Lena Dunham's Remembrance Of Things Past
The Bright Young Things of 2006 and the need to make shit
Sorry. SORRY! I’ve been busy the last few weeks and haven’t written anything here. I did that thing where I had a bunch of articles due elsewhere at the same time. In case you didn’t see any of them, I wrote about how custom embroidery is so hot right now (and hopefully stays that way) for the NYT Styles section, profiled Simon Kim as he gets set to open his most ambitious restaurant to date for the latest issue of New York, and for my FIGURING column at The Cut, I wrote about my experiences with ADHD and how I’m hopeful I didn’t pass those genes down to my daughter.
But enough about me—I want to talk about Lena Dunham.
No, I don’t want to talk about her in that Obama era way where some 20-something blogger was on deadline without anything to write about, so they turned in 1,500 words on how something her character on Girls said was “deeply problematic” in hopes that the piece would “go viral,” i.e., 10,000 “hits.”
Instead, I wanted to say that I really enjoyed her personal essay, “How I Became A Filmmaker” in The New Yorker, because it reminded me of something that I often forget in my darker moments when I think the well has gone dry and nothing new or good will ever come out again.
Now, before I say anything about the article, I want to get it out of the way that Dunham does talk about being able to use her family’s loft in Tribeca, and yes, her parents are the artists Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons—that’s all been talked about a thousand times before. In fact, I’d argue that Dunham is one of the people that got us talking about “nepo babies” even before it was a term that had entered the public consciousness. Back before the term first started popping up (possibly around 2020), people often pointed to Dunham’s “famous” parents as a reason she’d had any success to begin with. That always seemed silly to me, since I don’t think most Americans could name more than two or three living artists, and I certainly don’t think Dunham’s parents would make that list unless the people we’re talking to have been Artforum subscribers for the last few decades. When I’d say that, the response would usually be something like, “Well, Jerry Saltz is her godfather, and her parents’ might not be celebrity famous, but they still knew enough people and had money that could open doors for their daughter, and…”
Just bringing up Dunham’s name in 2013 was like talking about any geopolitical issue taking place in 2026, in that everybody would sneer and then offer up an opinion. That’s why I’m always a little shy about saying I love something she did, even though I’ve liked basically everything she’s been involved in. A perfect example is the other night I was watching the 2011 film The Innkeepers because I like Ti West’s work and wanted to check out some earlier stuff, and I thought, “This movie isn’t that good, but I like Lena Dunham as the annoying local barista and I’ll keep watching in hopes of either seeing her again or because I feel like this slow burn horror movie will deliver soon.”
I think we’re out of those woods. The kids love Girls, and now the media is hosting roundtable chats asking people if woke is dead and why it’s a good thing if it is, so I don’t think people are policing every word she utters or writes articles accusing her of being “problematic.” And, as the New Yorker article I took a long time to get back to shows, Dunham, who will turn 40 in May, has gotten to the place in her life and career where she wants to do some looking back. “Scene One” is Dunham’s remembrance on her first attempts at becoming a filmmaker, about her experiences stemming from making the short film Dealing during her summer break from Oberlin.
The story has plenty of Dunhamesque details, like how she brought her beautiful friends (“two stunningly petite brunettes who made me feel both more and less worthwhile when they flanked me”) with her to Sundance Film Festival’s “even more indie counterpart, Slamdance,” and an admission that, of all the guys there, “the only one I got to kiss,” was a guy who called himself a “sound sculptor.” Her mother and their relationship is part of the story, so is her friendship with Jemima Kirke (“the one friend in high school who had seen me as more than a comic sidekick”), both common themes and people anybody familiar with Dunham’s work will instantly recognize. But what I thought gave the story its poignancy is when Dunham is awed by the short film made by Benny and Josh Safdie, “baby-faced and dressed in the knowingly grandpa-ish garb that signified indie culture at the time.” Dunham befriends the brothers, long before they had any acclaim of Oscarm nominations, and eventually becomes part of their little crew.
