The selfie sends us closer apart. Whether one is in Iowa City, Brooklyn, or Tokyo, one can send a selfie, a digital self-portrait, at the click of a button. The technical configuration of a selfie is two-fold: the hand extends away from the body, but the image sent, predicated on distance, brings people closer together as they electronically or emotionally connect. Distance begets the desire to take a selfie as one uploads his or her image to a person or public that is not physically present.
The selfie, therefore, becomes a symptom of the dialectic between intimacy and distance, a technology of paradox. Within this technical configuration, the stance assumes multiple connotations, as one positions one’s hand away from one’s self (in order to capture one’s visage and torso) which can be perceived as greeting the viewer1 (in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck’s concluding monologue asks, “give me your hand if we be friends”), a warding off of the viewer, or a masturbatory gesture – a release of one’s self through the click of a button. Elizabeth Losh confirms the selfie’s “intimacy” as the gestural image “require[s] a closeness” (2015, p. 8). Paul Frosh also concentrates on the process of the construction, writing that the selfie demonstrates a “fluctuating between the self as an image and as a body, as a constructed effect of representation and as an object and agent of representation” (2015, p. 1621). Frosh’s choice of “agent” suggests an autonomous construction of self-representation. Furthermore, the “fluctuating between the self as an image and as a body” underscores the term “self” as another term for “self image.” The morpheme of the -ie suffix added at the end of the word “self” forms a derivative – the selfie is a product of the self, and, herein, an image product, made from the self.
The selfie, therefore, is the constructed image of le corps propre: the body proper. The selfie puts one’s best face forward. Thus, I refer to “selfveillance” as the internalized impulse to construct the body proper on social media, as the user anticipates the gaze of others and constructs an image that meets the tacit approval of this ubiquitous gaze. In creating one’s proper body image, the selfie’s construction relies on the position of the hand sur-, from above, intimating social media’s ubiquitous gaze that routinely surveys one’s image. Once a selfie is posted online, the image is susceptible to being viewed by anyone – a twenty-first century form of surveillance.2
Lena Dunham’s HBO show Girls (2012–2017) explores social media as a tool with which characters wrestle for control over both the corporeal self and the selfveillance of their digital image. Dunham plays Hannah Horvath, a writer who often suffers from what David Rakoff dubs “procrasturbatory entropy” (2011, p. 59) and who blithely states in the first episode that she may be “a voice. Of a generation.” From this self-imposed authorial, albeit narcissistic, position, Hannah constantly documents her body via iPhone or tweets about HPV, sexual mishaps, or to elide her social anxiety; social media and the internet allow Hannah to (re)gain or (re)assert her autonomy in moments where she lacks physical or figurative control.
As the show’s creator, Lena Dunham markets herself through venues such as her Instagram, her twitter account, her memoir Not That Kind of Girl (2014), her podcast “Women of the Hour,” and her blog “Lenny Letter,” co-created with Girls’ executive producer Jenni Konner. Dunham’s media-savvy not only promotes her show, but it also grants her the control over her self-image and her public perception that Hannah and her friends desperately attempt to attain or assay. While the series is fictional, the distinction between Dunham and Horvath often collapses in terms of social media (mis)use and the ways in which both women navigate social and sexual politics via technology.
This collapse, collision, or collusion between author and character most frequently involves Dunham’s/Horvath’s body, primarily in situations that call attention to Dunham’s/Horvath’s femininity, sexiness, or perceived lack thereof. Furthermore, Dunham often uses actual events from her own life as creative fodder and recurrently comments on her body on the show, as she does in her film Tiny Furniture (2010). It is upon Horvath’s body, and therefore Dunham’s body, where confusions of authorship corporeally arise.
Therefore, I contend that on Girls, as well as on social media, Dunham explores the structuring of the selfie in order to reconcile how the general public reads her physical body. Dunham’s body, as well as her relationship to social media, complicates notions of authorship and selfveillance as the star, director, writer, and producer of the show. While many critics mistakenly assume Dunham’s doppelgänger Horvath to be another iteration of Dunham, Horvath and Dunham sharply deviate in their self-awareness of their corporeal presentation. This deviation is where Dunham negotiates her self-image through how or when her naked body is filmically seen.
Furthermore, Horvath’s social media use becomes a form of selfveillance, rather than surveillance, as she anticipates how others will view her and prepares (or polices) her face or body accordingly.3 Whereas Hannah’s selfveillance arises out of moments where she attempts to (re)gain control of how others perceive her body or sexual appeal, Dunham meticulously monitors and manages her social media platforms and the way she is framed on the show. Dunham accounts not only for the gaze of the general public, but the way she would like to look at or depict herself. As social media places us continually under (self)watch, the selfie serves as the main currency for mitigating intimacy and distance, the look of others and the localized look of our self. While Hannah succumbs to selfveillance as she struggles for control and authorship via social media, Lena Dunham formally and narratively analyzes how the selfie circulates as currency in exchanging value for images of the female body and sexuality.
In the opening of Season 1 Episode 4, titled “Hannah’s Diary,” the audience hears the trill of a cell phone receiving a text message, followed by Hannah’s exclamation, “Oh my god!” over a dark screen. The second time she cries out, the show cuts to a shot of her popping into the static frame: a close up of Hannah’s face, her roommate Marnie blurred in the background due to the selective focus – the camera delineates what the audience has clear visual access to. The first cut occurs when Hannah turns around and extends her cell phone to Marnie and, subsequently, in a medium close up, the audience as well. The positioning of her arm outstretched, iPhone gripped in her hand, is the “gestural image” of the selfie in reverse: a display of the selfie, not the taking of one. As her arm extends away from her body, the focus of the shot is on the phone as Hannah now blurs into the background. Dunham privileges the selfie, rather than Hannah, due to selective focus and in the selfie’s proximity to the audience.
