Lena Dunham, Me, and Media

I've been trying very hard to analyze and verbalize why I'm not so into Lena Dunham as a filmmaker and storyteller. Aside from the (hopefully) obvious problems already stated and pondered in several articles.

Here: http://www.racialicious.com/2012/04/19/dear-lena-dunham-i-exist/

Here: http://www.racialicious.com/2012/04/19/girls-that-television-will-never-know/

And here: http://thehairpin.com/2012/04/where-my-girls-at/

But I don't feel like I need to elaborate on the diversity issue. (at least not right now)

In the first article, the author stresses how in film and creative writing programs, the curriculum tends to be biased towards diversity.  She brings up a good point on why she considers "Girls" to be undiversified through this theory.  I think that the way that American film and television has been cultivated and presented to the masses affects the way it is taught in school.  As a film student, like with any creative form, you tend to repeat or reflect similar things that you have seen within that field. Most art forms tend to go through cycles and innovate themselves in order to grow, which, unfortunately, is what I think Film arts is lacking.  It's also why, Film seems to be in constant debate over whether it's an art form or pure entertainment.  I think it should be an art form and should be held to the same caliber we do other art mediums.  However, to do this, the Film world needs to be reevaluated and revamped on several levels.  I decided to go into Film for several reasons, one was that I wanted to create characters that I wish I could've seen as a teenager.  I think that much of the film industry's problems come from lack of proper and positive reflections of different people.  I'm tired of watching movies geared towards a female audience but developed by male department heads.  So in that sense, it's great to see a film or buzzworthy tv show that has female creative control.  However, I feel the industry also uses this when the female audience gets restless to say "Look! Here ya go! Be satisfied now, quit complaining!"  They don't tend to give us anymore or any variety on the subject.  So we end up with this kind of watered down, acceptable show created by women and made for women.  This is my main problem with Lena Dunham.  I think she is trying really hard to create what she thinks is a controversial show.  The female-fronted show that we've been waiting for! However, for me (and from what I've gathered quite a few people) it isn't enough.  I find her still reflecting female roles we've seen before.  She does try in certain instances to turn things around, but I have problems with three main instances that she presents; body image, sex/relationships, and independence/ responsibility.

For you to understand my weird Lena Dunham overload that I have experienced recently, I present you with a fairly simple timeline.  Last week, I wouldn't have recognized her name.  I had previously, somewhere in the past 6 or so months, heard some buzz on Tiny Furniture from fellow filmmakers and students.  I filed it away in the back of my mind as something that I should watch sometime, but I forgot to add it to my physical list of things to watch, so I forgot about it.  I had recently been hearing buzz through twitter and facebook about this new show, "Girls," and how it was going to be something groundbreaking and possibly shocking.  At least that was the impression that I got from the word running around. I don't have a tv and I don't really watch much on websites that show ads, so I hadn't actually seen anything about the show.  Last Tuesday, I was looking for something new to watch on Netflix and while trying to search for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Tiny Furniture popped up.  I remembered that I had been meaning to check it out and decided to settle in with it.  Already unsure of it upon viewing, the wheels in my head were turning opinions and analyses around and trying to get down to the bottom of my problem with the film.  I still didn't know the name Lena Dunham, I read it in the credits but I don't think I would've remembered the name if asked who directed the film.  On Friday, I saw an article discussing diversity in the new buzz show "Girls" and decided to read it based on several conversations I've had with a good friend of mine about diversity in media.  I get to Lena Dunham's name and it all clicked.  I read the following 2 articles over the next day and continued discussing their issues as well as my own with my roommate the next day. I decided to watch the premier episode of "Girls" to be able to fully discuss my point.

LENA DUNHAM OVERLOAD

At first I thought maybe I was just overloaded.  Or maybe I was just pushing a certain amount of Girl Hate on her for being successful and only 2 years older than me.  I am clearly extremely jealous of her success and I have no problem admitting that.  Yet I still had a problem deeper than that.  So I kept analyzing.  One of my friends posted on Twitter : @Fishhearts: "If you've been reading the media commentary lately, you'd assume the entire future of feminism is on Lena Dunham's shoulders." on Tuesday. I had just watched Tiny Furniture and I didn't find it incredibly impressive or groundbreaking on a feminist front. I didn't particularly care for the film, but I also didn't turn it off.  It had decent production value for an independently created film and small crew.  I enjoyed certain scenes and dialogue and the mise-en-scene of most of the film.  Yet it still affected me negatively.  In Tiny Furniture, I don't find her to grow at all.  From my first viewing of "Girls", she seems like she is going to have to grow up or she won't be able to survive.  Both main characters I find incredibly immature and weak. 

