm, waiting for the minute when I could, with good conscious, turn off the television and go to sleep.
Because from the moment that Lena appeared on the screen as Hannah, a young woman from the Midwest who has been living on her parent’s dime in New York for the past two years, to the first time she referenced how hard it is to get a job in this economy—in the publishing industry, no less, which doesn’t even pay living wages for its executives, thereby rendering a quest for a salary almost superfluous— to the awkward, uninspired sex between Hannah and her worm bellied loser of a lover, to the final scene in which Hannah, on her own, walks bravely past a TAXI CAB, Carrie-style, towards the subway, I was fucking bored.
