All About Lena

Lena Dunham 

A few years ago, Lena Dunham was a nobody posting independent shorts on Youtube. At the time, she was more famous for having famous parents than having done anything remotely interesting in her own right. Today, however, you cannot avoid Lena Dunham. She is everywhere and she is spewing trash like a broken garbage truck.

I do not have a problem with Lena Dunham's artistry. Tiny Furniture was an interesting film about coming home from college and finding yourself, while Girls is a portrayal of what life is like for young women in New York. She writes, directs, and edits her work and her acting is average. It is not so much these things that are problematic as what she has said and that is where she is stirring up controversy.

In her memoir, Dunham claimed that she was raped by a classmate at liberal arts college. She gave the person a name in her book and then stated that he was a member of the Young Republicans. Unfortunately for Dunham, the young man had never laid a finger on her. Lena later backtracked on this and the essay was seen as fictional.

A few months ago, Dunham flew into a rage on social media when her relationship with her sister was discussed in an internet magazine. In her memoir, she wrote that she shared a bed with younger sister and explored her body. The passage in question smacked of child abuse and molestation. When confronted with what she had written, Dunham tried to backtrack, but couldn't. Her sister claimed that what happened to her was normal.

Most recently, Dunham wrote an article comparing her boyfriend to a dog. Considering her track record, it was par for the course. The Anti-Defamation League issued a statement claiming that the article was "tasteless" and "played with offensive stereotypes about Jews." Dunham herself is half-Jewish and culturally identifies as a Jew just like Philip Roth. Yet Roth has been able to satirize his heritage without creating needless, useless controversy.

Lena Dunham's problem, it seems to me, has a lot to do with the generation she is a member of. Most young people today are not filtered when it comes to their private lives. If you go on Facebook, you will see them posting pictures of what they had for lunch, where they went for dinner, what they were doing throughout the day. The same is true for Instagram and it's even worse on Twitter. Everybody is talking about their lives and sharing and, sometimes, oversharing.

Social media is a part of the problem here. We like it when people "like" our posts on Facebook or Instagram. We like having followers, but the truth of the matter is that "likes" and "friends" don't matter in the real world. You can have 500 friends on Facebook and still be the loneliest person on the planet. The internet, whether we like it or not, is not the real world.

Yet it also seems to me that Dunham pushes the envelope because she knows she can. On Girls and Tiny Furniture, there are numerous moments that can be described as cringe worthy. One of the tamer ones occurred when Hannah Horvath described herself as being "a pounded out piece of meat." This kind of realism works in the arts. After all, Manet portrayed a prostitute for his "Olympia"

Pushing the envelope in the arts is one thing, but pushing it in real life means that it will necessarily backfire. The amount of ink that has been spilled virtually on Dunham's memoir and her frequent Twitter should have shown her that there is a fine line between what you can say in your films and what you can tell people on Twitter. Her audience might laugh at her antics on her TV show because it is happening to someone else, but it's entirely different when the medium is a memoir or a Twitter update or a New York Times article.

People like Lena Dunham remind me of Tinkerbell. They need applause in order to exist. As long as their audience loves and adores them and thinks that their works is even remotely interesting, they are happy. When that audience turns around? Well, let's just say that Twitter rage and name calling and TMI is what you get because these latter day Tinkerbells hate it when people are not paying attention to them.