Living all the way up here at 42.27º N, it takes a while for spring to get sprung. Yesterday was the first day I could honestly say that 1) the leaves on the trees were mature enough to create actual shade, 2) I considered painting my toenails, 3) I lusted after the neighbors’ landscaping project, and 4) I became desirous of watching movies outside.
So we went to the drive-in. The last time I went to a real-life drive-in was probably 1984, and some of us hid in the trunk — only to learn they charge by the car, not by the head. The film this time was superior to anything I saw back then: the new Joss Whedon mega-wattage The Avengers.
Let’s confess right now that I am not the ideal viewer for The Avengers. I’d seen that first Iron Man movie but none of the other franchises; I’d never even heard of Hawkeye or Black Widow or Nick Fury. When presented with a list of names that includes Captain America, The Hulk, Thor, and Iron Man, I do not wonder to myself, “Which one would beat the others in hand-to-hand battle?” (The film answers that question anyway, and it was enlightening.)
But then, a drive-in is not the ideal place to see a film. I spent a goodly amount of time ruminating on the virtues of birth control, considering the family of screeching parents and seven rambunctious kids sitting next to us, till most of them passed out from exhaustion. All of which made me miss some early scenes and doubtless some subtlety. I’m being sarcastic about the subtlety.
Did I mention the bad guy wants to take away freedom itself from humanity?
I shouldn’t be so sarcastic, because I watched the film in a certain haze of beer and picnic food and still managed to discern that Mark Ruffalo as Dr. Bruce Banner/Hulk and Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanov/Black Widow offered some welcome breaks from the testosterone fest. Granted, Johansson wasn’t given much to work with aside from that skin-tight black suit, but at least she wasn’t shafted the way Jeremy Renner/Hawkeye was (brainwashed by the bad guy in the first scene).
Long story short: tetchy crowd of super-strong dudes, each accustomed to working on his own, learns to work together to save the world.
Anywho. None of this is to say that it’s not worth your time — or even that my viewing conditions were optimal enough to have you trust my judgment. As super mega-budget dynamo flicks go, it’s got snappy dialogue, Big Fight Scenes, and lots of Robert Downey, Jr., and much of this made us laugh out loud at all the right points. I’m more than happy to grant that director Joss Whedon knows how to make a big-ass movie that you’ll totally enjoy even if you have no idea why you should care about Thor’s demi-god brother from another planet.
But I still left thinking about how easy it would be to forget absolutely everything that had transpired onscreen, and how much I would look forward to seeing a gloomy, low-budget independent film to cleanse my palate.
Carole Lombard pulls it off, again
11 May 2012
Lord knows how they persuaded her to put on this getup. That fez/turban; the tantalizing nakedness. But Carole Lombard always seemed to be game for trying things. She earned her earliest role in 1921 at age twelve, when a director saw her playing baseball in the street. Later on she revealed onscreen a neat, unexpected combination of traits — as David Thomson puts it, she had “a powerful attraction for men because she could be elegant and kooky, gorgeous and grounded; a lover and a pal all at the same time with the best cheekbones this side of Marlene Dietrich.”
Back to the horrors of finishing an article — wonder if it’s easier to write semi-naked, with a fez/turban on one’s head? But lord knows I don’t have the energy for the makeup. (Thanks to the Charlie Parker folks for the image.)
“Damsels in Distress” (2012): a mix of PG Wodehouse, Broadway, and non-dairy dessert topping
9 May 2012
Many of my friends are currently in end-of-semester grading hell, a period inevitably followed by the grade complaints, and thence by lying on the sofa in fetal position. To all of you I recommend you self-medicate with a dose of Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress. Once you hear that the “prevention” sign keeps falling off the Suicide Prevention Center manned by Violet, Rose, Heather, and Lily, don’t you understand how therapeutic this film might be for you?
Topping the list of suicide prevention tips offered by these women are tap dancing, scented soap, eating doughnuts, and dating morons. I suggest that seeing this film is equivalent to such advice — and I offer it as medicine for melancholy.
