It’s fair to say as well that unless your politics fall within a certain spectrum accepted by the majority, audiences are also not going to want to see it in a movie. Usually, only when a delicate subject has evolved into a moot point does Hollywood venture to summarize the crisis with melodramatic performances and life lessons. Exploring a hot-button issue while it is contemporary is a no-no and criticizing America is generally the nightshade in what constitutes “box office poison.” Going further, if you intend to take a stand against American hypocrisy and frame your frightening dystopian hypothesis within a pseudo-documentary format, you’ll really be pushing it— in the case of Punishment Park, you’ve pushed your release date thirty years, which was how long the film was banned in America.

Made in 1970, the film is very guilty of being of its time. We’re talking Weather Underground, Black Panthers, COINTELPRO, Vietnam, the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, Kent State shootings, the hyper-politicization of America’s youth and minorities, and the great divide that stretched between those who thought America was the best of all possible worlds and those openly advocating social revolution. There were no two ways of seeing— there was one or the other, and the other was immoral. Were kids who forcibly shut down a draft board office heroes or traitors? In such hotheaded circumstances, objectivity was the last thing on anyone’s mind.

Punishment Park takes an authentic piece of legislation— the 1950’s McCarran Internal Security Act, which authorizes detention for disloyal or subversive persons in times of war or internal security emergency— and examines the theoretical consequences should this law be enforced. As the narrator of the film explains in the opening shot of an American flag flapping in the desert:

The President…is authorized without further approval of Congress to determine an event of insurrection within the United States and to declare the existence of an internal security emergency. The President is then authorized to apprehend and detain each person as to whom there is reasonable ground to believe probably will engage in certain future acts of sabotage. Persons apprehended shall be given a hearing without right of bail, without the necessity of evidence and then shall be confined to places of detention.

This narrator is a member of a West German/ British “documentary” team covering the trial of accused subversives as well as the punishment of another group. Over the course of three days, defendants are brought before a citizens’ tribunal where they attempt to justify the morality of their actions (there being no tangible evidence they are a genuine, violent threat, their charges are based on words, ideas, abstracts) and are even offered in some instances to recant their beliefs by signing loyalty oaths to the government.

Scenes from this trial are intercut with coverage of a group of prisoners struggling through ‘Punishment Park,’ an area in the California desert, where prisoners can win their freedom if they “capture the flag.” The flag they are to reach is 53 miles from their starting point. If that weren’t challenging enough, the detainees are sent into the desert with no food or water in stifling meteorological conditions, all the while being pursued by police and National Guard troops, hunted if you will. The park serves a two-fold purpose: it becomes a training exercise for troops as well as a “punitive” trial for “subversives.” Moreover, if some dissidents are killed in pursuit, their deaths save the taxpayers money and keep prisons a little less crowded. If convicted, they are “criminals” and thus their worth as human beings has become negligible.

The accused standing trial are a motley bunch: white and black, male and female, hairy, bearded, bell-bottomed, yet bespectacled and somber, suggesting intellectual habits. The defendants are not garden-variety hippies or armchair revolutionaries. Leroy Brown is an author, broadcaster, and political activist. Jay Kaufman is co-founder of the Committee Against War and Repression. James Arthur Kohler is a conscientious objector. These people are organizers, pamphleteers, and pacifists. It is they who provide the intellectual arguments of protest. Prosecution makes perfect sense in this context. Cutting off the head is pure Machiavelli.

On the other hand, the tribune is entirely white with but a single woman affecting the demographic singularity. None of them is an elected official. They are amateurs working in a jurisprudential capacity wielding indiscreet judgments on lifestyle choices eminently unfamiliar to their own, in effect running a kangaroo court or star chamber in which the game is fixed before it’s even started. It is true that they are generally older, though it’s not necessarily a generational gap thing— whether Frank Sinatra is more of a man than Jimi Hendrix, say– but rather has everything to do with preferred paradigms. After all, the soldiers and police who enforce the decisions of the establishment are the dissidents’ contemporaries and are very much of the opinion that the “criminals… get what they deserve.”

In the deliberations between the court and the accused, everyone’s talking, no one’s listening. The exchange veers dangerously between philosophy and churlishness. More than an authentic trial, the back-and-forth reminds one of bitter family spats, summed up perfectly when one tribunal member complains the kids could have used “less Spock and more spank,” a hit against the baby boomers’ parenting guru Benjamin Spock (who, incidentally, was a major figure in the anti-war movement and was arrested for attending numerous demonstrations). Because of their emotions they cannot rise to their responsibilities nor realize how hypocritical it is that they should imprison those who deny America’s claim to being a “free” country.

You could argue this is the filmmakers’ polemic. Or you might say Main Street is being defensive. Whatever the case, their inane remarks become fodder for the accused to define their dissent in very strong, if not poetic language. Leroy Brown, the black author, comments, “America is as psychotic as it is powerful and violence is the only thing that can command your goddamn attention.” Allison Michener, an activist, elaborates on this during her session, arguing, “People become violent when they are deprived of their basic human needs.”

In the field, the prisoners running for their freedom are tailed by the documentary cameramen who query them on their condition, disposition, attitude. A young man in a ragged shirt, dirty, bruised, asks, “If they kill me now what difference does my politics or any politics make? I’ll be dead.” Another prisoner on the run clarifies, “My view is not committed to revolution…it’s committed to sanity.” Was this sentiment not famously reconstituted by comedian Stephen Colbert when he suggested, “Reality has a liberal bias?” It is one of the field’s pacifists that puts the plight of the accused in the most accurate moral context when he says, “Right now, the honorable thing to do is to be a criminal.” It is a fair extrapolation: if the government’s laws are unjust and it cannot justify its wars or violation of civil liberties, then individuals who break those laws, whether it is draft evasion or persuasive agitprop, provide a moral counterpoint.

When the dissidents are running for their lives in Punishment Park, the narrative of survival becomes a treatment on the various approaches to protest. The prisoners quickly disperse into factions choosing very unique survival techniques: basically they can meet the system with violence or nonviolence. Thus philosophy materializes into a simulated environment with real life consequences. In very tense scenes in which police and National Guard troops apprehend the activists in various stages of flight, the answers prove disastrous. These are probably the very best moments of the film as they are rife with confusion, anger, desperation, and madness. The cameramen too, cannot remain neutral. They become hysterical at what they perceive to be injustice and spar with the police.

One speculates on the casting— these are non-professional actors working from an outline rather than a screenplay— were they chosen for their beliefs? The acting, if amateur, is good. It never feels put-on, even when the dialogue is occasionally outrageous (the character of Leroy Brown has two of the best lines in the film: “How the fuck are you gonna overrule the constitution, man?” and “You just want to sit on your fat dividend-drawn ass and draw dividends!”) Did the director play off the actors’ beliefs in order to maximize tension? (The Stanford Prison experiment was conducted around the same time.) There is an us-and-them feeling to the actors that is hard to fake. As far as pseudo-documentaries go, Punishment Park feels frighteningly historical.

