Concerning "Girls"' Hannah's new job, Daniel D'Addario wrote this:
Hannah has taken a gig at GQ, where she’s explicitly told not to answer the phone giving the name of the outlet; she’s writing sponsored content for Neiman Marcus, those glossy pages in the magazine that look sort of like — well, Ray explains it best in the episode’s first moments. “It looks like a real article,” he says, “so they trick you into reading it, but then you find out it’s a paid advertisement, which is both morally and creatively bankrupt.”
It seems much the same as Adam’s anti-Gawker rant earlier in the season — a man hectoring a naif for not sharing his point of view about the idiocy of the media world. And Ray is sort of right: Hannah would never have been hired to be a staff writer at GQ. All the perks of her job — from paycheck to snack room — stand in for respect in precisely the manner she craves.
But Ray’s sort of wrong, too, about just how bankrupt the enterprise is — the twist is that all of Hannah’s colleagues working on the advertorial side are ambitious writers, who’ve been published in, say, n+1 and The New Yorker. Hannah undergoes a period of self-doubt as she wonders whether or not working full-time in a less-than-artistic environment will preclude her from doing the work she wants to do.
This is, rather notoriously, not a problem Lena Dunham herself has confronted in quite the same way in her real life. Though criticisms on these grounds have largely died down, it’s true that her path to success as a writer was smoother than Hannah’s because she didn’t have to consider financial realities to the same degree.
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I don't think it's about selling out, rather, about whether living in a way that doesn't make us feel especially spoiled actually fits sorta well with us. Anyone out there who is having to compromise themselves to get by, may have to deal with self-hate -- which, actually, I kinda doubt, because it's what the world expects out of us: none of us are all that special -- but won't feel like the world's radar is on them for living however they please.
I very much doubt that if you listen to how Lena Dunham describes her life, it'd be that she's just living it. Good stuff, of course; but you'll hear how she's been burdened, chastened, reigned in, as well. What we have to hope for her is that her strength to follow her vision isn't bested by her feeling safer, less abandoned, by subscribing her art to our expectations -- her character -- even truculently -- instantly dating a black man when we start pressing, for instance. She's doing pretty good so far.
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