Perhaps my expectations were too high.  How dare I expect a strong and independent young female protagonist? I commend Lena Dunham for presenting us with the Female Gaze and showing us things that Hollywood normally wouldn't consider beautiful and making it so.  However, for me, she doesn't break the stereotyping and ideas of our generation.  I wouldn't normally put the weight of the responsibility of our whole generation on one person's shoulders, but that is how the media is presenting her and even how she seems to think of herself most of the time.  I am what the media would consider her exact audience, I just turned 23 two weeks ago, I have a BA in Film Arts, I graduated Cum Laude just shy of a year ago, I'm white, I'm rebellious, I'm sex-positive, I'm a feminist, and so on.  Yet, I feel disconnected from what I've seen of her work.  I connect to some of it. In Tiny Furniture when she first arrives home and her mother tries to wake her up early and she yells that she just wants to sleep, she just graduated, can't she just sleep for a little while.  I find myself constantly wanting to yell at my mother every time she asks me about potential film gigs, "I just graduated! I have 2 jobs! I pay my own bills! Can that just be enough right now?!"  And there is the big difference between the characters that Lena Dunham creates and myself.  I am relatively financially independent from my mother.  I'm sure if I needed some help, she would gladly help me, but she also raised me to be responsible for myself from a young age.  I sat her down when I was 19 and asked her exactly what she paid for for me so that I would know how much money I would need to make when I graduated to provide for myself.  Now, I'm sure Lena Dunham is fairly independent now, she would have to be to be the main creative force of her own series at 25.  If I ever happen to meet her, I'm fairly certain Lena Dunham and I would probably be some form of friends. I don't want to speculate about her life/privilege too much, I have no idea how that girl was raised.  However, someone like me or some of my fellow film graduates would be unlikely to achieve the same kind of success as she did.  From the characters that she creates for herself to play, she reinforces some ideas that in order for her to have been successful as a young adult, she needed extreme financial support from her family.  I don't know the route she chose to fund her breakaway Tiny Furniture but I'm sure casting her famous artist mother, Laurie Simmons, didn't deter people from seeing it.  I can't help but assume she's accepted some help in order to achieve such rapid success.  I think she is talented, but I just feel like she could do more to try and present alternatives to popular representations of women in media. 

Both of her characters' attitudes about finances irk me.  I think it's because of my recent allignment with the Occupy movement.  I felt that every time I would argue my points with an elder or someone who didn't see themselves as the 99%, they would always tell me I was too young, I didn't know any better, and I hadn't had enough responsibility in my life.  Of course, for me, I fought against all these things. I always pointed out that I was relatively fiscally responsible, I was financially independent, I didn't go to college and come out with liberal bullshit, I knew what I was talking about.  I feel like her characters back up what a lot of people think about our generation.  Ideas like we don't know what it's like to work (I haven't had less than 2 jobs in 2 years), that we just expect everything to be handed to us.  I'm not sure if Lena Dunham does expect things to be handed to her, but the way that she portrays her characters show that they believe that. @Fishhearts: "When are people going to realize that Girls criticizes its characters & their privilege? #DunhamGate " (I believe he and I are going to be in a Dunham fight for a while) I understand the attempt at poking fun at privilege, but I don't think they really know how to make fun of it, since from what I can tell the girls playing "Girls" are privileged in reality. If poking fun at the notions of our generation is supposed to turn the ideas on their head, I don't find the attempt successful.  Maybe it's not her intention to turn the ideas on their heads, but then why would you just restate negative ideas of our generation?

MEDIA and INTERNALIZED MISOGYNY:

I grew up feeling like I didn't have female protagonists to relate to on tv or movies, especially as a teenager.  I was really into SLC Punk! and Trainspotting which have nice creations of independent thinking and acting women, but they are rejected by the male protagonists of the films.  I found myself either identifying with male protagonists or delving into Queer Cinema just to be able to see the struggle that I felt every day on a screen.  I definitely think that tv nowadays is starting to present more varying female protagonists, but it's not enough for me.  I want to see strong, independent, responsible, honest, communicative WOMEN.  None of which I see in Lena Dunham's creations.  I feel like people are presenting her and her show as what we've been waiting for.  That we should be supportive of her because who else are we going to support? She's the only young female creative controller on TV right now.  I can't support her just for those reasons.  I need to see my reflection in media and "Girls" isn't that for me. 