There’s a trick to watching it. You may go in expecting something more like Stillman’s earlier films, Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), and The Last Days of Disco (1998) — each of which follows its likeable, everyman protagonist into a strange subculture with its own mores and social codes. The comedy and drama of each film benefits by means of that contrast between subculture and a sense of “reality” outside it. Not so with Damsels in Distress.
The trick is that this is secretly a just a frothy Broadway musical, except with fewer overt song-and-dance numbers, about a cartoony, P. G. Wodehouse version of college life. There is no outside reality, no representative from our own world. You might be fooled at first because it’s filmed like an indie, and featuring what Broadway cannot do: offer us lovely, up-close shots of Greta Gerwig’s lovely, serious face. But once you embrace the idea that this is an oddly 2012 incarnation of a Fred Astaire musical, with all the ridiculous non sequiturs and silly conversation (albeit with less singing), you’ll see why this is so therapeutic for those of us actually wrangling with the horrors of actual college.
I don’t make the Fred Astaire reference lightly, for he starred in a 1937 musical entitled A Damsel in Distress in which he sings and dances to the same “Things Are Looking Up” Gershwin number used here by Stillman. Moreover, with P. G. Wodehouse co-writing the script and George Stevens directing — and featuring a romance with a character named Lady Alyce Marshmorton, I think you can guess exactly what kind of silly romance might ensue. Now, imagine the same artists behind a current-day film, cast instead with a minor character calling himself Freak Astaire and a 20-something crowd of mumblecore actors who excel more at expressing their physical awkwardness than their dancing chops.
And Greta Gerwig, whom one could look at all day. She was the sole shining light in that execrable Greenberg, and here she steers between her work at the Suicide (Prevention) Center and her own plunge into depression. Or, rather, “I prefer to say I’m in a tailspin.”
Those quips! Every single line of dialogue is ridiculously delectable, just like a Jeeves and Wooster tale; we walked out of the theater kicking ourselves that we couldn’t remember very many of them. “We’re also trying to make a difference in people’s lives,” Violet (Greta Gerwig) tells her new friend Lily as she explains their work at the Suicide Center. “And one way to do that, is to stop them from killing themselves.” My favorite lines always underlined the film’s distance from reality, its silly anachronism. When the characters encounter an untrustworthy man, for example, Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke) proclaims him “a playboy, operator type.”
When we walked out, I said approvingly (making clever reference to this week’s episode of Mad Men), “It’s like a bowl of nothing but Kool-Whip.”
My partner disagreed. “It’s more than just Kool-Whip,” he said. “It’s also got a little bit of fruit and some crunchy bits.”
We loved it.
Girls vs. women
8 May 2012
I’ve been thinking back to my first semester of college, when I met a confident, gorgeous, funny 3rd-year woman student in my dorm named Maria. She had long, beautiful, straight hair and a penchant for practical jokes, and she was a standout geology student (which made me, temporarily at least, also a geology major).
The fact that I refer to her as a woman is because of her. “There was this woman in my high school,” she’d begin a story — and for someone like me who’d grown up refusing to call myself a woman, this casual reference was mind-blowing. At the first reference, I actually found myself wondering if this “woman” in her high school was a middle-aged mom who’d gone back to school. Gradually, it occurred to me that embracing the notion that I was a woman rather than a girl could be liberating. “Want to go out with me and a couple of women from the frisbee league?” she’d ask, and I’d feel like I was part of a new and very, very cool club. A club of not-girls.
Is it corny to believe that adopting Maria’s term woman – and abandoning girl – was one of the most meaningful moments of my feminist education?
I got onto this line of thinking because of Lena Dunham’s show Girls, of course, but also because we have an epidemic of girls underway in film and especially TV:
- Two Broke Girls
- New Girl
- Bad Girls Club
- Girls Gone Wild
- Gilmore Girls
- Gossip Girl
- The Girls Next Door
- Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
It strikes me that my ongoing use of woman won’t have the same effect on my 18- or 19-yr-old students because I’m not one of their peers. I’m a 40-something professor, not a 20-yr-old with long, straight, glossy hair. But I wonder if I should bring up this topic explicitly.
