This blog really is ending up being a part-time side project
for me, and I’ll try not to neglect it so much in the future. I’m just feeling
a bit more inspired right now with my realisation that one aspect I’ve pretty
much ignored this whole time is television. I don’t know why; I watch a lot of
TV, and much of it is just as good if not better than a lot of film I've watched.
Okay so most of my viewing consists of American shows, and
primarily HBO shows for that matter, which I’m a complete sucker for. Studying
television at uni this year has awakened me to the fact that I’m essentially the
perfect ‘quality’ TV viewer: white, from a middle-class background and
educated- with a greater awareness of wider cultural practices. I'm a slave to
HBO’s reputation and marketing strategies to the point now that I’ll watch near
enough anything that’s made by the network, regardless of content. And to be
honest I don’t really care that this happens- so many HBO shows I’ve seen have
just been so bloody good and totally worth the necessary added engagement and concentration
these shows require and which I actually relish.
My latest foray into the HBO canon has been Girls, Lena Dunham’s trendy and
critically-divisive personal project about four twentysomething women living in
New York and their various friendships, love lives and work struggles. The
world they live in is undeniably privileged, despite their long-running
monetary woes, but general lives are far more relatable and truthful than that
of obvious comparison piece Sex and the
City.
This is what attracts me to this show the most: it’s honesty
and realism. It’s refreshing to see something where the characters are openly
depicted as flawed and at times even blatantly unlikable- from Hannah’s (Lena
Dunham) constant erring between self-depreciation and obnoxious self-satisfaction, Marnie’s
(Allison Williams) boredom with loving boyfriend Charlie, Jessa’s (Jemima
Kirke) recklessness and promiscuity and Shoshanna’s (Zosia Mamet) crippling naïveté.
It was this quality which maintained my love of perhaps my all-time favourite
show Six Feet Under, which had some
of the most layered and well-drawn characters I’ve seen in anything. Their
relationships are anything but rosy, with Hannah’s on-off boyfriend Adam (Adam
Driver) proving a complex and debatable figure in terms of the extent to which their
relationship is indeed loving or exploitative on either of their parts. Friendships
too are facile, open to falling apart over the most mundane and petty of
things.
This honesty extends too to facets of their everyday lives:
the small niggles of first-world problems and the woes of being young, from
having parents refuse to pay for your maintenance, to having an overbearing
pervy boss, to accidentally smoking crack. On top of that is the unflinching
depiction of the girls’ sexuality and I guess ‘female’ problems(?) which at
first was almost a source of exoticism for me as a male viewer but then became
a frank depiction of human existence which I value in anything I watch. The sex
scenes are refreshingly imperfect, from the awkward experiments with anal sex,
messy fumblings with condoms and possible STDs. We see their everyday lives,
from them simply getting dressed in their bedrooms to having serious
discussions in the bathroom.
Some of the criticism levelled at the show is that it
depicts a closeted world with only white middle-class characters. I hardly
think this was a deliberate intention on Dunham’s part; instead, this being a
reflection of her own life, it presents a fairly accurate picture of New York
which unfortunately like most of America and the rest of the world, remains
segregated, exclusive to only some. It’s unsurprising that young women in their
twenties would want to hang out with other young women in their twenties. Girls is
a highly subjective view of New York and the people in it (note the near
absence of skyline views of the city)- instead this could prompt questions
about the position of modern women. I’m not an expert, but the show could be
seen to align with postfeminist notions of individual agency and a detatched
awareness of self-identity, especially with Hannah. Here women can be accepting
of consumer culture and single lifestyles. However, Girls is questionably a product of pre-second wave feminist
notions, such as their continuous desires for heterosexual romance and frequent reference to how their appearance is perceived to others.
So if Girls does
have a target audience, does it necessarily have to be female? Hardly, at least
I prove it doesn’t have to be- I really enjoyed it, devouring the first series
in two days. Producer Judd Apatow said the show was intended to allow men an
insight into the world of realistic women. Perhaps I’m more accustomed to the show
due to my being in my (very) early twenties, making the features of the
characters more relatable for me than a middle-aged viewer. The show comes
across as pretty hipsterish with its distinctive apartments and costumes, as
well as an indie soundtrack which actually happens to feature a lot of bands I
listen to. Honestly, I’m still not totally sure what a hipster is, I don’t know
whether I’d be seen as a hipster. To me ‘hipster’ seems to have become a term
for any sort of postmodern counter-culture typically associated with young
people, a term now linked disdainfully with smugness and irony. Perhaps this
association has been the cause of some the criticism levelled at Girls?
Either way, I’m putting off watching the second series until
my exams are done and I can’t wait to watch series two. The show makes a satisfying
change to my usual programmes, one which is insightful, well-written and
surprisingly funny. You don’t have to be a girl to watch Girls, in much the same way you don’t have to be a CIA agent to
watch Homeland. Relatable and
engaging characters are what make a good show, and this has plenty. The title ‘Girls’,
rather than, say, ‘Women’ implies the leads are still in a state of
development. Indeed they all still have a lot of growing up to do, and I’m
looking forward to seeing how that goes ahead for them.
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