Blair Witch

"Blair Witch" is a faceless remake disguised as a faceless sequel, intended for teenagers to see in multiplexes with giant, pre-assigned recliner seats. Like most current horror films, it imparts a gentle Glade Plug-In odor of mainstream leftist politics while it "scares" the audience with loud, startling noises and CGI kabuki faces from "The Exorcist: The Version You've Never Seen." In this case, the political message comes in the form of a gratuitously included lower-class white couple who rudely invite themselves into the Blair Witch woods along with the more symmetrically diverse and civilized (two whites, two blacks) main characters. The lower-class whites have a Confederate flag on their wall and are symbolic representatives of the "dark Internet"--the boy's screename is "DarkNet666"--that wilderness of Reddit and "creepy MRAs" that leftists fret about and say is in need of HR department regulation and censorship. The lower-class whites act as a sort of red herring when it is revealed that they are trying to spook the city folks by making Blair Witch stick people and putting them around the campsite. The real Blair Witch, which appears in CGI flashes as something similar to the human-alien hybrid from "Alien: Resurrection," is still actually terrorizing everyone, though. DarkNet666 becomes the Blair Witch's henchman at the end, indicating that people into "weird," antisocial things will likely go over to the dark side.

Bogue Maai

Maai smells expensive and like something produced before allergen regulations. How the oakmoss and civet smell (are?) so real and are used in such quantities, I do not know. The problem to me is that it smells like an imitation of old fragrances rather than a new one. Perhaps I am too susceptible to marketing, image, and stories attached to perfume but wearing this is not nearly as pleasing as wearing actual La Nuit, Montana, Kouros or what have you. It feels incomplete. It has no history. ELDO Rien is a similar old-style opulent chypre but it is its own entity, and its cast of rubber and tar over aldehydic floral make it feel modern rather than a dogmatic imitation of the past. My first thought on smelling Maai was not that it was incredible, but that it smelled uncannily like Marilyn Miglin Pheromone or Charlie. Actually, my first thought was "Aviance Night Musk!" I have never smelled Aviance Night Musk, but Maai smelled like my mental image of Aviance Night Musk, if that makes any sense, something from 1980 that would've been advertised with an image of Dressed to Kill pantyhose legs in heels. It almost has a feminine bowling alley dowdiness to it. It feels bizarre to pay $300 for Marilyn Miglin Pheromone. In ten years if they still make this and all the real chypres are gone, we'll see how I feel. On another note, the perfumer himself, Antonio Gardoni, is very nice to look at. Perhaps if I smelled Maai emanating from his chest hair it would not make me think of Sally Struthers in Five Easy Pieces so much.

Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs

Amazon recently put a ludicrous "trigger warning" before Tom and Jerry cartoons to comfort viewers who cannot handle the fact that all art and all people in the world have not always met the high standards of 2014 liberal propaganda. The "offensiveness" in question is the black mammy character. This rightfully irritated a lot of people, who were quickly shushed by think piece liberals who view any protest of political correctness as evidence that one is bigoted and racist and reactionary. While it's a good thing that the cartoons are still uncensored, I am definitively opposed to the framing of classic films with didactic apologies and excuses and explanations and trigger warnings. It poisons the mood and scolds the viewer into not laughing at things that were intended by the creators to be funny, because modern leftist academic arbiters of culture have decided that this is necessary. No sir, not for me.

Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs is a 1943 Merrie Melodies masterpiece directed by Bob Clampett. I have little interest in animation or anything intended for modern children, but I love Coal Black. It's one of the eleven Warner Brothers cartoons that was withdrawn from circulation in the 1968 because of its perceived offensiveness to blacks. Unlike many of the other Censored Eleven, which traffic in pickaninnies, big lips, and watermelon jokes, Coal Black is sophisticated, intelligent, hilarious, and technically marvelous. It is certainly one of the best black films to come out of Hollywood during the golden age, and it is remarkably ahead of its time.

