Girl Riot

8 minute read
James Poniewozik/Austin

The last time Lena Dunham was at the South by Southwest film festival, at age 23, plugging a (literally) homemade indie film with flyers from Kinko’s, she did a sit-down with the New York Times in which she mentioned, among other things, that she was a macrobiotic vegan. Two years later, we’re in the same hotel caf, and Dunham is here with HBO, which has commandeered seemingly every surface in town to promote her new comedy series, Girls (premiering April 15 at 10:30 p.m. ET). She orders a hamburger, medium rare.

I order the same burger and mention her Times quote. “Yeah, that was a pretty amateur move,” she says with a laugh, remembering that it led to an awkward encounter with actress Natalie Portman after Dunham went carnivore again. “She said, ‘I hear we’re both vegans,’ and I was so embarrassed that I was like, ‘Yes! We’re both vegans!'” Dunham was so racked with guilt that she later “bum-rushed” Portman to confess.

The problems of Girls’ emerging adults–STD scares, student-loan debt, bad relationships, worse career options–are far removed from Hollywood faux pas involving Queen Amidala. But the incident captures the spirit of Dunham’s raunchy, brilliant, brutally honest comedy about coming of age smart and female in New York City. Amateur moves. Tried-on-for-size identities. Grand declarations, later amended. Rookie mistakes, postmortemed with self-aware humor. Delightful embarrassments.

The archetypal HBO show creator is a gruff, blustery, high-art white dude on the far side of 50, given to grand themes and frequently named David (Milch, Simon, Chase). Dunham, 25, is quippy, self-deprecating and pop-culture-immersed, and practically lives on Twitter. (Sample: “That moment when Nyquil hits feels like being licked by an orchestra.”) She does have a high-art background, as the daughter of photographer Laurie Simmons and painter Carroll Dunham. But where the typical HBO auteur sought to remake TV in the image of ’70s cinema, Dunham is glad to let it be TV. “The Sopranos started when I was in seventh grade,” she says. “I don’t remember a time when TV wasn’t art.”

You could argue that Girls is another example of HBO’s modeling TV on film–in this case, indie film. Having made some YouTube videos, an undergrad feature at Oberlin College and an online art-world parody (Delusional Downtown Divas), Dunham wrote, directed and starred in Tiny Furniture a year out of college. She played Aura, a budding filmmaker, just graduated, who has moved back in with her photographer mom (played by Simmons, who lent her SoHo loft for the location). Aura bounces among unrewarding relationships and makes selfish decisions, making for an unsparing but empathetic portrait of the artist as an entitled young woman.

Tiny Furniture won the Narrative Feature prize at South by Southwest, and HBO called Dunham for a meeting, though she says she didn’t have a script to pitch: “I said, ‘Here’s the kind of show I would want to see. Here’s what my friends are like. They don’t have jobs, but they’re really smart. They take Ritalin for fun, but they’re not that f—ed up. They’re having these kind of degrading sexual relationships, but they’re feminists.'”

HBO bit, and Dunham joined with executive producers Jenni Konner and Judd Apatow. Apatow–who brought you such dudely comedies as Knocked Up–might seem an odd partner. But he also produced Bridesmaids, and his TV series (Undeclared, Freaks and Geeks) have a naturalistic, improvisational style that resembles Dunham’s work. Apatow says he was “blown away” both by Furniture and Dunham’s easy confidence. “Her parents are artists,” he says, “so there’s no neurosis about the creative process for her. When she goes to write, it’s like she’s going on vacation. Most writers look like they’re going into the depths of hell.”

Girls is more structured and less precious than Furniture, with more concrete stakes and less matter-of-fact privilege. Dunham plays Hannah Horvath, a would-be essayist and unpaid intern whose parents visit from the Midwest and announce that they’re no longer going to pay her bills. Two years out of college, she’s out of the nest and has to start flapping her arms, fast. She’s also in an about-75%-bad relationship with Adam, a pretentious, occasionally sweet hipster (Adam Driver) who answers a request to use a condom with “I’ll consider it!”

Hannah’s three best friends each represent different career and romantic stages. Her roommate Marnie (Allison Williams) has a stable job and a perhaps too-stable longtime boyfriend; worldly Jessa (Jemima Kirke) has blown back into town from her most recent adventure; Jessa’s cousin Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) is a naive wallflower who substitutes life experience with a self-esteem-oriented dating book, most of whose conclusions are “That’s unacceptable, ladies!”

You may recall that HBO once aired another little show about four women in New York City. Girls steers into the Sex and the City comparison–Shoshanna calls Jessa “a Carrie, with some Samantha aspects and Charlotte hair”–but is its own thing: Greenpoint, Brooklyn, not the West Village; ratty couches, not shoe closets; cringe humor, not vibrator puns. And Hannah doesn’t resolve each episode with a voice-over and an overworked metaphor. Girls tolerates a mess.

Hannah is not Dunham, but she’s also not not Dunham; she even has the same tattoos, with the same backstories. (One of them, which Hannah credits Jessa with giving her, is the handiwork of Kirke, Dunham’s friend from private school.) Like Woody Allen (in Tiny Furniture, Aura reads Without Feathers) or Louis CK, Dunham is terrific at performing variations on herself. She plays Hannah’s literary aspirations for comedy, like when Hannah asks her parents to run her tab a little longer while she’s psychosomatically high on a cup of weak opium-pod tea: “I don’t want to freak you out,” she says slowly, “but I think I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice, of a generation.”

Dunham credits Konner with whispering that line to her on set. Like most TV, Girls is collaborative, but it also feels like the product of Dunham’s eye and voice. It may get as much attention, though, for how much of her body Dunham puts into it–like the explicit sex scene in Episode 2 when role play between Hannah and Adam goes awkwardly, sidesplittingly awry. (Dunham has taken some cheap shots for daring to appear naked onscreen looking like a normal human woman who occasionally eats a damn hamburger.)

There’s a lot of bad sex in Girls, but to a point. “We’re always trying to make the sex an exploration of where the characters are at emotionally,” Dunham says. “Hannah thinks she’s this tough girl gathering experience in the city, that she can handle this weird, potent sexual interaction. She actually kind of can’t.”

But some of the nakedest scenes in Girls are ones in which Hannah is fully clothed. (The following is a spoiler, but Girls is not really a spoiler-vulnerable comedy.) The morning after she pleads with her parents, Hannah wakes up alone in their hotel room. They’ve left cash in two envelopes: $20 for Hannah and $20 for housekeeping. She takes both and walks out onto a bright, crowded midtown sidewalk to Harper Simon’s lovely “Wishes and Stars.” And … credits.

It’s audacious, the comedy equivalent of an antihero moment from Breaking Bad or The Shield. You’ve come to like Hannah, with her self-deprecation and her quips, and then, as Dunham puts it, “It’s like, ‘You just took that from a Mexican lady with five children because you want to f—ing buy some fancy sandwich.'”

Hannah is not evil; she’ll probably regret it someday. So many great stories are about dealing with regrets; Girls is about creating them. “I was thinking about getting a Girls tattoo,” Dunham says. “Jenni Konner told me, ‘That is the worst luck in the world. It could just be the saddest reminder of your cancellation of all time.'”

Which may be right. But Girls is a soulful, exhilarating argument for just that kind of amateur move, for the screwups that mark you and make you, so that even when you put on your grownup clothes, you can feel them, written on your skin.

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