In his closing statements, the defense attorney reads a quotation that best illustrates the inherent dangers the tribune is engaging with conviction and arbitrary sentencing. The speech seems straight out of Richard Nixon’s playbook: “The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting. The communists are seeking to destroy our country. Russia is threatening us with her might. And the republic is in danger. Yes, in danger, from within and without. We need law and order or our nation cannot survive.”

But it’s not Nixon speaking in 1970, it’s Adolf Hitler in 1932. Once a country begins cutting civil liberties in the name of national security, the consequences of compromise are far-reaching. As one of our founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, so aptly put it, “Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.”

What does it all mean now? Quite a bit, actually. The drama of Punishment Park is very much alive, more than forty years later. Guantanamo Bay remains open, an escalation of troops in Afghanistan is called a “surge,” and last autumn the police crackdown against Occupy protesters descended into brutality. A “terrorist” is still very much a catchall phrase for those who might try to fight the system, whether through violence or argument.

The director of Punishment Park, Peter Watkins, is an Englishman. A number of individuals were offended that a foreigner had the gall to dramatize our society in such critical terms. But someone’s got do it if we don’t. Dinner table manners be damned.

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Film exchange row was on Fourteenth Street in New York City, and with the reels under my arm, that’s where I headed. First I called on Empire Film Exchange. . . . The exchange was owned by Adam Kessel and Charles Bauman. There was the usual counter where the operators from the nickelodeons brought back the reels of the program they had shown to exchange for other reels to make up their next program. Empire had a small office for the bosses and a still smaller screening room where they looked at pictures they might buy. –From One Reel a Week, University of California Press, 1967.

Here is one of those nine photographs, and its possible, secret story.

She exists, now, in sepia. She is taking notes in the offices of the Empire Film Company in New York in a photograph from 1910, her hair done up in the style of the day in the years before the “war to end all wars” which, beginning just four years after this photograph, will claim over 15 million lives. His suit is too big. The sole of one of his shoes is exposed beneath the chair. He looks weary.

They are in the offices of Empire Film at a moment in time when there is not yet any such thing as a motion picture industry, but rather a diverse assortment of scrappy film productions companies—some very short lived—including The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company (which D. W. Griffith joined in 1908), Majestic Films, The Edison Manufacturing Company, The Duquesne Amusement Supply Company, The Selig Polyscope Company, The American Vitograph Company, and others.

There are so many details in the picture, but which ones are important? Neither of them are looking directly at each other. He might be dictating; she might be taking notes. Or perhaps she is simply recording information, tallies of how many reel rentals there were this week, etc. Or there is nothing written at all on her pad of paper; she is posing, acting for the camera, just like the actresses in the films of the offices of the Empire Film Company. There is the carved face on the wall above her head. There is his seat cushion. There is the overexposed window behind him, which is open. There are many objects on the desk whose meaning can only be guessed at. It’s not fair that we don’t know.

Their story could take the guise of any of the film genres that guided thought in the 1910s and 20s. In the western he is the new sheriff and she his young wife, and when she sees a man’s throat slit behind a barn and the way he tries to hold his life in as it bleeds through his fingers something in her mind will become dislodged and even the act of acting happy will be impossible for her. In the train robbery version her husband will act the hero, stupidly, to the bandits (including a boy no older than ten) who are about to burst into the photograph from off-screen right and demand the cash from the day in the hidden drawer next to the man’s left knee. In the Civil War nostalgia film version she will treat the house slave with unexpected compassion, subtly reinforcing the fact that she, the mistress of the house, has the power to confer such compassion. In the domestic melodrama version she will be the mistress, seated in the very chair where he first fell in love with her, the light coming in from the window at frame left illuminating her face in such a way that makes us wonder even now, over one-hundred years later, what she is thinking about.

There are the moments after this photo was taken, moments that while lost to documented reality exist nonetheless. In these, after the photographer is satisfied and wipes the sweat from his brow, the woman will throw her hands to her mouth in laughter. Her brother (his name, let’s say, is Edward), seated opposite her, will laugh also, because this is what they have always done; this is their way. She laughs and then he laughs. Sometimes they don’t even know why. No, wait: he knows why. When she (her name is Evelyn) was a girl, she nearly died of scarlet fever, the rash slowly spreading from her neck to arms to back as if she were being consumed by her very own body. He stayed with her for those two weeks (he was ten; she was seven), sleeping on the wooden floor beside her bed, and listen to her labored breathing and the mysterious, incoherent phrases she would sometimes call out during her fevered nightmares. And sometimes, now, years later, when her face flushes in embarrassment, he calls her Scarlet, and she smiles and laughs. And then he laughs. It is these small, private exchanges that—in a way that even he himself does not fully understand—give order to his life.

But there is also a darker version of events, one in which Evelyn never wakes up from the scarlet fever, and Edward, perhaps too sensitive to the tragedies of this world, as if even the sight of broken-winged sparrow fluttering in the street gutter would tinge his day with sadness, never recovers from the loss. Oh, he appears to. And in this version of the story the woman in the photograph is not his sister at all, but rather some other person, hurried in from the outer offices of The Empire Film Company to fill the seat. And even at the moment this picture is made, Edward can feel himself being torn between two possibilities: the so-called real world and the world of magic cast by the very movies he has helped to produce.

The only book he has ever truly loved is Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, which he first read several years prior to this photograph, when it was still James’s latest book. And in that novel (whose words to him are like steel cage bars that either protect him from something terrible or else trap him away from something wonderful) one phrase especially has stuck with him: the darkening shadow of a false position. That’s how he feels now, looking at this photograph: that ever since his sister’s death (for she died, not “nearly died”) he has lived more and more comfortably beneath the darkening shadow of a false position. The false position of hope.

The most horrendous—but also the truest—version of what happens in the moments after this image was taken is that there will be a knife fight between them, whoever they are, and fuck Henry James, because this will be the real thing. She will strike first, out of lustful revenge (“You promised. I was the only one!”) and he will be wounded in the arm and leap out of his chair, scattering papers. He has no knife per se, so he reaches for the silver letter opener as she takes another jab at him, puncturing his leg. He falls back against the wall. A framed picture falls. She will shake her hair loose and for a moment it’s possible that, rather than kill each other, they’ll have sex right then and there. But then he lunges at her with the letter opener and punctures the soft flesh beneath her ribs. Her white blouse is stained in crimson blood (scarlet you might say were this the different version of the story) and she lunges right back at him and gets him in the same spot, beneath his ribs, and life leaks out of both of them now. And then, unexpectedly, she jabs him again, and again, in the same spot. It’s as if she has prepared all of her life for this very moment. In desperation he lunges for her in agonized fury and bites her arm so hard he breaks a tooth.

