Lena Dunham’s “Girls,” and Why Older People Hate It
I was reading the article accompanying Terry Gross’ interview of Lena Dunham (creator, writer, and director of HBO’s Girls—more on my burgeoning, if narcissistic, love for her soon) and stumbled upon an interesting quote early on:
Not everyone was so enamored [with the show]. Within hours of Girls’ premiere on April 15, a backlash started growing online, with critics charging that the show is narcissistic, lacks racial diversity and showcases whiny, privileged millennials complaining about topics only relevant to whiny, privileged millennials.
I think that enough has been said about the show’s unrealistic lack of diversity considering its NYC setting, so I’m not going to bother. What I find interesting about the anti-Girls attitude, particularly as showcased in Gross’ (a ghost writer’s?) quote above, is not anything that exists within the show itself. It’s the idea that Girls ”showcases whiny, privileged millennials complaining about topics only relevant to whiny, privileged millennials.”
Let’s backtrack. The argument against entitled “millenials,” a generation of which I am purportedly a part (and against whose name I cannot help but rally*), is nothing even remotely new. Bret Stephens’ childish tirade against the college graduates of 2012 (yet another group of which I am a member) published on the Wall Street Journal’s website recently was just another entry in a long line of complaints by the old guard about society’s newly minted adults. I even find myself bitching about teenagers when I, at 22, am barely a stone’s throw from still being one myself.** My complaints about teenagers are superficial, though, and hardly as scathing as the comments that people like Stephens (who is not even 40 yet) fling at people my age. Statements like his try to poke at something deeper than some fourteen-year-old’s Ramones shirt***—they attempt to implicate people my age for our sense of entitlement, plainly suggesting that we are “mass conformists,”**** that we cannot possibly be equipped to think for ourselves, that we are ready-born complainers.
We’ve been the subject of criticism because of how “easy” we’ve had it, because of how lucky we are to have had technology develop exponentially from early on in our lives. Don’t get me wrong—we are lucky. But everyone is lucky, in some way. I am lucky to have been born in America when my parents were born in the USSR; they’re lucky to have not had to escape the impending German invasion like their parents did; their parents were lucky to have not had to live through anti-Jewish pogroms of the late-19th century, like their parents had. Those who are able-bodied are lucky, those who are born into affluence are lucky, those who are naturally thin are lucky. It can be said about anything and everything, and it is. We’re all lucky, and the trend at this point is that the later someone is born (in first-world countries, at least) in this quickly-developing world, the luckier they are.
Can we—can any of those “lucky” people—be blamed for their situations? The complexities of how we “use” those advantages are innumerable and splintered into as many permutations as there are “millennials,” so is it possible to even make blanket statements regarding a generation with a sample size of just a few members?
It’s a rhetorical question (here’s a hint: the answer is no), and one that trips people up when they start to talk about media and art that is produced by millennials. In a genre of art—particularly television*****—that has always been gleefully concerned with escapism (e.g., the unfounded nostalgia of Mad Men [arguably the best television show ever made, but I digress]), it’s refreshing to see something like Girls that gets close to reflecting a “real life” situation through screen-based fiction. It’s not perfect, sure, but there are obviously compromises of reality that need to be made in order to ensure compelling television.
Back to Gross: let’s ignore the qualifiers “whiny” and “privileged,” since I think that the silliness of those tags have been thoroughly addressed here. What we get is that the show “showcases millennials complaining about topics only relevant to millennials.” I don’t understand how catering to the show’s target demographic (people my age, probably moreso females than males) is in any way different from how other realistic fiction television shows operate. I hate using Sex and the City as an example since it’s both a terrible television show that I can only watch when under the haze of a raging fever and the go-to for lazy journalists when groping for ways to explain Girls to the older set, but how was Darren Star’s approach any different than Dunham’s? The show catered to the “liberated” (i.e., “let’s pretend our decisions are not still completely based around what men want”) thirty-something female set the way that Dunham’s show caters to people like me, but the difference is that while Carrie was clomping around her unreasonable apartment in unreasonable shoes, the protagonists of Girls are closer to what I experience on a daily basis than the protagonists of SatC were to their viewers. Maybe it’s my circumstances—I’m essentially the same age as the Girls, I live in the same city, I have the same (privileged, sure) lifestyle and the same (“lucky”) struggles. But some of the show’s experiences are simply expressions of what actually occurs in the lives of girls my age. We’ve all have sex with sadsacks who ask us to step on their balls and offer us Gatorade after we “almost come,” haven’t we?
The issue, it seems, is the insularity of the show. From what the older kids are saying, we millennials are hard enough to understand as it is. We do, undoubtedly, function quite differently from even people who are barely leaving their 30s: the name “multitasking generation,” for the first time since the term “Baby Boomers” was used to describe a generation, is actually quite astute. It’s hard to tell how we’ll turn out because we haven’t turned out yet, and people who are upset about Girls catering to its target audience (which, again, is something that all television shows do) seem to just be complaining about not understanding where we’re coming from. They compare our experiences to their own, as all older generations do when thinking about younger ones, and just don’t get it. “Parents just don’t understand,” as the wise man said.