Corny or not, I still think that teaching that simple linguistic shift could be mind-blowing for young women. Oh, if only Zooey Deschanel (TV’s New Girl) or those glamorous bitchez on Gossip Girl referred to themselves and their friends as women. That would be interesting.
“Veronica Mars” (2004-07) for a dose of noir
7 May 2012
She used to be friends with them, a long time ago, but they hardly think of her lately except to hurl a couple of those old accusations at her. It all fell apart when Veronica Mars’ best friend was murdered. Not long after, Veronica lost her place among the anointed super-rich of Neptune and she went back to being just another lower-middle-class kid – one of many who live in the shadow of (or who provide services to) those extravagantly arrogant one-percenters.
The fact that she’s had a foot on either side of that fence makes her the perfect observer of both worlds. Veronica is cynical, sure, but she’s still capable of being shocked by the depths of sordid ugliness she witnesses in her crepuscular investigations. Moving back and forth between those different worlds of social rank – and between the brilliant SoCal daylight and its nighttime neon crappiness — makes her a liminal figure, prickly and slightly nostalgic about the naïf she used to be, about the love she used to feel for her lock-jawed, troubled ex-boyfriend, Duncan Kane, and her murdered best friend (Duncan’s sister) Lilly.
What’s not to love about Veronica Mars, at least seasons 1 and 2? Its skewering of the 1%, the diminutive Kristen Bell in the lead role (and the excellent Enrico Colantoni as her gumshoe father, an actor who raises the quality of every scene), the wisecracking dialogue. But what I love best is the cross-cutting of genres between film noir with the high school teen dramedy. Veronica is a modern-day Sam Spade/ Philip Marlowe, whose hard nose is pretty hard, yet still allows for a few sensitive spots where she can still be offended, hurt, disgusted, or maybe swept off her feet. (I maintain that Rian Johnson’s Brick, which won the Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, must’ve been indebted to Veronica Mars as an influence.)
It’s those California noir night scenes I love best – the ones in which she sits in her crappy car on a stakeout, or in her father’s private detective office with the glow of a computer screen. The cinematographer never missed an opportunity to give us more of that vivid noir texture: the nighttime ripples of an apartment-building swimming pool, the shadows and grime of the Camelot Motel under the harsh glow of streetlights. Those places where she’s alone and lets the melancholy move in, like coastal fog. Where she’s not performing those publicly-acceptable versions of herself. Where she’s allowed to think.
It’s such a good emotional escape — to hunt down one or two of those episodes at TheWB.com (despite all the ads; sorry ’bout that) and let yourself dive in. It’s a kind of noir you don’t get to see enough of, and which hits a wide range of pleasure centers. Why don’t any other teen shows opt for noir rather than melodrama?
About a week before Ocean’s Eleven (2001) came out, I saw the original with Frank Sinatra et als (1960). It was terrible. All the more reason to love the Steven Soderbergh version. He took the bare bones of the original but did some pretty serious rewriting and major character development to give us style, humor, better actors, and a better ending.
Just think what you could do with a film like King Hu’s A Touch of Zen, which is already pretty good. It’s just too long and has some other issues as I’ll detail below. As I occasionally like to offer up my own brilliant plot ideas for an eager reading audience, here’s my advice to Hollywood: tweak this story and you’ve got box office gold!
The original story centers on Ku (Shih Jun), a mild-mannered, unambitious scholar in a small village who refuses to follow his mother’s advice and apply for a better-paid job in the magistrate’s office. One day he encounters two strangers: first, he’s commissioned to paint a portrait of a sinister-looking man named Ouyang (Tien Peng); and second, that night he hears strange noises coming from the abandoned and reputedly haunted house across the way. When he investigates, he’s spooked by a strange and ghostly figure who later proves to be Miss Yang (Hsu Feng, above), a laconic, unsmiling, beautiful woman on the run from a corrupt official who wants to execute her and has hired Ouyang to do it. Ku teams up with her to help (as much as a clumsy scholar can), and the remainder of the film traces their attempts to escape. It culminates with a terrific battle scene in a bamboo forest with some kickass Buddhist monks, which shows this film’s influences on later wuxia greats like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and House of Flying Daggers (2004).