Just over a month before this picture was taken, a bomb destroyed the Los Angeles Times Building, killing over 20 people, and when he hears gunshots outside the window his mind is seized with the images of the mangled dead in Los Angeles, their severed parts in the dust only to be re-animated in the second coming (“He will come again to judge the living in the dead”) and this epiphanic moment of his gives her time to finish him off, to gut him like she gutted deer so many times as a young girl with her full-bearded uncle in Oneonta, New York.

There is so much blood now on the wall and the window and the desk and the floor that she slips. Somewhere, not far away, a camera is rolling and Edwin S. Porter is directing a scene from the short film The Greater Love. The earth passes through the tail of Halley’s Comet, and a woman in Philadelphia is said to die from the resulting cyanogen gas. President William Howard Taft has a nightmare in which the sheets of his bed metamorphosize into sheets of black quicksand that suck him into outer space. H. G. Wells republishes his story “When the Sleeper Awakes” which contains the lines “We have our troubles . . . this is a time of unrest.” There is so much blood now, even the sepia can’t disguise the color.

But the story doesn’t have to end this way. Why should it? It could end, instead, in the very instant it began: the precise moment of the photograph. There is no before. There is no after. There is just the forever now of this frozen moment, full of possibilities, when their eyes are always-already on the verge of meeting.

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***

“The dome guy” actually had a pretty colorful and intrepid name. Whether it was Richard Buckminster Fuller, R. Buckminster Fuller, Buckminster Fuller, or just “Bucky” — mention his name and most people will look blank until an additional qualifier is added: “you know…the dome guy.”

While it’s true that the geodesic dome — a pattern of self-bracing triangles that closely approximate a sphere, or partial-sphere — and the accompanying movement for inexpensive housing was his first major success, Buckminster Fuller dabbled in a lot of things. Under his Dymaxion brand name – a portmanteau of the words dynamic, maximum, and tension – he designed a house, car, world map, bathroom, and self-practiced sleep regimen of four thirty-minute naps a day. He published over thirty books, coined the term “Spaceship Earth,” and ultimately took to the world stage, lecturing about the application of science to solve the problems of humanity.

He was, in short, a decent inventor and engineer, but ultimately a much better self-promoter. He was a benevolent egomaniac. Because of his wacky futurism, the fact that many of his concepts never progressed past a prototype, his tendency for neologisms, his ultramodern worldview of Earth as a place with limited resources, and his push for alternative lifestyles, he was often viewed by the mainstream as a crackpot.

But to the Bay Area counterculture and communal-idealists of the 1960s, the 70-something-year-old man, who dressed almost exclusively in black suits and bow ties, was an icon. Despite never living in the region, it was here that many of his ideas were instantiated by “radicals” looking for a new doctrine to follow, and where his work continues to influence successive generations of experimenters.

It’s this local link that underpins The Utopian Impulse exhibition at SFMOMA (running until July 29, 2012), where Fuller’s work is laid alongside modern, local inventions inspired by his teachings, as well as backstory to his relationship with other Bay Area institutions, such as The Whole Earth Catalog — creator Stewart Brand apparently got the idea to petition NASA to release a photo of the whole Earth, after attending one of Fuller’s lectures while tripping on acid. Some of the links are slightly tenuous, some concrete, but it’s all a reasonable excuse to bring together a fascinating story that spans several generations, with Fuller’s genius as the centerpiece.

It is at this point that I must disclose a vested interest in the topic: my wife and I recently purchased a geodesic dome of our own in Sonoma County, but with little knowledge of Fuller or his philosophies. It was only after moving in that I began researching “the dome guy” a little more. An attempt to watch the unedited, web version of Everything I Know — Fuller’s 42-hour stream-of-consciousness lecture — failed after only 12 minutes, so I was excited by the prospect of a museum trip.

The exhibit showcases a lot of aesthetically-pleasing visuals associated with Fuller’s work, either his original notes and calculations, or derived graphic art by his devotees, as well as a 60-minute film from 1977 featuring some delightful insights into how his undiagnosed childhood near-blindness informed his later-life thought processes.

This, however, was all preamble to the improbable main event: a “live documentary” entitled The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Sam Green (The Weather Underground, Utopia in Four Movements), featuring an accompanying Yo La Tengo score, performed live by the band.

I was eager to see a modern interpretation of the day’s history lesson. After a brief introduction, the screen was filled with the captivating shot of a geodesic dome flying through the sky, its cover pulsating and flapping with the peristaltic motion of a jellyfish. The camera pulled back to reveal the source of its propulsion, a long cable attached to a U.S. Military aircraft, which then slowed and dropped the structure to Earth. A suited Bucky then seemingly steps out from inside and approaches the camera with a Hitchcockian menace.

The intensity of this grainy footage, featuring a real application of his domes — their lightweight-ness and strength made them especially appealing to the military, who deployed thousands — spliced together with Fuller’s own propaganda, was provoked further as Yo La Tengo took to their instruments.

And this is the live documentary — part slide-show travelogue, part TED talk, part concert. The traditionally-centered projection screen augmented by a band at house right, and the director at house left, narrating and orchestrating the event.

What’s interesting about the format is that, excepting petty breaks from the script to acknowledge obligatory represent-hollers from the audience each time a place name is mentioned, the live component initially seems unnecessary. The piece is essentially a classic documentary, so why separate the voiceover and score to be performed live? In fact, Yo La Tengo’s score was so accomplished and fitting that it, as all good film scores should, blended quickly into the fabric of the moving images. Aside from a couple of (enjoyable) volume-level freak-outs from the band, I kept forgetting they were even there, playing live. When I did remember to look at them, I wondered how they felt — it’s not often that the success of a popular band’s performance depends on not being distracting.

While the source of the music became effortlessly forgotten, the inverse was true for the film’s dialog. Having Green step up to a spotlit microphone moments before he was to speak each time, before melting back into the shadows to watch the next sequence, was as fascinating as it was distracting. In a way, it laid bare the filmmaker’s techniques. The timing and cadence of the storytelling was joined by his on-stage movements and, unlike an un-live documentary, I was consciously aware that he was watching his own work back with us.

And this was the critical difference. Even though the media itself could be combined to produce the same technical result, it was the not-usually-seen nuances of the “crew” that made the whole affair so intimate and powerful.

Green’s warm voice and obvious enjoyment at performing, conjured up the same abstract personal connection I get to a good radio presenter, which is not something usually invoked by film. And when Yo La Tengo did occasionally rise from the aural background to become the focus, well, it was great remembering that Yo La Tengo were in the room.

