by Joy Press
As if to throw down a gauntlet, the series’ second episode was titled “Vagina Panic”: Jessa plans to have an abortion, and Hannah gets tested for STDs. At one point, the camera floats upward to offer a panoramic view of Hannah’s body, splayed on a gynecologist’s chair. She flinches as the female ob-gyn inserts the speculum. “Is that painful?” the doctor asks. “Yeah, but only in the way it’s supposed to be,” Hannah says (as if to wink to Girls’s audience, “Yes, you’re supposed to be cringing”). Meanwhile, Jessa decides to have sex with a cute stranger rather than show up for her abortion, and conveniently gets her period, making the whole question moot. Although Girls would revisit the topic of pregnancy termination more directly in a later season, this early episode served as a declaration of its intent to be daring.
Apatow says that although HBO rarely pushed back on anything contentious, he himself was nervous about staging an abortion at the start of the series, worrying that “it might feel like we are just shoving that in people’s faces day one. You have to pick your moments.” And the political moment of Girls’s debut was a fraught one: House Republicans led an attack on the federal rule requiring employers to provide female employees with free health insurance coverage for contraceptives. When, in February 2012, law student Sandra Fluke was allowed to testify to the importance of birth control insurance coverage for young women like her before an all-male House committee, she became a lightning rod for Republican rage. “It makes her a slut, right?” Rush Limbaugh snarled on his radio show. “It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. . . . She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.” A few months later, the Republican Party adopted a virulently antiabortion platform for the 2012 presidential election, calling for a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion with no explicit exceptions for women’s health or in cases of incest or rape.
Girls leapt right into this political battleground. Midway through the HBO pilot was the excruciating “quiet game” sex scene between Adam and Hannah, an indication to the network that this show would contain starkly realistic, deglamorized depictions of female sexuality. As Dunham puts it, “It was essential [for HBO] to understand: There is going to be sex, and it’s not going to be sexy. A lot of the time girls are allowed to be a mess in an adorable way, and this is girls being a mess in a not adorable way.”
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Girls premiered to fairly universal acclaim. Slate’s Troy Patterson opened his review by hailing the series as “an exceptional piece of American art, as witty as The Women, richer in raunch than Portnoy’s Complaint, charismatic like Sleater-Kinney.” Yet almost as soon as critics anointed her, Dunham was smacked by a backlash.
That shouldn’t have been surprising: women’s evocations of their lives have historically been derided as trivial or whiny. The eminent Mexican poet Octavio Paz once complained of Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits, “I feel I am before a complaint, not a work of art.” Dunham’s own mother, Laurie Simmons, recalls feeling ashamed of working with female subject matter (dolls) when she started out in the art world: “I’d come to New York when conceptual art and video and all of this very intensely rigorous, intelligent, and conceptual work was happening, and I just thought, Oh no, this is like girl play.”
In an essay about confessional female writers, Rebecca Traister noted that in a media landscape with little space for women’s voices, those roles often get filled by female writers “willing to expose themselves in a way that is comfortable, and often alluring, to many of the men who control the media, and to many of the women who consume it.” But Dunham was exposing herself in a way that was discomforting and not the least bit alluring. Almost as soon as the series premiered in 2012, she became a love-hate figure in a way that echoed the polarizing impact of Roseanne and Murphy Brown.
After I wrote a Los Angeles Times feature about the series’ debut, colleagues gravitated toward my desk to vent their repelled reactions to Girls—not just after the first episode but for months to come. Like many viewers in the outside world, my workmates were offended by the characters’ obliviousness to their entitlement, even though it seemed clear to me that it was an intentional feature of the show rather than a mistake. And then there was the affront of Dunham’s naked flesh: I was never quite sure if it was the fact that she refused to starve herself or her lack of shame over her perfectly normal, slightly flabby physique that drove haters so crazy.