The dvd copy I got, a simple VHS-to-DVD transfer, shows the film’s abundant wear & tear — all those night scenes are almost too muddy to see, and you often see scratches or grit on the film itself. At just over 3 hours it’s long and seems to end 3 different times. Still, this tale has great characters, terrific fight scenes (including one in a bamboo forest that has huge potential for re-imagining, and not just in a Crouching Tiger imitation way), and — best of all — a ghost-story subtheme.
Nor does it need to be set during the typical wuxia never-never land of an unspecified past of swordsmen and secretive martial arts sects. In fact, I can imagine a great modern version taking place amongst Chinese Americans of a 1940s San Francisco or perhaps one of its agricultural regions nearby, like Watsonville or Gilroy, during the same era that saw the internment of Japanese Americans. Can’t you just imagine the final fight scene taking place in a redwood forest or a eucalyptus grove, or perhaps on the oceanside cliffs south of Monterey? (Hollywood: call me and we’ll talk. My screenwriting and/or consulting rates are shockingly affordable.)
No matter the setting, the first order of business is to switch up the protagonist. In the original, our hero(?) is Ku, the bumbling scholar — but although we need to start with him, once we meet Miss Yang she needs to supplant him as protagonist. (I mean, even us bumbling scholars don’t really like to see ourselves as protagonists.) Ku pales in comparison. He reminds me of that creepy dude in my college dorm, the one who always seemed to leer at you from his doorway. Miss Yang could also use more of a back story, as well as clearer motivations to explain, for one, why in the world she has sex with Ku, with his creepy toothiness and weird makeup. (The Feminéma rewrite might have to find a more Chow Yun Fat-style sexual partner for Yang. Mmmmm.)
Second: don’t drop the creepy haunted-house subtheme midway through the film. The film’s first half takes place on the best set ever: a lonely, run-down village, at the center of which is a hauntingly memorable abandoned home and compound that used to belong to a military general. What a set it makes. The white plumes of the tall, ghostlike pampas grass constantly block your view of what’s going on. Spiderwebs everywhere — fabulous! It provides the setting for one of the film’s best big fight scenes, during which our heroes scare the bad guys by making them think real ghosts are attacking them on all sides. Afterward, however, we leave the haunted house and don’t return.
I say you can bring it back in with the Super-Dooper mystical Buddhist monks, who make a couple of handy appearances in the film’s second half. No matter how this story gets rewritten, the monks stay in.
Best of all, just imagine the possibilities if our sword-carrying heroine and her monk friends are not just battling corruption (Californians trying to grab Chinese-American land and business as well as those belonging to Japanese Americans, possibly?) but also World War II, nativism, and 1940s sexism. It could be a cross between blaxploitation and wuxia — with just enough historical and place-specific context to make it interesting.
Hollywood, remember how much money Crouching Tiger made? It ranked as the 19th most profitable film worldwide of 2000 and raked 44 film prizes from 14 different awards-granting institutions.
Now, finally: a title. A Touch of Zen might sound a bit too tame for the action I foresee.
- Zen and the Art of Surviving a War?
- Zenifornia?
- Mod Zen Explosion?
If you had grown up in a rural town in the 1980s like I did, you’d have found teen sex comedies to be a rich fantasy world. Molly Ringwald, John Cusack, Winona Ryder … their characters were all cuter, funnier, and more apt to experience wacky hijinks in those suburban locales than anything us rural kids could imagine. It helped us fantasize that high school life could be a lot more exciting than it was. The only thing we had in common was that those movie characters all seemed to find their high schools boring, too. It was reassuring
This background gave me a special appreciation for Jannicke Systad Jacobsen’s characters in her début narrative feature Turn Me On, Dammit! (Få meg på, for faen; she has previously made documentaries). At least in my town one or two of us had cars, so we could drive around. 15-yr-old Alma (Helene Bergsholm, looking a bit wicked in the photo above) and her friends, in contrast, are limited to the bus. Her mother works at the turnip factory. Otherwise, the boredom, limited boyfriend material, and stultified circles of girls … yup.