After a day immersing myself in the wild, but somewhat coldly analytical, world of Richard Buckminster Fuller through aged documentary and museum walls, it was Green’s less-informational, emotionally engaging Love Song that brought me closest to connecting with Bucky’s ideals.

For all of Fuller’s egotistical self-hype, and the modern-day criticism that his views were too anthropocentric, his objective was one of the truest forms of humanism: a belief that nature’s systems have already solved our engineering problems, and that the world has enough resources for everyone to lead a higher quality of life, it’s just an issue of distribution. Not many thinkers of his time were looking at the Earth as a single ecosystem, thinking outside of geographical and political boundaries, and advocating renewable energies and affordable living.

On a personal level, I’m just happy to be back in my dome, sitting writing this, with a fuller appreciation of the physics and ideologies holding up the roof above me.

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Like Tintin, I would travel the world with my faithful pooch; I would be the good-hearted scribe with an insatiable desire for the scoop, helping out myriad poor unfortunates along the way. I would bust an Egyptian drug cartel, recover the lost jewels of a famed diva, even journey to the moon. Ensconced in my mildewed tub, these 25-year old dreams regained all their power and separated me from my reality: I was in an MFA program in the deep south and that night like many others before I’d taught English Comp to disinterested freshman and then headed to the bar for a drink and instead had a dozen or more; I was blotto and disconsolate at home in my bath yet again having done very little writing or adventuring that day. The next day, having wakened with an irreducible hangover, promised to be much the same.

Despite my bath tub drunkenness I invariably handled the Tintin comics with care, always placing a towel next to the tub and drying my hands before flipping to the next page of the boy journalist’s globetrotting exploits. The books hold great value for me and I treated them as such—I own them all and have had some more than thirty years—though a few did get waterlogged. My childhood favorite Tintin and Cigars of the Pharaoh—the plot runs in a long and calamitous series of events involving gun running, a film crew, a cruise ship, mummified Egyptologists, and heroin smuggled rolled into cigars—has been replaced several times.

***

My parents divorced when I was quite young. I don’t remember much about it; some images here and there, flashes of light. Sounds. I remember the beach. We were living in the coastal city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia at the time and I do remember the beach. Before my mother and I left, she pulling me and our suitcases along to escape a shattered marriage and a place she despised, my father took me for a walk along the Red Sea. I imagine we said a gruff yet tender goodbye, that he told me to be a man and take care of my mom and other stuff a dad is supposed to tell a son should such a situation befall them. My mother was furious when he brought me back (we were heading straight to the airport) because I had somehow misplaced my shoes and she was apoplectic about the prospect of me flying back to America barefoot. I gather we ended up finding a pair like 4 sizes too big in which I duckwalked the Atlantic.

Their marriage was likely over long before this day of my sandy toes, but it sounds a telling event: my dad has never been big on such concerns as how others protect their feet. Looking at the timeline of it all, it was probably over even before I was born, and my appearance simply prolonged that last painful spell, but as my mother tells it, she left when she felt ready to leave. Part of her newfound willingness was undoubtedly courtesy my now stepfather, who appears in my memories around this time as a slim and dapper man smelling of cologne, wearing a safari suit and Ray Bans, with hair so perfectly coiffed it would make a newscaster blush. He is fond of the story of my first words to him: “Bruce, you have a very nice car.”

Bruce gave me my first Tintin comic. This was some months later with my mother and I back in the States, living in our house in Sterling, Virginia and he stationed in Beirut, Lebanon after completing his assignment in Jeddah. (My dad now disappears into a haze and is not fully recovered, with the small exception of another beach trip, this time in Thailand, until my early teens.) Bruce and my mother were still courting at this point and it behooved him to curry favor with her precocious child. He says he struggled to find an appropriate tack till one day when he was perusing a newsstand in Beirut and came upon a Tintin comic. He had seen Tintin years previously, in Algiers, at the house of a colleague with a young son and he thought they would be perfect for me. He was right. I couldn’t wait for my mom to get a package from Bruce in hopes there would be a new Adventures of Tintin comic inside for me. At this point I don’t know if you could even get them in the States. I certainly know they weren’t available anywhere in Sterling. Each time one arrived I read it immediately and read it again. Tintin and Snowy and Cuthbert and Captain Haddock became some of my favorite companions.

When a suicide bomber drove a van filled with explosives into the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983, 63 people were killed. My stepfather was not among them, though many of his colleagues were. He had left Beirut and flown to Athens to see my mother for a long weekend (I’m not sure where I was at this time, probably staying with a neighbor). That was when they decided to get married, and despite the conclusion of his successful and fortuitous courtship, I continued to get my Tintin comics.

***

I started thinking about Tintin again last winter when the trailer for the movie came out. When I saw it I was horrified. The thought that a child’s first experience of Tintin would be WHOOOSH! BANG! BOOM!, Industrial Light and Magic, CGI, Avatar crap in lieu of the profound (and quiet) joy I experienced with every Tintin adventure seriously bummed me out. I wondered how today’s kids could possibly develop a relationship like Tintin’s and mine under the pressure of an incessant barrage of light and sound. When I think of Tintin, I think of a seven-year old me turning my sheet into a tent, my bed into a ship; a boy alone in the middle of the vast ocean of his bedroom, the stars above his flashlight, imaginary waves lapping his imaginary craft, fully absorbed in Tintin’s every step. I do not think of the multiplex. It’s as if a mad love affair is reduced to the act of climax: there is no charm, no romance; there is only stimulation.

Around the same time the trailer for the Tintin movie came out my now ex was diagnosed with cancer. After several months of seeing her through surgery and chemo and crying in the morning, night, and afternoon our relationship fell apart under the relentless pressure and, having completely lost control over my own life, I made plans to leave the country. That I was scurrying ten thousand miles, tail firmly between my legs, did not escape me then and doesn’t now. Of course I wanted to do the right thing—but for who exactly: her, me, her family?—and damned if I knew what that was anyway.

I was scheduled to leave in June, but after multiple sessions of bargaining and begging (mostly on my part in futile attempts to assuage my guilt), the departure was pushed to August, then to October. Part of me wanted nothing more than escape, to open the next comic on my next adventure, banishing all past attachment and accompanying pain to the bookshelf, but unlike my pal Tintin I was entwined by the obligations of real life and flesh and blood counterparts. She and I had worked hard for the relationship—had plans, an agenda—and with the discovery of a small cluster of mutant cells everything changed and our possibilities were reduced to nothing. In the end she agreed I should go. I left.

We kept up through GChat my first month or so overseas, but those conversations inevitably turned to a stew of acrimony and accusation and we haven’t spoken since, which is probably for the best. I have no idea of her health and welfare, though I spend a lot of time wondering.

