Lena Dunham

[domino harvey]

What? She's just extending the lame complaint regarding a lack of racial diversity to its logical extreme

[matrixschmatrix]

Well, as the article goes on to point out, the lack of diversity in Girls isn't an inherent fixture of Dunham's world, and the idea that there are white people tv shows and movies about white people problems and black people shows and movies about black people problems is itself a problematic one- it justifies ghettoizing and systematically eliding non-white people from mainstream releases, it implies that the world of Precious is the natural home for black people of whatever place in society, and conflates 'upper class' with 'white'.

When you say it's a show about well-to-do white girls, that implies that there's something inherent about the connection there, which isn't accurate. It's not ridiculous to ask that all the other people who are actually there be represented, and a flip response comparing that situation (which is the overwhelming norm) to one in which white people aren't heavily features (which is a prodigious rarity) seems absolutely worth questioning to me.

edit: as usual, Ta-Nahisi Coates puts it better than I do

[domino harvey]

Which is the same things people bemoaned about Seinfeld and Friends-- works of fiction are not beholden to multiculturalism, period, and your humorless extreme reading of Precious joke is exactly the sort of Tumblr Outrage that helps no one

[knives]

Seinfeld actually featured a passable if not great show of multicultralism though. It just was not in the main cast (you're not going to see me defending Friends). While I don't entirely agree with him it seems that Matrix's point that white people show= rich characters (or at least upper middle class), but black characters= poor is a major problem in our society's POV.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

Doris Wishman and Lena Dunham.

[Alan Smithee]

I haven't seen Tiny Furniture but I watched Girls to figure out in 30 minutes why people hate Dunham so much. I will say I get the hate a little bit. It really doesn't bother me all that much it's just uninteresting. It's by a young girl about young girls for young girls. As far as the racism thing I will say that I live in Dunhams world (williamsburg Brooklyn) I hang out in the same kind of social circles, go see bands and art openings often, we probably even have mutual friends. Minorities do exist in these circles but there still arent that many. I think it's reasonable to believe the characters don't have many minority friends but you can rest assured they'll be there in future episodes. I'm surprised in all this talk not to hear much about the absurd magic Negro at the end of the episode. That was offensive mostly to my intelligence as a viewer.

[onedimension]

Yeah, the problem with the 'Precious joke' is that (although I suspect it may be sociologically complicated in a way that doesn't lead to the necessary indictment of white people for their racism) Wasserface Arfin ISN'T in the world of 'Precious', because she would never go there. But plenty of black, Asian, Indian, etc. etc. people are in the world of 'Girls' - it's just that no one writing for the show notices them.

Anyway, it's more just garden variety narcissism and the consequence of people self-sorting into the circles they like. Didn't Pauline Kael say she didn't understand how Nixon got elected, because "No one I know voted for him"?

But beyond race or skin color or class or gender (and why don't 20-something men complain about their representation on the show?), it's about diversity of experience- and no one is required to use every paint on the palette, but when the show gets hyped and praised to the skies, people are going to have raised expectations. The joke from the first episode about Sex and the City was unwittingly perceptive, because to an extent shows like that, and 'Girls', are just showing four different versions of the same person.

Show, like, an Iraq war vet, an obese girl who can't get dates at all, a roommate running a webcam site out of her bedroom, idk- that all happens, too, but people prefer to have those 'types' get their own niche- don't mix up our safely distinct TV programs with the overlapping messiness of Reality!

[MichaelB]

I haven't seen Tiny Furniture but I watched Girls to figure out in 30 minutes why people hate Dunham so much. I will say I get the hate a little bit. It really doesn't bother me all that much it's just uninteresting. It's by a young girl about young girls for young girls.

Exactly. I'm not the target audience by any stretch of the imagination, and it wouldn't even register with me if it hadn't been for this fascinatingly obsessive discussion.

Anyway, it's more just garden variety narcissism and the consequence of people self-sorting into the circles they like. Didn't Pauline Kael say she didn't understand how Nixon got elected, because "No one I know voted for him"?

I come across this attitude all the time, and just as much on the right as on the left. If you look at the comments on the Daily Telegraph and Spectator websites, you'll see people expressing utter bafflement that Britain isn't executing shoplifters, banning immigration or getting out of the European Union, because everyone they know has that opinion. This last point may well be true, of course.

[matrixschmatrix]

I just want to point out that the line about Nixon, which is always attributed to Kael, is totally apocryphal. It's a useful line because it summarizes a way of thinking, but she never said it.

[zeroman987]

Exactly. I'm not the target audience by any stretch of the imagination, and it wouldn't even register with me if it hadn't been for this fascinatingly obsessive discussion.

I feel the same way as well. I haven't seen Tiny Furniture but I watched the first episode of "Girls". I still haven't figured out what made it so "good". Quite frankly it bored me and I couldn't find any character to like (except her boss or the guy that told her to get a job at McDonalds). I want to believe that the whole thing is an indictment of upper middle class white people, but I keep getting the feeling that this is an earnest piece of work and she really believes that she has a difficult life; that she really does think she is too good to work a McJob because she is so smart.

However, even if it were an earnest piece of work, I could enjoy it if the characters were not so poorly written. There are no clear motivations for their actions. The main character shows no passion for her "work" and none of the ancillary characters have anything driving them or the story forward except their desire to not work a real job. (I guess that is a clear motivation?). They are all completely interchangeable and completely uninteresting to watch. Maybe it is because I am a young professional that lives in a large midwestern city but this show is almost offensive to me. Then again Chicago has our own problem with rich bums so I guess I shouldn't feel so superior to those east coasters.

