Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (Parthiv Chhabria)

HBO’s seminal television-program, Girls was disliked particularly because it provoked an uncomfortable feeling in its audience’s gut—the sense of second-hand embarrassment that sends a shiver down your spine. The most prolific victim of this willingness to bend out of shape so perversely, who Sianne Ngai refers to as an “absolutely elastic subject—who is nothing but a series of adjustments and adaptations to one situation after another”, is the  character of Marnie. In what is perhaps the most agonizing scene in the show, the aspiring singer-songwriter interrupts her ex-boyfriend’s success party to sing a folk-inflected rendition of Kanye West’s Stronger—going completely off-script. Marnie’s performance is awkward not because she sings poorly, but because everything about it is incongruous: the context, the lyrics, or the melancholic timbre in which she softly coos about her “BAPE shit”. 

Marnie lives her like exactly like Ngai describes, in a perpetual state of performing—or participating in the “affective labour” often assigned to female characters. Birthed in the advent of internet blogging, Girls is inherently aware of the interconnectedness of the post-industrial economy, and the way viral moments of vulnerability became a currency in the era of neoliberal subjecthood. Marnie pitches herself, performs likability, and delivers sincerity like a service—only to fail spectacularly. Marnie’s misreading of the room reflects the friction between private affect and public performance, a disjuncture that Ngai ties to the zany’s unstable position in late-capitalism, where the imperative to constantly monetize our inner-lives, whilst navigating unstable boundaries between work and play.

It is not lost on me that Marnie is a perennially unemployed character, always between part-time gigs and minimum-wage jobs—and that she is engaging in this act of navel-gazing, to somehow win back her extremely successful ex-boyfriend. The asymmetry of this moment, between her precarious economic position and the Icarian theatricality of her a capella performance, intensifies this sense of desperation. In the nascent stages of Instagram influencers, it is not difficult to understand why Marnie would put herself out there in this way, hoping to be rewarded. What is particularly revealing about Marnie’s failure is how it foregrounds the gendered nature of awkwardness under postfeminist culture. Her breakdown does not occur in spite of neoliberal feminism’s promise of empowerment, but because of its contradictions. Marnie is the quintessential postfeminist subject. She is attractive, educated, white, and possesses the freedom to be whoever she wants to be. But, to be who she wants to be is ultimately to brand herself—to turn her identity into a commodity that must be curated and sold.