Review: Girls
Dec. 26th, 2012 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pktechgirlbackupyay, I have HBO and can watch things that have generated hugely divided critical response, like Girls, and then I can have opinions on them. Before the DVDs come out! Hurray!
For context, I had mostly read Ta-Nehisi Coate's posts + the comments section, plus brief mentions in other blogs. If I could summarize the criticisms: Girls is frivolous, it lacks diversity, and it claims a universality it doesn't have.
I have a couple of thoughts. One, Girls captures some very deep things, but it doesn't explain them very well. A commenter on one of TNC's posts derided the characters as having first world problems like too nice a boyfriend. What actually happened was a girl who stayed in a relationship way past its expiration date but stayed in it, tormenting everyone involved, due to a combination of feeling like she needed a reason to leave, and fear of being alone/the initial depression following even a very necessary break up. That has been an important pattern in many of my friends lives- male and female- and it doesn't show up in art very often. You see that same needing-a-reason in this monologue where Hannah, the protagonist, is getting an STD test*
[summary: Hannah almost kind of wants AIDS so that she has a reason to be mad at the guy she is fucking, because although the relationship is shredding her emotionally, he hasn't done anything she feels she has the right to be mad about]
I will buy that Girls falls short of explaining this feeling to people who haven't experienced it. I don't think it's even what I would point to if I wanted to demonstrate the phenomenon to someone. But that doesn't make it valueless. It doesn't even make it not art.
I will totally validate complaints about how very white Girls is. On the other hand... most of TV is whitewashed, and it doesn't get the same vitriol. The problem is not with Girls, it's with the television industry as a whole, and the solution is more POC and female writers and show runners, not forcing people who can't write good black characters to force them in anyway.** Similarly, you can complain about Hannah being unlikable, and I will immediately agree, but she was always intended to be unsympathetic. Just like every male lead on every art show. Now, Hannah is considerably less awesome than Don Draper or Vic Mackey or Tony Soprano, but I think the stories of people who are just quietly to blame for their own problems are undertold.
They also do a bang up job on weight, with Hannah (played by show runner Lena Durham) being American-normal television-fat, and complaining about it, and her very thin friends trying to comfort her, and yet clearly still believing she's fat. They nailed another character's anxiety over being a virgin in her 20s. The demographic of girls- white, female, early 20s, creative types in NYC- are overrepresented in television, but their problems are not.
Also, this is a fucking brilliant demonstration of male entitlement
Unfortunately, the show takes a deep dive in the second half of the season. They use the man-Hannah-is-fucking
in too many different roles*** so while her reactions to specific are very authentic, his character is a mess. They clearly wanted to the show consequences coming home to roost for the manic pixie dream girl, but don't quite make it work.**** So if the problems I've listed above resonate with you, watch and enjoy. But if you're looking for something to explain those problems, go read The Fate of Mice. Actually, everyone should do that, The Fate of Mice is both shorter and better. But you can watch Girls afterwords.
*which weirdly involves a pelvic exam even though they can test for everything with blood alone.
**I knew that one of the show's writers had, in response to criticism about the show's whiteness, tweeted "What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME." That was problematic, but I was willing to overlook it as an attempt to be clever in <140 characters. But while researching this, I learned that she refers to shitting as "taking Obama to the White House." So one hand, I'm even more glad that I was that this lady isn't writing black characters. On the other hand, they should probably fire her and replace her with someone who can.
***You can't have him be the cool guy who turns down sex because she'll get too attached and end up hurt, and the unstable, possibly bipolar boyfriend who PEES ON HER AND KEEPS GOING EVEN AS SHE SCREAMS TO STOP, and the awesome relationship she's sabotaging because she doesn't believe she deserves love. Breaking up with the guy who pees on you as you scream for him to stop is a sign of health respect for yourself and I'm not going to let HBO tell me otherwise
****This could be resolved in season two, or it could get a million times worse.
For context, I had mostly read Ta-Nehisi Coate's posts + the comments section, plus brief mentions in other blogs. If I could summarize the criticisms: Girls is frivolous, it lacks diversity, and it claims a universality it doesn't have.
I have a couple of thoughts. One, Girls captures some very deep things, but it doesn't explain them very well. A commenter on one of TNC's posts derided the characters as having first world problems like too nice a boyfriend. What actually happened was a girl who stayed in a relationship way past its expiration date but stayed in it, tormenting everyone involved, due to a combination of feeling like she needed a reason to leave, and fear of being alone/the initial depression following even a very necessary break up. That has been an important pattern in many of my friends lives- male and female- and it doesn't show up in art very often. You see that same needing-a-reason in this monologue where Hannah, the protagonist, is getting an STD test*
[summary: Hannah almost kind of wants AIDS so that she has a reason to be mad at the guy she is fucking, because although the relationship is shredding her emotionally, he hasn't done anything she feels she has the right to be mad about]
I will buy that Girls falls short of explaining this feeling to people who haven't experienced it. I don't think it's even what I would point to if I wanted to demonstrate the phenomenon to someone. But that doesn't make it valueless. It doesn't even make it not art.
I will totally validate complaints about how very white Girls is. On the other hand... most of TV is whitewashed, and it doesn't get the same vitriol. The problem is not with Girls, it's with the television industry as a whole, and the solution is more POC and female writers and show runners, not forcing people who can't write good black characters to force them in anyway.** Similarly, you can complain about Hannah being unlikable, and I will immediately agree, but she was always intended to be unsympathetic. Just like every male lead on every art show. Now, Hannah is considerably less awesome than Don Draper or Vic Mackey or Tony Soprano, but I think the stories of people who are just quietly to blame for their own problems are undertold.
They also do a bang up job on weight, with Hannah (played by show runner Lena Durham) being American-normal television-fat, and complaining about it, and her very thin friends trying to comfort her, and yet clearly still believing she's fat. They nailed another character's anxiety over being a virgin in her 20s. The demographic of girls- white, female, early 20s, creative types in NYC- are overrepresented in television, but their problems are not.
Also, this is a fucking brilliant demonstration of male entitlement
Unfortunately, the show takes a deep dive in the second half of the season. They use the man-Hannah-is-fucking
in too many different roles*** so while her reactions to specific are very authentic, his character is a mess. They clearly wanted to the show consequences coming home to roost for the manic pixie dream girl, but don't quite make it work.**** So if the problems I've listed above resonate with you, watch and enjoy. But if you're looking for something to explain those problems, go read The Fate of Mice. Actually, everyone should do that, The Fate of Mice is both shorter and better. But you can watch Girls afterwords.
*which weirdly involves a pelvic exam even though they can test for everything with blood alone.
**I knew that one of the show's writers had, in response to criticism about the show's whiteness, tweeted "What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME." That was problematic, but I was willing to overlook it as an attempt to be clever in <140 characters. But while researching this, I learned that she refers to shitting as "taking Obama to the White House." So one hand, I'm even more glad that I was that this lady isn't writing black characters. On the other hand, they should probably fire her and replace her with someone who can.
***You can't have him be the cool guy who turns down sex because she'll get too attached and end up hurt, and the unstable, possibly bipolar boyfriend who PEES ON HER AND KEEPS GOING EVEN AS SHE SCREAMS TO STOP, and the awesome relationship she's sabotaging because she doesn't believe she deserves love. Breaking up with the guy who pees on you as you scream for him to stop is a sign of health respect for yourself and I'm not going to let HBO tell me otherwise
****This could be resolved in season two, or it could get a million times worse.