***

An occasional complaint about Tintin is that he lacks depth. He has little to no background biography, is emotionally flat and morally boring. He has no love life to speak of and only predictable and stale relationships with likewise one-dimensional characters. This criticism totally misses the point. Tintin is the perfect fictional creation for the imaginative young reader: the girl high in her castle tower, the boy in his secret jungle lair, me on my ship. Tintin is a world famous action star that his fans can instantly relate to without being pushed away by looks or age or muscle. He doesn’t kill, he doesn’t curse, he doesn’t drink. He doesn’t have Marlowe’s scornful wit or Bond’s secret number and charming misogyny. In this otherwise bitter brew of testosterone and rage, Tintin is an innocent existing in a whirlwind of synchronicity and delight. He is a character to be inhabited, not gawked at, judged or worshipped.

Perhaps if Tintin had to deal with the horrors of instant communication in the internet age—the complete inability to quietly separate—he would have been more neurotic, possess that desired depth of character, turning over past accomplices and adversaries in his mind. If he could feel the bite in his chest at the appearance of an unwanted email from an imprisoned foe, the pop of a lurid IM from a past acquaintance met in the lobby of a Bratislava hotel. But, graciously, Tintin has no past to mourn and no future to desire. He has no space in his mind outside of the moment and how to escape the forthcoming potentially fatal jam. Tintin exists only now.

Some have tried to mature the young hero. In his novel Tintin in the New World, Frederic Tuten gives Tintin the lust and depth he always lacked, with a healthy dose of Thomas Mann style bildungsroman. Judging by the reader reviews on Amazon, it was not a popular move. (I read the novel years ago, and can’t remember much, but I do remember I was thoroughly charmed with the update of my childhood friend—though, in some twist of ego-stroking masochism, I’ve read Magic Mountain twice.)

***

I’ve been in Vietnam about five months—escaping not only my personal life but the economic/social catastrophe that is my occupied homeland; I can get a decent job here and, rather sadly, enjoy a significantly higher quality of life than I can in ‘Merca (or can the vast majority of Vietnamese—simply illustrated by the fact that the house across the street doesn’t have indoor plumbing—I’ve quietly nicknamed them “The Buckets”—both for their toilet and my imagined picture of their bed, with the grandparents nose to toes and little Charlie in the corner eating gruel and pining away for his Golden Ticket). Whereas I was struggling in the States, I’m doing okay here, and, by virtue of The Buckets, have a much better idea of what that really means.

The only souvenir purchase I’ve made so far is a “Tintin in Vietnam” T-shirt. On the shirt, a jaunty and slightly blurred Tintin and Snowy are seen marching off towards the mysterious unknown captioned by the words “Tintin in Vietnam.” “SAIGON” is emblazoned in lightning bolt script on the back. Hergé didn’t actually create any adventures for his famous pair in Vietnam, but I tend to think Tintin’s sailor friend Captain Haddock—with all his sailor’s predilections to drinkin’, cursin’, and whorin’—would have enjoyed this town.

***

Basil, one of my coworkers in the Consular Office at the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, Syria, where I interned one summer in my early twenties, often called me Tintin—our hair cut and color, particularly at that time, are disarmingly similar. “Good Morning Tintin!” he would say whenever I walked into the office. “Where’s your dog? Where’s Milou?” (Snowy’s original name.) The one day I wore my “Tintin in Vietnam” shirt on the streets of the backpacker area in Ho Chi Minh City, I got several astonished looks as people made the connection between the shirt and the guy wearing the shirt. Yeah, maybe a little past his prime and sans white pup, but hey, could be… “Hello! Tintin in Vietnam!” with big waves and smiles.

We share a number of similarities besides the hair. We both like dogs, drunks, eccentric people of massive intelligence. We’re both well travelled, intelligent, always game for a new adventure in a far off exotic locale. Yet we’ve both been isolated by this constant need for movement, are rootless, and can only ever manage to maintain connection to an eclectic mix of a few close companions. We are permanently displaced by choice and by need.

Like it or not, it is clear to me Tintin has played a critical role in making me who I am. My career aspirations, my desires, my wanderlust. The increasingly faulty belief that I can actually get away from it all, start fresh—that flying across an ocean makes everything left behind disappear and that each new adventure starts with the first page and finishes on the last. I have wound up and down the Americas, Europe, Africa, and now Asia searching for the story that would somehow bring it all together, focusing a cavalcade of experience into a meaningful chunk of expression. Desperate, flailing attempts to make art from disparate bits of life.

In that I see where I have failed. They may be the Adventures of Tintin, but they might be more aptly called the Adventures to Tintin. Unlike Tintin, my journeys have always been almost totally self-obsessed—about me (or a narrator so thinly disguised) and what I’m doing and how damn unique my vastly experienced perspective of the world is. They ridiculously scold Tintin because he lacks self-consciousness, because he does not succumb to an awareness of his existential pain, but it seems to me he has it right—I no longer turn to Sartre for succor on a lonely night when the stars scream my insignificance, but I’ll take the juvenile possibilities of Tintin any day. If just for a moment to feel the bliss of inhabiting his life of mindful adventure, returning to my mattress as raft or deep in my tub, forgetting the hollow shrieks of the hollow child attached to the chemo drip, the strangely foreign faces of past lovers, the impossible work, an unfair childhood, those who are betrayed, hated, missed.

With Tintin there is certainty beyond death. He will escape, he will survive, and his scars, if any, will heal before the reader even catches on to the injury. He will not cry about his lot, beg therapy, or drown his sorrows in booze. He will not write bad poetry or get in a ridiculous bar fight that he may feel fresh bruises more keenly than past hurts. Tintin does not mourn or mope or rage for he knows that the next page will likely take a precarious turn and to lose focus is to lose everything. For him, like all of us, that is all there is, this moment and the next stretched out until the end. Yet, unlike us, he relishes it. While I run away to any outlet to mask my reality, Tintin continues without fear and without expectation. And I return, time and again, to the heat of the bath trying to forget that I have failed to meet his example yet again, where I lay naked and pruned before him, pliant and begging forgiveness.

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Shortly, after it began to gather a cult following and spawned video games, comic books, and musicals. Now more than 30 years later, Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, the franchise’s lead actor, are backing a remake by director Diablo Cody (Jennifer’s Body, Juno), which will follow the original story line closely while substituting Bruce Campbell’s swarthy hero Ash for Jane Levy’s female Ash and featuring a cast of young up-and-coming actors.

To fans this is as scintillating as it is confounding: Why not a sequel? Why proverbially fix what ain’t proverbially broken? Well, if news of a remake weren’t enough, Raimi also filed a lawsuit against the production company Award Pictures for planning a sequel.

