I had a copy of the pilot of Girls I got for free with another DVD set (I think it was whatever HBO show I bought at the time, I can't even remember). I had it on good authority it was great and worth the bother, and this was before streaming really took off so I could use the promo disc as it was intended. Maybe twenty minutes in, I gave up.
Opening on a scene where a white girl who's taken her parents' generosity for granted finds out they're cutting her off made me too uncomfortable and probably tapped into my own sense of teenage narcissism that spilled over into my early 20s. I don't really like cringe black comedy, it's why I don't think I could sit through Nathan for You or a lot of Curb. Reading over the pilot episode, I can kinda see how you're supposed to sympathise with Dunham's Hanna, things are shitty for her, but at that age, I couldn't even get an unpaid internship my parents thought would turn into a real job. I was happy to have the government give me money so I could feign financial independence from my parents (they still covered my insurance even after I had my own policy and a wage, I only removed their details when I worked for the actual company to get my now removed subsidy. Sadly, they didn't realise they'd under-insured me when I finally had another breakdown at 28 and I had to explain why when I was well again).
But my point is, even when I was down to my last 80c which covered the train ride into town to hand in my Centrelink form and get paid, I didn't call my parents for more money. I might've asked for more if I was desperate in uni but I kept it to a minimum, and usually felt bad if I spent it on anything other than rent, food or bills. During my first episode, I spent money on a dress and I remember my mother making a comment about it being "my money" in that way you know they really disapprove. I don't think she did like how I spent my money back then, but she wouldn't say, and I know she wasn't thrilled with covering my rent when I wanted to move out permanently and live in the city. Up until then, I came home from uni every year so I wasn't staying in residence over the summer, and we usually had to reapply, out of towners getting priority, so it meant I was approved for each year I attended. I have no idea what I'd have done had I not, I know my parents really wanted me to move back after my first hospitalisation and I'm sure they were looking into me finishing my studies at the sister campus in town, where my mother actually worked. I know she pulled strings to get me through my first year, I doubt they'd have let me take my exams down there had I asked myself. I know she really came through, however I also couldn't drop out at that point and take a year off despite desperately wanting to (looking back, this was my first instance of absolute burnout and not realising this made it harder to get over and avoid repeating). I appreciated she later said she didn't know how I got through it despite everything. I had to. I had a choice to really screw up and I chose to keep going instead, whether I hated it or not.
So, I don't really see how I'm supposed to find Hanna's character endearing, when the pilot ends with her, in a haze from opium tea, demanding her parents pay her 1100 a month and that they read her memoir she'll never publish. I know this was based on her personal experiences and you're meant to cringe with her but, no thanks. I understand there was supposed to be self-deprecation in this character portrayal but to me Dunham wasn't selling it in real life. She was becoming an industry darling who later had to apologise for assuming she knew what a black man was thinking. (Her getting together with Amy Schummer really became a bad marriage of egos at that point, and both of them were being exposed for their abundant flaws despite their previous popularity).
I don't hold up these projects when they're female-centric as they tend to get bogged down in their own need for validation from critics as being important feminist pieces that seem to suggest they're exempt from objective criticism. I hated Wonder Woman and the 2016 Ghostbusters were just overshadowed by this so when it came time to really give opinions on the films themselves, any negative critique was labelled sexist. Brie Larson failed to be another champion for the cause when she said something valid in a very invalidating way, I heard a lot of condescension where others didn't. Sorry, honey, but you do sound like you hate white dudes. You sound passive aggressive and silly, that's what people were mad at. Somehow, you made Disney money off the back of "charity" so underprivileged girls could watch your movie. (I know it wasn't her but it was terrible when you really thought about what it meant in terms of valid "charity"). There's a myriad of better ways you can say we need more women reviewing movies. Most of the white dudes I watch on YouTube have actual time for female reviewers. They've been very respectful of them. If you want to say Red Letter Media are right wing commenters, you're a fucking idiot. Whether they were working with women previously or not, they're not the most problematic white guys online. I'm pretty confident I know which white dudes to throw under the bus by now, and it's not Rich Evans.