My other problems with her characters may seem trivial but are extremely important to me.  Like I said, I've been discussing media bias quite frequently lately and noticing all the inequalities within TV and film.  It's sad that I notice how diverse shows like "Grey's Anatomy" and "Private Practice" are.  It shouldn't be something that I have to praise a show for, it should just be natural.  There are enough different people in the world and plenty of channels with loads of shows to where every person should feel represented.  Because of lack of representation, many people grow up without a reflection and constantly questioning what is wrong with them that they don't want what they see in the media.  I went through adolescence with this problem.  Somewhere deep down, I always knew I was non-monogamous, but I was never told that was ok until adulthood nor was I taught any kind of language that wasn't negative about it. I actually find it fairly amazing that I was able to come to terms with it and be myself at this early of a point in my life.  In these kinds of senses, I don't feel that "Girls" shows us anything different.  I enjoy that the main characters aren't these ideas of Hollywood beauties, but are in fact still beautiful and still finding love and living life (again, something that I shouldn't be noticing.) 

I'm fairly certain Lena Dunham is confident and not body-conscious, at least not typically, in reality because she so openly places herself in these roles that involve her nudity.  However, her characters in Tiny Furniture and "Girls" constantly self-deprecate and fish for compliments from the best-friend characters nearest them.  Why can't we see so many differently physical women comfortable and confident in their bodies?  My roommate, Savanna, and I have been constantly discussing the issue of women in media and now this past week have been in Lena Dunham Overload.  Clearly, many women suffer from body-consciousness.  I, myself, analyze my body in a mirror almost daily and have struggled with eating disorders.  So many conversations with friends revolve around physical issues we have with ourselves and comparing ourselves to others.  For some reason, TV and film thinks that because we all have these issues, they need to reflect that one aspect of a woman's daily struggle and we'll feel connected to the character.  We'll see that every woman has this problem and we'll realize that it's ridiculous because every woman is comparing herself to another, etc, etc.  They act like it's this huge milestone that women need to get over, which we do.  But they go about it in the entirely wrong way.  If we see reflections of our body types in media and the characters' confidence and success and how this doesn't hold them back, then we'll realize that if they can ignore those things, we can too and not let it hold us back.  I decided when I was 18 that I wanted to be healthy, not thin, not curvy, not anything but healthy.  By presenting myself with body-positive role-models, I was more able to see how my self-deprecation was affecting me. It makes me cringe any time I see a character on TV or film shutting themselves down because of something physical.  Then either they suffer from individual depression about it or their friends come running to the rescue. They hardly ever deal with it themselves or show signs of real change in their attitudes towards body-consciousness.

While watching Tiny Furniture I felt myself constantly rolling my eyes and wondering when she was going to DO SOMETHING, anything, really.  The things that she did take upon herself to do and when she did speak up, were usually disrespectful to her mother's house or for her own random fun.  During the entire film, she pushes herself forward maybe twice.  I did really love the explosive arguement between her younger sister and herself at a houseparty.  It felt like something that my sister may have thought about me when I was a teenager and overtly trying to push boundaries.  However, none of these arguements go anywhere and they never even seemed to end in any kind of growth or actual heartfelt apology.  The times when Aura, Lena Dunham's character, did speak up, it was usually against her sister or mother.  The times when I wanted her to speak up was with the guy who she let stay in her mother's house without asking first and the guy that she ends up sleeping with it at the end.  The first, after overstaying his welcome, which Aura let's him take advantage of the situation and never bats an eye to his behavior, fusses at her and complains that she should never have promised him anything if she couldn't deliver.  She very meakly replies that she didn't feel she had promised anything but still overly apologizes and clearly allows herself to feel bad about the situation and takes it out on her mother.  Perhaps, it's because I've been through a workshop on internalized misogyny so I more readily recognize it now, but I seriously could not stand to watch it.  Even if you're constructing a character to grow from passivity, why wouldn't you use this excellent opportunity to show it?  That was my biggest problem with Tiny Furniture, I never felt like she grew remotely throughout the film.  If anything, her character retreated into what I would assume would be herself pre-college, which for me, isn't some sort of commendable story or character. With the second guy, knowing that he had some flags up, she still pursued him and ends up having unprotected sex with him in a pipe in a construction site.  Now, I visually loved that scene, I have had awkward sex like that.  But the whole time I was cringing because of the lack of protection and the laissez-faire attitude about it.  She seemed genuinely bothered by it but unwilling to speak up about it.  We end the movie shortly after this scene and see remorse in Aura, but again no real action or reaction to what she has been doing.  I could have even accepted if she was more confident in her poor decision, but because she doubts herself and then doesn't do anything for herself, I couldn't view her character in anyway other than immature and weak.  I really wanted her to stand up for herself and to take control of her life.  In "Girls", Lena Dunham creates a similar character, except this time she speaks up for herself some what more.  By the point that I watched "Girls" though, perhaps I was being overly critical.  Even with her slightly more outspoken new lead character, I saw so much passivity in her and again so much that I just wanted her to be more independent and outspoken.

