Ultra Pop Culture

Bridget Coulter

Two culture buffs muse on their favourite pop cultural obsessions. Bringing you hot takes and nerdy theories about film, TV, music, fashion, celebrity culture and more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episodes

  1. 4h ago

    #8 The Lena Dunham Episode: From Girls to Famesick

    Is Lena Dunham the voice of our generation? That's our question for today, as we trace her extraordinary career from her origins as the precocious young writer and director of indie film Tiny Furniture to her award-winning, era-defining HBO show Girls, which brought her instant stardom that quickly turned to notoriety, controversy and a retreat from fame for several years due to chronic illness and addiction issues, as detailed in her explosive new memoir Famesick. In the episode, we talk about the memoir and Dunham's relationships with stars like songwriter Jack Antonoff and her co-star Adam Driver. We also look back at her work, including her previous memoir Not That Kind of Girl and her recent transatlantic romcom Too Much, which starred Megan Stalter and Will Sharpe. Most of all, though, we talk about Girls (2012-2017), the Millennial coming-of-age comedy of manners which brought us iconic characters like Hannah Horvath (played by Dunham), Marnie Michaels (Allison Williams) and Adam Sackler (Adam Driver). We talk about what made the show so relatable for millennials - the grimy, crumbling apartments, soul-sucking jobs, unpaid internships, pretentious hipsters and dead-end relationships. We also discuss what we think made Girls so triggering for a subset of media commentators. Was it the autofiction element, which blurred the boundaries between the show's creator and the self-involved main character Hannah Horvath? Or was the satire, which focused on privileged and pretentious young people, simply too biting for the 2010s, a time when clickbait rage content was just beginning to dominate the discourse. The episode also includes some discussion of Phoebe Maltz Bovy's new book on heterosexual women in pop culture, The Last Straight Woman - in particular, the 'frumpy-but-horny' female stereotype and how this pertains to Dunham's work (and also, surprisingly, The Vicar of Dibley!). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    1h 9m

About

Two culture buffs muse on their favourite pop cultural obsessions. Bringing you hot takes and nerdy theories about film, TV, music, fashion, celebrity culture and more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.