{"id":596,"date":"2024-05-08T13:01:57","date_gmt":"2024-05-08T17:01:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/faithandreason\/?p=596"},"modified":"2024-05-08T13:01:57","modified_gmt":"2024-05-08T17:01:57","slug":"maybe-lena-dunhams-girls-wasnt-so-bad-after-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/faithandreason\/2024\/05\/maybe-lena-dunhams-girls-wasnt-so-bad-after-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Maybe Lena Dunham\u2019s Girls Wasn\u2019t So Bad After All?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Brooklyn bridge from East river at sunset with flare.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

From 2012 to 2017, I watched Lena Dunham\u2019s\u00a0Girls<\/em>\u00a0as it aired on HBO. In the show, which was about four female 20-somethings with a host of mental, emotional, and interpersonal issues trying to make it in Brooklyn, Dunham played Hannah Horvath, a fledgling writer who was supposed to have graduated from college in 2010 (the year after I did). The show opens with Horvath, who is an only child from Michigan, being financially cut off by her parents and then continues to follow her romantic, professional, and interpersonal ups and downs over the course of its six seasons.<\/p>\n

The wide (and mostly justified) criticism Dunham received throughout the 2010s for both the show and her off-screen comments came from both the political left (which fretted about\u00a0Girls<\/em>\u2019 lack of diversity and its biting, non-PC humor) and the political right (which was horrified by the show\u2019s apparent endorsement of loveless sex, aimless youth, and Dunham\u2019s own constant nudity). For critics of all ideological stripes, Horvath\u2019s\u2014and Dunham\u2019s\u2014solipsism, myopia, reductivism, and narcissism proved both maddening and riveting.<\/p>\n

Years ago, when I watched\u00a0Girls<\/em>\u00a0each week as it was released (which I did, religiously) my contempt for Hannah and her friends was near total.<\/p>\n

I got married in 2012, at 25; by the time the show concluded in 2017, I was 30, with two small children and a full-time job. I knew that \u201cconventional\u201d lives like mine were the show\u2019s unspoken foil, and that women like me were Horvath\u2019s cast-off alter-egos. After all, I was beholden to exactly zero of the navel-gazing and wandering that characterized Girls<\/em>\u2019 protagonists.<\/p>\n

Despite my centrist politics and conservative personality, I do have a capacious and apolitical appetite for art\u2014including art I find personally or politically repugnant. But when it came to this show and the sensibility it espoused, I knew that I was the opposition. So, while I watched\u00a0Girls<\/em>\u00a0for its incisive cultural commentary and its clever, witty dialogue, I cringed while I watched.<\/p>\n

This spring, having recently welcomed a new baby and wanting something less than demanding to view while feeding him and folding endless laundry, I rewatched Dunham\u2019s show.<\/p>\n

Now 36 and a stay-at-home mom with four kids, my life has only grown ever further away from the\u00a0Girls<\/em>\u2019 perspective and plotlines. And yet, I don\u2019t feel so much like the opposition anymore.<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s easier to view self-absorbed 20-somethings with charity rather than contempt because I\u2019m no longer their peer. Or maybe the world has spun so much further off its axis in the past few years that what was decadent in 2012 now feels more \u201cwith us\u201d than \u201cagainst us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whatever the reason, I can say that with the benefit of new context, two things about the series really stood out for me this time through\u2014and not in a bad way.<\/p>\n

First, there is the humor. Amidst growing laments about the death of comedy due to Gen Z\u2019s inability to laugh at anything (least of all themselves), the jokes in\u00a0Girls<\/em>\u00a0that felt merely edgy in the 2010\u2019s now feel positively counter-cultural. The show opens with jibes about how unattractive liberal women actually find emasculated, post-modern men and indulges in copious amounts of equal opportunity stereotyping at the expense of entitled young adults. It also pokes irreverent fun at hipsters and \u201cnon-binary\u201d people, and unsparingly mocks the pseudo-intellectual pretension of many graduate school programs in the liberal arts.<\/p>\n

Second and perhaps more importantly, there is the ending. At the conclusion of the series, Shoshanna is 27 and Jessa, Hannah, and Marnie are 29. Shoshanna has deliberately moved on from her erstwhile friends to get married and form a new social circle. After a failed marriage, drug relapses, and countless romantic dumpster fires, Jessa has matured into a monogamous and honest relationship with Adam, Hannah\u2019s ex-boyfriend, and has apologized to Hannah for this irreversible betrayal that has permanently distanced them from each other. Hannah finds herself a single mother, having resolved to keep the baby that resulted from a one-night stand with a surf instructor, and leaves Brooklyn to settle upstate, where she\u2019s found a teaching job with insurance and can afford to care for her child given the lower cost of living.<\/p>\n

Finally, Marnie, who like Jessa has already gone through a divorce, initially takes aboard the responsibility of helping Hannah care for her baby, but ultimately recognizes that she needs to figure out her own next steps and floats to Hannah\u2019s mom, Loreen, the idea of law school. In response, Loreen tells Marnie that maybe she should be a judge. In one of the most (perhaps unintentionally) revealing lines of the show, Loreen explains that she has a friend who is \u201ca gas,\u201d with \u201cspray tanner\u201d and \u201ca big diamond in her upper ear cartilage\u201d and who nonetheless is \u201ca really good judge.\u201d In other words: the kooky unconventionality that the series valorizes is mostly just aesthetic; it can and ultimately should coexist with conventional professions, with marriage, and with motherhood.<\/p>\n

Today, we have ever fewer 29-year-olds so much as considering marriage or motherhood. So, somehow, in the span of less than a decade, the (very!) extended\u2014but ultimately finite\u2014adolescence featured on\u00a0Girls\u00a0<\/em>seems almost like a throwback.<\/p>\n

This is not a show for which I ever expected to feel nostalgia. But here we are. I guess it\u2019s a good reminder that things can, in fact, always get worse. Which means they can also always get better\u2014and that there are sometimes unexpected reserves of good in what may seem all bad.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s hoping.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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