The selfie Hannah receives is of Adam’s (her quasi-boyfriend’s) penis that she quickly shows not just to Marnie, but to Marnie’s boyfriend as well. The selfie becomes immediately accessible for visual consumption by whoever is in close proximity; yet, almost as soon as the selfie is sent, Hannah receives a subsequent text from Adam that announces, “sry [sic] that wasn’t for you.” However, this selfie is not of the traditional facial ilk. It is, colloquially, a “dick pic,” connoting a narcissism associated with this banal sexual explicitness. Furthermore, the dick pic re-evokes Frosh’s “gestural image” that requires “closeness” in one’s position to the body part that he or she documents. This moment in Girls is an electronic masturbatory gesture: Adam sends a part of himself to Hannah as a sexual stimulant, and Hannah, initially, perceives this to be a gesture of intimacy. However, with the clarification that this selfie is meant for another woman, Adam robs Hannah of her equal standing in their relationship, as she is the unintended recipient, not the object of desire. Though Adam is unable to know or see what Hannah does with his selfie, his text negates any sexual or romantic connotation.
The selfie initially appears as a flirtation, priming Hannah for sexual intimacy. Yet, in this sequence, intimacy is assumed and then negated in the span of just a couple of texts. As the scene progresses, Hannah’s phone in the foreground brings the audience closer to our protagonist, rather than bringing Hannah closer to Adam. And though Marnie encourages her friend not to respond,4 the moment her bedroom door shuts, non-diegetic music starts, a thrumming guitar rift suggestive of urgency and assertion. Yanking off her shirt, Hannah grabs her phone and positions it away from herself, now ready to be an “agent of representation,” not simply the receiver of someone else’s.
Just as when she showed Marnie the selfie, the phone’s screen is now in focus and, thus, the audience’s vision is mediated through the screen of the phone, privileging and foregrounding the selfie over her physical body. This sequence exemplifies one’s desire to present one’s proper self, via a selfie, in order to connect with others via social media, as well as policing one’s self-curation based on the judgments of a sexual partner. While Hannah grabs her breasts, and snaps a shot of herself in this highly sexualized position, the selfie suggests not agency, but an underlying anxiety to (re)position the way Adam perceives her.
The tension between intimacy and distance inherent to a selfie also manifests in the physical stance for taking a selfie. Andre Gaudreault and Philippe Marion channel the theories of Marshall McLuhan when they write that “humans have a metonymic relationship with our media; they extend the human body. … They are thus a logical continuity of our skeleton, our muscles, our senses, and our brain” (2015, p. 119). The word “metonymic” highlights our technology as either a substitution of our body or a closely related extension of ourselves. The structuring of a selfie, the arm literally extended away from our body, becomes both a “continuity of our skeleton, our muscles” in the image captured at the edge of our fingertips, and the image becomes a substitution or replacement of the self in the digital realm.
This extension is also contradictory since there needs to be some distance between the person and the camera – otherwise the image will be a blur. This stance ultimately points to the fundamental asymmetry in this relationship where one sends a picture to someone else due to that pre-existing distance. Frosh, too, notes the paradox of the smartphone as “both a part of the body and not part of the body, capable of giving us feedback with vibrations from its accelerometers,” implying that the technology itself (and the final product of our self-image) is inherently linked to our mind, body, and soul.5 In Girls, the selfie is a manifestation of Hannah’s anxiety for control. Taking a selfie becomes Hannah’s attempt to (re)gain control of her self-image in a situation in which she was made to feel overlooked and undesired.
Furthermore, this scene becomes a reflexive moment in which not only Hannah, but Dunham formally attempts to (re)gain control in how she’s physically perceived and sexualized. In Dunham’s feature film Tiny Furniture (2010), Aura (Dunham) shows her childhood friend Charlotte (Jemima Kirke) her college video “The Fountain.” The video, made while Dunham was a student at Oberlin College, features her in a bikini, methodically setting up her toiletries on the lip of the stone fountain. A security guard interrupts her and the short ends with her then-boyfriend asking, “What is this thing about wanting to be naked in public?” The film concludes with a discussion of what distinguishes public versus private space.
In Tiny Furniture, Charlotte reads the online comments: “Ahoy, mateys! Whales ahead. What a blubber factory. Put on some pants or a burlap sack.” While Charlotte attempts to placate her friend not to take the comments seriously, Aura exclaims, “I do sometimes!.” In this moment, there is an acute overlap between author and character, as Aura comments on her film that is Dunham’s film and her body that is Dunham’s body. The lack of distinction or distanciation between the two women encourages the audience to read Aura’s reaction as Dunham’s.
Additionally, Dunham (quoted in McCammon 2012) in an interview with Esquire reflected that
Sometimes I think, Boys were mean to me in high school so I can take whatever. Of course that doesn’t mean you can handle five thousand commenters saying you’re fat, but it does prepare you for feeling like a weirdo.
It is inevitable that some might read Dunham’s comments as indistinguishable from Aura’s own frustration over anonymous Internet trolls,6 suggesting that Dunham’s own bodily insecurities are not so far removed from that of her characters. In Tiny Furniture and Girls, as the author of and protagonists in each of these stories, Dunham (re)gains control over her image and narrative that both Aura and Hannah are incapable of attaining.
Dunham’s formal and cinematographic control over her self-image is evident in Season 6 when Hannah has drunken sex with her surf instructor Paul-Louis. As Hannah climbs off his bunk bed, naked, to clean up her vomit on the floor, Paul-Louis comments, “You got a lot of pubic hair.” Hannah subsequently in...