I veered off topic, my point was I didn't have a lot of time for watching Dunham beat herself up in the way I've consciously been doing my whole life. I've absolutely taken sole responsibility of dishing out any damage anyone had primed for me. If people did miss the point of Girls, maybe it wasn't as obvious, I don't know. Like I said, Dunham making herself so thoroughly unlikable, even to this very day where she's tweeting egotistical "LGBT ally saviour complex" nonsense for attention, how am I supposed to believe she's still not stuck in a sense of narcissism, as if she's being sarcastic, I'm not seeing it, and I'm not that bad at reading sarcasm for someone who may or may not be on the spectrum.
I'm going over a video essay that's from one of those verified content farms like WatchMojo that are usually a little too fair to certain shows. I also came across Dunham's article on Marilyn Monroe suggesting she's not unlike her, her mention of "childless" women annoying coming from a supposed feminist given women who have chosen not to have kids, like me, are childfree, childless denoting you're somehow a failure for failing to procreate. I understand she's gone through a lot of shit and tragedy but I can't see why she needs to keep popping up online saying contentious shit all the time. I also saw she was looking to make a Girls movie by 40, as of 2015, and she's now 37, so I'm questioning what interest there would be in a Girls movie, coming from someone who didn't think we'd ever be a Community movie, the fans wanted that and got it. Are there fans of Girls who want a movie? Well, the lack of a hashtag campaign would suggest otherwise. Rabid fanbases make shit happen, for good or bad. I haven't seen a groundswell for other movie adaptations of cult millennial shows.
I will admit my aversion to Girls was Dunham holding up a mirror to my own self-loathing, mid-twenties self. I still carry a lot of regret for how self-indulgent my episodes feel in retrospect, which is why I've distanced myself from involving people in this. I hate people in her age bracket are suffering from economic problems they didn't themselves create, what distances Dunham from that is her personal privilege and connections that gave her an in-road others perhaps didn't have. And her relative success now removes her from that economic burden. Which is fine, she's worked hard enough, I won't refute that, it's only made her less relatable. Maybe the idea of her having a memoir she felt worthy of publication rubs me up the wrong way when I didn't see myself as a self-indulgent writer, just an ignored one. Having said that, what she did publish in real life received a lot of backlash that wasn't worth the PR acrobatics she had to do back then to apologise. But yeah, joking you were a sexual predator towards a sibling would be considered triggering to anyone who did suffer sibling sexual abuse, whether your experience wasn't viewed the same way. (How many times do you want to apologise for what you've said in one lifetime? How are you not constantly exhausted and embarrassed?). I don't see why she continues to say what she says despite her success, unless it's a form of compulsive self-sabotage she hasn't addressed through therapy. I do know it is a nightmare navigating your 20s and 30s with a diagnosis nobody can agree on while being given far too much medication to cope with said illness when you're inside a medical model that dehumanises women for having mental illnesses in the first place. I wouldn't take that away from her.
Maybe it's because I didn't treat my 40s as being a terrifying phase and have been so desperate to get out of my 20s and 30s with the erroneous notion people would take me seriously by now. They don't. But I didn't have drug and alcohol addiction, endometriosis and the weight of expectation from the industry to be something I'm not. I sympathise with all that until Dunham reminds me she's sometimes incapable of checking herself before wrecking herself. Dreading your 40s seems to be the millennial curse left over from Gen X/Y fearing their 30s, where you're called a boomer at age 45 until someone reminds you how old the oldest millennials are now. I just fail at relating to them by simply being stuck between Gen X/Y and millennials and I was always writing to get away from myself and my surroundings. I wasn't bold enough for her honesty, which is admirable when it's not being completely and pointlessly offensive and glib.
As an addendum, she landed in similar BS as Ellen did over a shelter dog, and outed her sibling who's trans. It's still up for debate if the molestation allegations were true since she was protected by a society that probably comes to the defense of the wrong people, and the sibling didn't press charges. I don't know if I'd have been that forthcoming about any of it in the first place. Again, how much reward should one person get for being that blatantly and brutally honest? I'm waiting for her to say she's on the spectrum as that's a big known trait, saying things you find benign and it being taken as absolutely offensive. (Yes, when you're learning about a thing the thing paints your judgement of other things. I'm sorry).
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