[Alyosha]

I guess these 18 pages (and counting) would be an easy target for feminist analysis.

[starmanof51]

I guess these 18 pages (and counting) would be an easy target for feminist analysis.

Copy, paste, publish. Add an abstract for flava, or maybe just your smilie

[duck duck]

Really, your calling out well off young girls for not having enough diversity in a NY film and Woody Allen has made how many films about elite New Yorkers with how many black people?

[MichaelB]

Really, your calling out well off young girls for not having enough diversity in a NY film and Woody Allen has made how many films about elite New Yorkers with how many black people?

Richard Curtis pulled off a similar vanishing trick in Notting Hill - named after the location of one of Britain's more notorious race riots.

Not that you'd know it from the film.

[tojoed]

Richard Curtis pulled off a similar vanishing trick in Notting Hill - named after the location of one of Britain's more notorious race riots.

Not that you'd know it from the film.

That's because the film was named after an area of London where Richard Curtis types live.
Nothing to do with the Notting Hill of the fifties.

[Michael Kerpan]

Doesn't present day Notting Hill still have a sizeable immigrant/minority presence (including Caribbeans)?

[onedimension]

Woody Allen would deserve the same criticism, if he were being praised to the skies. If there's any bias in my criticism, it's not so much because Dunham's a woman as it is that she's roughly my peer, age-wise.

[zeroman987]

Also, Woody Allen can actually be funny and direct an interesting movie.

[MichaelB]

Richard Curtis pulled off a similar vanishing trick in Notting Hill - named after the location of one of Britain's more notorious race riots.

Not that you'd know it from the film.

That's because the film was named after an area of London where Richard Curtis types live.
Nothing to do with the Notting Hill of the fifties.

It's exactly the same place! Indeed, the Notting Hill Carnival remains the highest-profile multicultural festival in the London calendar to this day - hence the surprise when the one major feature film with 'Notting Hill' in the title turned out to be an entirely whites-only affair.

If Curtis had named the film 'Hampstead', a far more monoracial part of London that's also home to a lot of Richard Curtis types, no-one would have batted an eyelid.

[Duncan Hopper]

Richard Curtis pulled off a similar vanishing trick in Notting Hill - named after the location of one of Britain's more notorious race riots.

Not that you'd know it from the film.

That's because the film was named after an area of London where Richard Curtis types live.
Nothing to do with the Notting Hill of the fifties.

I live near Notting Hill and can assure you that the area is indeed racially diverse, with an especially large Afro-Caribbean community.
Notting Hill is next to areas like the Westway and Shepherd's Bush, some of the most racially diverse areas in the whole of the UK.

[tojoed]

I know Notting Hill and I'm perfectly aware of its diversity. My point was that Curtis's film was a
romantic comedy about a white bookseller who meets a white movie star, and there was no reason
for him to deal with the race riots of the 1950s or any other aspect of the area. It was just the place where he lived.
If I made a film with the title of the street where I grew up, my "Brick Lane" wouldn't be anything like Monica Ali's.

[MichaelB]

I know Notting Hill and I'm perfectly aware of its diversity. My point was that Curtis's film was a
romantic comedy about a white bookseller who meets a white movie star, and there was no reason
for him to deal with the race riots of the 1950s or any other aspect of the area. It was just the place where he lived.

I never said that he should have dealt explicitly with the 1950s race riots - I merely used that as an example of why people understandably raised eyebrows, given that prior to 1999 a word-association game involving the name 'Notting Hill' would almost certainly have led to the words 'Carnival' or 'riots'.

And the film is only partly about a white bookseller who meets a white movie star - it's also explicitly pitched as a love letter to Notting Hill itself.

If I made a film with the title of the street where I grew up, my "Brick Lane" wouldn't be anything like Monica Ali's.

But presumably it wouldn't be glaringly and unconvincingly all-white? Or would it? (I imagine that's impossible with Brick Lane, but I'd have said it was pretty difficult with Notting Hill!)

[hearthesilence]

A bit late to this thread, but this kind of thing has been bothering me in the past year or two, even before the brouhaha over Girls and coinciding with the time I moved here to Brooklyn/New York after spending much of the previous years around Illinois and then downtown and the South side of Chicago.

Los Angeles Plays Itself just ran at the Whitney - I saw the last 25 minutes there for the first time, and I'm glad the timing was so perfect, because it really nailed everything that's been bothering me about cultural isolation/tunnel vision in the way filmmakers present (or worse 'romanticize') urban living:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UMFdvgq ... ure=relmfu#" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

then

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wszUJVlw ... el&list=UL" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[tojoed]

If I made a film with the title of the street where I grew up, my "Brick Lane" wouldn't be anything like Monica Ali's.

But presumably it wouldn't be glaringly and unconvincingly all-white? Or would it? (I imagine that's impossible with Brick Lane, but I'd have said it was pretty difficult with Notting Hill!)

It would be mostly white, not all, 1950s Brick Lane was quite different from today.
Anyhow, we are doing a good job of not talking about Tiny Furniture, so back to the people who
are on topic, if there are any.

[tavernier]

Lena Dunham is on Colbert tonight, if anyone cares