Modern wimps feign shock and discomfort at Coal Black because it is a ghetto retelling of Snow White that uses darky iconography and jazz music. The same people get fidgety and uncomfortable at Ralph Bakshi's masterpieces of the 70s, Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic, and Coonskin, because those feature not only darky stereotypes but hypersexualized, nipply females. The message, feeling, and artistic value don't matter to the politically correct; they just know that black people aren't supposed to be represented in cartoons with big lips.

I think what makes modern people object so strongly to films like Coal Black and Song of the South is the atmosphere of joy and exuberance and humor. They're uncomfortable with any film with black people that doesn't serve the sole purpose of subjecting white audience members to orgasmic race masochism and cultural guilt. Things as politically incorrect as Coal Black are popular in the present day, but they have to have been solely authored by a black person. Lee Daniels's Precious wallowed sadistically in campy black stereotypes--sexual depravity, laziness, fried chicken, morbid obesity--but it was framed as inspirational and uplifting so whites allowed themselves to enjoy it.

Bob Clampett said it best:

"In 1942, during the height of anti-Japanese sentiment during World War II, I was approached in Hollywood by the cast of an all-black musical off-broadway production called Jump For Joy while they were doing some special performances in Los Angeles. They asked me why there weren't any Warner's cartoons with black characters and I didn't have any good answer for that question. So we sat down together and came up with a parody of Disney's "Snow White" and "Coal Black" was the result. They did all the voices for that cartoon, even though Mel Blanc's contract with Warners gave him sole voice credit for all Warners cartoons by then. There was nothing racist or disrespectful toward blacks intended in that film at all, nor in Tin Pan Alley Cats which is just a parody of jazz piano great Fats Waller, who was always hamming into the camera during his musical films. Everybody, including blacks had a good time when these cartoons first came out. All the controversy about these two cartoons has developed in later years merely because of changing attitudes toward black civil rights that have happened since then."

Woman: Antichrist

Much has been made recently of Rose McGowan's comment in an interview with Bret Easton Ellis that gay men are misogynists.  Liberal faggots wrung their hands and attempted to deflect criticism of themselves by accusing McGowan of homophobia, a tactic that continues to look sillier and more censorious with each passing year as homosexuality is now pretty much universally  tolerated in America. Ellis himself is the subject of continual moral panics from liberals as he frequently says commonsense things that everyone thinks but has been trained out of saying out loud, so it is appropriate that McGowan felt she could be honest with him.

I'd imagine McGowan anticipated the ensuing kerfuffle, but then maybe she didnt; the media has been overwhelmingly preoccupied with the nebulous concept of "misogyny" for the entire year, and movie actresses are dubiously looked to as great minds, political leaders, dispersers of socially responsible leftist propaganda. Female celebrities that dare to publicly  refuse the feminist label are weeded out and subjected to intense criticism until they relent. The authors of apologist think pieces will attribute their mistake to an ignorance of the true nature of feminism and the unjust stigma attached to the word, listing ways that the woman in question is actually a feminist, against her will. If they are speaking of an outsider, a polarizing weirdo like Lana Del Rey who makes liberals bristle with her discomfiting visions of fetishistic, welcomed abuse that directly contradict the values of the Jezebel hive mind, they make fewer apologies.

What people are failing to realize is that feminism, in its earlier stages, did not differentiate between homosexual and heterosexual men when it came to discussing the male oppressor. Gay men were in fact a large and particularly devilish part of the threat, gravitating as they did to careers that trafficked in the aesthetics-obsessed bondage, enslavement, and critiquing of women, such as fashion and dance. This was the de facto feminist view of male homosexuality that lasted until the 1980s and the emergence of a militant, organized queer activist movement that took most of its cues from feminism and in doing so united women, people of color, and gays in the collective fight against a sole enemy: the straight white male. Millennials seem largely unaware that gays were ever historically considered part of the looming patriarchal male threat, barring the "check your privilege" meme of 2013, where liberals in comment feeds would attack the alleged "privilege" of those with opinions other than their own when they grew tired of articulating coherent arguments. This bit of acidic Uncle Tommery materialized on Jezebel earlier this year and hinted at what was inevitably to come.

