Lena Dunham Was Once Stabbed, And Other Things We Learned From Her SxSW Keynote

Lena Dunham is simultaneously funny, weird, insightful and deeply awkward. Her keynote address at the SXSW Film Conference was all these things and more.

The Girls writer has a long history with the event – one of her early films, Creative Nonfiction, was rejected by SXSW, before being accepted the following year after she reworked it. Clearly Dunham deals with rejection better than any of the characters on her show (especially Marnie): Her subsequent film Tiny Furniture would go on to win the festival’s audience award, and the first three episodes of Girls had their world premiere at SXSW in 2012.

Headed to my spiritual home of South By South West, the only festival environment that wouldn’t drive me to an early grave.

— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) March 9, 2014

Her keynote speech included a lot of rambling anecdotes, but also raised a lot of serious questions about women in film. Here are some of the things we learned.

–

She Wants More Parts For Her Fellow Girls

One of the key points she made was of the ongoing lack of opportunity for women in film. Girls star Adam Driver is on a bit of a hot streak. This past year, he’s appeared in the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis and the critically-acclaimed indie film Tracks, and rumour has it that he’ll be playing a villain in the upcoming J.J. Abrams Star Wars flick.

Dunham is happy for him and will let him finish, but she asked where all the good parts are for the women of Girls. “People are ready to see Adam play a million different guys in one year – from lotharios to villains to nerds,” she said. “Meanwhile, Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke and Zosia Mamet are still waiting for parts they can get interested in.”

Williams did a recent stint on The Mindy Project, and Mamet joined the likes of Jake Johnson and Mandy Moore in the short-lived animated series High School USA!, but aside from that, there are very few new entries on their respective IMDB pages. Lena Dunham has already done her bit, writing great parts for them – now maybe someone else can have a go.

–

She Wrote A High School Play About Abortion

Dunham has been a provocateur since the beginning. In fact, one of her earliest plays dealt with a very touchy subject.

“I’ve been a passionate storyteller for better or worse for a long time. Better would be the eulogy that I wrote for my grandma,” she said in her speech. “[Worse] would be Waiting, the play about an abortion clinic that I wrote and directed in 10th grade, and staged almost entirely with girls who had not yet begun to menstruate.”

I would give almost anything to see this play. Please pull it out and do a staged reading, Lena.

–

She Doesn’t Let Internet Snark Get Her Down

Barely a mention of Lena Dunham goes by without a snarky aside about how she is fat, overrated, untalented, out-of-touch; she’s a favourite target of vitriol on Twitter and in comments threads. Dunham knows all about this, and doesn’t care — because at the end of the day she hopes to be “an agent of positive change, specifically for women and girls.”

She then took aim at some more specific targets. “I’m sure there are some really great [Republicans], but I just, I haven’t met them,” she said, before going on to single out “the commenters on Deadline Hollywood”, and male comedians who say women aren’t funny.

–

She Has Suffered For Her Art

Dunham was on babysitting job when she got the call to tell her that Creative Nonfiction had been accepted for competition at SXSW.

She was overjoyed, until the junior sociopath in her care stabbed her in the leg with a pencil, telling her “I hate to see you smile.”

–

She Really Wants You To Tell Your Own Story

“Don’t wait around for someone else to tell your story,” she said. “Do it yourself, by whatever means necessary. We live in this golden age of accessible technology: people make movies on iPhones, people get famous on Vine — which, I don’t even know what Vine is, didn’t even exist a year ago — people get book deals on Twitter, so you can go forth and conquer.”

Stories, Dunham said, bring us all together and make the world seem like a smaller and less frightening place. “I think if I’ve learned anything from my time in a writer’s room, and hearing people talk about their stories every day, it’s that all of us are total freak shows, and our lives have been unfathomably weird if you get into the details.”

So there you go. Get out there and start telling your own weird story.

–

–

Alasdair Duncan is an author, freelance writer and video game-lover who has had work published in Crikey, The Drum, The Brag, Beat, Rip It Up, The Music Network, Rave Magazine, AXN Cult and Star Observer.