Emily: Hey Rebecca! I don’t know if you’ve been following the pre-coverage for “Girls,” but there is so much out there—including an admiring profile that I wrote about Lena and the making of the show—that viewers were already well into the backlash, and even the backlash-to-the-backlash, before tonight’s episode even aired.
Rebecca: So what’s being said?
Emily: Aside from numerous Q. & A.s with Dunham and her collaborators, there have been a series of worried columns emphasizing the grimness of the sex: Frank Bruni wrote one, Lorrie Moore had some of these concerns in her New Yorker writeup, and Liel Leibovitz wrote a particularly apocalyptic take for Tablet. Then, in Slate, Katie Roiphe complained that the sex should be better, more like the sex she has.
Rebecca: So it’s the “Girls in Peril” kind of thing?
Emily: Also, “Oh, the pornographication of youth.” To me, the problem with this perspective is that it strangely skips right over the fact that “Girls” is a raw, dirty comedy, not a position piece or an op-ed. An autobiographical one as well, based on a very specific social set. You told me that you cried at the scene with the tights, right?
Rebecca: With laughter!
Emily: Damn. I was hoping for some contrarian swashbuckling.
Rebecca: Instead, we’ll be all sisterhoody. The tights scene, like so many other scenes, was so achingly true and yet, I think, formerly unrepresented.
Emily: You visited the set early on and wrote a Profile of Lena. Did anything surprise you about the actual show?
Rebecca: If anything surprised me, it was the girly cousin in pink, the one who is obviously satirized in a way the others aren’t.
Emily: Shoshanna.
Rebecca: Shoshanna, of course. There was a broadness to her characterization that surprised me.
Emily: That’s definitely true—although that fades a bit in later episodes. Lena intended Shoshanna as a minor character, but she ends up more prominent, in part because of Zosia Mamet’s performance. That scene does seem intended to exorcise “Sex and the City” comparisons.
Rebecca: Yes, that was a clever way of getting that question dealt with. I found Shoshanna delightful; I just felt her to be less vividly true than the others. I mean, Hannah is so complex a character.
Emily: I agree. Fully formed from the start.
Rebecca: She’s also the descendant of every other character Lena has incarnated.
Emily: Aura, Oona, Hannah.
Rebecca: I am not sure I can go any further without just expressing my admiration for Lena.
Emily: Go for it. We’re pre-certified as Team Lena anyway.
Rebecca: O.K. I was incredibly impressed with “Tiny Furniture,” her control of the material. And she’s done it again. There are obvious comparisons to be made to people like Woody Allen and Louis C.K. and Larry David. But I can’t think of anyone who did it so sure-handedly at such an early age. I mean, she’s already an old hand at it.
There’s just a remarkable kind of control and maturity (in the service of showing immaturity and lack of control).
Emily: I agree. When I saw the pilot, last summer, my heart sped up. My skin actually prickled. I felt so excited to be exposed to this confident new voice, and then also how Dunham was dealing directly with subjects I’ve long been fascinated with—digital culture, sex from a young woman’s P.O.V., plus the whole portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-woman element. I’m a fan of all the iconic middle-aged male showrunners who run most of the cable TV shows, but it seemed like a huge breakthrough to get a similarly powerful vision from a very young woman.
Rebecca: I, too, felt thrilled to see this part of experience represented—and for it not just to feel like “girls can be just as gross as boys,” which is what stayed with me after “Bridesmaids.” Why do you think it has taken until now for this kind of female comic to emerge?
Emily: I’m not sure—although I do think it may involve the simultaneous emergence of wild, unmediated female voices online, which is where Lena Dunham first showed her work.
Personally, though, I loved “Bridesmaids,” including the pooping scene. Not because I love fart humor, but because it was taking place in a pristine bridal salon.
Rebecca: I wrote a whole book about the sickness of the bridal industry, but I still thought that scene in “Bridesmaids” was just there to appease the boyfriends who’d been dragged along.
Emily: I’m one of those boyfriends.
Rebecca: You began this conversation by talking about how some critics have gone in the “fearing for our daughters” direction, but I have to say that, as a mother of sons, I want to know how not to raise someone who says things like “That’s why I like carpentry. It seems more honest.”
Emily: There’s been a ton of discussion out there about Adam and how gross he is—I’m sure this will continue once people see the second episode, which starts with a doozie of a sex scene. But I have been seriously bugged by a lot of writers who seem not to get that Adam’s banter isn’t literal abuse of Hannah. It’s kinky role-playing. Of course, it’s radically incompetent role-playing, which is what makes it funny. I loved Adam’s insane riff about Hannah being a “working woman,” for instance. And to me, it’s obvious Hannah’s getting something out of sex with this guy—it’s an experience she can use in her writing, for one thing. That’s part of what reminded me of Louis C.K., who is a different kind of memoirist, because he’s a standup comic.
Also, those scenes, and some of the ones in later episodes—not all the sex on the show is bad in the same way!—gave me flashbacks to laughable experiences in my early twenties that I’d completely forgotten about. Maybe I’m just inept, but I have a feeling I’m not alone in this.
Rebecca: I loved the sendup of boys’ porno-influenced behaviors, like the biting of the lip. And I liked that quote of Lena’s from the Bruni piece: “There’s no way that you, young man from Chappaqua, taught that to yourself.”
Emily: I also thought Lena’s line about Chappaqua was funny, but I grew up in the eighties, reading Mary Gaitskill, who is all about S&M role-playing and young girls drawn to kinky men. Philip Roth is from Newark, not Chappaqua, but he seemed to have figured out how to pull women’s hair. I know that young people watch more actual porn because of the Internet, but rough sex as a crucible goes way back. I always think people forget that “Tiny Furniture” is centrally about Aura realizing that her mother’s experiences in the seventies were nearly identical to her own.
I also think I didn’t find Adam quite as gross as you do. He’s repulsive, but he’s also got a kind of goofiness—it shows up even in this first episode, when he says that wrong-headed but well-meaning thing, “You aren’t that fat, you could get your tattoos lasered off,” kissing her on the shoulder.
Rebecca: I’ll have to see how Adam develops. As with them all—it’s exciting to think of Lena getting to play this out over a series. But I do hope that in Real Life (as opposed to Lena Dunham-world), there’s some alternative for young men other than having emo pretensions and almost no actual emotional range. Funny to see that paradigm sent up, though. And yes, of course, people have been having ungainly, embarrassing sex in their twenties for as long as there have been twenties. And sex.
Emily: Let’s say something specific to finish off. Just tell me your favorite moment in the pilot.
Rebecca: I’ve said it, but the removal of the opaque black tights while lying front-first on the couch. Hilarious physical comedy and such a deft encapsulation of that stage of life. Perfect.
Emily: I think my favorite moment was that endearingly off-kilter but loving moment when Jessa says about Hannah, “I think she’s in a really good place.” To me, the show is as much about those friendships as anything else. It’s part of what I find so stirring, and not at all depressing, about “Girls.”
Photograph: HBO