Crucial detail: Alma is horny. Really horny.
Most teen sex comedies mess around with the sex/love spectrum. Alma alone covers all those octaves, with special skill for sheer hormones. She dials the phone sex service Wild Wet Dreams on such a regular basis, racking up such a phone bill, that her favorite telephone operator there calls her with a monthly free bonus call. She’s willing to fantasize about virtually anyone, including one of her friend’s fathers. But mostly she fantasizes about her neighbor Artur (Matias Myren), daydreams more tender and romantic than her usual fare.
So imagine Alma’s delight when they attend one of those dismal dances at the youth center and, in a private moment, Artur takes his woody out of his pants and pokes her leg with it. “Artur poked me with his dick,” she announces excitedly to her friends Saralou and Ingrid when they’re back inside. Artur denies it, and soon the entire school shuns her as Pikke-Alma (Dick-Alma).
What all of this amounts to is a very different kind of teen sex comedy. Rather than wacky and exaggerated like the 1980s genre I know so well, it’s quiet and subdued. The subject that motivates the film is the simple fact of Alma’s horniness, but that fact never amounts to a real problem (except that it places a wall between her and her mother). If you get right down to it, I think the film’s real problem is the sense that rural kids feel confined and restricted by their isolated locale.
The film quietly contrasts Alma’s horniness with her poker-faced friend Saralou, who fears getting trapped in their awful tiny town by a baby or a husband. Instead (somewhat delightfully) Saralou wants to go to Texas to fight the death penalty . There’s also the usual glimpse of a world beyond: a friend’s older sister, Maria, who’s so happy at college in Oslo that she cuts short all her visits home.
Perhaps you can intuit from this that the stakes are low in Turn Me On, Dammit! but that doesn’t mean you won’t find it disarming and sweet. Even after all those years I still find teenagers mooning over one another to be a worthy object of my gaze for 90 minutes — and Systad Jacobsen’s characters are more sweet and believable than most. Especially when, on the bus home, they pass the road sign announcing that they’re entering their little nowhere town — at which point each of the teenagers flips it off. No wonder Alma goes home and dials up Wild Wet Dreams; isn’t masturbating, after all, the very best possible solution to rural boredom?
In January of 2011 I picked up Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and could not put it down except to post an ecstatic comment about how good it was. It quickly became the book I most frequently handed out as gifts to my friends. Bechdel, the cartoonist best known for her strip “Dykes to Watch Out For,” as well as for her minimum-standard feminist criteria for seeing a film, subsequently termed The Bechdel Test, is an amazing memoirist/ graphic novelist.
Fun Home is a memoir of Bechdel’s young life told in graphic novel format – especially trying to parse out her difficult, mercurial father whose gayness stayed secretive and whose death remains mysterious.
So when I heard last fall that she planned a similar book to plumb her relationship with her mother … well, let’s just say I placed an order for the book immediately. It’s no wonder I raced to finish yesterday’s piece on maternal ambivalence and We Need to Talk About Kevin, for the subjects are twinned. It’s like the most perverse Mother’s Day idea ever. I caught a glimpse of one panel from the book, a panel that hints at the relationship between the author and her mother:
So yeah, ‘scuze me while I throw myself into Bechdel’s pages. I’m turning off the phone, curling up with the blanket and a cup of tea, and letting these images and wry, terse text carry me on a psychological rollercoaster ride – to kiss the sky, and experience my stomach drop out from under me.
We’ve all seen it before: the 2-yr-old is standing in the middle of the room screaming his head off. His face is red, his hands balled into comical little fists. His mother and I stare at him with a kind of exhausted paralysis. She looks at me and says flatly (and funnily), “Oh, the maternal ambivalence.” This takes place years before either of us was aware of We Need to Talk About Kevin, either book or film. Now I wish I’d seen the film with her — I can’t imagine how interesting our post-viewing debriefing could have been, how much more I could have learned from that conversation.