Is it unusual for our generation to make art that concerns ourselves? In a post-confessional, postmodern world, self-reflection is essentially par for the course. What better subject is there to tackle, especially at such a young age, than one’s own experiences? Is this narcissism, or is it just a continuation of artistic tendencies that have long been expressed outside of the world of television? Must television be egalitarian because of its means of dissemination, or can it, like other art, be accessible to those who find interest in its subject matter (in Girls’ case, people my age)? What are the complaints about, really, if we strip away the basic misunderstandings concerning my generation? Are they about television, about exclusivity, about females being portrayed realistically on screen? Or is it just a jumbled mess of complaints, the widespread, inherent, self-preserving desire to denigrate that which is not readily understandable?
It’s impossible to come to a conclusion, as much as saying that makes me feel like I’m writing the ending for a Discovery Channel fluff piece about black holes. The anti-Girls sentiment is more complicated than I expected when I started out writing this post, and to some extent it seems like more of a materialization of our fear of one another and what other people are like than it is a legitimate series of complaints about a television series. Not to unnecessarily monumentalize the whole thing (as writers are wont to do), but I believe that there are rarely times when a culture so focused on jealousy and spot-grabbing as ours reveals itself to be exactly what it is, and the response to Girls is one of those. It’s a look into our usually well-hidden desires to push those with a leg up, the “lucky ones,” down so that we can get past. What the people focusing on anti-millennialism don’t realize is that just because they’ve gotten to the top of their ladder doesn’t mean we can’t meet them there or, better, get to the top of our own. They don’t question whether they got to the “top” faster than their arguably less lucky predecessors did, nor do they acknowledge that the spot carved out there might not have existed if not for those people who came before. There is a happy spot between fear of the “lucky,” audacious young and self-impeding deference towards the old. Whether this spot is something that the anti-millennials will be able to achieve, at least in the midst of an explosion of veiled crisis expressions, is not something upon which I can comment. I, unlike people like Bret Stephens, know that the best way to keep from falling off of the ladder is to focus on the positioning of my own feet, and not on that of others.
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*Can’t we just be the “Sweet Shades, Brah” generation? The “Fuck You I’m Sleeping In Over Here” generation? The “I Guess I Can Afford $5.00 Cold Drip if I Sell My Guitar on Craigslist” generation? Even my unfunny suggestions are better than “millennials.” Generation Y is okay, but it makes me think of “Y: The Last Man” every time.
**To be fair, no matter what generation they’re in, teenagers are the fucking worst. I was the worst, you were the worst, your kids (if you want to inflict more shitty teenagers upon the world) are/were/will be the worst.
***The Ramones are the second worst.
****In what case would that not be true when trying to look at the totality of a generation? Logically, looking at the whole will result in some glaring majority of people who are like—or pretend to be like, seem to be like—one another.
*****Television as art is a complicated discussion, but there are a few shows that I think cross the divide. Like Temptation Island.
![writersbloqinc:
In honor of Unsolicited, we will be profiling the top 16 writers on the bloq each day leading up to the event.
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Today’s Profile: Charline Tetiyevsky
Where are you from?A small suburb in New Jersey innocuously named Springfield. Over a ton of marijuana from Mexico was found by police just hanging out in a warehouse there, though, which sort of sums up our part of Jersey. Oh, and there was the diner where a dead guy was found in a mob boss’ car. With which program are you affiliated?Columbia University’s undergraduate creative writing program With whom have you workshopped? (Can be professors or writers you admire)Scott Snyder was a great professor I had sophomore year of college. He’s writing comics for DC now, which is just awesome. I also really enjoyed taking a number of classes with Sonya Chung-she’s a wonderfully responsive teacher. I took a comic workshop class down at the New School for fun a few years ago, and had the good fortune of working with the fantastic Ariel Schrag. What made you decide to study writing?When I was eight years old, I wrote a commercial for “Charline’s Moisty Towelettes.” It went roughly like this:JUNIOR: Oh no! I spilled the grape juice on the carpet!DAD: Don’t worry, Junior! VOICE OVER: Charline’s Moisty Towelettes are here to help! They come in ten different colors and sents [sic]: red poppy, green guava, brown trees-And so forth. I figured I could only go up from writing infomercials. Who are your favorite writers?Philip K. Dick never fails, and neither do Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace, William Faulkner, Jeffrey Eugenides, Hunter Thompson, Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegut, or George Orwell. Do you have any interesting writing rituals you can share with us?No, but I do find it impossible to listen to music with lyrics when I’m writing. If you were about to be stuck on an abandoned island and could bring only one literary text, which would it be?I guess it depends on how you define literature, but I’d probably bring “Black Hole” by Charles Burns. This question makes me very sad, though. What do you do when writer’s block hits?It’s probably not the most effective strategy, but I wait and go read something (usually non-fiction) until I feel like it’s time to start writing again. Reading over what you’ve already written in its entirety doesn’t hurt either.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2p9ori7lT1rq4g3ro1_500.jpg)
