[ed. I'm late to the Lena Dunham party but have been binge-watching Girls lately and she's wonderful.]
Lena Dunham had a panic attack last night. The actor/writer/director/producer started to tot up her advancing years, and before she knew it, she was measuring out her grave. "I thought, in two and a half years I'll be 30, then 10 years from that I'll be 40, then 10 years from that I'll be 50." She shudders to a halt. Is she genuinely worried? "All the time. It's why I don't sleep at night."
Nobody in the 21st century has done angst quite like Dunham. The angst of being unloved, undesired, unattractive, unpopular, unsuccessful. The irony is that, at 27, she has been named as
one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world, signed a
$3.5m book deal, completed her third series of the TV comedy
Girls and has a rock star boyfriend.
Girls is funny, filthy, disturbing and acute. Dunham has taken Sex And The City and refashioned it for an age of eternal internships, dysfunctional relationships and middle-class disappointment. Whereas Sex And The City is aspirational – desirable women, designer wardrobes, glamorous jobs – nobody would want to be Dunham's character, Hannah, in Girls. Her clothes are scruffy and stained, her brilliant career is stymied, OCD blights her life and the men she meets are more rapists than dreamboats. Hannah is the ultimate un-American heroine.
Girls is Sex And The City when the recession has bit, the world looks bleak and dreams have turned to dust. It focuses on the lives of four girls in Brooklyn, New York, where Dunham lives. Three are conventionally attractive, if angsty in their own way, but it is Hannah who is the really interesting one – an aspiring writer desperate to expose herself to any possible experience to make her work more real, but equally desperate for regular love and safety. Hannah often hangs around in knickers and vest, exposing body and soul. She is as self-obsessed as she is self-loathing, socially gauche (at one job interview, she makes a joke about her would-be boss being a date-rapist) and frequently humiliated (her boyfriend sends her a photo of his penis, then apologises because it wasn't meant for her). And we root for her all the way.
We meet at a restaurant in Los Angeles, where she edits Girls. I don't recognise Dunham at first, and am not sure why. She's certainly more elegant than Hannah – she doesn't dress as loudly or look as bulky – but there's something else. Then it strikes me. I don't recognise her with her clothes on. So often in Girls, she's stripped to her tattoos or less, and here she is fully covered: stripy blue and white T-shirt, chic red cardigan, leggings and boots. The tattoos – garish, inky and prison-like – say a lot about Dunham. She got her first at 17, as a mark of her womanly independence, and yet they are illustrations of her favourite childhood books (
Eloise on her back,
Ferdinand the bull on her shoulder). She laughs when I tell her I didn't recognise her with clothes on, and admits that covering up has become a disguise. "My tattoos are the main way people recognise me if I'm out."
Dunham's success is an astonishing story, not least as an example of self-actualisation. The girl who ransacked her own life to write a warts'n'all TV show about a girl desperate to become famous by writing a warts'n'all book about her own life becomes world famous in the process.
I tell her I imagine she was a hyperactive child, forever on the go. No, she says, anything but. "I was a really lazy kid. I almost never left the house. If it was a weekend, I wouldn't even go outside, because I hated going in the park, hated doing any sports, hated walking around, hated doing almost everything. I liked to read and watch TV." Both her parents are artists and she was fascinated by their world.
Was she confident? "In a sense, yes, but I didn't have that many friends. I just talked a lot. I talked before I walked. I talked to myself, my parents, my babysitter, my little sister, the doctor, whoever was there. But I didn't have a tremendous amount of friends until high school." She says it was partly because she didn't want them and partly because they didn't want her. "I was pretty annoying. Looking back, I was a know-it-all."
What was the most annoying thing about her? "I'm not saying I was smarter than other kids, but I wanted to talk about what I wanted to talk about, and I wasn't interested in meeting anybody halfway. I remember being on play dates and not feeling there was a sympatico between us, then going home and hanging out with my parents and feeling, well, this is what's fun, this is what's interesting to do."
The waiter arrives. She's on first-name terms with him and orders fruit and yoghurt, and orange juice. Hannah is more of a macaroni cheese and cheesecake girl.
In her teens, Dunham went to Saint Ann's, a school in Brooklyn that specialises in the arts. There, she met Girls co-star
Jemima Kirke, and came out of her shell. "It was an amazing place, like a home for wayward children." Was she regarded as wayward? "No, I think maybe eccentric and slightly difficult. I was never a bad kid, I just wasn't necessarily doing my work as I was told to or connecting perfectly with my peer group."
Was she better behaved than Hannah? "Ummm, yes." Actually, she says, when she did try to act properly wayward, she was useless. In one episode of Girls, Hannah takes cocaine and makes a night of it. When Dunham dabbled, it was a different story. "I tried coke, but was a total failure. I snorted a little bit, then always sneezed. It was sadder than having not tried drugs, in that I tried drugs and failed at trying drugs."
Dunham often sounds like an eager-to-please teenager, her voice rising at the end of sentences, so that statements become questions. But her actual words belie that: confident, considered, wise beyond her years.