“Maternal ambivalence” isn’t just the right statement in a situation like when your kid has one of those histrionic meltdowns; it’s the only one to mitigate the maternal sense of failure and the simultaneous balking at calling it “failure.” If your kid behaves horribly, impossibly, inconsolably, how do you as his mother evade the sense that you ought to apologize for his awfulness, as if it’s your fault? How do you know it’s not your fault — in fact, isn’t it sort of your fault? How do you stop feeling implicated in the mini-psychodramas of a 2-yr-old – who, frankly, is probably going to act out no matter what you do? How do you help but feel that when they’re in this state, a 2-yr-old is often a kind of little animal with no reason and certainly no manners, and therefore out of your control?
I’m hardly the first to notice that ours is a particularly hysterical culture when it comes to blaming mothers, mothers blaming themselves. I’d go so far as to say that ambivalence is a healthy response to the schizophrenic messages about what motherhood is supposed to be. With that in mind, however, let me say: We Need to Talk About Kevin is not for the faint of heart.
What you realize while watching Lynne Ramsay’s film is that we never seen representations of mothers who feel riddled by ambivalence. Dads? Sure. As bracing as Louis C. K.’s humor about being a bad parent can be, it’s popular, socially acceptable, hilarious. Mothers don’t get the same leeway. Moms are supposed to be happy, well-adjusted, delighted with their children. Pregnancy is supposed to make women glow. Motherhood, we hear all the time, is supposed to draw out women’s “natural” self-sacrificing tendencies. Good mothers, we learn, raise good children.
But then there are those dark exceptions. What about that mother who drowned all her children? Whose fault is it if your kid is a bully or a mean girl? Worst of all: when a kid kills fellow students in a school shooting rampage, who do you blame? These are some of the dark questions We Need to Talk About Kevin explores.
Eva (Tilda Swinton) wasn’t always so ambivalent. As a travel writer, she can remember some pretty transformative, ecstatic experiences; she’s not given to depression. There was that one time when she crowd surfed during that tomato festival, when she and everyone else was drenched in smashed tomatoes. You have to look carefully at first to see whether she’s hysterical or elated.
She experienced sex that night with the same giddy elation. Franklin (John C. Reilly) asked if she was sure she wanted to go without the condom — and she said yes, she was sure. For a moment there, she wants to be pregnant and knows perfectly well that their drunken, happy sex might get her there.
The actual experience of pregnancy is something else again. All those other blissful and very pregnant women stretch and happily rub their enormous bellies in the locker room of the Y after that prenatal yoga class, while Eva looks glum. She walks out of the gym amidst a stream of giddy six-yr-old ballet students and is unmoved by their pink tutued effervescence.
It doesn’t change after the birth. She doesn’t want to be this way — she just is. Even worse, he’s a colicky baby, screaming constantly. It’s even worse when she realizes that the baby quiets down the minute Franklin gets home, confirming his belief that Eva has over-reacted to the baby’s fussiness. All of this makes her feel guiltier. She’s a bad mother for not liking that baby more … but his screaming makes it all the harder. Even a jackhammer is preferable to that scream.
Look at Franklin with his son. He’s delighted. He functions as the quintessential, bright-sided American optimist. Everything’s great! And the baby responds in kind: Franklin’s presence is a balm to little Kevin. Every time his father appears, Kevin transforms into a different child.
What’s wrong with her? Is she responsible for his awful aggression? Yet she can’t help but think there’s something wrong with this child — really wrong. And when she says “something wrong,” she invokes that little kernel of anxiety that keeps you wide awake, heart pounding, at 3am with worry about what that something might be. She takes the toddler to the doctor, who gives him an unequivocal thumbs up. Whew — right?
