TAMASHA zine

Hey everybody! Today I’m going to talk about Girls, which is a TV show about four white ladies living in New York City and Brooklyn who are in their mid-twenties and deal with post-collegiate ennui, shitty jobs, pregnancy scares, and deadbeat boys (mostly deadbeat boys.) There’s been a lot of criticism lobbed at the show since it debuted about its narrow focus on privileged white characters, and a lot of counter-criticism from the show’s defenders that for asks: Why is everyone criticizing Girls, when shouldn’t everyone be happy with the simple fact that a 25-year old woman is writing and directing her own show on HBO? Isn’t that enough of a feminist victory? Why isn’t everybody celebrating Dunham for her achievement in a field that is dominated by older white men?

Of course it’s always more complicated than that. I was so ready to write an incendiary post about Lena Dunham and Girls. I hated Tiny Furniture (for its bitter bleakness, for being its target audience and yet finding no relatability to its cold and unlikeable characters) and was prepared to hate Girls for the same reasons. And yet Girls is surprisingly not bad, with acidic barbs and occasionally compelling characters. I’m consistently surprised at the directions Dunham takes the show, and the situations she places her characters in feel, at its best, unexpected and familiar at the same time. 

But for all of its sharp witticisms and skewering of elite New Yorkers and night shots of Brooklyn’s shimmering streets, it’s not hard to see the many places in which Girls falls apart at the seams. There is a frustrating inconsistency to the characters’ personalities - are they confused, complex twenty-somethings whose abnormal decisions are symptomatic of their lack of direction and hormone-fueled irrationality, or is it simply bad writing? 

And are we supposed to like Hannah Horvath and root for her to succeed (in…boning someone who appreciates her? finding a stable job?), as indicated by the many signifiers of her emotional depth and the supposed moving bond of her friendships with the other girls (which, come on - are we really supposed to believe Hannah and Marnie are genuine friends and not the frenemies they clearly are just because that one time they jammed to “Dancing On My Own”?) If so, why is she so irredeemably unlikeable?

And the last couple of episodes have contained numerous places where it is painfully obvious that there is a 25-year old behind the script - “She’s got a face like Brigitte Bardot and an ass like Rihanna” Uh huh.

So when people give some highbrow analysis of Girls’s narrowness of perspective saying that the lack of POC in the show is a reflection of the characters’ tiny community and sheltered upbringing and not really a representation of the entirety of New York and Dunham backs it up by asserting that all the characters represent various aspects of her personality, it rings a little, well, defensive. 

In a recent interview, Dunham is asked about her show’s lack of diversity, after having remained more or less mum on the issue (script supervisor Lesley Arfin did not, and got rightfully skewered for her highly tasteless tweet.) She responded:

“If I had one of the four girls, if, for example, she was African-American, I feel like — not that the experience of an African-American girl and a white girl are drastically different, but there has to be specificity to that experience [that] I wasn’t able to speak to. I really wrote the show from a gut-level place, and each character was a piece of me or based on someone close to me. And only later did I realize that it was four white girls.”

This statement reads a little bit like, “I don’t have the experience or talent necessary to write interesting and subtle non-white characters, but I’m totally okay with reusing and recycling the same tired ethnic stereotypes and using them to populate the backdrop of my multi-faceted main characters.”

Let’s take a look at the characters of colors that have so far made an appearance on this show: 

-a black homeless man who catcalls Hannah on the street
-an overachieving Asian girl who “knows Photoshop” 
-a sassy Latina secretary who criticizes Hannah’s eyebrows and is okay with their boss’s wandering hands as long as it is benefits her
-Jamaican and South American nannies with whom Jessa tries to educate and empower

What exactly is it about the lives of the four girls that is so specific that it was simply unthinkable to Dunham for one of them to be not-white? That they are complex human beings?

You might be wondering at this point (if you were a crotchety old man), “These damn ethniks need to stop going on about not seeing their own kind represented in some tv show.” I wondered this myself too - why did I care so much when people like Mindy Kaling and Aziz Ansari were already making waves in Hollywood, that progress already somewhat visible in shows like Community and Parks & Recreation?

I’ll tell you why. It’s because writing non-white characters that break stereotypes on tv shows is the first step to making us, the POC of America and the rest of the world, relatable and worthy of recognition. As a shy and bookish Indian-American growing up outside of Detroit, I read a lot of books and watched a lot of tv, which were for the most part predominantly populated by white characters. The few Black, Asian, or Latino characters I encountered were either supporting characters relegated to the background, tokenized, or both. Seeing people who looked like me was so rare that when they did pop up from time to time, it felt alien and strange. 

So from an early age, I found it more natural to empathize with white people. It was easier to read universal emotions on their faces than it was on non-white people, and it became harder to relate with other Indian-Americans even as I struggled to fit in at school. It was often much simpler to dismiss the difficulties of interacting with people from India and chalk it to being from two fundamentally different cultures than to take the time to communicate with someone whose first language wasn’t English and find some common ground. I found Indian people embarrassingly unhip in accordance to the way immigrants were depicted in the media (Apu, anyone?) 

It wasn’t until I started reading novels by Jhumpa Lahiri, Tanuja Desai Hidier, Vikram Chandra, watching movies by Mira Nair and Gurinder Chadha that I began to feel pride in my Indian heritage - it was the first time I’d seen the South Asian experience depicted in such a nuanced and multi-dimensional way. I still love low-brow fare like American Desi and Harold and Kumar Go To Whitecastle for their insistence on showing Asian-American characters who are just as interesting and complicated as white people. (On a related note: call me, Kal Penn.) 

I can rattle off a whole list of the books and film and music by South Asians that mean so much to me, and it still isn’t enough. It took me 20 years too many to realize that the stories of Indian-Americans were worth telling, that it was worth telling my story. 

My point is, it’s not just Dunham who is guilty of white-washing the American experience. It’s most of the media, and the media is much, much more influential than we give it credit for. Is it really a stretch that we hoped that it was going to depict women of color with the same sensitivity it shows their white counterparts?