One of the worst things about being a progressive and so being,
as progressives like President Obama and Senator Harry Reid have
from time to time claimed to be, on “the right side of history”
must be that you thus make it impossible for yourself to learn
anything from history. If history has a right and a wrong side—if,
that is, it follows a course of Marxian inevitability toward the
progressive utopia—then any social problems with their attendant
miseries that may be thrown up by progress short of that utopian
conclusion must simply be endured, pending the millennium. If we
are inevitably on our way to somewhere else, then the wisdom of
where we have been is no longer relevant and, like our forefathers
who discovered and formulated it, badly out of date.
Take, for example, the problem raised by Lee Hirsch’s
documentary, Bully. Mr. Hirsch’s heart-rending tales of
children mercilessly tormented by their coevals at school—two of
them are said to have killed themselves as a result—cannot fail to
win the audience’s sympathy. All his moral indignation is focused
on mealy-mouthed teachers and administrators who, when they are not
denying that the problem exists, confess themselves helpless to do
anything about it. We share that indignation because we know, at
some level, that this is simply not true. It cannot be true. And
yet neither Mr. Hirsch nor anyone else in his film has anything to
suggest they should do about it, apart from getting everyone to
join in a progressive, feel-good rally with T-shirts and balloons
saying “I hate bullying” or words to that effect.
Older folks, of course, can remember when nearly everyone knew
what to do about bullying. If it took place in the presence of a
teacher or adult authority figure—as does the only example Mr.
Hirsch is able to catch in his lens, which takes place on a school
bus—then the adult authority figure can take a break from driving
or whatever else he may be doing at the time and give the bully a
good belt around the ear-hole. If it takes place out of sight of
adult authority, as it is quite likely to do when authority is
prepared to stop it, then the only thing to be done is to fight
back. Or to get a bigger and stronger friend or relation to fight
back for you. Even those who are small and overmatched are unlikely
to be picked on if they are known to be spirited enough to stand up
for themselves—which is the origin of that old and not-quite-true
truism that all bullies are cowards.
The only time when this simple and now dreadfully outmoded
method of dealing with bullies is mentioned in the film comes from
the bigger and stronger friend of Ty Smalley, one of the boys who
killed himself. Trey, the friend, is a boy who by his own account
used to be a bully himself, and he speaks feelingly to Mr. Hirsch’s
camera about a time when he had offered to fight back against the
bullies tormenting his saint-like friend. But Ty had said to him:
“Trey, it’s not worth it. Be better than them.” So Trey was better
than them, and Ty died—killed by his own sense of despair and
helplessness rather than the bullies. Both boys internalized the
progressive imperative to believe that the only thing it was not
possible to do was the only thing that their grandparents would
have been taught it was possible to do. They will doubtless be
remembered, come that wonderful golden future when there shall be
no more fighting, among the pacifist heroes who helped to make it
happen.
TO ME, sex is an even more obvious example of how the wisdom of
the past is disregarded. It must be disregarded if we are
not to forsake our confidence in the benign but inexorable course
of history and its utopian conclusion. Like Bully, the new
HBO show Girls—which is, among other things, a brilliant
parody of Sex and the City—explores what its characters do
not even have the wit to treat as an intractable problem, but with
comic rather than tragic results. The show’s author and principal
character is a 26-year-old genius named Lena Dunham whose
feature-film debut Tiny Furniture (2010) was a sort of
prototype for the series and, like it, included some of the most
unerotic sex ever portrayed on screen. This is partly because Miss
Dunham as the series’ heroine, Hannah Horvath, though actually
quite pretty, has a short, pudgy body which she enjoys exhibiting
as a kind of token of the kinds of sexual humiliations to which she
sees herself as being routinely submitted. These, in turn, stand
for the larger, life-humiliations involved in her being unattached,
unlovely, and virtually unemployable.
In Girls, Hannah makes a joke out of her being the
voice of her generation—or a voice of a generation—but it’s pretty
clear that that’s what her creator is to the chickerati of the
media who have been queuing up to interview her. They presumably
understand that the appallingly brutish and unromantic sex Hannah
enjoys with her loutish boyfriend Adam (Adam Driver) depends
entirely for its humor on our knowledge that neither she nor any of
her friends has any but the foggiest ideas of anything better. They
don’t dare. Having been carefully protected all their lives from
the once commonplace understanding of the necessary connection
between sex, love, and marriage, they never think to connect that
connection, or its absence, to everything else that makes their
lives so comically miserable.
Miss Dunham, unlike her on-camera self, may know better or she
may not. When Tiny Furniture came out, she told Rebecca
Mead of the New Yorker that her character in that film was “like
me, minus a certain kind of self-awareness. She is one step behind
where I’m at, at any given moment.” But one step may not be far
enough for her to be ahead. Still, the excruciating humor of
Girls does not depend on her awareness of historical
contingency or the lack of it. It’s clear that her humor only works
in a world where it would be simply impossible for anyone to take
seriously the notion that sexual continence might have anything to
recommend it. Even the excellent new book by Elizabeth Kantor,
The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After, which gives
old-timey-style “dating” advice to young girls, daren’t go that
far.
Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times writes that
“‘Girls’ is unsettling” partly because “it is an acerbic, deadpan
reminder that human nature doesn’t change. There was a lot of sex
in the ’60s, but not much sexual revolution. For all the talk of
equality, sexual liberation and independence, the love lives of
these young women are not much more satisfying than those of their
grandmothers.” Feminism has taught Ms. Stanley thus to take for
granted the misery of the “love lives” of the grandmothers—and if
the latter have anything to say to correct her assumption, she’s
not interested. Revolutions, even not-very-revolutionary ones, have
no reverse gear. Ms. Stanley is shrewd enough to see that “the
depiction of slacker life in New York…could easily be interpreted
as a cautionary tale written by the religious right,” yet one
senses that no one she knows would dream of taking it this way.
To Emily Nussbaum of New York magazine, Lena Dunham
listed Whit Stillman as first on her list of influences—just ahead
of Woody Allen, Noah Baumbach, Nicole Holofcener, James L. Brooks,
and Mike Leigh. As it happens, Mr. Stillman (Metropolitan,
Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco) has a new
movie out called Damsels in Distress. It deals with the
same sad predicament of young women who, as the
feminist-progressive consensus insists, must deny their feminine
nature and take the historically male attitude to sex as nothing
more than an opportunity for casual amusement. Mr. Stillman—who,
many years before attaining his present eminence, wrote for The
American Spectator—is more obviously aware than Miss Dunham of
the extent to which “an atmosphere of male barbarism predominates”
on today’s college campuses, for his heroines actually set out to
do something about it. They see their task as “a form of youth
outreach,” somehow to re-invent courtship, love, and romance—and,
as in Disco, dancing. Damsels represents a
fairy-tale response to the loss of those social rituals to which
the sexual revolution so largely put an end. Mr. Stillman knows
it’s a fantasy, of course: a fantasy of a lost reality that he,
quite as much as Miss Dunham, can treat only as an ironic framework
for comedy. But as he told me, possibly ironically, when I spoke to
him about it, “That’s our whole game of fake irony.” Who knows?
Maybe it is Miss Dunham’s game as well.
