I’ve mentioned the ABC TV show Big Ideas before. I tend to record the various episodes on IQ and review them at my leisure. There’s no particular theme to Big Ideas and I can easily be put off viewing a particular episode just by scanning the synopsis, but sometimes the description is so inscrutable that I‘m compelled to watch at least some of it just to see what it’s about.
Big Ideas on the 4th of February opened with a talk by Hanna Rosin recorded at the RSA in London about her book The End of Men and the Rise of Women. I didn’t get to hear much of it, but some of her proposals must’ve slipped into my unconscious because I’ve started to notice some of the things she’d said actually being mentioned on news items. I suppose Rosin’s message was made more palatable because was as smart, sharp and funny as Waleed Aly (the Big Ideas host) described, but it also helped she didn’t appear to have an agenda other than observing and highlighting the major shifts in gender politics that some of us might’ve overlooked.
Very briefly it seems the workforce in the US is now equally divided between men and women, which means there are an awful lot of men out of work and with little or no opportunities to ever rejoin the workforce. This has effectively pulled the rug from under men who might’ve been valuable in a relationship as the breadwinner or co-breadwinner but who are now seen as simply another mouth to feed.
That’s just the start and, let’s face it, she was talking about the US, which, as well as seeming light years away sometimes seems light years ahead of Australia sociologically speaking. However, it’s not just Australia’s sociological disposition that tells us a TV show like Girls could only have been made in the US.
If you’ve heard of the HBO series Girls and you’re a bloke and the title’s put you off watching it, I’d urge you to have a squiz and see if you can pick up on some of the incidental implications for mankind as we know it that occurred to me.
Girls is naturally all about a bunch of girls trying to make it in New York city and predictably the critics have responded to it as such. The star of Girls in every sense is Lena Dunham, who not only takes the leading role of Hannah Horvath, but also writes and co-writes, produces and occasionally directs the episodes, of which there have a been twenty in the two series broadcast so far.
Although Girls has seemingly been positioned to fill a perceived void - imagine a low-key twenty-something version of Sex and the City, (which Dunham says she reveres) – its credibility begins with Dunham’s inhabiting the role of Hannah and it’s not entirely a surprise to discover some of the episodes apparently portray Dunham’s own real-life experiences. I saw her pick up an Emmy for Girls before I saw an episode and she is Hannah Horvarth. All this underlines the fact that there is an acceptance of and perhaps even a hunger for Hannah’s un-Hollywood flawed body type – (she’s dumpy and sports tatts) and her ‘real’ persona and the show’s somewhat bleak and almost monochrome presentation, in stark contrast to the movie-biz feel of Sex and the City, of course.
That the girls in Girls are varied and interesting you’d expect, but I reckon it’s worth taking a look at the various blokes bouncing off and around the girls. It’s often been said of male writers that they can’t write convincing female characters - take Monty Python for example - the most common explanation being that the writers in question find it impossible to empathise with females, leading to the women characters being disappointingly one-dimensional - the only memorable females in Monty Python are the Panto-type female impersonations
While it’s true that the men, (well, they’re mostly boys in fact), in Girls are kind of one-dimensional it somehow seems to fit. Women are most definitely complicated and girls on the verge of becoming women even more so, but through the Girls’ eye view you see that men in general are most definitely pretty simple and very, very easy to understand and just as easy to manipulate.
This is more revelatory than it sounds. We’ve grown so accustomed to the Hollywood view of the world (as promulgated by men, of course) that there is nobility in just being a bloke, that a bloke has dreams and that a bloke wants to build and that a bloke wants to destroy and, yes, that it’s a bloke on whom God himself is modelled.
Men are dreamers but they’re also doers as they pose with chiselled features in profile heroically surveying some distant horizon while the woman hangs on stoically and slightly to the rear wearing gingham and looking at her bloke adoringly with the wind blowing through her straw blonde hair.
HG Wells looked into the future with his book The Time Machine. I read the Classic Comic and have seen both movies – I might’ve even seen a TV adaption. I’m not sure if I read the book – I know I read The War of the Worlds. Anyway, the future world the Time Traveller happens upon (he’ll always be Rod Taylor in my mind) is inhabited by the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi dance about in the sunlight saying ‘hullo birds, hullo flowers’ while the Morlocks grunt and grumble underground fixing things and occasionally feasting on the Eloi.
With a little adaption I can see the Eloi as being entirely descended from women, now self regenerating without the involvement of men, and the Morlocks as being the uncouth and misshapen descendants of men, swearing a lot and fixing the plumbing.
I haven’t figured out how the Morlocks regenerate and it doesn’t bear thinking about really, but it’s a sobering prospect for us blokes and one we should keep in mind as we move towards becoming entirely redundant and wobble towards oblivion.