Post-Cannes "Famesick" Review
Byline forthcoming.
What has always unsettled people about Lena Dunham is not that she confesses too much but that she refuses to apologize for possessing a self substantial enough to narrate from. The contemporary woman is permitted visibility only on the condition that she behave as though visibility were an unfortunate administrative error. She may disclose pain, but only if she does so penitently. She may narrate desire, but only if she frames herself as its victim rather than one of its active, unruly participants. Famesick, Dunhamâs recent memoir and a New York Times bestseller, disregards these rules so flagrantly that the polarized reaction to it was practically inevitable.
The hostility directed at Dunham has always possessed a peculiarly physical quality. Critics have discussed her body as though it were an ideological provocation rather than an organism. One writer notoriously described her as resembling a âbig pile of pudding,â a phrase that reveals more about the criticâs terror of that they perceive as neurotic female flesh than about Dunham herself. Male artists are granted corporeal immunity. Their bodies may be ravaged, grotesque, diseased, addicted, even decomposing, without forfeiting their authority as thinkers. The male intellect is presumed to transcend the body that houses it. Women, meanwhile, continue to be treated as though thought itself were cosmetic â as though the legitimacy of their ideas depended upon the degree to which their bodies invite erotic consensus.
This is especially true for women who insist upon writing about themselves. Female self-attention remains one of cultureâs least forgivable sins. Men produce six-volume autobiographical epics and are hailed as visionaries of consciousness; women produce memoirs and are accused of narcissism. Watching reactions to Famesick, especially from other women, I was struck by how often the criticism amounted to an injunction against female centrality itself. Donât make everything about yourself. Donât discuss your pain too extensively. Donât insist that your perceptions deserve interpretation. Above all, donât appear insufficiently ashamed of occupying narrative space. We continue to demand that women attenuate themselves emotionally, intellectually, physically.
What makes Dunham especially difficult to metabolize is that she does not fit neatly into any approved cultural category. She is too earnest to be merely ironic, too intellectual to be merely confessional, too interested in difficult art to remain wholly legible as a mainstream celebrity. Dunhamâs world has references to Vito Acconci or Laura Albert that coexist comfortably beside reflections on Taylor Swift. This combination now appears anomalous because contemporary culture increasingly punishes mixed sensibilities. We prefer identities that are coherent brands rather than contradictory appetites. Dunham still belongs to an older tradition of cultural omnivorousness, one in which a person could be simultaneously highbrow, vulgar, ambitious, sentimental, and unserious without requiring ideological purification.
The memoirâs emotional center concerns the instability of feminine identity under conditions of scrutiny. Dunham writes about relationships structured by asymmetries of age, prestige, creativity, and emotional availability. The men in these stories are often less malicious than emotionally illiterate, trained to confuse artistic seriousness with personal neglect. There is a melancholy familiarity to her realization that what she required was not proximity to genius but a more emotionally present, openly affectionate kind of love. Contemporary culture remains strangely invested in romanticizing male artistic dysfunction while treating womenâs emotional needs as evidence of bourgeois weakness.
This context makes Adam Driverâs recent refusal to discuss the memoir at Cannes entirely intelligible to me. Many interpreted the gesture as a silencing of a female writer, but that interpretation feels too simple. Press conferences are exercises in message discipline, not salons. To discuss Famesick publicly would have meant entering a conversational labyrinth with no stable exit. Questions about television would become questions about intimacy; questions about intimacy would become questions about gender politics, diagnoses, bodies, aging actresses, manipulative directors, underage celebrities, internet misogyny, and the ethics of autobiographical narration. Any response risked sounding evasive, exploitative, or patronizing simultaneously.
There is also the peculiar burden now placed upon male actors to provide impeccably calibrated feminist commentary at all times. A man must neither objectify women nor appear indifferent to them; neither overexplain female experience nor retreat from discussing it entirely. The margin for rhetorical survival is vanishingly narrow. Driverâs preference for the term âactorâ over âactressâ struck me less as ideological triumph than defensive minimalism â an attempt to avoid generating still more discourse around categories that already threaten to consume the conversation whole. One can easily imagine the younger Driver attempting to reassure his mother at the outset of his television career with the strained confidence of someone who does not yet understand what cultural machinery he is entering: no, Mom, really, this probably will not involve me being cast in love scenes; I mostly like serious movies where people stare out windows and discuss mortality; there may not even be a love scene; yes, Iâll clean my room when I get home.
The memoirâs portrait of Driver is, in any case, more sympathetic than many summaries suggest. Dunham depicts a young actor anxious about the consequences of visibility before he possessed the authority to control it. One senses his fear of becoming trapped inside a single role, of television reducing him into an object of repetitive consumption rather than permitting the range he imagined for himself. There are anxieties about sexuality, seriousness, professionalism, and audience reception â fears that the show might become culturally larger, stranger, or more humiliating than intended. These tensions unfolded against the backdrop of Dunhamâs own emerging instability, her still-unrecognized psychological and physical struggles, and the inevitable miscommunications produced when two ambitious young artists are asked to simulate intimacy for public consumption.
What survives these recollections is not scandal so much as awkwardness â and awkwardness is one of the few experiences contemporary culture has lost patience for. We prefer villains and victims because they are easier to monetize morally. But Famesick repeatedly insists upon the humiliating ambiguity of ordinary human attachment.
Speaking about this book is somewhat complicated, and I suspect part of the sympathy many viewers still feel toward Dunham originates in the particular emotional texture of her work on Girls. There is something strangely moving about a person attempting to document a relationship that emerged in the aftermath of another, seemingly traumatic one among her familiar social orbit, with Adam Driver ultimately cast into the role of counterpart. He was never presented as a conventional romantic hero, nor did the series particularly desire him to be one. Yet the detail I cannot stop thinking about remains the funniest and perhaps the most revealing: Dunham sitting on a kitchen counter eating vanilla ice cream, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she has what appears to be the finest vanilla bean-flecked product in the state of New York standing naked directly in front of her. The scene captures the peculiar chemistry that made their performances memorable in the first place â not fantasy, exactly, but an awkward, hyper-observed intimacy that felt recognizably human.
My first exposure to Dunham and Driver together came not through Girls but through outrage over a Vogue photoshoot. Commenters accused her of fraudulence because the images had been retouched â as though retouching were not the fundamental operating principle of fashion photography. The fury seemed disproportionate even then. People were not angry that the magazine manipulated the images; they were angry that Dunham had entered the symbolic territory of glamour at all. Certain women are allowed to be desirable. Others are allowed only to comment on desirability from a safe intellectual distance. Dunhamâs offense was insisting, however ambivalently, upon occupying both categories at once.