“There are worlds and then there are worlds.” —Cornelius Eady (cited in the Coates post)
A few links for our Girls discussion:
- John Scalzi’s “Things I Don’t Have to Think About Today” is probably the best articulation I’ve seen of what ‘privilege’ means
- more recently, along similar lines, Scalzi has likened privilege (esp. of being a straight white male) to the lowest difficulty setting on a video game, which may be an especially useful analogy for us in this class
- it might be worth thinking about the racist Hunger Games tweets as another point of departure here
- just so we have them handy, the three blog posts I asked you to read: Jenna Wortham, Kendra James, and Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Lena Dunham’s interview on Fresh Air is worth a listen if you have a chance
- Malcolm Harris has a usefully provocative piece that’s mostly about the recent Swedish Culture Ministry blackface cake debacle, but that has a great reading of the final scene of the Girls pilot at the end:
If this show had been made five years ago, I think there would be a token character, but Dunham did something much more impressive. In the pilot’s last shot, her character is walking out of her parents’ hotel room having just stolen the maid’s tip after trying and failing to order room service on their bill. As we get ready for the episode to end, the viewer (and character) see the first black character. It’s the most important shot in the episode.
Critics use this scene as glaring proof of the show’s racism: There’s one black character, and of course it’s a homeless guy! Gotcha, dumb bitch! But it’s the creators who scripted this scene when they obviously didn’t have to, and Dunham who acted half of it. Hating the show because of rich white girl privilege is ignoring that it’s already a show about rich white girl privilege in a way that Sex in The City never was; can you imagine Samantha cringing away from a black person while on the phone talking about her shoes? And if critics think an artist trained at Oberlin doesn’t know how to count the number of black people in a tv show, then they’re forgetting they probably learned how to do it in the same class.
Girls is a show about a racist who doesn’t hate black people, she just doesn’t see them, and when she does, she looks at her shoes. The shot is in such a significant place in the episode because it is absolutely crucial that the viewer see her not looking.
A couple more quotes, the first from Emily Nussbaum, and this may get to the heart of the fictional world/real world issue here:
Still, like SATC, Dunham’s show takes as its subject women who are quite demographically specific—cosseted white New Yorkers from educated backgrounds—then mines their lives for the universal.
And from Alyssa Rosenberg:
There’s a world in which Girls‘ whiteness wouldn’t be so alienating: a media landscape in which we had a healthy mix of shows and movies created and run by men and women, people of color as well as white folks, and dedicated to the deep exploration of experiences that range from tight, insular groups of friends to the mechanics of bureaucracy.
Jenna Wortham:
Plus, back then it was pre-internet, so we didn’t really know what the world did and didn’t look like beyond our window. But now, we know better. We can see hundreds of thousands, millions, of other people out there, just like us, blogging, tweeting, posting makeup tutorials, comedy skits, and Dance Central videos on YouTube, so that we could see more of the world is like us.
Lastly, Coates:
It is not so wrong to craft an exclusively white world–certainly a significant portion of America lives in one. What is wrong is for power-brokers to pretend that no other worlds exists. Across the country there are black writers and black directors toiling to bring those worlds to the screen. If HBO does not see fit to have a relationship with those writers, then those of us concerned should assess our relationship with HBO.