yesterday marked the first day of my re-exploration of lena dunham’s girls. i hosted an event where seven young lena scholars met in a loft in brooklyn to discuss what i suspect is one of the most revealing popular media works of our time.
the event was rather freeform—the only thing i knew for certain was that some people were going to show up and we were going to watch the first episode of the first season of girls. i suspected we would discuss. as is the case with most things i do, i was never sure to what extent the event, the discussion, or the commentary surrounding them were serious or not. was our primary goal to understand a complex piece of media or to perform, is some more detached way, that we were consuming the media and making an attempt to understand it? as usual, both interpretations make sense.
the parallels between the lena dunham scholars watch event and girls itself became almost immediately clear: the meeting we had could easily have been in an episode of girls. after getting off our jobs in tech, media, and in the service industry, we walked or rode the l train to a meetup of young adults to watch a fictional group of similarly young people do roughly the same things on-screen.
however, the parallels run much deeper than situation, geography, and age. insofar as girls is understood as an attempt by lena to understand and criticize herself through warped and fictionalized auto-biography, it’s relatable to anyone who has tried to represent themselves through media, including social media. the protagonist in girls is hannah horvath, played by lena dunham, and it’s often unclear whether the commentary in girls is about lena herself, or broader social commentary on young metropolitan transplants delivered through a fictional character.
hannah horvath and lena dunham are understood to be separate people: one real and one fictional. the fictional character, however, is subsumed by the narrative of the real person. when we watch girls, we’re watching a fictional character go about her life, but we’re also watching a real person attempt to express something by acting like a fictional character. the appeal and the genius of girls is that it’s unclear where reality ends and fiction begins—or whether there’s really much of a difference between the two.
as i thought about hannah as a conduit for understanding lena, i realized that navigating this complex blend of reality and fiction was likely familiar and interesting to each of the people in the room because we had all navigated it before—even with each other. the people in the room had for the most part been exposed to online versions of each other before meeting in person. we had met on some form of social media and eventually all been a part of a group chat where the event details were shared. it was as if we encountered each other first as hannah and later as lena.
we simultaneously experienced and observed interactions between performance and reality. as we thought about the relationship between hannah and lena, we socialized with people we understood in a similarly disjointed way: as convoluted amalgamations of pseudo-fictional online figures and offline in-the-flesh people. by examining the relationship between hannah and lena, we came to understand each other and ourselves.
the humor in girls doesn’t often involve making jokes with punchlines—the humor is embedded in the situations and characters. the show doesn’t depart from its narrative to makes a joke. the narrative is the joke. lena’s ability to write characters that are clearly dramatizations but are teeter on the edge of believability is what stood out to me in the first two episodes because it reminded me of my own tendency to hyperbolize my commitments and interests and watch them eventually become so dramatic that they can only be seen as jokes.
lena and hannah are seemingly always performing, but also trying to be earnest. lena’s creation of girls is a self-critical conversation between versions of herself. when i examine the tensions lena dunham creates through girls, it makes me examine the tensions i create for myself. add a dash of narcissism and a penchant for off-kilter self-criticism, and i’m compelled to say she’s just like me. for real.
quasimatt 