The film ultimately makes a surprising move. Seen through Eva’s eyes, we have no doubt that Kevin is a sociopath — a brilliant, manipulative, unfeeling monster. But the film doesn’t let Eva off the hook (just as she never lets herself off). Nor is this a self-flagellating move. The film does something amazing, disturbing, revelatory: it shows that although she may not be responsible for Kevin’s psychosis, the crazy intimate antagonistic fucked-upness of their mother-son relationship is, in fact, at the very center of Kevin’s choices about acting out. Insofar as he wants, above all else, to keep her engaged with him — to provoke her out of her maternal ambivalence and malaise — she is, in fact, partly responsible, and she will never get over it.
In addition to offering us this creepy, awful realization, however, Lynne Ramsay’s film is a sustained critique of the crazy cultural contradictions we hurl at mothers all the time. Those reality shows filled with problematic children and terrible parenting — parents who cede authority to a stranger who shames them on network TV. State laws that not only permit potential employers to ask women whether they’re mothers, but which view motherhood as a “problem” for a woman doing the job (mothers are disproportionately discriminated against in hiring and promotions, and pay a “mommy penalty” in lower wages for the rest of their careers). Draconian new laws designed to criminalize “bad” mothers even when the science of such determinations is sketchy at best — these are just tips of the iceberg of schizophrenic ways that American mothers are simultaneously put on pedestals and punished. Google “mommy wars” and you’ll find infinitely more chaos.
Early on in the film Eva walks out of a job interview, feeling uncharacteristically good. As she approaches a couple of very well-heeled middle-aged women she knows, she begins to smile to greet them. One of them reaches up and smacks Eva, hard, across the face.
A man rushes up behind the stunned Eva to help, to call the cops, to do something. “No, no, no … it was my fault,” she assures him. At first this seems like the craziest, most masochistic statement you can imagine.
The thing is: she really believes it. And our culture put her there. This utterly memorable, haunting, scathing film will not let you believe those questions about nature vs. nurture, innocence vs. guilt, or good mothers vs. demon mothers are simple ones. You’ll leave this film feeling like you’ve been smacked, too.
And yet there’s something about the ending that feels … do I dare say it feels like a change in the air? Not revelation, not transformation, but something new. Please watch We Need to Talk About Kevin and tell me what you think. I for one can’t stop thinking about it.
Hannah (Lena Dunham) is lying in her hospital gown, rattling on nervously to the gynecologist about why she’s getting screened for sexually transmitted infections. She describes her lifelong fear of dying of AIDS. The doctor asks if she knows someone who died of it. “Umm, it’s more of like a Forrest Gump based fear,” she explains. “That’s what Robin Wright Penn’s character died of. So….”
Even though she always uses a condom with her partners, she says, she’s worried about getting infected by the “stuff that gets up around the sides of condoms.” (Having googled that query, she’s pretty convinced it’s something to worry about.) The gynecologist looks at her with exactly the kind of disbelieving annoyance that was probably on my face during this scene.
“You could not pay me enough to be 24 again,” the gynecologist says.
“Well, they’re not paying me at all,” Hannah replies.
I can’t imagine a better snippet of dialogue to catch the way these Girls of Dunham’s articulate exactly the kind of emotional and intellectual chaos I see in my students of the same relative intelligence and class status. They’ve got a whipsmart quick-wittedness that serves as the lingua franca of young women — self-identifying as smart, self-deprecating, funny, astute, sometimes brutally honest. Traveling in packs with the volume jacked up, these girls’ verbal patter can reach a manic level. But they’re neither self-aware nor knowledgeable enough to know how idiotic they sound to everyone who lives outside their tribe. The patter covers up a lot of the neurotic uncertainty.
You sort of want to grab them by the shoulders, give them a good shake, and say, calm down, shut up, and stop it with your attention-deficit chatter for a sec. You also kind of love them for their non-filtered logorrhea. 
Which brings me to the first relevant point about this show: as its creator/ director, Lena Dunham offers us a theory about why these are “girls,” not “women” — and it has to do with what they call themselves, and what they will allow themselves to be. Whereas Sex and the City fantasized a world we could all aspire to, with perfect financial comfort, work enjoyment, sexual confidence, spectacular clothing, and available men, these Girls are finding none of the above. They live in Brooklyn, not Manhattan. They have bodies and clothes I recognize as real. They screw up their job interviews.