McGowan was absolutely right: gay men are shockingly misogynistic. This is because homosexual men follow a markedly different life path than heterosexual men. Male homosexuals exist in the world of women in their developmental years. Typically second or third in a succession of more conventionally turned out siblings, they stick close to their mothers, who adore and coddle them and give them their first exposure to the glamorous accountrements of femininity that they will continue to fetishize as adults: high heels, dresses, makeup, perfume. In school the homosexual surrounds himself with female friends, who tend to be more intellectually driven and understanding of his nonconformity.

Before the pubescent kick-in of testosterone, straight boys seem dull, opaque, ill-mannered, unpleasantly associated with the systemic torture of sports. After puberty, the straight man cements himself as the eternal unattainable sexual ideal. The homosexual both wants to be the straight man and wants to sexually possess him. He will spend his life coping with this desire in a variety of ways: the fetish of  masculine "working man" signifiers and clothing, the pursuit of older men that resemble his  probably disapproving father, the masturbatory casting of himself in an Internet-driven drama of "masc" versus "femme." After he has accepted his deviant status, he will develop pride in it. In an important way, he is more masculine than all straight men combined: once he enters an actual gay community, he can isolate himself in a decadent brotherhood of men, untouched by the stabilizing, maturing influence of women. He can indulge himself in the aspects of women he finds interesting via transvestism and diva worship. These things are inherently misogynistic because they involve the worship of nonexistent women too perfect for this world, divorced of ugly physicality and murky reproductive function. This article from satirical site Christwire has a ring of uncomfortable truth. If this seems shocking, consider the way that lesbians tend to similarly branch off into an all-female world founded on physical disgust of men.

Are we in need of correction? I don't think so. The concept of "misogyny" is largely pointless to me, as behind it is an implication that there is something wrong with art that expresses the artist's hostilities towards women. The critiquing of art in this way is fine as long as it does not devolve into calls for censorship. Strangely, while critics are highly attuned to smaller surface signifiers of "misogyny" in film and literature--sexualized nudity, shrew archetypes, femme fatales--sometimes a film with an explicitly misogynist thesis evades criticism, perhaps out of disbelief that that's what a popular film could actually be about.  I'm thinking of Lars Von Trier's Antichrist.

Antichrist is so transparently about the perceived inherent evil of women that it is impossible for me to imagine anyone interpreting it as anything else. This may have something to do with the fact that it's regarded as a shock picture, a famous endurance test, and that it is a horror film that is more Bergman-arty than scary and thus leaves the typical horror viewer disappointed, bored, and distracted from the issue of what it might "mean." Von Trier has been attacked for misogyny because of the religiously tinged noble suffering of his heroines in Breaking the Waves, Dogville, and Dancer in the Dark but Antichrist, which literally classifies all women as Antichrists and biologically determined torturers of men, somehow doesn't enrage the politically correct in a similar way.

The plot of the film is that Charlotte Gainsbourg's character, who has been putting together a dissertation about the persecution of women throughout the ages, begins to believe that what she is reading is true and that women are inherently evil. After the death of her son, whom she is revealed to have deliberately crippled, she and her husband, Willem Dafoe, retreat to the cabin where she went to write. She gradually goes bananas and supernaturally summons the destructive forces of nature; her husband, a psychiatrist, continues to believe that she is grieving normally until she drives a grindstone through his leg, castrates him, and cuts off her clitoris in front of him in guilt. Nature is on her side in the form of some ominous woodland creatures that rat Dafoe out when he tries to hide from his her. Dafoe eventually succeeds in strangling her and seems on the verge of escape, but an army of faceless women are seen descending upon him in the final shot.

