Solipsism and the City

It occurred to me to wait to post this until I actually saw the premiere of Lena Dunham's 'Girls' on HBO. Then I remembered that a) I'm not exactly an authority, here in the blogosphere; people don't actively queue for my opinions and b) this winning combination of nonchalant defeatism and navel-gazing makes me the exact target audience for this show and de facto a voice to be heard. I've seen Tiny Furniture anyways.

Preface: I love my life. I really do. Its problems are really much closer to TV pratfalls than the actual pain or despair I skirt daily when I'm not giving money to subway panhandlers; in fact this pathological middle-class guilt is probably the circuitous source of any big depressions or lacks I've ever known.
(I already don't like this – everyone knows you don't get to quantify your life's pain. But Lena Dunham is under my skin, and in a weird way I feel I owe her an explanation.) I like to think I kiss the ground I walk on daily, give thanks in my pithy way to not God exactly but something closer to the Force in Star Wars...I give thanks for a fabulous band of witty malcontented friends, and funny, wildly supportive and uniquely amazing family members, my city, this structure-less almost-career plan I'm forging ahead with – we'll call it art, for clarity purposes. I am happy and very, very lucky. That said, buckle up for this here rage against the modern self-referential comedy machine. I feel I get to see colors, reflections, abstractions and aspirations of my entirely pleasant and scarcely dull existence hoisted upon the big and small screen almost every day. And I do have feelings about that.

Lena Dunham's apparently making an HBO series about us, you guys. My guys. My favorites: the listless, lonely, hyper-quick, pretty poor, art brut underemployed Funny Girls in all their meandering, cynical glory. The Me's, the You's, the Everyone We Know.

At first I was excited. The world needs to know! We have a voice, we make a generation! Love us, preach our humor to Middle America, did you know the dream is still alive, only different? It's also occurred to me and some like-minded fellows to be a little repulsed by Lena, for a) the fact that she is getting famous on a reality so tangible to us we didn't think of it first b) we didn't think of it first c) she comes from wild privilege and d) navel-gazing: the aspect of my lifestyle which I simmer in so wretchedly; that useless self-awareness from which I categorically draw most dissatisfaction and unhappiness. The thing about we funny girls in New York's art world is there's an element to US that I'm not sure I want to celebrate yet. That of course could just be the hetero-normative patriarchy striking me where I stand, but I don't really want the terms of my success (which, if you look carefully, I have entirely tied to Lena Dunham's) to be a capitalization on a little of what makes me gross...to myself. And then I have to face the real Ugly in the mirror and wonder...why not?

I'm talking about Lena Dunham's bravery: Lena Dunham is not afraid to be really ugly in super public. A New York magazine writer said it well: she herself can be very lovely, yet seems to actually go out of her way to challenge her viewers with images of a less than perfect body in less than flattering clothes or hair or make-up, often having far less than perfect (and fairly graphic) sex. Of course on one hand this is really laudable (THE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW!) but it draws attention to what even we in the club have buried and really ought never to worry aloud: this is no longer escapism at all. This is no longer fiction. Take 'Sex and the City,' my preferred example of “art” (to be sort of generous) as escapism, married to a little bit of female empowerment in the abstract. This show is decidedly not MY LIFE, but me and Carrie share enough similar talismans (love of clothes, feisty girlfriends) to have some sort of aspirational empathy take place: I can feel for her, with her, recognize bits of my self in her, but she's certainly not real. Lena's real. She has terrible sex, and she struggles with money, and she feels purposeless and foolish, and ridiculous, un-glamorous things happen to her. I do a lot of these things in a week. How do I actually like them apples? AND THEN I WONDERED...what's the lesson I should be learning if I am both target audience and source material for this show? Not that TV's some kind of instructional messiah, but, okay, okay, I'm asking, why would I – anyone – really want to watch a show about themselves?