The men are so undesirable as to be chilling. Hannah’s perpetually disappointing fuck-buddy Adam (Adam Driver), an “actor,” hangs out in his apartment with no shirt on — clearly imagining that he’s far more all-that than he is. Hannah’s awful sex scenes with him will make you grip the arms on your chair.
It’s not just the spectacularly bad sex that makes you cringe; it’s also the crazy sense of entitlement undercut with glimpses of self-doubt managed, one guesses, by anti-anxiety medications. How else to explain Hannah’s situation at the table with her parents as they announce they’re cutting her off financially? When she protests that she’s not done writing her memoir (!) she explains, “I think I may be the voice of my generation.” But then she backs up. “Or at least a voice. Of a generation.”
You see? This is great stuff, and it’s delivered with that same combination of quick-witted self-deprecation I recognize from those students of mine. And yet: she’s writing her memoir? Also believable, also cringe-making.
So yeah, you won’t identify with these characters. My students won’t show up in the fall telling me “I am sooo like Shoshanna!” the way they did ten years ago with Miranda, Carrie, Samantha and Charlotte. (There’s even a nice scene in the first episode in which Shoshanna burbles about which character she identifies with.) These girls haven’t figured out what they want, nor how to get it. They’re full of borrowed, would-be sage advice picked up here and there — and they’re quick to criticize each other — but they’re floundering. It’s kind of amazing.
Perhaps I should pause here to note that, between gazing on these Girls with disbelieving annoyance and laughing my butt off, I can’t believe no one has done this before. This writing is crisp, subtle, tight. The characters interrupt each other with non sequiturs so realistic and ridiculous that I want to watch all the episodes again to make sure I caught all the best jokes. Like when three of them sit in the clinic’s waiting room while Hannah gets ready for her STI examination:
Marnie, speaking to Shoshanna about Hannah: She’s obsessed with getting AIDS. She’s thought she was going to get it since she was like ten years old. That’s what this is about. [rolls eyes.]
Hannah: I don’t have an obsessive fear of AIDS. I have obsessive fear of HIV that turns into AIDS. I’m not a fool.
Marnie: Well, you don’t have HIV. You just don’t. It’s not that easy to contract.
Shoshanna: It’s really not that hard to contract either, though. I mean, haven’t you seen Rent?
Marnie, rolling eyes: Please. I’ve seen it like twelve times. It’s basically why I moved to New York.
You see? I swear I heard those same girls at the coffee shop this morning.
Compared to Dunham’s Tiny Furniture (2010, made when she was only 23, gulp), Girls is tight — and fearless. I quite liked that film, but this series has an underlying perception and forthrightness about how these girls live that shows Dunham’s growing talent as a writer. Parts of it even feel like a shot across the bow by this gifted writer and young woman, especially given the second episode’s subject matter, “Vagina Panic” — which circles around Jessa’s scheduled abortion as well as Hannah’s STI anxieties.
Between the four of them, they articulate virtually every perspective on abortion — everything from “it’s devastating” to “whatever” — because that’s what they do; they blather. There’s no conceptual consistency to their opinions; they haven’t really thought them through. But neither does any one of them question the utter necessity of getting that abortion. “What’s she going to do? Have a baby and take it to her babysitting job? That’s not realistic,” Hannah insists in one of those perfect moments of clarity. Let’s face it: the idea of any one of these girls taking on motherhood is appalling.
Fuck yeah, Lena Dunham. We’ve all been complaining for years about the Judd Apatow-ization of film — the perpetual focus on men’s neurotic feelings and ambivalences, while stereotyping the women in their lives — so listen, friends, the time has come to watch one of those actual women skewer her own tribe. It’s so funny, so awful that you (like me) might find yourself watching the episode all over again to catch on to the jokes.
You could not pay me enough to be 24 again. Unless I could be Lena Dunham, using this as material toward a spectacular future.