It is evident from the interviews and press materials accompanying Antichrist that Von Trier was terrified of bringing something this inflammatory to the screen. He did not seek out actors; the perverts came to him.  Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe are both notorious for their seeming desire to appear in as many sexually depraved, disturbing roles as possible. Von Trier insisted that his actors not ask him about the "meaning" of what they were making. He knew full well the risks of releasing a work that indulged in all the "misogynist" myths, linking woman with a cruel, biologically deterministic vision of nature, having her literally and figuratively cripple the men in her life, and topping the entire thing off with a sensational and ambiguous one-word title that would lead viewers to believe it would be about a more conventional, less politicized kind of Hollywood devil. While the film got a big reaction for its misogyny at Cannes, American reviewers seemed more focus on the gore and shock aspects of it than its message. It became very popular because it was so undeniable.

Von Trier followed Antichrist with two films that were comparatively gentle about women, Melancholia and Nymphomaniac. Both feature sympathetic, unconventional female leads that seem more obviously to be surrogates of Von Trier himself. I view this progression as evidence of his guilt and effort to apologize, in his own way, for the implications of Antichrist.

Lena Dunham is an Exhibitionist Pervert Visionary

Lena Dunham is the greatest new filmmaker in at least a decade. She's abhorred by liberals and  conservatives alike--mostly liberals--and the attraction of hostility from both sides of the political spectrum is almost invariably a sign of great art.

When Tiny Furniture came out it was popular to dismiss Dunham in a sexist fashion with words like "twee" because she was a girl and had tattoos and Boho friends and the marketing of the film and the word "tiny" in the title made it appear sort of cute. Boring people on Criterion Collection forums, the people that have thought it novel to complain about the presence of Armageddon in the collection for nigh on two decades with no sign of stopping, pitched a righteous fit when Tiny Furniture was made part of the collection. It was smartly packaged in a case that created continuity with Criterion's edition of Fassbinder's BRD Trilogy--square close-ups of the heroine's faces, and in Dunham's case, with a subtly unflattering pixellation effect. I stupidly fell in line with this brand of thinking until I actually watched Tiny Furniture, was blown away, and proceeded to re-watch it four more times that week.

I immediately knew myself to be in the presence of an outsider, a rebel thinker, a true nonconformist. Tiny Furniture was fresh and addictive because it wasn't asking any of the questions movies about girls normally ask and its conflicts were not located in places the viewer would expect. The Dunham surrogate in this case, Aura, did not register as particularly spoiled or insensitive or pathetic to me, as the media characterized her. She was someone real that I wanted to know, someone cool, as were her friends. I certainly wanted to "take an Ambien and watch Picnic at Hanging Rock or Christiane F." with them. Aura was literary and cultured in an effortless way. She could handle being around men and fetishized the sort of masochistic interactions that unimaginative feminists would be frightened of, while making all of the men in the movie realistically disappointing and flaky. When the hipster deadbeat chef Aura works with begins talking about cum omelettes and tentacle rape, Aura laughs good-naturedly and seems turned on. Conversation of this sort, seen through the eyes of lesser feminists, is usually present to bludgeon the audience with the artist's notion of the inherent "badness" and "creepiness" of men. Jemima Kirke's character, Charlotte, has a great speech about embracing the more disturbing aspects of sexuality:

“When I was sixteen, I was absolutely in love with this man. I was head over heels. One time, we were in Soho, and we broke into this residential park, and it was raining, and it was so romantic, and I was so sure he’d kiss me, and then he just reached over, and he just grabbed my cunt, and I was really traumatized, and I was super sad for a long time after that, and then one day I just got over it, and I realized that that’s what you call spontaneous.”

