Creative Non-Fiction (2008)

Lena Dunham, if nothing else besides a talented filmmaker and sharp-witted personality, is a young master of the alternative college comedy domain. She's barely old enough to legally cringe at the taste of a PBR, but has the incisiveness to relate the banalities of dorm living and all of the messy unpleasantness, absurdities, and sometimes even the fun that can accompany it without an ounce of sentimentality. Now that’s something to appreciate.




Her clarity is sharp. It's like you're watching a visual representation of her chatting with a friend, unaware of the audience beyond. She has a hyper awareness of her current station in life, even of her own physical self that's so upfront it could nearly be a picture of sheer banality. In her latest 60 minute feature, Creative Non-Fiction (2008), it would have been easy to veer off into the superficiality of a story plagued with college-aged ennui, and while Creative Non-Fiction is not as favorable as her short films and web series (there is too much interest in playing with the longer form here that her wit becomes diluted) it has a distinct Dunham signature on it, the kind that doesn't trick you into believing there's a force of magic behind it. No glossiness allowed. You get a peek at how people really look, right down to the pores of their complexions. Nothing pretty about that.

Possibly the greatest asset of Dunham's comedy is this hard embraced honesty that shows you just how things are, a picture of behavior so uncanny it can be dreadful to have confirmed as truthful. Her stories can shock so blatantly that now Pee-Wee Herman's right-on phrase pops into my head, "it's so funny I forgot to laugh." Its humor akin to that of The Office (BBC) particularly in those moments when David Brent (Ricky Gervais) makes a scene of such offensiveness you just want to pretend it didn’t happen. But in the end, Dunham’s movies never breach that kind of awkwardness, and stay happily camped out on the edges of good-natured snark.

Now that Dunham has graduated from Oberlin College—whose campus is a prominent set in her movies—Creative Non-Fiction is probably the last of her documentation of college life. Her next stage of features (and shorts, too), logically, I’d guess, those dealing with post-college career and relationship anxiety, should prove equally as exciting to see. Or maybe that’s a naïve way to describe it. Holding up a mirror to the different stages in one’s life can hardly be qualified as an “exciting” endeavor, I’m afraid. And there, that might be it: an incredible amount of bravery is injected into Dunham’s stories to confront what we really look like.

For the filmmaker herself, she’s splayed across the screen naked, partially nude, or scantily clad in plenty of scenes in many of her movies. Never have I seen a twenty-something so confident or at least so brazenly open on naked display. She’s not plasticky, not in any physical shape that reflects the values of Vogue magazine. You have to admire someone with that kind of audacity, whether it’s to give a proverbial finger to the accepted standards of female beauty, or just because she has no compunction about her physical self. Both are admirable motivations, but her interest in physical connections—make-out sessions, an impromptu strip tease (or strip-down, as it more aptly appears in one of her shorts), extreme close-ups of skin against skin between sheets—never resembles anything exciting sexually. In Dunham’s films, the body stands in on more clumsy terms; it’s just this thing we can’t get away from that so easily deceives what her characters mean to say.

That makes the whole college comedy thing sound heavier than anticipated, but that’s all painlessly rectified when we see how Creative Non-Fiction concludes on almost the same note it began: it is, after all, just another day in the life.