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It is this sense of saudade that forms the emotional underpinning of the animated film Chico & Rita, the collaborative work of Spanish Director Fernando Trueba and prolific Spanish designer and artist Javier Mariscal. Like the feeling of nostalgic yearning itself, Chico & Rita is an immersive experience, with each of its parts acting in concert to create both a narrative and a feeling. It’s a love story between two people — you guessed correctly: Chico and Rita — but it’s also a love story dedicated to a fleeting time and place that gave birth to some of the most innovative and invigorating music of the 20^th Century.

Chico & Rita opens quietly in present day Havana – an anonymous elderly shoe shine man winds his way through shabby streets lined with buildings whose cheerful pastel exteriors speak to a time of former glory. The man reaches his one-room apartment, pours a beer, and stares searchingly over the skyline of the city as a radio program featuring hits from a bygone era transports his memory and the film’s setting to 1948. Pre-Communist Havana has been called the Caribbean Paris, and it’s in the midst of this energetic atmosphere that the story of Chico and Rita’s star-crossed relationship begins.

Among the hustle and bustle of Havana’s world-renowned Tropicana Club, Chico, a gifted and penniless piano player with a cad’s bravado, has a chance meeting with Rita, a singer with a sultry voice, a prideful facial expression, and a quick draw with sharp retorts, and in whom Chico immediately sees his ticket to musical success. The two have a series of enjoyable verbal sparring matches, finding in one another a mutually recognized passion for music as well as a fierce artistic ambition that each seems to believe can transport them to a life of fame and comfort. From the Tropicana Club, Chico and Rita embark on a turbulent personal and professional romance that travels the globe, from New York City, to Los Angeles, Paris, and Las Vegas, and which stretches across four decades, encompassing a range of successes and failures.

The film’s animation artist, Javier Mariscal, is perhaps best known for creating Spain’s design aesthetic and graphic identity in the post-Franco years, and while his drawings and illustrations have been central to his design work throughout his career, Chico & Rita marks the first time his artistic vision has been translated into an animated format. His animation style — as lifelike as Waking Life, but less realistic and more painterly — reinforces the emotional peaks and valleys each character experiences throughout the film. As Chico and Rita’s initial passion blooms, they’re bathed in warm colors, wide nighttime shots of New York City forgo the typical tendency to create an exciting city of lights and instead feature formidable buildings cast in lonely hues of blue, Rita’s vibrant yellow dress accents her fiery personality, etc.

Interestingly, Fernando Trueba doesn’t devote much time to or energy on developing complex characters in the typical sense in Chico & Rita, nor does he allow their relationship to blossom in any sort of traditional way —we know little to nothing of either character’s background, motivations, friends, or outside interests, and there isn’t an atmosphere of candlelight dinners, games of ten questions, or bonding experiences apart from a series of passionate moments of physical and musical symbiosis. Their immediate bond is as romantically mysterious as it is powerful. It’s almost as if they meet already in a state of saudade for one another.

In the hands of a lesser director, the lack of character development would feel like a weakness; however, Trueba’s encyclopedic knowledge of music (Trueba is also a music producer) comes to bear by using the richness and dimensionality of the improvisational expertise of artists like Tito Puente, Chano Pozo, and Dizzy Gillespie, to amplify moments of heartbreak, tenderness, and hope, giving depth to Chico and Rita’s experiences through musical narrative.

As the film moves from Cuba to New York, Paris, and Vegas, Chico and Rita are repeatedly drawn to one another, compelled by their romantic passion, while also repeatedly driven apart by their individual passion for music and dedication to their own ambitions. They yearn constantly for one another, while simultaneously longing nearly equally for personal success. Along the way, their talents, passions, and ambitions highlight issues of sexism, opportunism, racism, and xenophobia in the jazz-fueled music industry of the day. Rita’s signature voice, a mark of musical authenticity in Havana, becomes a fetishized signifier of “primitive” sexuality in the United States, relegating her to a category of tokenized fame. Meanwhile, Chico is literally sold by Rita’s white manager, who packs him off to Paris by way of Chico’s two-faced (or maybe desperate) friend and manager.

Though often painful and unjust, their experiences transform them. Chico’s bravado falls away over time to reveal the soft heart underneath, while Rita’s experience as a non-white, female musician in the United States gradually wears down her fierce pride, making room for the person she is beneath. And ultimately, they each undergo hardships in order to discover that sometimes you have to become intimate with the darkest of nights in service of the light that dawns on its heels.

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(Via Flavorpill)

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A television show about my twenties would follow the life of a girl who is lost, literally and figuratively. There wouldn’t be a laugh track. The show would open deep in my lost year—the year I drop out of college and disappear. With no ability to cope, and no way to ask for help, the main character—my character, me—is completely crazy. She makes a spectacular mess.

A lot happens in the pilot. About ten days before the start of Junior year, my character gets on a plane and abandons everything. She runs away to Arizona by way of a trip to San Francisco with a much older man she has only corresponded with via the Internet. We’re talking about the old-fashioned Internet, in 1994—a 2400-baud modem or some such. It is a small miracle she isn’t killed. She cuts off all contact with her family, her friends, or anyone who thought they knew her. She has no money, no plan, a suitcase, and a complete lack of self-regard. It is real drama.

The rest of that first season is equally dramatic. Before long, she finds a seedy job doing about the only thing she’s qualified to do, working from midnight to eight in a nondescript office building. She sits in a little, windowless booth and talks to strangers on the phone. She drinks diet soda from a plastic cup, sometimes with vodka, and does crossword puzzles. It is so easy to talk to strangers. She loves the job until she doesn’t.

There is an interesting cast. Her coworkers are girls who are also messy. They are different races, from different places, but all lost together. They give themselves names like China and Bubbles and Misty and at the end of a long shift they hardly remember who belongs to which name. My character has many different names. She wakes up and says, “Tonight, I’m Delilah, Morgan, Becky.”  She wants to be anyone else.

This is late-night television. Cable. China does heroin in the bathroom at work. Sometimes, she leaves a burnt strip of tinfoil on the counter. The manager calls them all into her office and yells. The girls will never rat China out. Bubbles has baby daddy problems. Sometimes, her man drops her off at work and the girls smoking in the parking lot watch as Bubbles and her man yell at each other, terrible things. In another episode, the baby daddy drops Bubbles off and they practically fuck in the front seat. Misty has been on her own since she was sixteen. She is very skinny and has scabs all over her arms and never seems to wash her hair. After most shifts, the girls go to Jack in the Box and then lay out by the pool of the house where my character is staying. The girls tell my character how lucky she is to live in a house with air conditioning. They have swamp coolers and live in crappy apartments. My character stares up at the sun from the diving board where she loves to stretch out and think, bitterly, “Yes, I am so fucking lucky.” She is too young to realize that, compared to them, she is lucky. She ran away but still has something to run back to when she is ready. My character doesn’t come to this realization until the season finale.

