By Kyle Smith
Tuesday, July 11, 2017
In season two of Girls,
Lena Dunham’s character Hannah Horvath gives a piece of writing to her
boyfriend (Donald Glover), a black conservative. After much insistent prodding
by Hannah, he admits he doesn’t think very highly of the piece, and so she
starts lambasting him for what she guesses to be his political views (she
doesn’t bother asking what he actually believes). Those views, not by
coincidence, become repugnant to her at the exact instant she discovers he
doesn’t like her essay. She grows increasingly agitated and argumentative, even
as he remains calm and reasonable, and finally she huffily announces she can’t
see him anymore because of politics.
By the time she relates the incident later, she has
repositioned herself as a civil-rights crusader who gives no quarter to
oppressive Republicans, telling two friends (a gay man and a woman) that she
had to break up with the young Republican “because your rights happened and your
rights happened!”’ The episode was, like many others in the series, a pinpoint
satiric attack on the Millennial mix of intransigent self-absorption, eggshell
self-esteem, and vapid progressive political posturing, all of it disguised by
a blithe willingness to lie not only to others but also to oneself.
What makes Lena Dunham’s entire existence seem like an
elaborate act of performance art is that Lena Dunham the person behaves in
exactly the same carelessly solipsistic way that Hannah Horvath did for six
seasons on HBO, and then she dissembles the same way Hannah would. It’s as if
Lena Dunham the person breaks her life into a series of clay pigeons at which
Lena Dunham the writer may take potshots.
What I’m leading up to is this: Lena Dunham dumped her
own dog, blamed the dog, may have lied about the dog’s history, was called on
it, then claimed she was the victim of the whole affair and begged people not
to apply “scrutiny” to a story she had published to 3 million Instagram
followers.
Dunham adopted the pooch, Lamby, in 2013 and proceeded
lovingly to extract writing material from the animal, offering the world a
nearly 4,000-word New Yorker piece
that made her look like — this was very on-brand for her — a clumsy but
soulful, loving, and ultimately endearing dog owner. In trademark fashion, she
freely admitted one reason she was moved to get a pooch: “I’d be permanently
rid of the whiff of self-involvement. (‘She can’t be that much of a narcissist
— she adopted a dog!’)” She also claimed the dog had had three previous owners,
which is two more than the animal shelter said. She went on to deploy the mutt
as an adorable prop at photo shoots and red carpets. Who doesn’t love a person
who loves a dog?
Just as Girls
was wrapping up its HBO run, though, Dunham unloaded the animal on Zen Dog, a
Los Angeles home for troubled canines, claiming that her ex-pet had been a
little monster beset by “aggression” and “particular issues, which remain
myriad,” adding that Lamby “ruined floors and couches and our life.” Yet one of
her chief takeaways from L’Affaire Lamby
was, naturally, the importance of “forgiving myself.”
Robert Vazquez, a spokesman for the place where Dunham
purchased the animal, BARC, a Brooklyn shelter for hipster dogs who are down on
their luck, did not buy much of this. In an e-mail to Yahoo Celebrity, he
disputed her claims that Lamby had had three previous owners, that he’d been
abused, and that he had behavioral problems when she adopted him:
We checked the records for Lamby.
He was “owner surrendered, not enough time,” so we do not know where she got
“multiple owners that abused the dog.” . . . When she adopted the dog from us,
it wasn’t crazy. . . . It’s just hard to believe the dog was nasty when she
took Lamby to every green room with her when Girls was still a thing 4 years ago.
Vazquez added that BARC’s adoption agreements require
owners who want to part company with dogs adopted from the shelter to return
them there rather than shunting them off on a third party.
Dunham fired back on Instagram with another post in which
she asked, “Why should this story be subject to scrutiny and anger?” In other
words: People mustn’t quibble with her version of reality, and anyone who does
so is angry, which is a favorite
Millennial method for sliming your detractors as not-nice. Very much like
Hannah Horvath, she added that she was the real victim here: “I hope those
judging can imagine the incredible pain of letting go of your favorite creature
on EARTH because you know you can’t help them be healthy and happy.” She also
suggested that those drawing attention to her evident disregard for the truth
were themselves suffering from some sort of psychological malady: “I know I’m a
lot of fun to place your issues on, but I won’t let anyone hang their hat on
this peg.”
Dunham complains, not without some justification, that
her every public act seems to cause a tiny furor. “I have weathered a lot of
micro-scandals,” she noted on Instagram, “but this one hurts MOST.” (More than
being criticized for smearing a fellow former Oberlin student as a rapist? Do
tell.) But Dunham evokes a lot of commentary from the public in part because
she invites it by so relentlessly publicizing every detail of her life — who
else blurts out 4,000 words for The New
Yorker about her relationship with a dog?
That her continuous self-chronicling amounts to
self-satire is what makes it completely irresistible. “I think that I may be
the voice of my generation,” Dunham’s Hannah says in the pilot of Girls. The voice of a generation
strongly associated with narcissism, shallowness, lack of commitment, chronic
immaturity, a co-dependent relationship with therapeutic jargon, and a tendency
to fall to pieces when criticized? I think she’s absolutely right.
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