Another controversy dogged the series from the start, a critique that was harder to shake off because it was true. Girls’s portrayal of contemporary New York City was shockingly deficient in racial diversity. Not only were the core four lily-white, but there was minimal melanin to be found in any of the secondary characters inhabiting Dunham’s fictional version of Brooklyn. Questioned about the show’s whiteness shortly before Girls premiered, Dunham seemed chastened. “I became aware of it as I was editing,” she told me. “You cast this world and you don’t know until you watch it if it reflects what you see around you.” She had been so focused on making a pioneering step for Jewish girls and weirdos that she hadn’t considered all the others who’d been marginalized. Five years later, after Girls had shot its last scene, Dunham answered the question again: “I was twenty-three and I was half-Jewish and half-Christian, so I invented two Jewish and two Christian characters. I wrote what I knew.” At Oberlin, she says, “the big thing was: don’t write experiences that aren’t yours” and the New York art world she grew up in was extraordinarily Caucasian. “Even if you had a very liberal childhood, the limitations of your own experience, they will come into play.”
Sue Naegle stoutly defends Dunham’s casting choices. While she was at HBO, she doesn’t recall ever looking at Girls and thinking, “God, your show is really white and privileged feeling. That’s what she was writing about. I found so much of the criticism around that time—more than anything, the body shaming criticism—so disheartening. I had to keep reminding myself that a polarizing reaction is okay; you just want people talking about it.”
Over the years, a handful of black actors popped up on the show. In season two, 30 Rock and Community alum Donald Glover jets in to play Hannah’s handsome new law-student boyfriend, Sandy. He is the opposite of bohemian Adam, not because he’s African American but because he is responsible and Republican. Sandy is also pro-gun, anti–gay marriage, and doesn’t appreciate Hannah’s writing. Insulted, she provokes a political argument, during which she tosses out the fact that two out of three men on death row are black. You can see the gears turning in Hannah’s eyes as she realizes she has made race visible in the room. The episode had been written before the media criticized Girls for its lack of diversity, but when it came time to shoot, Dunham encouraged improv vet Glover to spin his own riffs on the topic. “This always happens,” he seethes quietly. “ ‘I’m a white girl and . . . I’m gonna date a black guy and we’re gonna go to a dangerous part of town,’ ” Sandy mocks. “And then they can’t deal with who I am.” Hannah protests that she never even thought about him as a black man. To which Sandy calmly replies, “That’s insane, okay? You should, ’cause that’s what I am.”
Like so many moments on Girls, this scene spotlighted a young white woman being schooled in her privilege and ignorance. Dunham says now that she was absorbing lessons alongside Hannah. “When someone makes a stride on television—when you see girls who look like girls you might know, you also want to see girls who look like all the girls you know. I get that there are women who have been waiting in the wings a long time to see versions of themselves, and it is frustrating to see a show that only half does it,” she acknowledges.
Dunham had come to HBO with her narrow, quirkily idiosyncratic tale, expecting to make the TV version of an independent film, the female version of that male curmudgeon comedy genre pioneered by Louie or Curb Your Enthusiasm. Yet Girls was instantly burdened with the weighty expectations of universality. Male characters, performers, and writers tend to get more leeway to be incorrigible one-offs, whil
e a woman’s story often stands in for all women’s stories.
Girls writer Sarah Heyward giggles when she contemplates the idea that the show’s mission was to capture universal truths about young modern womankind. “Something about the show made people feel like it was supposed to be inclusive and it wasn’t,” she says, stroking her green-tinted hair. “I know through and through how much of it is Lena. It’s not even inclusive to my experience!”
The unbearable whiteness of Girls remained a talking point throughout its run. Even Shonda Rhimes was dragooned into the debate in a 2012 CNN interview. “I watch the show—I find it delightful. So why couldn’t one of those girls have been Native American or Indian or Asian or Hispanic or black and been exactly the same story?” As someone accustomed to casting with an eye toward diversity, Rhimes was baffled: “I don’t understand why it would have to be a different story because the person was a different color.”