Benny and Josh had already surrounded themselves with a remarkable group of technicians—cinematographers, production designers, actors—and after school they set up shop in a building on lower Broadway, not far from my parents’ place. That and a companion building across the street became a kind of dormitory for wildly talented indie-film nerds, a crew of boys—always boys—who attended Tisch or Columbia, schools whose film departments, unlike Oberlin’s, consisted of more than a passed-around Super 8 camera, a broken projector, and an aging professor who enjoyed talking about Swedish modernism and hugging students tightly while sighing. I used every trip home to New York as a chance to ingratiate myself with them, offering to hold the boom, to P.A., to wheat-paste flyers for screenings, or just to pay for dinner at a Chinatown noodle shop, because I was the only one who still got an allowance.
Dunham writes about how she’d always dreamed of hanging out with people who made movies, and all of a sudden she was. The crew inspired her to shoot a “feature” that she descibes as, “misguided but ambitious hybrid of vérité digital and Godard-inspired Super 16 entitled ‘Creative Nonfiction.’” Greta Gerwig even shows up, back when she was still just a mumblecore icon known mostly to people with film blogs and the last few people who had jobs in shops that rented videos.
The idea that there’s nothing good going on is constantly on my mind. How can’t it be? Have you looked at the news in the last ten minutes? It’s really staggering. In his book, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century writes about how he sees this as a problem of the last 26 years, and not just a fairly recent thing. His books hits on a lot of good points that had me rethinking some of my own previous ideas of this very weird and scary century we’ve been living through, but one thing I keep going back to is how I remember a lot of new and interesting things happening even just a few years ago. If anything, I think there was a big creative boom over the first 15-or-so years of the 21st century, but now we’re going thought a flattening of opportunities for artists, as well as an obliteration of enthusiasm and inspiration for many people who flourished during that time. I came up during that era, and I’ve watched plenty of jobs disappear and friends say they’re giving up their creative endeavors and getting into marketing or consulting over the last decade. That means I’ve seen the change happen in real time, but also that I’m older now. I’m in my mid-40s, and the young people I’m around are almost all toddlers. I hardly go out, and I treat leaving my Brooklyn neighborhood like an excursion. I have to remind myself constantly that I I’m not entirely sure what “the kids” are up to, but that doesn’t mean the answer isn’t “nothing.”
In 2006, I had no clue there was this little gang of film nerds that included Dunham, the Safdies, and a few other folks whose work I’d start getting excited just a few years later. Granted, they’re all just a few years younger than me, but when their work started breaking out, I even had to admit it was something new and different that I hadn’t seen coming. It was a similar feeling a year or so ago, when everybody I know started asking me what I thought about the band Geese. I still sometimes have to ask if that’s the jam band (Goose) or the Brooklyn band, but when they verify it’s the latter, I’ll say I think they have some really good songs, but I’m more fascinated with how I didn’t see their popularity coming because I’d been led to believe there was no new rock bands starting up anywhere in America. As if all the guitar, amps, and bored teenagers with access to a basement or garage to practice in had all just disappeared. Even funnier to me is that the band literally started right up the block from me; I probably passed Cameron Winter dozens of times when he was a kid on his way to Brooklyn Friends.
I know, I know—Lena Dunham, the Safdies, and Geese all grew up in New York City and had all sorts of advantages 98 percent of the population don’t have. I get how that argument will always come up. But what I think the larger point that they all help me make is, whether we know it at the time or not, there’s always something happening. People—young ones—are always going to be making things. Creativity and the need to create isn’t going away. Sure, people will only get lazier with all the “advances” technology offers up, and a lot of people simply won’t have the chance to create because the system forces people to work to live when they could be making things, but I’m pretty sure there will always be some weirdos somewhere who can’t help but spend whatever time they can creating stuff people will get obsessed over.