They're both hopeless romantics who wear their hearts on their sleeves. Most of the chatter around Dunham's show, "Girls," focused on the sex and forthrightness of 20-something girls, but she really seems to have a soft spot for love. She's an unabashed Nora Ephron fan, but younger and tailored to the early 21st century, where everyone lives in Brooklyn's up-and-coming outposts and your (boy)friend's mother comments on your Facebook photos. In the bits of "Girls" that I've seen, Dunham seems to be most concerned about romance, the quirks of longstanding friendship, and the difficulty of being honest, not merely sex, fashion or pop culture. Her recent essay in the New Yorker about her college boyfriend was appealingly sweet in a way that I wasn't expecting: "All my explanations for this behavior are purely conjecture at this point, because, four years later, it's so hard for me to tap into the well of desperate emotion the relationship unleashed in me. I'd spent my entire life getting my kicks from various esoteric hobbies (fashion illustration! Shrinky Dinks!) and quality time with my nuclear family, but here he was. My only pleasure. I told him I hoped we would die at the same time in the mouth of a lion."
I've only seen one full episode of "Girls," which I thought was pretty lame -- the one where all the characters go to a warehouse party in Brooklyn. The party almost seemed like the depiction of one in Brooklyn that would have been on a CBS sitcom. There's a rave! An indie-rock band plays! Someone does crack! There's a fight between punk-rockers and a dad! All these signifiers of young urban cool are here, in one place, at the same time! I'm pretty lame too, but I'm pretty sure parties don't unfold like this Nonetheless, I agree with Dunham when she jokes in the show that she might be "a voice for a generation" (after her attempt at describing herself as "the voice for her generation" falls flat). She portrays better than anyone else what it means to be 20-something post-Lehman Brothers, capturing an era of deep uncertainty that's only magnified by living through the most amorphous, unclear part of your life.
Above is the trailer for "Girls."
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