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Dunham's "Girls"
Oct. 6th, 2014 08:27 amI never did get into Lena Dunham's cable show "Girls". When it first came out, the show's buzz did waken my interest. It was said to be "Sex In the City" for the younger set. I was not a fan of the older show, but you have to give such fare a look. Giving the show a look, I gathered that it was indeed more feminist than prurient, and I looked for entertainment elsewhere. Dunham and "Girls" are often discussed though, and Ross Douthat gives us an interesting note to keep.
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The thing that makes Dunham’s show so interesting, the reason it inspired a certain unsettlement among some of its early fans, is that it often portrays young-liberal-urbanite life the way, well, many reactionaries see it: as a collision of narcissists educated mostly in self-love, a sexual landscape distinguished by serial humiliations — a realm at once manic and medicated, privileged and bereft of higher purpose.
Now there is plenty of charm and fun and human interest on the show as well, and I’m quite sure that Dunham does not intend the reading I’ve just offered. More likely she agrees with Elaine Blair, whose New York Review of Books article chided the show’s “nervous” liberal critics, and praised “Girls” for depicting the ways in which, thanks to the sexual revolution, “all of us can know more people in more ways than was ever previously allowed,” with “the ultimate prize to be wrung from all of these baffling sexual predicaments” being “a deeper understanding of oneself.”
[...]
Any reactionary affection for her work is doubtless unrequited. But it’s merited, because Dunham is doing a rare thing: She’s making a show for liberals that, merely by being realistic, sharp-edge, complicated, almost gives cultural conservatism its due.
-- Ross Douthat for The New York Times
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The thing that makes Dunham’s show so interesting, the reason it inspired a certain unsettlement among some of its early fans, is that it often portrays young-liberal-urbanite life the way, well, many reactionaries see it: as a collision of narcissists educated mostly in self-love, a sexual landscape distinguished by serial humiliations — a realm at once manic and medicated, privileged and bereft of higher purpose.
Now there is plenty of charm and fun and human interest on the show as well, and I’m quite sure that Dunham does not intend the reading I’ve just offered. More likely she agrees with Elaine Blair, whose New York Review of Books article chided the show’s “nervous” liberal critics, and praised “Girls” for depicting the ways in which, thanks to the sexual revolution, “all of us can know more people in more ways than was ever previously allowed,” with “the ultimate prize to be wrung from all of these baffling sexual predicaments” being “a deeper understanding of oneself.”
[...]
Any reactionary affection for her work is doubtless unrequited. But it’s merited, because Dunham is doing a rare thing: She’s making a show for liberals that, merely by being realistic, sharp-edge, complicated, almost gives cultural conservatism its due.
-- Ross Douthat for The New York Times
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