Lena Dunham
Yesterday Terry Gross did a lengthy interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air” with Lena Dunham, the 25-year-old creator of the hit HBO show “Girls.” The show has drawn criticism because its four characters are all white women, 20-somethings in New York. And Gross’s interview made news for Dunham’s acknowledgement that she will seek greater diversity in the next season.
Below are two excerpts from the interview, which I think demonstrate important social attitudes. First, Dunham says that she was writing what she knows, and wanted to be “super-specific” to her own experience, and that world is half-WASP, half-Jewish. So she really didn’t know anything about a diverse racial experience, and didn’t think to put it in the show.
The second excerpt involves Dunham’s sensitivity to gay people’s experience. She knows a lot of gay people; and she calls her character in the show “liberal and enlightened” on gay issues, but also with traces of homophobia.
The social attitudes exhibited here are the elite attitudes that I shared till I threw myself into Palestinian solidarity work. The American establishment today is a mingled Jewish-WASP one (my wife and I are typical), in which being enlightened means being thoughtful about gays. But that extension of spirit doesn’t really include people of color. It’s just outside the frame. And don’t expect to see any Arab-Americans in the cast… Dunham:
You know, I am a half-Jew, half-WASP, and I wrote two Jews and two WASPs, like I really – and something I wanted to avoid was sort of tokenism in casting and not speaking – you know, if I had one of the four girls, for example, if she was African-American, I feel like, you know, not that the experience of an African-American girl and a white girl living in Brooklyn are drastically different, but there has to be specificity to that experience and specificity that at this point I wasn’t able to speak to. And so I thought about it, I really wrote the show from sort of a gut-level place, and each character was a piece of me and/or based on, you know, someone very close to me. And only later did I realize that it was four white girls. And so as much as I can say it was an accident, it was an accident, but I also later, as the criticism came out, I thought: I hear this and I want to respond to it. And I also, you know, the show – I don’t know if this – I want – this is a hard issue to speak to because all I want to do is sound sensitive and not say anything that will horrify anyone or make them feel more isolated. But I did write something that was super-specific to my experience, and I always want to avoid rendering an experience I can’t speak to accurately, and I want to avoid, you know, kind of classic network tokenism in casting because although I think that people of color are severely underrepresented on TV, I’m not sure that that’s always the solution. That being said, you know, as I said in an interview with Huffington Post, like, now we have the opportunity to do a second season, and believe me, that will be remedied. I’m really excited to introduce new characters into the world of the show, and some of them are really great actors of color, and some of them are white actors, and we’re going to continue to try to tell really honest stories, but the world of the show is definitely growing more diverse….
I was really hoping that my, you know, my gay male friends – of which I have many – would find it hilarious and not think that I was, you know, that I was expressing my own deep-rooted homophobia because it was really important to me to look at the honest way that an – even though Hannah is an enlightened, liberal girl probably thinks about gay men as her target audience, she still is not pleased to find out that she was dating one.
This is one inarticulate young woman. In her interview she sounds remarkably shallow, even for a 25 year old. Now I know why HBO is not on my list.
But she is right about one thing – the large urban environment is a highly segregated one, especially in terms of color. I’ve seen and noted that myself. And it’s not just New York or eg, Boston. It’s even high tech meccas like Silicon Valley. Though at least there it would be difficult, if not impossible, to avoid Asians. Even there, when it comes to social settings, like still gravitates to like. And Jewish gravitates to everything white, like milk to honey.
“The American establishment today is a mingled Jewish-WASP one (my wife and I are typical), in which being enlightened means being thoughtful about gays. But that extension of spirit doesn’t really include people of color. It’s just outside the frame. And don’t expect to see any Arab-Americans in the cast”
Being “thoughtful about gays” has no economic component. Some of the same well born wasps and jews are gay, its been shown that people are more sympathetic when they have gay people in their lives; whatever else is true about the gay experience in the US, elite gays face no economic sanction for being gay, unlike “people of color” who do indeed face sanction, both social and economic. because of “who they are.” gay solidarity is perfect for the bourgeois. the morality behind the movement is obvious, but unlike activism that would “help” the vast majority of “people of color” in the united states — where organizing and other acts of solidarity would require actually going to working class and poor neighborhoods– sexual preference related activism can be done from the comfort of your beach house. and it is.
What do you expect from a girl who went to St Ann’s and Oberlin? She’s out of college less than four years ago and gets a HBO show produced by Judd Apatow. Hmmm. This doesnt bother Weiss – this obvious insiderism that is absolutely rampant in “pop culture” circles, where people who went to st ann’s and oberlin are rammed down the publics throat as representatives of the “young” experience in america. as if most young americans are “struggling” artists living in flats in soho or something. Weiss just wants the few “people of color” who went to st anns and oberlin to be represented on judd apatow produced shows? Not really a rallying cry.
The beef with Dunham isnt that her show under represents groups of people, the beef is that her show drastically OVER represents people like her. Her experience is one that the powers that be love to portray, the young graduate from a good school, living pretty well and trying to make it in the big city, amongst other well educated young people doing the same. What percentage of the population does this depict? She and her ilk are the safe bet, a little “edge” but nothing that would rattle any cages, and we all know how much people love shows about well to do white people living single in NYC – my girlfriend calls the show “Sex and the City for awkward, relatively unattractive hipsters”
( or is that what I called it?).
The remedy to this problem is not to add a few more awkward, relatively unattractive hipsters who happen to be black or hispanic to the show, the remedy is to not watch shit like this. After all, if in the next season there is a character that went to horace mann, NYU film school, lives in a flat in tribeca and happens to be black, is that really “diversity”? If you say so. Personally, I dont think Phil has given up his “elite attitude”
I can’t believe a single inch of space was wasted on this important site about a show as execrable as Girls … if you want a good analysis of it, read the brilliant Eileen Jones over at ExiledOnline
I often don’t get to make time for “good” shows (or at least ones that I like).
I at least figure if it has any merits whatsoever, it will be available to me at some point – and even if it doesn’t.
ONe of these days I am going to make my wife sit down and tell me what religion she is. Last time I asked she told me she believed in a “five-finger” religion, and offered to show me how it worked. When I regained consciousness, I had to admit it was one of the most powerful sermons I ever heard.