Lena Dunham and the inevitable demise of the bunny-boiler
You know what, Adam, it’s really liberating to say no to s**t you hate,” Hannah tells her on-off boyfriend in the current series of Girls. Lena Dunham, 27, who plays Hannah and writes, directs and produces the hit HBO show, has said that she wants the characters to “feel real”. Indeed, it was Hannah’s masochistic fixation on Adam in the first series that provided one of the most unsettling and “real” mirrors of a generation of young women.
Hannah is both passive and predatory. She tells her friend Marnie while strolling down the street: “So I texted Adam about tonight and I have not heard anything back.” Marnie replies: “Hannah, look at me. He never, ever texts you back.” After thinking for a moment or two, Hannah says: “Maybe I should call him.” The image of the woman waiting by the phone is a staple of popular culture, from Carrie Bradshaw pontificating on why Big hasn’t called her in Sex and the City, to the huge black cordless telephone that looms in shot like a monumental sky-scraper as Cher waits to hear from Christian in the 1995 film Clueless. To wait is a traditionally female occupation; it means being subject to another’s will.
In my new novel, Eat My Heart Out, the main character AnnMarie cannot be bothered to wait for Vic, with whom she has had a doomed one-night stand. She bombards him with e-mails, long musings on the nature of love and its mythic origins in Plato. Finally, she turns up at Vic’s house at five in morning. “Why didn’t you reply to any of e-mails, Vic?” she demands. “Those were messages in a bottle, Vic. They were sent in faith, Vic, faith. Do you know what faith is?”
“You’re a bunny boiler, that’s why,” says Vic.