The horror of HBO's "Girls"

 

"The backlash against the show has been mainly about the all-whiteness of the cast, the way there are no people in color in Lena Dunham’s NYC except bit-part, background workers here and there. Personally I think people of color have dodged a bullet, and should celebrate their own non-representation in this TV-mumblecore hellscape. While this show slimes along, I like to imagine the whole rest of mixed-race NYC having a terrific time everywhere that Lena Dunham and her friends are not, letting Dunhamites move around in a permanent bubble of privileged-white-girl malevolence, shunned by all decent people

In response to the criticism about the show’s blinding whiteness, one of the Girls writers, Lesley Arfin, tweeted sarcastically: “What really bothered me most about [the movie] Precious was that there was no representation of ME.”

HBO's Girls is the latest attempt to create a "realistic" world that upper crust white liberals can identify with. However, like most shows of this nature, it is not recreating what the "world" is like or "life" is like, but simply how these people perceive, or wish to perceive, it. One of the most glaring results of this has been the complete lack of non-white characters in the pilot episode except for, of course, a homeless man. This would be one thing if this was the community in which these characters lived in, but the brooklyn art scene is known for being quite racially mixed. It has been common among (wealthy) liberals in recent years to proclaim that they don't "see" race. Normally this is meant as some brave post-racial society declaration, but as incidents like these accumulate it might be better to view them as an admission of blindness.

People in this world have very little clue how life works for the vast majority of the people around them, and because of that they are only able to frame what they do in terms of their innate talent, rather then their luck or privilege of being born to certain people at a certain place at a certain time. In addition, because they have the financial (read parental) resources to pursue unpaid internships and other such (initially) unprofitable activities (see Ross Perlin's recent excellent book "Intern Nation"), effort and "skill" is still tangentially connected to their success. It's easy to see from that myopic point of view why they are able to presume that those who don't have their success are simply not working hard enough. This point of view also white washes (in a very literal way) the world around them. A combination of their racial and class position allows them to ignore the issue of race and proclaim a strange kind of  "equality" between groups (hence the odd tweet above that equated the movie precious to the "black" experience, therefor justifying her portrayal of the "white woman" experience).

A major part of racial and class inequality (and it's visceral sting) is the ability of those who control our cultural institutions (like news media, television, movies etc) to paper over them and pretend they don't exist. Shows like Girls are especially harmful because they aim to create a "realistic" world, and in attempting to do so end up even further entrenching the ignorance of racial and class issues they don't (or even can't) understand.

Works Cited

Jones, Eileen. "The Horror of HBO's Girls." The EXiled. The EXiled. Web. 07 May 2012. <http://exiledonline.com/the-horror-of-hbos-girls/>.

 

Perlin, Ross. Intern Nation: Earning Nothing and Learning Little in the Brave New Economy. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2012. Print.