After reading Filip Stabrowski’s article “New-Build Gentrification and the Everyday Displacement of Polish Immigrant Tenants in Greenpoint, Brooklyn,” I kept thinking about Greenpoint. Although I have always lived in Brooklyn, the only knowledge I have of Greenpoint comes from the occasional episode of Lena Dunham’s Girls. Not really an expert on the show, I decided to google the phrase: “Gentrification in Lena Dunham’s Girls.” It was my luck to find a blogpost entitled: “A Brooklyn Habitus: The Image of Gentrification in HBO’s Girls.”
In “A Brooklyn Habitus: The Image of Gentrification in HBO’s Girls,” the author writes that “it is important to note that Girls does not display any of the social and economic consequences for the displaced.” This is significant because Girls was/is a popular show that sets a certain tone and image of what life in New York City is all about. It depicts Brooklyn as a place for privileged white twenty-somethings who are immature and not ready for adult responsibilities. The point here is not to bash Lena Dunham. Rather, it is to suggest that by choosing to make a show so self-focused, Dunham leaves out a large chunk of background information that is integral to the description of Greenpoint.
Stabrowkski writes, “Since the rezoning, Greenpoint has morphed from immigrant enclave, where working-class immigrants could find work, housing, and social services, into a waterfront citadel, where economic and cultural elites produce their own landscapes of privilege and exclusion.” This line struck me as exceedingly appropriate after I thought about the Girls storyline. How many times do viewers find themselves annoyed (depending on who they are) with Dunham’s sense of humor or take on growing up? I wonder, how many times do the less-privileged scratch their heads and wonder how Dunham makes loads of money off of her awareness of her privilege?
This last sentiment can be felt throughout the blogpost mentioned earlier. The author says, “The series [Girls] occasionally points out privilege — often by making a joke about it — and manages to compose however fractionally its own version of Brooklyn’s gentrified habitus. From within the bubble of Hannah and her friends, the viewer sees the artist-hipster culture that leads to gentrification.” In other words, Dunham is somewhat aware of reality and yet, she chooses to mainly ignore the ethnic history of Greenpoint. For her, Girls is all about life in the new Greenpoint. For her, the neighborhood’s past is, for the most part, irrelevant.
Girls is not a piece of history and does not aim to inform viewers of what Greenpoint used to be. For me, this fact further emphasizes just how much Greenpoint has changed in the last twenty years. It is disheartening to learn that what was once a center for Polish immigrants has now become the setting of a TV show that sometimes satirizes the behaviors of its incompetent and privileged main characters.
Questions to Consider:
- Do you think TV shows are a good way to learn about the gentrification of a neighborhood?
- If you have seen Girls, do you think it does a good job of portraying the gentrification of Greenpoint?
- Do you think that Dunham should have explored the history of Greenpoint in Girls?
