Ross Douthat this weekend revealed to his no-doubt-horrified readers that many cultural reactionaries (including myself) actually really enjoy the show Girls. Not because we're terribly interested in the doings of Hannah Horvath (series creator Lena Dunham) and her coterie of imbecilic friends. Rather, we see in Dunham's portrait of millennial life one of the truest examinations of the sadness that is decadent modernity. Here's Ross:
The defining portraits of younger, well-educated blue-state life, from "Friends" to "Sex and the City" to their imitators, are essentially propaganda for expressive individualism, sometimes allowing room for nuance but never for a real critique.
Except for "Girls." The thing that makes Dunham’s show so interesting, the reason it inspired a certain unsettlement among some of its early fans, is that it often portrays young-liberal-urbanite life the way, well, many reactionaries see it: as a collision of narcissists educated mostly in self-love, a sexual landscape distinguished by serial humiliations — a realm at once manic and medicated, privileged and bereft of higher purpose. ...
There are scenes — an extremely dark sexual encounter involving an otherwise likable male character near the end of season two — that make [Elaine] Blair’s sexual happy-talk [interpretation of "Girls"] seem frankly absurd. There are moments — a messed-up daughter’s encounter with her feckless dad, a character’s rant against her close friends’ self-absorption — that are almost puritanical (in a good way!) in their moral perspective.
Ross says this admiration is probably unappreciated by Dunham, but I'm not so sure. As best as I can tell, Dunham is actually a deep plant in the progressive movement trying her hardest to undermine the liberal sensibility. Consider, for instance, her video in 2012, in which she compares voting for Barack Obama like having sex for the first time:
This is beyond parody, something so absurd that no rational human being could look at it and think "Yes, this is an appropriate way to choose the leader of the free world and the man who controls a nuclear arsenal." And yet, the left went nuts for it! They loved it! Its patent absurdity was lost on them. So Dunham, the false flag reactionary provocateur, had to step up her game for 2014. She had to do something so bizarre and gross it couldn't help but completely discredit the progressive agenda. So she agreed to appear in a parody of the (already self-parodic) song "Turn Down for What" in which she announced that she's voting because of her concern for reproductive rights before drunkenly shuffling around the voting area like this to prove how super-serious voting is:
Frankly, I think Dunham's conservative handlers have taken this a bit too far. There's no way any young person or any progressive can watch that video with pride, right? And think to themselves "Hey, this is a good way to reach the youngs and convince them of the importance of voting." I mean, this can't possibly work, can it? The kids can't look at this and think "Wow, better get to dat voting booth!" Right? Am I so out of touch?