Rhimes’s and Dunham’s approaches seem almost diametrically opposed. Whereas Shondaland shows us what an egalitarian utopia could look like, Lenaland pretty accurately reflects the world its creator inhabits: a milieu riddled with unconscious racism and unacknowledged privilege. But is reflecting reality good enough? As the debate continued to rage, Girls’s ongoing preference not to cast actors of color in major roles began to seem like obstinacy.
Ta-Nehisi Coates suggested a way to break the cycle of skewed representations. Good writing is a “selfish act,” Coates argued in the Atlantic, declaring, “I’m interested in [Dunham’s] specific and individual vision, in that story she is aching to tell. If that vision is all-white, then so be it.” For Coates, the real issue was systemic exclusion: “My question is not ‘Why are there no black women on Girls?’ but ‘How many black showrunners are employed by HBO?’ ”
The answer was troubling: HBO had aired no long-form scripted prime-time series created by an African American since it began showing original programs in the mid-eighties. It would take until 2016 for the network to air its first series created and run by an African American woman, Issa Rae’s Insecure.
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Visibly shaking in a burgundy gown that showed off her tattoos, Lena Dunham took the stage at the Golden Globe Awards in January 2013 to accept her statue for Best Actress in a TV Comedy Series, the first of two awards she took home that night. (The other was for Best TV Comedy Series.) Dunham dedicated the honor to “every woman who’s ever felt like there wasn’t a space for her” and thanked her fellow nominees, Zooey Deschanel, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Globes cohosts Amy Poehler and Tina Fey for helping her survive middle school and other traumatic experiences in her young life.
Resuming her hosting duties a few minutes later, Fey mocked, “Glad we got you through middle school, Lena.” Although it clearly had not been intended as a dig at aging actresses, everything Dunham said seemed to kindle a controversy.
The undercurrent of resentment was not all that surprising in the entertainment industry. Here was a young woman not just leapfrogging the line but also doing it without the compromises required of network showrunners. Jill Soloway, who had spent decades toiling on other people’s series and trying to get her own pilots on the air, admits to feeling jealous of Dunham’s work. How many times had Soloway been critiqued for female characters who were too unlikable, too Jewish, too weird?
Dunham didn’t set out to create unlikable characters, just recognizable ones. If it sometimes felt as though Dunham was deliberately humiliating her creations (especially her alter ego), she intended that more as a personality-revealing challenge. “My natural inclination is to put characters I play through heinous tests, and I’m never sure why I’m doing it until later, when I see what it’s explaining about the character or the world. I do think Hannah courts it, but we also live in a world that’s tough for a twenty-four- or twenty-five-year-old woman to navigate. There are things you’re going to face that are totally debasing. Friends always say, ‘That would only happen to you.’ But I just think I’m the only one talking about it.”
Some of these mortifying moments in Girls emerge in the work world, where our heroines’ ambition collides with the restricted opportunities of New York City’s postfinancial crash creative class. Marnie, with her perfect hair and chic clothes, looks like a Sex and the City go-getter—but that show was backdropped by the turn-of-millennium boom. Marnie gets laid off from her gallery assistant job and turns to hostessing at a restaurant. Jessa floats through a number of low-level gigs (babysitter, children’s clothing store employee, caretaker for an elderly artist) before finally deciding to actively pursue something: a degree in social work. The most focused character, Shoshanna, graduates from college with a rigid “fifteen-year plan,” which the real world promptly decimates.
Meanwhile, Hannah is her own worst underminer. At a job interview, she ruins a genuine connection with her potential boss by making an inappropriate date-rape joke. Seasons later, she gets into the prestigious University of Iowa creative writing MFA program but quickly hightails it back to New York, having pissed off her fellow students and failed to produce any writing.
“It took us a little while to realize Hannah does have some talent, but sometimes she is too busy living the life she thinks a writer is supposed to be living to actually sit down and work,” Dunham explains. Hannah’s whole identity is wrapped up in the persona of a confessional nonfiction writer, someone constantly chasing experience as raw material for the work. She snorts cocaine off a toilet seat and deflowers a nineteen-year-old boy in a graveyard in the hope that she can stockpile some good stories. At one point, she dresses up in a disguise to entice Adam with role play. (In the past, he involved her in his perverse fantasies of defiling little girls.) Instead of getting turned on, however, he accuses Hannah of being “outside your body watching everything” and, even worse, of exploiting him. “I’m not here to fill your life up with stories for your fucking Twitter.”