Something that I did like in both Tiny Furniture and "Girls" was that the sex wasn't pretty, it was awkward and gritty.  But again, the sexual situations didn't seem to be in Dunham's character's control.  Even in "Girls" when Hannah asks the boy she's about to fuck to get a condom, he says maybe and she very passively asks what that means.  When he comes back and is putting a condom on, she ask if he's putting one on, he jokes no, but for me, I don't know this guy, it doesn't seem she really knows or trusts this guy.  I can't help feeling (this might be my inability to separate Aura from Hannah) that if he hadn't put one on, she wouldn't have rejected him.  Again, for me, as a passive person, sex is one of the only things that I have always been outspoken about.  Growing up, I felt like the weird liberal aunt to my friends, explaining contraception and discussing consent and coercion.  So watch "Girls" made me just want to shake Hannah and ask her why she can't take care of herself and ask for what she wants.  How we're introduced to her male friend, is that he hasn't been responding to her, she just calls him up saying she's nearby.  I understood the want of using sex for comfort on a hard day. I actually enjoyed them showing that and that she was taking some control of the situation by putting herself there, knowing she would get sex out of it.  But again, she didn't ask for it upfront.  As a passive person, I understand what she was doing, because I have frequently done it too, but I have always made sure, especially in recent years, that there is a full understanding of the situation for all parties involved.  Showing their communication, would have been something that I found somewhat interesting and groundbreaking for a tv show.  On TV sex seems either entirely casual, in pursuit of a relationship, or in a relationship. 

 My roommate and I have been discussing this.  We both agreed about our feelings about Tiny Furniture, but when she watched "Girls", she felt it mostly relatable for her and hilariously entertaining.  This caused me to take longer thinking about my feelings about the show and movie.  Savanna thinks I'm judging the show too soon and maybe I am.  I don't feel the need to keep watching it, even though I found instances in it funny, overall I was annoyed.  I may give it another chance if in a future episode someone thinks it would be noteworthy for me to watch.  I just feel that even if she didn't intend to be a voice for a generation or for feminist television, she's given that torch and to begin a movie or show without considerring the portrayal of your own sex is ridiculous to me.  I guess we're just different people.  I studied film and art because I wanted to create character's that other teenagers like me could relate to growing up.  That they would be able to see strong and responsible female characters and know that it's ok to speak up for what you want.

I think by writing and contemplating on this for several days, I have finally come to my conclusion.  While I do have some, what I consider reasonable, personal problems with her lead characters in both Tiny Furniture and "Girls".  I can recognize that while I am experiencing a different kind of young adulthood than them, that it is still a reflection of some people's current situation.  I'd still rather a positive outlook on our generation, but what can I do but create my own.  My biggest concern with "Girls" is its blatant use of internalized misogyny as definition of characters.  It is a universal concept among women and in that way is relatable. Using it solely for the reflection that it allows doesn't actually change perceptions, but rather reinforces them without recognition. So, my problem is clearly more with the film and TV world in general, but had been brought out in the feminist praise of Dunham.  A groundbreaking show for me, would be something with strong, independent, outspoken women as protagonists who purposefully break those societally evolved perceptions of women.  I think a show or film like that could do wonders for our current and future generations and for the future of film and media culture.