Many missed ‘ voice of a generation’ joke
Dunham talks about ‘ Girls’ finale and the series’ lasting effects
Spoiler alert: The following story contains details from Sunday’s series finale of HBO’s Girls.
“I think I might be the voice of my generation. Or, at least, a voice of a generation.”
That’s the now- iconic declaration aspiring writer Hannah Horvath ( Lena Dunham), high on opium, made to her parents in the first episode of HBO’s
Girls. The line not only became a sort of thesis statement for the landmark Millennial comedy, but a label that many critics believed was Dunham’s own self- inflated view of herself. Five years and six seasons later, as
Girls came to an end Sunday night, Dunham says the way people have zeroed in on that seemingly throwaway joke has been slightly unfair.
“It was just always so funny, because we so clearly thought that was a true, comic line, delivered by someone who just ingested a massive amount of opium,” Dunham says. “I don’t want to be the person who is calling out sexism everywhere I see it, but it’s always a reminder to me how hard it is for people to separate women from their characters and their creations. Because I feel like there’s a very good chance that a male creator may not have been held accountable for that, or treated like they came out arms swinging, announcing that they were here to change the media landscape.
“It truly was a joke,” she continues. “I totally accepted it as something that will be somewhere near my obit or tombstone, but that is something I think about a lot, people’s inability to see it as the self- aware joke that it was.”
So, was Girls’ series finale in anyway a response to the backlash? The episode ended with Hannah breastfeeding her infant son, Grover, at a rustic home in Upstate New York where she is about to start teaching at a liberal arts college.
Being a young single mom — and a white woman — with a well- paying job, her own house and support from her parents is a fairly specific experience, meaning that Hannah was not ultimately supposed to represent an entire generation, as some believed.
Girls co- creator Jenni Konner says that Hannah is no longer narcissistic enough to think she can speak for all twentysomething women.
“It remains to be seen, but I think by going to teach, she’s not necessarily as arrogant as that,” Konner says. “She’s grownup a lot.”
Adds Dunham: “She’s realizing that life involves compromise, and there’s no way she could do the things she’s doing— having a child — without realizing that.”