Donald Trump, Lena Dunham, and Why the ‘Persona’ is a Bad Fit For Politics
Evergreen caption: Lena Dunham has apologized. Image by Getty Images
As anyone with even the most fleeting familiarity with the news cycle knew would happen, Lena Dunham has now offered an apology for her remarks about wishing she’d needed and had an abortion.
Yes, we are all sick of hearing about Dunham’s antics. Yes, I’m conflicted about keeping her in the news cycle. But there’s a part of her apology that has fairly, shall we say, yuge significance for understanding our times:
“My words were spoken from a sort of ‘delusional girl’ persona I often inhabit, a girl who careens between wisdom and ignorance (that’s what my TV show is too) and it didn’t translate.”
This “persona” assertion is important. Why? Because it tells us that there’s no clear line between the fictional Hannah Horvath, Dunham’s entitled protagonist on “Girls,” and the ostensibly real person who stumped for Hillary Clinton. What Dunham is telling us is that her entire (public) life is performance art, and that we have no good way of knowing when we’re getting the real her. Does she mean the latest outrageous thing she said? Who knows!
Sound familiar? Hint: He just won the presidency.
Ethically, I’d rather if the Democrats didn’t engage in persona politics. Strategically, I can understand why they tried. Personally, I wish they hadn’t, and would hope they wouldn’t do so in the future. But it seems unlikely, in the current cultural and political climate, that featuring a celebrity persona along those lines, who maybe means what she’s saying and maybe doesn’t, but is at any rate offering up the id (or unpleasant person version) of a certain percent of the electorate, was what cost them the election.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy edits the Sisterhood, and can be reached at bovy@forward.com. Her book, The Perils of “Privilege”, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2017.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
