It can be considered that we are different people every
second we are alive, in the way I read once that we can never step into the
same river twice (the flowing-all-the-time water forbidding it.) All this water
movement (and, more importantly, the movement being horrifically out of our
control) reminds me of the chorus of the lesser known Stone’s song (originally
written and performed by Otis Redding, no doubt) “(Dis)satisfaction,” and how
we can get ourselves plenty of it if we obsessively reach for that next cool thing
we don’t have. “(Dis)satisfaction” was playing on a Walkman while my father
tried to wade across a whitewater river in Colorado, and my mother begged him
to stop because she knew he couldn’t swim. He made it to the other side and was
fourteen different people as he survived it, and the river was over four hundred
different rivers because of the water current speed. The water current speed polished the
flat stones of the riverbed, and the stones were many different stones in the
time it took my father to climb up the other side bank in his big shorts. I was
nine years old and the Houston Rockets were about to claim the NBA championship
while Michael Jordan was out shagging fly balls. Briefly, while my father was his
eighth or ninth different person of the wade, I imagined how his body
might tumble down the river and bounce off Colorado boulders until I was
fatherless. While he was on his tenth and eleventh different person, I took
moments to imagine him gone forever down the river, and I was dissatisfied right
along with the song playing in my ears. When he survived on the other bank, the
song ended and the family talked about the satisfaction that comes from a
properly cooked salmon fillet.
All of this
is to say that, in a roundabout way, if I had to guess at an overall theme for
the first two seasons of Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls, I would guess “dissatisfaction” and feel dissatisfied with
my guess. I watched the first season of Girls
after a familial birthday present DVD purchase went characteristically wrong,
and held a two-day marathon viewing of the second season online while my new
roommate ate frozen pizza next to me and looked content. At certain points
during the second season, the two-year-old pit bull sat with us on the couch
and rested her big head on my left knee looking dissatisfied. At these moments,
on the living room couch in front of the silver computertelevision, the three
of us were at our most misguided summer vacation twentysomethingness (the pit
bull being adolescent in her dog-yeared body, but close enough to get the gist), and I recognized, for better or worse, that we were, on that gray couch of dog
shed:
2. Not
living in one of the trendier boroughs of New York City
3. Past
the years of having casual sex with mail carriers (if the years ever existed at
all)
4. Very
much writing people with voices in our heads telling us to not write (these
voices coming from other people we know somewhat well, and also our own voices
influenced by these other voices, negatively.)
5. Begrudging
Millennials with our eyes set on an innocuous prize “out there.”
6. Stuck
in a Girls-themed game of
carrot-hanging-from-the-end-of-the-stick, where the carrot represents
“fulfillment” and the stick’s length is mathematically represented in the following
equation: lifespan (to the present moment) + opportunity x privilege ÷ expectations [note: the
total, due to the inordinately high value of the expectations, always equals
less than 1. And 1 is the goal so, you know, everything sucks.]
For those of you who haven’t sufficiently trekked the Girls terrain, allow me to break the poshy
landscape down for you: The female (and male, for that matter) characters of Girls have a lot of good shit going for
them, but that doesn’t keep them from wanting/kind of demanding and/or laying
claim to more good shit. They have college degrees and, often, intro-level
jobs, but they want Mac-adorned offices and careers that caress their creative
minds and oversized egos (and they want these jobs, and their accompanying pay
raises, yesterday.) They have comfortable apartments to live in, but drool over
luxurious brownstones and dream of the days when they’ll be able to not only
have enough money to own their own swanky places, but also fill them out with
furniture and art from (insert names of trendy boutiques and galleries here.)
They have, where applicable, stable relationship partners, but they want
dangerously exotic sex adventures where they desperately need and are
desperately needed, where they are romantic objects of affection and amateur
porn stars at the same time (they also want intelligent, respectful
conversations with their partners to fill the mornings after the sex adventures. duh.)
