The Loneliness of Lena Dunham

The characters of the hit tv-show Girls show themselves to be egocentric, promiscuous and generally unmoral. They constantly betray their friends and lovers, they use their sexuality for material gain, and they break the hearts of people who genuinely love them. Instead of simply denouncing this behaviour, I think it is more interesting to see what causes it, and how it is a ‘sign of the times’, rather than a scandalous abnormality.

To do this, it pays to look at Lena Dunham’s earlier film Tiny Furniture. It’s about Aura (played by Dunham herself), who just graduated from college and returns to her parental house in New York, planning to find an appartment with a college friend. Aura is much sweeter and more innocent than Hannah, the character Dunham plays in Girls. Whereas Hannah is sexually aggressive and toys with the hearts of her love interests, Aura gets toyed with by boys who use her for their own ends; in one case, for a place to crash and a fridge to raid, in the other, for scoring vicodin.

Crucial is the exact way in which Aura gets manipulated. After flirting with Jed, a video-artist in town for business, she invites him to stay a week at her parents place. When circumstances finally force them to share a bed, he rejects her by turning his back to her when she touches him. His manipulation consists in breaking unspoken social rules; he accepted her invitation, he ate her food, he got into her bed, but he was never interested in her romantically, and he refuses to acknowledge that she wouldn’t have done those things for him if she wasn’t interested in him.

Another social institution Aura vainly relies on is family. Upon returning home, she finds out that she is not a member of an organic community called family. Her bedroom is no longer her bedroom, her little sister is more successful than she is, and her mother doesn’t answer to ‘mom’, but to her first name only. She tries to provoke her mother into being her mother by acting out like a rebellious teenager, but gets only sympathy in return. In the end, Aura has to lie to herself and say that her mother depends on her, while obviously the opposite is true.

Tiny Furniture is a nakedly honest film about loneliness, the kind of loneliness that results from a breakdown of community in the sense of family life but also in the sense of the social norms we share. As a defence against such loneliness, such vulnerability, egotism is asserted. After all, how can you be lonely when you don’t need other people, and take what you want for yourself? Notice the different roles of the parents in Tiny Furniture and Girls; Aura identifies with her mother and finds reasons to stay with her, while Hannah ruthlessly manipulates her parents into giving her money.

Maybe this is why Lena Dunham is constantly getting naked in Girls; to make up for what she isn’t showing of herself, that is her nakedness in the sense of her loneliness and vulnerability.