Critics and fans predictably equated Hannah with Dunham. After all, both were Brooklyn-based writers with a penchant for emotional and physical exhibitionism. But the differences are just as telling: where Hannah is an unfocused, self-defeating slacker, Lena is a workaholic who, careerwise, has yet to stumble. And while Hannah invariably manages to alienate colleagues, Lena commands enormous respect on her set. “One of our crew guys got in an altercation in his hockey locker room because someone was talking shit about Lena,” Konner says, laughing. “Her crew would take a bullet for her.”
One thing Dunham does share with her creation, though, is a relaxed attitude toward nudity. Konner says that when Dunham is directing and acting in a sex scene, “She’ll run to the monitor [naked] to watch the playback, and I literally need to remind her, ‘You have to put on pants!’ ”
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By season two, Girls’s cultural prominence far outstripped its actual ratings, which averaged 4.6 million viewers across TV and digital platforms. (Game of Thrones episodes, in contrast, pulled in more than 14 million that year.) But rather than pushing the show toward more accessible material in search of a larger audience, the writers headed for bleaker terrain. Jessa trashed her impulsive marriage to a hedge-fund jerk, Marnie’s overconfidence crumpled, and Hannah’s childhood OCD returned.
Dunham has written of her own experience with the disorder: in her memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, she lists things that panicked her as a child, among them “headaches, rape, kidnapping, milk, the subway, sleep.” She was fixated on the number eight and racked with fear of sex. Later, in high school, she took “massive doses” of antidepressants. Her personal travails informed the story line of Hannah’s gradual relapse, which starts with repetitive gestures and graduates to hiding under her bed, plagued by uncontrollable thoughts. The OCD resurgence is triggered by anxiety: a hip publisher has contracted with Hannah to write a confessional e-book with an impossibly short deadline. What she hands in gravely disappoints him. “Where’s the sexual failure? Where’s the pudgy face slicked with semen and sadness?” he snee
rs.
She has failed at being the voice of a generation, or at this editor’s idea of millennial femininity. Back at home, Hannah compulsively roots around her ear with a Q-tip, resulting in a gush of blood and a trip to the ER. The punctured eardrum came directly from Dunham’s life. Apatow says that one day she came into the office wounded, claiming that she had “slipped” and popped her eardrum. He thought the story sounded unlikely; Dunham quickly admitted it had been the result of compulsive behavior and decided to weave it into a script. When it was time to film the eardrum-bursting scene, however, Konner fled the set. “It was too upsetting to me. I had lived through it with her and it was . . .” She shudders. “Just disgusting. But when Judd saw the dailies, he said, ‘It’s not gruesome enough!’ ” They ended up having to reshoot it.
Even harder to watch was another story arc running through the Q-tip episode, written by Konner and Dunham: a brutal sexual encounter between Adam and his new girlfriend, Natalia (Shiri Appleby). Over the course of the first two seasons Adam had developed from an emotionally remote, creepy dude into a sweet, complex character. Girls fans had grown to love him, which made what came next hurt. After breaking up with Hannah, he began to date a more emotionally grounded woman. Where Hannah hesitated to assert her needs in bed and complied with Adam’s kinks, Natalia tells Adam what she likes and where she draws the line. The clarity excites him. But a chance encounter with Hannah sends Adam, a recovering alcoholic, to the bar. The aftermath of his drinking spree is a scene as grim as it is graphic. It starts with Adam ordering Natalia to “get on all fours” and crawl down his dirty hallway. Her discomfort is clear as he positions her on the bed and has rough sex with her. When he pulls out and masturbates over her, she begs, “No, no! Not on my dress!” The camera closes in on her disgusted face as she lies still, his fluid pooling between her naked breasts. Natalia quietly declares, “I really didn’t like that.”