Every woman has a series of episodes about her twenties, her girlhood, and how she came out of it. Rarely are those episodes so neatly encapsulated as an episode of, say, Friends or a romantic comedy about boy meeting girl.

Girls have been written and represented in popular culture in many different ways. Most of these representations have been largely unsatisfying because they never get girlhood quite right. It is not possible for girlhood to be represented wholly—girlhood is too vast and too individual an experience. We can only try to represent girlhood in ways that are varied and recognizable. All too often, however, this doesn’t happen.

We put a lot of responsibility on popular culture, particularly when some pop artifact somehow distinguishes itself as not terrible. In the months and weeks leading up to the release of Bridesmaids, for example, there was a great deal of breathless talk about the new ground the movie was breaking, how yes, indeed, women are funny. Can you believe it? There was a lot of pressure on that movie. Bridesmaids had to be good if any other women-driven comedies had any hope of being produced. This is the state of affairs for women in entertainment—everything hangs in the balance all the time.

Bridesmaids could not afford to fail, and didn’t. The movie received a positive critical reception (the New York Times referred to the movie as “unexpectedly funny”) and did well at the box office. Critics lauded the cast for their fresh performances. Some people even used the word “revolution” for the change the movie would bring for women in comedy.

A revolution is a sudden, radical, or complete change—a fundamental change in the way of thinking about or visualizing something. Could one movie really be responsible for a revolution? Bridesmaids was a good movie, one I really enjoyed—smart humor, good acting, a relatable plot, a somewhat realistic portrayal of women in a cinematic wasteland where representations of women are generally appalling. Bridesmaids wasn’t perfect, but given the unfair responsibility placed on the movie, the burden was shouldered well. At the same time, the movie did not bring about radical change, particularly when, as Michelle Dean noted in her review of the movie, many of the familiar tropes we see in comedies and in the portrayals of women were present in Bridesmaids. She notes that the portrayal of Melissa McCarthy’s character Megan, in particular, treads familiar ground. “Almost every joke was designed to rest on her presumed hideousness, and her ribald but unmistakably ‘butch’ sexuality was grounded primarily in her body type and an aversion to makeup.” Within this context, considering Bridesmaids revolutionary is a bit much.

Why do we put so much responsibility on movies like Bridesmaids? How do we get to a place where a movie, one movie, can be considered revolutionary for women?

There’s another woman-oriented pop artifact being asked to shoulder a great deal of responsibility these days—Lena Dunham’s Girls, a new television series on HBO. In the past several weeks, we’ve seen a lot of hype about this show. Critics have almost universally embraced Dunham’s vision and the way she chronicles the lives of four twenty-something girls navigating that interstitial time between graduating from college and growing up.

I am not the target audience for Girls. I was not particularly enthralled by the first three episodes but the show gave me a great deal to think about which counts for something. The writing is often smart and clever. I loved the moment when Hannah (Dunham) is in her parents’ hotel room, and they’re reading her memoir manuscript. Her father says, “You’re a very funny girl,” and she says, “Thank you, Papa.” I thought, “I see what you did, there, Dunham.” I laughed a few times during each episode and recognize the ways in which this show is breaking new ground.  I admire how Hannah Horvath doesn’t have the typical body we normally see on television. There is some solidity to her. We see her eat, enthusiastically. We see her fuck. We see her endure the petty humiliations so many young women have to endure. We see the life of one kind of real girl and that is important.

It’s awesome that a twenty-five year old woman gets to write, direct, and star in her own show for a network like HBO. It’s just as sad that this is so revolutionary it deserves mention.

At times, I find Girls and the overall premise to be forced. Amid all the cleverness, I want the show to have a stronger emotional tone. I want to feel something genuine and rarely has the show given me that opportunity. Too many of the characters seem like caricatures, where more nuance would better serve both the characters and their storylines. Hannah’s not-boyfriend, Adam, for example, is a depressing, disgusting composite of every asshole every woman in her twenties has ever dated. We would get the point if he were even half the asshole. The pedophile fantasy Adam shares at the beginning of the second episode is cringe worthy. The ironic rape joke Hannah makes during her job interview in that same episode is cringe worthy. It all feels very, “Look at me! I am edgy!” Maybe that’s the point. I cannot be sure. More often than not, the show is trying too hard to do too much but that’s okay. This show should not have to be perfect. Everything should not have to hang in the balance.

Girls reminds me of how terrible my twenties were—being lost and awkward, the terrible sex with terrible people, being perpetually broke. I am not nostalgic for that time. I ate a lot of ramen during my twenties. I had no money and no hope. Like the girls in Girls, I was never really on the verge of destitution but I lived a generally crappy life. There was nothing romantic about the experience. I understand why many young women find the show so relatable, but watching each episode makes me slightly nauseous and exceptionally grateful to be in my thirties.

Every girl or once-was-girl has a show that would be best for her. I’m more interested in a show called Grown Women about a group of friends who finally have great jobs and pay all their bills in a timely manner but don’t have any savings and still deal with messy love lives and hangovers on Monday morning at work. Until that show comes along or I decide to write it, we have to deal with what we have.

As you might expect, the discourse surrounding Girls has been remarkably extensive and vigorous—nepotism, privilege, race. Dunham has given us a veritable trifecta of reasons to dissect her show.

Lena Dunham is, indeed, the daughter of a well-known artist and the principal cast is comprised of the daughters of other well-known figures like Brian Williams and David Mamet. People resent nepotism because it reminds us that sometimes success really is who you know. This nepotism is mildly annoying but it is not new or remarkable. Many people in Hollywood make entire careers out of hiring their friends for every single project. Adam Sandler has done it for years. Judd Apatow does it with such regularity you don’t need to consult IMDB to know who he will cast in his projects. The cast’s parentage is largely beside the point.

Girls also represents a very privileged existence—one where young women’s New York lifestyles can be subsidized by their parents, where these young women can think about art and internships and finding themselves and writing memoirs at twenty-four. Many people are privileged and, again, it’s easy to resent that because the level of privilege expressed in the show reminds us that sometimes, success really starts with where you come from. Girls is a fine example of someone writing what they know and the painful limitations of doing so.

One of the most significant critiques of Girls is the relative absence of race. The New York where Girls takes place is much like the New York where Sex and the City took place—one completely void of the rich diversity of the city. The critique is legitimate and people across many publications have written deeply felt essays about why it is problematic for a show like Girls to completely negate certain experiences and realities.

I say again: Every girl or once-was-girl has a show that would be best for her.

