Hannah Horvath's Body

In the 2000 film State and Main, the harried film director (William H. Macy) is trying to get the leading actress (Sarah Jessica Parker) to do a topless scene. She's refusing, but she's done it before, and he's completely flabbergasted as to why she won't do it. After all, according to the director: "The country could draw her tits from memory."

State and Main was written and directed by David Mamet, funny enough, because I think about that line sometimes when I see the sheer amount of vitriol that has been spilled on the Internet regarding nudity on the HBO show Girls (which, of course, features Mamet's daughter Zosia). While the show has been generally frank-ish with nudity, save various leads whose characters mostly make love in their bras, the lion's share of the nudity falls to the character of Hannah Horvath, played by the writer/director/and creator of the show, Lena Dunham.

We can draw Hannah's boobs from memory. We know the way her body looks in many stories and iterations. She has sex. She makes jokes about her vagina. She has boobs. She takes a bath. Her body is noticeably soft. There are tattoos. As The New York Times put it in a "bye girls" thinkpiece, Dunham is a "body artist," and according to Manohla Dargis the appeal comes from "its insistence on Hannah’s slurping and blabbing, her inconsideration and periodic cruelty, her neediness and narcissism."

I have seen enough movies to know that Hannah is probably on or around my size. She has the kind of body where all of a sudden, she was the Large and the size 12 at the store, and sometimes the clothes look bad but to make an effort to up a size is just exhausting. She looks fine, anyways. If she is thrifting, there's not much in her size. If she is shopping at the mall, she's beholden to what is deemed large and what may fit.




But the collective “internet” (i.e., dudes, i.e., folks used to tiny, small, minute bodies) reacted as if she threw acid in their eyes. And part of it was weirdly true, in so far as an average American female - as compared to a professional working actress in film and television - comes off like a giantess, with their flesh seeming infinite. There are no straight lines to a body, and it is not the kind of thing that looks good on the screen.

If Hannah was played by a game and willing actress, she would probably be just as pilloried; but because Dunham is the brain behind the show, the "internet" can find something suspect in the nudity. Some sign that she is crossing a line by existing. She makes them so mad! The camera is capricious in what it likes, and what it likes in females is something close to a skeleton: which is why, women with oversized features (which also photograph well) and tiny bodies tend to be successful.

The insane vitriol that has been spilled towards Hannah's body has underlined just how ridiculous expectations are for women. (And for the purposes of this piece, I'd say it's the cultural expectations that white American women like myself are dealing with in this case. This subject is a big subject and I want to hear from others about their experiences.)

People aren’t familiar enough with the cruelty of the actual medium of film, what someone looks like on it (even if we have more access to images now than ever) to understand that the mean looks bad on film. Dunham occasionally wards off that cry on the show with some pre-emptive self depreciation, saying that she’s chubby, claiming that she is imperfect before anyone else can. I’ve seen the same rhetoric used on The Mindy Show. It bums me out sometimes because I never have seen myself as chubby, and should I even use that word? I feel proportional, I feel average-sized. When I am boxing regularly I feel strong and find the new muscles in my newly thick neck to be highly amusing. Those are generally the feelings I have about my body.

For nearly two years, I had a job where I had to attend roundtable events in order to write about new and upcoming films. This meant that I watched a lot of films, averaging one or two new films a week, and I would frequently be in the same room as actresses, waiting for them to talk in a midtown hotel.

It was, well, a year of realizing stuff.

When you have to watch a bunch of movies, all at once (and this was during the great recession, so pre-streaming ubiquity), one thing that comes up again and again is the very nature of bodies. Most working actresses had a certain body type that “looked good on film,” and what looking good on film meant was that their collarbones popped out and - if this was the sort of film that lingered on their body - you would notice the details. Their legs would go straight all the way up, as skinny as a finger, and you could count the knobs of their spine on their backs. These are whippet-thin bodies strictly made to capture the light correctly.

In these roundtables, I’d see the actresses in person, made up and wearing something provided by the studio, and so very often I’d just be struck by how small they are, how thin. How their bodies disappeared in space. Their physical presence was so regressive that I just felt like a monster next to them, twice the person, from a completely different planet. Sometimes I thought that this job I was doing would’ve been perfect if I was a twelve-year-old girl. If I could’ve had the chance to see - on film and up close - the actual physical requirements of being an actress, I would’ve probably stopped comparing myself to famous women, to hating myself and not eating in order to achieve some sort of bodily perfection, and from it, all good things would have flown.

As a slight aside: during the roundtable years, I had realized one thing - when Hollywood gets some sort of gross fascination with a particular actress’s breasts, it’s often that they have the heft of a d-cup on a very small frame. I have at least a d-cup but on an average American woman’s frame and it was a trip to realize that the proportions on me, which feel curvy but not like an exclamation point when I walk in the room, are pretty much the same proportions on whatever actress of the month who inspires weird and gross leering.

So there is a point to this, which is to say, literally every woman who is on a big screen is basically a size 0 - 4 at most (in fact, I remember reading one of those Vogue model interviews where she discussed being a size 6 as being “curvy” and everyone just finds her “very sexual” as a result). This visual limitation messes with our heads! When I had seen a recent award-winning film’s preview, my first thought went to how sickly the lead actress looked, how her clavicle shimmered, how I could count her bones; and yet when I saw the film in the theaters, it evened out - really it was HD that was the problem in this case. She looked fine as a theatrical presentation.

If these visual representations of women - sizes 0 - 4, visible bones, beautiful women, straining to work on the camera - are our norm in the television and on screen, then our expectations for what a woman should be when you see them in reality get all warped. What I know about brains is that we are simple animals on the face of it. We like the norm and the mean, and when something jams that idea, it can make our brain fritz.

Hannah Horvath made our brain fritz, and it's something that I admire and respect about Dunham's work. (Frankly, the likes of a Kim Kardashian does the same thing ... )The weight of a woman's body, what it means and what it indicates, is never going to be something that's simple. I've been surprised to see just how loaded it can be, still, when it comes to the sheer nerve of an average woman demanding to take up space.

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