Anna – Page 9 – Three Guineas

March 2, 2013October 23, 2013

Weekly Girl Crushes

Girl Walk // All Day

When you are walking through Central Park and run into a roving pack of modern dancers, there is normally only one option: flight. But Girl Walk // All Day has made me rethink my blanket policy on impromptu modern dance performances. Starring Anne Marsen as “the Girl,” Girl Walk // All Day is a 75-minute film featuring Marsen and two male dancers who stomp, flail, and pirouette through all five boroughs (yes, even Staten Island). We first meet Marsen in a claustrophobic ballet studio. But the classical music soon gives way to a soundtrack by Girl Talk as Marsen ecstatically breaks out of the studio’s four walls. This rupture of the public/private divide generates much of the humor, tension, and joy in the film. Although a vague narrative of “the Girl,” “the Guy,” and “the Creep” runs through the film, the “story” of each scene emerges when Marsen invades the private space of others. A few of the bystanders clearly recognize that they are being filmed, but the vast majority respond with genuine confusion, laughter, awe, and, only rarely, complete disinterest. In one particularly fascinating section, Marsen carries countless shopping bags as she stumbles through a hoard of Occupy Wall Street protesters. Some begin clapping, assuming she’s a performance artist denouncing capitalism, while others actually mistake her for a clueless shopper. Neither of these interpretations is entirely correct, but this is unimportant. What matters is that the private thoughts of the bystanders affect the public performance. Whether she is being championed by tourists on the High Line or being chased out of Yankee Stadium by security guards, Marsen is challenging our urban propensity to turn on our iPods and shut out the city. While NYC is known for its stoic citizens who could see a man change his pants on a subway train without reacting, NYC is also famous for forcing people to live their private lives in public: we make out in front of Grant’s Tomb, have screaming fights inside a Duane Reade, and then cry on the Q train all the way home. Girl Walk // All Day gets at this essential contradiction of urban living, celebrating the chaos of the city and the quiet lives of its inhabitants. Continue reading “Weekly Girl Crushes”

February 27, 2013October 23, 2013

Sleeping it Off

While discussing the now infamous Girls episode “One Man’s Trash” with a group of 23-year-old girls who currently live in Bushwick, I heard the following critiques: the episode seemed out of place, it wasn’t funny, it felt like a slap in the face to an audience who really wants to hear Shoshanna say a few funny lines about emogees. Now that I’ve reached the ripe old age of 30, I feel that I can confidently say that these girls are simply wrong. The episode is distinct both structurally and tonally from the rest of the series, but this distinction is meant to startle the audience—to wake us up.

The episode opens with Hannah and Ray standing near a sign that reads “Don’t Ever Sleep Again.” As we follow them inside the coffee shop, Ray quickly gets into a screaming match with pretty, pretty Patrick Wilson over trash that hasn’t been put in its proper place. These two narrative signposts—sleep and trash—mark Hannah’s descent into a fantasy world of comfort and maturity before she returns to her discontented young adulthood. I’m not taking part in the is-Hannah-hot-enough-to-sleep with-Patrick-Wilson debate because (a) it’s stupid and (b) it also fails to take into account the way in which Wilson represents uncomplicated beauty—the type of beauty Hannah has previously resisted. To write Josh (I’m sorry, Joshua) off as a perfect brownstone ken doll is to miss the larger point that the attractive life he represents is ultimately revealed to be as hollow as Hannah’s claims that she is special because she is able to “feel so much.” On both sides of the 24/42 divide, we find loneliness, vulnerability, and a sense that something nameless is missing. Hannah tries a bit harder to name it but ultimately ends up taking out the trash and walking away. Continue reading “Sleeping it Off”

February 15, 2013October 23, 2013

Working Girl

I’m clearly a card-carrying member of the as-yet-to-be-created Lena Dunham fan club. But even if I weren’t mildly obsessed with her, I would still be impressed with her recent appearances at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and on Alec Baldwin’s Here’s The Thing. These interviews reveal a fiercely intelligent, self-assured young woman who, unlike her character Hannah, is too busy working her ass off to fret about whether or not she is the voice of a generation. Due to the seemingly confessional nature of Girls, Dunham is often confused with her character (and there are obviously similarities between the two, like their propensity for going pantsless). But the Hannah of the first two seasons would definitely not be capable of writing, directing, and staring in her own film; creating an award-winning television show; and then securing a lucrative book deal—all before the age of 27. The only writing Hannah has completed this season is a one-line, coke-induced epiphany about raising show dogs and a meandering essay that reveals little more than her inability to accept criticism. This disconnect between the insecure, unfocused Hannah and Dunham herself has led critics as well as Internet commenters (always a civil lot) to claim that Dunham doesn’t deserve her success, that she is just lucky, that she is merely the product of nepotism, etc. But you don’t end up with this resume at the age of 26 by mere luck or connections. Many wealthy celebrities have children, but very few of these children are creating provocative and entertaining work (or doing much of anything that doesn’t involve blow). In these two appearances, Dunham—who has become emblematic of a generation defined by anxiety, discontent, and apathy—reveals the confidence and ambition of a millennial who isn’t content to remain in her parent’s basement. Continue reading “Working Girl”

February 6, 2013October 23, 2013

In Defense of Narcissism

Since Montaigne first wrote about the absurdity of the French class system by describing bathroom habits, the essay has been a heterogeneous mix of philosophy and autobiography. With loftier goals than mere memoir yet easier to digest than a dry brick of text (I’m looking at you, Hegel), the essay has functioned as the means by which smart people comment about the human condition by staring in the mirror. However, when women write essays in today’s media climate, the gates of narcissism are apparently thrown open, civilization is eroded, and we are all left yearning for the days when old white men wrote about the serious world in clear, terse prose. Continue reading “In Defense of Narcissism”

February 3, 2013October 23, 2013

The End of Men

Perhaps 2012 was the year of the aging hero. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the The Dark Knight Rises’ limping Batman while watching James Bond repeatedly fail his physical tests in Sam Mendes’ Skyfall. Although the film was trumpeted as a feminist Bond, an intellectual Bond, an artful Bond, it is, more than anything, an elegiac Bond. During the first three-quarters of Skyfall, it appears as though we are witnessing not just the decline of Daniel Craig’s Bond but the decline of Bond himself—that eternally youthful masculine archetype who uses physical strength and gadgets to fuck and kill his way across the globe. But the film clings to this archetype, yearning for the past even as it looks warily to the future. Elegy and nostalgia have always been interrelated concepts: you can’t long for the past unless you are mourning its passing. It should then come as no surprise that a film questioning the need for Bond should so fetishize the totems of Bond. Watching Bond and M travel through London in an Aston Martin initially thrills the audience, but the viewer is also jarred by the sight of a powerful woman sitting in the passenger seat of this mid-century masculine toy. This relic has no place in the modern world. Mendes hints at this possibility—that the 21^st century no longer needs Bond—but after stepping toward this precipice, he immediately stumbles back onto more comfortable ground. Continue reading “The End of Men”