Where Dunham Doth Tread
Creative License with a Creative Voice
In the first season of the first episode of Girls, the main character Hannah Horvath, played by the contemporarily controversial Lena Dunham, attempts to explain to her parents why they should continue to support her, despite what they view as a lack of self-directed motivation. “I might be the voice of my generation,” she declares. “Or at least a voice. Of a generation.” While one of the most screen-shotted, quoted-out-of-context, quotable moments of the four-season old series so far, what Dunham’s audience, either congratulatory or critical, continue to miss is that Dunham exposes to us, in that first, early scene, the nut of the entire series: we’re all just one voice, of one generation. There is no universal truth, and the twenty-something New Yorker, no matter how precocious or published, has no designs upon the title—nor, more controversially, does her fictional persona, Hannah. Girls is just another story told—well told — through another set of eyes, as subject to interpretation and creative license as Scandal or House of Cards or any prime-time slotted HBO amalgam of wit and nudity.
Every article, every reckoning of Girls success, scandal, and questionable content, assumes two things, nearly universally: that Hannah is a narcissist, and that art imitates life. While both assumptions may be true (one truer than another) to an extent, both miss the mark. Hannah may be a narcissist: shamelessly self-involved and good-intentioned only to the point of making herself look better in her own eyes or others, it is only at the points during which Hannah begins to unravel that we see that she is nowhere near focused enough to be operating with the truly calculated agenda of someone who focuses solely on herself. She is, quite literally, and archetypically, all over the place. Whether it be her over-concern in the happinesses of her friends, or her relationship with Adam, or her writing career and lack of day job success, all of Hannah’s energy and attention is focused inward on herself, but because she is trying to make sense of the internal universe that consistently fails to guide her path, and has to be sorted before she can begin to sort her external word. She is, in short, experiencing the exploratory growing pains of any young adult transitioning from pampered girl-child to thriving independent.
The second debatably incorrect assumption, that art imitates life, perpetuates one of the greatest fallacies of our overly-transparent, media-exposed society: that in there, somewhere, must be a grain of truth. The seed of sand which chafed Girls into the pearl of creation. I am sure Dunham draws from personal experiences and anecdotes—those of her and those she knows—to write. What writer doesn’t. However, it’s overly presumptive to assume that Hannah’s characteristics are Lena’s characteristics, and vice versa. If Adam Driver spent as much time shirtless as his character [also named] Adam does on the show, whether he does or not is as immaterial to the plot as is the background Dunham’s plot development. Her motivations obsess us: what does Girls stand for: a millennial declaration of self-awareness? Wry social commentary? Perhaps, despite the separation of reality and fiction, Hannah does speak the ultimate truth, at least once, outside of the scope of her own processing: Girls, like the character, is merely a voice. Of a generation. Although astute, funny, and at times as honest as it is conflated, the meaning and motive of the series is as mysterious as the machinations of any of its characters. And so, we should learn to accept it for what it is, just as Jessa, Shoshanna, Marnie, and Hannah struggle to accept themselves and each other.