In short, the women of Girls have
educations, jobs, money, homes, friends, lovers, but want better jobs, more money, cooler homes, cooler friends, better lovers.
They want and, interestingly, feel like they deserve (for reasons best
considered in future posts) upgraded versions of their lives. They, like many
Americans, want the almighty More (i.e., the Supersized life, without the extra calories.)
And it
isn’t (Dunham's alter ego) Hannah and her posse’s constant push for More (or subsequent disdain for
what they consider to be their own sorrowful lots of Less) that irks me. It’s
that I’m pretty sure Dunham wants me to empathize with Hannah’s existential
woes (cue not-so-subtly sad orchestral music when Hannah’s sweet-ass-internship
director does not [gasp!] offer her a salaried position after all her hard work
writing copy for I don’t know like twenty hours a week or something.) But how
can I, or anyone, empathize with a kid who gets a piece of chocolate cake and
cries because it doesn’t taste the way she thought it would (or, maybe even worse,
because it is not [double gasp!] served on a vintage dessert plate)? Are
viewers actually supposed to forget that not everybody gets a piece of
chocolate cake? Are we supposed to forget that chocolate cake signifies surplus
(i.e., it is only served after all
nutritionally adequate foods have been consumed. And if not everybody is
getting the chocolate cake, are we supposed to forget that it is likely that
not everybody is getting dinner either?) Are we to forget all of this and start
craving a piece of (More-flavored) chocolate cake of our own?
After completing the many hours of
show (some of them viewed from locations as exotic as a fourth-floor
Quality Inn and Suites bedroom couch in Lansing, Michigan), I suspect Hannah has
rarely fleeced her More-hungry shoulders in Dr. Dustin Hoffman’s I Heart Huckabees therapeutic universe blanket. For if she had clothed herself in the universe blanket, she would know
that “Everything she could ever want or be, she already has or is.” Dr.
Hoffman’s point being, of course, that if one looks strictly outside of oneself
for "fulfillment" (perhaps the ultimate More), one’s bound to get mad exhausted
during the search (see carrot-hanging-from-the-end-of-the-stick reference
above.) A little mindfulness/appreciation of what one already has might go a
long way (even in “Brooklyn, New York City where they paint murals of Biggie.”
Shout out to Talib Kweli.) Maybe we could take “has” to a capital H place and
give More a run for its insatiable-appetite-money? Granted, Zen characters void
of passions/desires/vices don’t make for must-see big-time television, and I
get this. Not many viewers are likely to tune in to pay-cable episodes of Dunham’s
Hannah sitting on a meditation cushion in her reasonably priced apartment while
she counts her breaths and the items on the long list of things she doesn’t
need to reach enlightenment. Contentment just doesn’t sell.
But I also wonder about the
healthiness of selling white, upper-middle-class (potentially misplaced) existential
discontent to American audience members who are likely still (knowingly or
unknowingly) dragging their tired legs and credit scores through the hopefully
soon-to-thin-out economic sludge. At what point is it socially inappropriate
for viewers to be led to look at Hannah’s character [twenty-threeish, recent college-graduate,
supportive parents, present friendship circle, somewhat healthy socio-sexual
opportunities] with pity, simply because she doesn’t have the stellar life she
has “always dreamed of” and “worked so hard for?” And before an answer is
decided on, let’s consider that a recent New
York Times article places the national unemployment rate at 7.5% and the
national unemployment rate for college graduates at under 4%, meaning that
Hannah’s prior-to-season-one-earned liberal arts degree puts her well ahead of
the fictional (and, symbolically, real life) pack when it comes to running away
from economic insecurity and/or poverty. Are we to feel bummed that she can’t
make this runaway in oh-so-cool, unreleased Dr. Martens? Isn’t it more
appropriate to feel bummed for those who can’t run/keep up in the first place?
Isn’t it cooler to let the bummed feeling push us towards some sort of
More-for-all (with no Emmy-nominated strings attached) program? Could that
program make it on HBO? It’s More than TV, I’ve heard.
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