Did you watch episode 2 of season 4 of Girls last night? If not, you need to catch up. Here’s why.
We have been been watching Lena Dunham’s Girls for a few years now. And if you are familiar with the show and its creator, you are also familiar with all of the criticism it has received since it first aired. The show follows four women around their post-College lives in New York City, and has been criticised for its lack of diversity and lack of strong male characters, voices and perspectives.
Dunham has responded to these attacks on a few occasions, saying she writes the show in a semi-autobiographical manner and to depict anything other than a group of young, privileged white women in New York would be dishonest.
She says that adding diversity for diversity’s sake would appear hollow and would be more disingenuous than writing about her own insular world.
So while we have heard Dunham herself respond to these criticisms, in episode two of season four the show itself responds to them. Dunham writes her character, Hannah Horvath, into a writing workshop as part of an MFA in Iowa. During the workshop, Dunham’s fictional incarnation has exactly the same criticisms hurled at her as Dunham has weathered in real life. Dunham’s fictional response is amazing.
The scene involves Hannah reading an excerpt from a short story she has written about domestic violence. Hannah gives the audience a trigger warning before she begins, and reads the story with a pride that implies she understands the weight of the issue she is dealing with and hopes her writing may help to lift that weight for some. But the response she gets is less than friendly.
The class is asked to describe what the story is about.
“It’s about a really privileged girl deciding that she’s gonna let someone abuse her,” a classmate says.
“How are we supposed to critique a work, which is very clearly based directly from the author’s personal experience? She is very much this character,” another says.
One classmate cites the single conversation she has had with Hannah as evidence that the main character is autobiographical: “I had the chance to speak with Hannah yesterday, and she is very much this character,” she says. (Is this a dig at critics who say Dunham’s show is all about herself but don’t actually know her? If so, it’s sassy.)
Another classmate compares her story to 50 Shades of Grey, again leveling a familiar criticism about female self-indulgence and inability to create serious work.
For the first time in the show’s history. Dunham writes a self-defense against these criticisms into the show itself. Her defense is voiced by another classmate:
“If it’s about her, so what? Who f-cking cares? This is her voice. This is who she is. We can’t squash her voice andwhat she’s trying to say,” he says.
And with that, Dunham reclaims control of her own voice and her own perspective, no matter how narrow.
And then, in the most important moment thus far, Dunham hits back specifically at criticisms about her lack of strong male characters. A classmate asks her why she excludes the male voice, and she replies:
“One word: history.”
It is as simple as that. Dunham is among one of the only people in Hollywood to get famous by excluding male perspectives and championing females ones, and I say more power to her.