Allison Williams, who plays Hannah's friend Marnie in Girls, once said Dunham "has the soul of a wonderful 85-year-old man".
After school, Dunham studied creative writing at Oberlin, a liberal arts college. By the age of 20, she was writing, directing and appearing in short films featuring characters that bore an uncanny resemblance to herself: schlumpy, neurotic, funny, and so uncool they were cool. Within two years of graduating, she had made
Tiny Furniture, her first full-length feature film.
Dunham's work is like a Russian doll of self-reference. Each project seems like a more ambitious version of the previous one. Hannah is based on the short period in Dunham's life when she was in a rut, unable to realise her ambitions, working dead-end jobs, falling out with friends, falling in with dodgy men. In Tiny Furniture, made when she was 23 and featuring her real-life mother and sister as her fictional mother and sister, Dunham's self-abasing Aura is a template for Hannah. Aura goes even lower than Hannah, allowing a man she fancies to have sex with her in a drainpipe on a construction site. Tiny Furniture in turn references a video Dunham made as a student, called The Fountain, in which she strips to her bikini, climbs into a college fountain, bathes in it and brushes her teeth. This video marked the emergence of Lena Dunham – it received more than 1.5m hits on YouTube, with thousands of bruising below-the-line comments, some versions of which made their way into the film ("Look, whales ahead!" "What a blubber factory!" "No, her stomach isn't huge, it's just that her boobs are really small – it's an optical illusion"). After the fountain episode, her character's boyfriend says that while he wants to get naked in front of people who want to see him naked, she wants to do it in front of people who don't want to see her naked. Dunham is part Woody Allen, part Nora Ephron (whose screenwriter mother told her, "Everything is copy").
In Girls, Hannah tells a friend that she's immune to insults, "because no one could ever hate me as much as I hate myself, OK? So any mean thing someone is going to think of to say about me, I've said to me, about me, probably in the last half-hour." By way of comfort, her friend offers, "You think everyone in the world is out to humiliate you. You're like a great big ugly psychotic wound." Girls, especially the first series, does not hold back.
Doesn't she get confused between herself and her characters? "I don't," she says with surprising certainty, through a mouthful of berries. "Other people do. Sometimes, the other cast members will call me Lena within the scene." In fact, what disorients her now is not so much the similarities between herself and Hannah as the differences. "It's confusing that I'm playing a character who's unable to assert herself and unable to get traction with her work and unable to be clear about her creativity, and yet at the same time I'm also writing, directing and acting in the show. It's strange to be in the meek, confused stressed-out skin of Hannah, then have to move into orchestrating the performances."
She stares at the massive plate in front of her ("Tell me if there's any of my fruit you want. I've over-fruited"), juggling with the real and the unreal. The more she writes, the less she trusts her ability to sift fact from fiction, and the less it matters to her: "It starts being about emotional truth." The most bewildering thing, though, she says, is her inability to distinguish real life from a TV studio. "At the end of a day's shooting, I don't know what's going on. I go to bed and I'm seeing a boom operator with a boom pole above my bed, and I close my eyes and think I have to do another take of sleeping, that first take wasn't good." I assume she's joking, but she isn't. "I still think I'm in the show, in bed getting filmed, acting as if I'm sleeping."
One of the radical aspects of Girls is how much time Hannah does spend in bed: mooching, writing, sleeping, having bad sex, occasionally having good sex. A number of young women who adore Girls tell me how surprised they are at how often Hannah is naked or near enough. I ask if she's an exhibitionist. Her voice tightens slightly. "I've always fought against that label, because it seems so simplistic and it has such a sexual connotation to it. I'm sure it must be perceived in that way, and it wouldn't be an inaccurate thing to say, but that's not how I was thinking about it when I did it."
In the past, she has said her interest in exposing herself is rooted in anything but self-confidence. In fact, there seems to be an element of masochism in it; an invitation for others to abuse her. She smiles. "Well, a lot of my parents' friends were performance artists, so I think I just understood that the body could be a tool in that exploration."
The only scene that embarrassed her is one in which she played table tennis topless with a new boyfriend. "It was one of the first times in the show that nudity had felt like it was supposed to be fun and cute and sexual. It wasn't a comfortable space for me to occupy. I have an easier time playing romantic rejection than playing loving situations. I have an easier time playing humiliating nudity than playing sexy nudity. I think it's because there's something really vulnerable…" She prods at the plate with her fork as she attempts to complete the sentence. "See, I'm stabbing a melon as I say this… I think there's something really vulnerable about the earnest emotions that come with being in love or being attracted to somebody that are anxiety-inducing to play, whereas there's the armour of humour and relatability to that other stuff that makes it easier to do. The times I'm embarrassed are when I'm writing about loving situations and romantic moments, rather than totally degrading sex and looking bad in your underwear." So she's happy only when she's playing unhappy? "Yeah, it's true! It's really complicated."
Image: Girls
