Girls, "It's a Shame About Ray"
Beat me with a stick, your sociology major, or your disputation about religiously consuming the polarizing Girls if you must, but like The Breakfast Club, Myazaki's features, and Tom Jones, Girls is a site for thematizing food on-screen.
In season 2, episode 4, Girls kicks off with a fancy dinner party at Hannah's (Lena Dunham) home, in a transparent effort to declare herself a real adult - one worthy of wine-accompanied entertainment - rather than the codependent college grad she is.She cooks Pad Thai and a Bundt cake for her friends and theirs'. In preparation, we see Hannah scowling at her computer screen - which presumably shows the recipe from an online source and meticulously cutting onions in her attempt to create an artifice that screams, "I'm a big girl now."
Her friends arrive in quasi-formal attire and play at adulthood together around a well set table. Here, food signals independence. An emancipation from meals cooked by your parents at home, or meals consumed in a college mess hall, or meals from take-out places in New York. The financial independence and domestic know-how required to gather ingredients and prepare a meal from scratch for, not only oneself, but for a dinner party is Hannah's interpretation of mid-twenties independence, even if she is a bit big for her breeches. It is the twenty-something equivalent of trying on mom's mascara for the first time as a kid.
I know I'm not being presumptuous here, because someone around the table criticizes Hannah's lack of grown-upness, and she meets the criticism with "Um, of course I'm grown up. That's why I cooked all this food!" widely gesturing to the meal with her arm. Oh, Hannah - always with the grand expectations and minimal self-awareness.
The food here signals not only an attempt at fostering one's adulthood, but a failed attempt, specifically. Her cooking does not negate her inability to pay the bills, or accept employment outside of her internship, or to resist the temptation to call mom and dad with the slightest problem. Hannah's meal is one that, to her, genuinely signifies her entry into being grown up but of course this signification is not enough. We, the audience, knows that. Poor Hannah doesn't. And this dramatic evocation, resonance, even irony, is conveyed perfectly by the image of food.
I love that you bring up Girls in your discussion on food onscreen. I find the 20-something's relationship with food so indicative of personality and currently places in life. I feel like young adults are often portayed in media as surviving on Ramen noodles/microwave popcorn (often spending lots of money that could be used for groceries at the bar/coffeeshop) until they're "mature" enough to organize their finances and start cooking real meals for themselves at home. I love that you point out even though Hannah isn't serving her friends instant food or ordering takeout it's a facade. She's not really an adult because she cooked dinner; she only wants her friends to think she's "made it", and will probably not cook dinner the following night when her friends aren't there to see it.
ReplyDelete(Out of curiosity, how do you choose which film, tv show or episode to analyze for the week? Did you recently see this episode or did it always stick out to you and stay with you?)
ReplyDeleteIt seems like her 'dinner menu' is somewhat chaotic too, pad-Thai and a Bundt cake with red wine in mason jars. As if by being focused on the details of preparing the meal she lost sight of the coherence of the dinner.