In Girls we finally have a television show about girls who are awkward and say terribly inappropriate things, are ill-equipped to set boundaries for themselves and have no idea who they’re going to be in a few years. We have so many expectations for this show because Girls is a significant shift in what we normally see about girls and women. While critics, in their lavish attention, have said Dunham’s show is speaking to an entire generation of girls, there are many of us who would say the show is only speaking to a narrow demographic within an entire generation.

Maybe the narrowness of Girls is fine. Maybe it’s also fine that Dunham’s vision of coming of age is limited to the kinds of girls she knows. Maybe, though, Dunham is a product of the artistic culture that created her—one that is largely myopic and unwilling to think about diversity critically.

We all have ideas about the way the world should be and sometimes, we forget how the world is. The absence of race in Girls is an uncomfortable reminder of how many people lead lives segregated by race and class. The stark whiteness of the cast, their upper middle class milieu, and the New York where they live, forces us to interrogate our own lives and the diversity, or lack thereof, in our social, artistic, and professional circles.

Don’t get me wrong. The stark whiteness of Girls disturbs and disappoints me. I wonder why Hannah and her friends don’t have at least one blipster friend or why Hannah’s boss at the publishing house or one or more of the girls’ love interests couldn’t be an actor of color. The show is so damn literal. Still, Girls is not the first show to commit this transgression, and it certainly won’t be the last. It is unreasonable to expect that Lena Dunham would have somehow solved the race and representation problem on television while crafting her twenty-something witticisms and appalling us with sex scenes so uncomfortable they defy imagination.

In recent years, I have enjoyed looking at pictures from literary events, across the country, wondering if I will see a person of color. It’s a game I play and I generally win. Whether the event takes place in Los Angeles or New York or Austin or Portland, more often than not, the audiences at these events are completely white. Sometimes, there will be one or two black people, perhaps an Asian. At the events I attend, I am generally the only spot of color, even at a large writer’s conference like AWP. It’s not that people of color are deliberately excluded but that they are not included because most communities, literary or otherwise, are largely insular and populated by people who know the people they know. This is the uncomfortable truth of our community and it is disingenuous to be pointing the finger at Girls when the show is a pretty accurate reflection of many artistic communities. Do we have any right to critique Girls when there’s so little diversity in a community that should know better and claims to do better?

There’s more, though, to this intense focus on privilege and race and Girls. Why is this show being held to the higher standard when there are so many television shows that have long ignored race and class or have flagrantly transgressed in these areas?

A generation is a group of individuals born and living contemporaneously. In the pilot, Dunham’s character, Hannah Horvath, is explaining to her parents why she needs them to keep supporting her financially. She says, “I think I might be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice. Of a generation.” We have so many expectations; we’re so thirsty for authentic representations of girls that we only hear the first half of that statement. We hear that Girls is supposed to speak for all of us.

There are so many terrible shows on television, representing women in sexist, stupid, silly ways. Movies are even worse. Movies take one or two anemic ideas about women, caricature them, and shove those caricatures down our throats. The moment we see a pop artifact offering even a sliver of something different, say, a woman who isn’t a size zero or who doesn’t treat a man as the center of the universe, we cling to it desperately because that representation is all we have. There are all kinds of television shows and movies about women, but how many of them make women recognizable?

There are few opportunities for people of color to recognize themselves in literature, in theater, on television, and in movies. It’s depressingly easy for women of color to feel entirely left out when watching a show like Girls. It is rare that we ever see ourselves as anything but the sassy black friend or the nanny or the secretary or the district attorney or the Magical Negro—roles relegated to the background and completely lacking in authenticity, depth or complexity.

One of the few equivalents to Girls we’ve ever had was Girlfriends, created by Mara Brock Akil. Girlfriends debuted in 2000, and ran for 172 episodes. It followed the lives and close friendships of four black women in Los Angeles—Joan (Tracy Ellis Ross), Maya (Golden Brooks), Lynn (Persia White), and Toni (Jill Marie Jones). I particularly admire how the show rarely made race its focal point. Joan, Maya, Lynn and Toni simply lived their lives. They were all professionals (a lawyer, a writer and secretary, a real estate agent, and an artist/actress/whimsy of the week), who dealt with job stresses, romantic troubles, romantic successes, new adventures, and tried to become better women. It took me years to appreciate Girlfriends and I’m not sure why, but once I fell in love with the show, I fell hard. Finally, I was able to recognize something about myself in popular culture. The writing was smart, funny, and the show did a good job of depicting the lives of women of color in their late twenties and thirties. The show wasn’t perfect but the women were human and they were portrayed humanely. Girlfriends is a show that never received the critical attention or audience it deserved but it lasted for eight seasons and still has a very dedicated fanbase of women who remain so relieved to see themselves in some small way.

What I understand about Girls is that there is a community of girls and women who are just as relieved to see themselves in some small way. Unfortunately, that community doesn’t include everyone who needs that relief. Realistically, it can’t but the fact remains that for many of us who watched Girls, who had high expectations, no matter how unfair those expectations were, it was disappointing to see yet another “smart” television show where our experiences were completely ignored.

Women of color come of age and have the same experiences Dunham depicts in her shows but we rarely see those stories because they don’t fit the popular imagination’s rendering of Other girlhood, which is generally nonexistent in popular culture. At least there have been a few shows for black women to recognize themselves—the aforementioned Girlfriends, Living Single, A Different World, The Cosby Show. What about other women of color? For Hispanic and Latina women, Indian women, Middle Eastern women, Asian women, their absence in popular culture is even more pronounced, their need for relief, just as palpable and desperate.

The incredible problem Girls faces is that all we want is everything from each movie or television show or book that promises to offer a new voice, a relatable voice, an important voice. We want, and rightly so, to believe our lives deserve to be new, relatable, and important. We want to see more complex, nuanced depictions of what it really means to be whoever we are or were or hope to be. We just want so much. We just need so much.

The desire for authentic representations of girlhood is like searching for water in a desert. It is a matter of survival, and also faith. We’ll die without water, but we know it’s there, even if we are surrounded by a billion grains of dry sand that all look the same. We know we’ll find a cactus plant or an oasis or that the skies will open with rain or that you can dig deep enough to find a small pool of water to quench an unbearable thirst. For some women, Girls is that pool of water in a dry desert of flawed representations of girlhood. For the rest of us, we’re still stumbling through the desert beneath the burning sun. We’re waiting. We don’t have much faith left.

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“Don’t be fooled by THE ARTS! They’re no big deal; certainly no excuse for people acting like jerks & by that I mean, so what if up till now there were very few women artists. There may have been women far deeper than, say, Mozart or Da Vinci but contributing their genius in a different socially circumscribed context.”

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“I’m not going to call what I attempted an experiment, exactly, but I did very much set out to develop this way of conveying experience that didn’t filter anything through the use of metaphor or the language of symbols.”

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