Because, believe it, I do. I think lots of people do. I always want to see theatre made by my friends, all full of winks and mutual references. Movies set in New York, movies that mention my hometown, stories that shed light on my particularities do feel like treats. Only they're fraught treats for the specific kind of fiercely funky cliché I feel I traffic with in public: when my individuality is acknowledged (as an extension of a whole thriving community of individuals living a life that looks like mine) I can somehow feel threatened, even unhappy. Think about how many girls you know with cat's eye glasses who claim to hate Zooey Deschanel, or the number of friends you have from outer boroughs who will look around a bar full of people dressed exactly like them and say, “I hate hipsters.” This is a Cold War, gang. We're in it to win it and oust the challenger: who can be the most unique in this brave New York?

Okay, another disclaimer. I'm not entirely delusional; I don't actually think me and my roommates banter like Zooey Deschanel and her motley dude crew on New Girl. I'm not always mid hi-jinks like the goofy gang in Happy Endings and I didn't come from New York privilege (and I don't have a million dollar contract with Judd Apatow) like Lena Dunham and the supporting cast of her new show. Obviously. But perhaps because I'm a bright young New York twentysomething and becoming hypersensitive to the accurate portrayals of my supposedly coveted existence (thank undergrad English for that last “thought” and insistent vanity) it's struck me recently that TV today seems more interested in self-consciously reflecting its people than, say, Taxi or Mash ever did. Nebulous archetypes still prevail – no one's really friends with a Carrie, Samantha or Charlotte (face it guys, you are all Near Mirandas at best). No one's really got a team of stunted pranksters in their social crew, like Troy and Abed from Community – but doesn't at least the humor of the modern show make a case for a TV Life a whole lot closer to Real Life than the one Ethel and Lucy seemed to know? Some more pennies for your thoughts: reality television, the way Chris Lilley's scathing mockumentary about bottom-feeders makes you feel (somehow sick, not in on the joke), the success of shows like Mad Men that purport to tell a truth, expose a fiction. Cinema verite documentary style television. Growing lack of laugh tracks. If we're no longer watching TV for pure escapism, perhaps there's a little bit of lusty validation mixed in – maybe TV is becoming the new novel, the new anti-lonely. I do get massive kicks from the vaguely mirrored elements of my not-as-glamorous single girls braving the big city day to day, but it also shakes me to my core. I am implicated, somehow.

Jonathan Franzen wrote an essay about privacy in 1998 positing that in one sense the victims of the 'share everything' culture are the people made to unwillingly partake: I don't want to see your presidential penis, hear your graphic conversation about sexual liberation on the subway. To be reductive, he was interested in the loss of reticence as a function of the changing culture, something about politeness, consideration for the other, subtlety. To see yourself in not so much as a gloss of glory is the kicker, I suppose. To see yourself unswaddled, implicated, unglamorous and un-attached (but funny! Quirky! Real!) is, despite my aspirations to self love and deep peace, a surefire B these days.

So thanks for the diagnosis, Lena and ilk. I know from here it's like, 'oh but look! The world's reception! You're not sick at all!' but here's my guilty confession, my intimation, my baby-sized cross to bear: every now and then, I want to keep the unappealing tamped down, the ugly in the bathroom mirror before breakfast. I get ashamed. And maybe I don't like it on television, maybe it will take some time. The irony's not lost on me that my first reaction is jealousy; I would love to make Lena Dunham's kind of theatre if I could – but I'm not sure I would be able to, if I honestly want it done. But hats, jacket, pants off to you, lady. You win this round. Bring in the cheap beer, the dud nights at Union Pool or Ninth Ward, bring in the incidents, the near-misses, the many days that tick by when you're not in love and you haven't finished your novel. Bring in the drunk best friend and the rainy day, the un-enviable shoes, the ringing horror of knowing my own life can look this unremarkable, unkind, so wildly, disturbingly self-involved. Funny business. Getting kicks, kicking, this is how we kids can be; I'll have to reckon with the monster, resurrect, find a new fiction somewhere.