There was also the issue of Dunham's purposefully sloppy appearance, which has been talked to death. Everyone has it wrong. Liberals champion her for beating the audience over the head with images of a "real" woman's body, framing her work in the context of insipid body positivity campaigns by Dove and Hanes.  This is a reductive and silly reading, typical of citizens trained by dour leftist academy to read "decapitation" and "gang rape" and "dismemberment" into advertising images of thin women. Conversely, conservatives tend to just dislike her because they consider her ugly, and they Twitter-harass her accordingly. What none of these people understand is that Lena Dunham is a pervert exhibitionist in the manner of Madonna. On my first viewing of Tiny Furniture, I was fascinated by my inability to properly categorize her style; she wasn't Mary-Kate-and-Ashley Boho like her friend Jemima Kirke.  There was something specifically trashy and whorey about her but not in the usual "hip" interpretations of those concepts. This is most notable in the scene where she is preparing for her job interview and chooses to wear raccoon eyes and enormous hoop earrings, the sort which weren't remotely fashionable, ironic or otherwise, in 2011. She looked authentically cheap and slatternly and seemed to enjoy rubbing it in the audience's face, highlighting it by framing herself in the pristine, spacey 2001 modernity of her mother's apartment in Cinemascope widescreen. Her physical presence is such that people walking through the room as a Dunham production is on the television will recoil and make a fuss, just from seeing her for a moment. My mother, who has watched and enjoyed all of Girls with me, still moans during every episode that she wishes Dunham would wear some makeup. Leftists are trained out of expressing things like this directly, but their hostility comes out in other ways.

For three years, Dunham has been the subject of wild moral panics instigated by the left. The reaction to her from conservatives has been relatively subdued--they dislike her for being a liberal pro-choice feminist symbol and that has been the extent of it.  The left, however, has conjured a continuous stream of shrill controversies on the level of what Marilyn Manson attracted from Christian evangelicals in the 90s, but with added heft and staying power because of the insidious viral aggregation of news stories and opinions that is unique to the age of social media. Jezebel, largely responsible for the popularization during the last decade of 70s-style militant second-wave feminism via their lacquering of its tired "rape culture" formula and victim obsession with a glaze of au courant Daria sarcastic smugness, led the crusade by constructing a straw man argument about how Dunham's white privilege and the absence of a Burger King Kid's Club-style ethnically diverse cast meant the show was both worthless and racist.  This agenda was transparently driven by the sour grapes of the Jezebel-Gawker writers, who are members of Dunham's general  demographic but lack her artistic prowess and capability for transgressive vision. This mattered little, because the race card had been played.  The received opinion among liberals (men and minorities in particular) was that Dunham was a twee spoiled racist unworthy of their attention. None of this criticism would ever have befallen a man, but that was beside the point.  For those that actually watched the show, there was something off about it, something bothersome. They might admire Dunham's commitment to body positivity and abortion and various leftist causes, but why did she have to be so unlikable in her execution? Why the unflinching focus on aberrant, miserable sex, which contrasted sharply with the Babysitter's Club way the show was marketed?

The second season of Girls addressed these controversies in a defiant way. A black Republican boyfriend was added to the cast and pointedly disposed of, after Hannah subtly breaks the fourth wall while fucking him, telling the audience that "this is what [they] wanted." Her nudity became so relentless it achieved a surrealistic quality when Hannah was shown wandering the streets pantsless in an oversized "Life is Good" T-shirt; even her supporters could be heard constantly saying that they'd "gotten the point" and that they didn't want to see her naked anymore (I, of course, loved it, and hope the nudity becomes even more pervasive).  Most significant, however, was when Dunham slyly toyed with liberal feminist notions of rape in "On All Fours," the penultimate episode of the season.  Adam, a character who has been the embodiment of brutal, uncontrollable, alluring male sexuality since the beginning, got drunk and fucked his new (thin, conventionally pretty) girlfriend played by Shiri Appleby in a way that would read as degrading to the anti-porn feminists of the 80s. He licks her ass against her will (she says that it's dirty), tosses her around, and comes on her tits. She expresses that she didn't like it and looks jarred. This is brilliantly crosscut with a Polanski-esque parallel plotline where Hannah ruptures her eardrum with a Q-tip, and the effect, particularly when it was actually airing and had not been talked to death, was truly thunderous.

The Internet reacted in bafflement. Liberal women thought that Dunham was making a party-line point about rape that would be explored in the next episode and screeched at anyone that thought that what the show depicted was ordinary bad sex. They were proven wrong when, in the season finale, Adam the "rapist" and Hannah reunited in the most conventionally romantic scene of the series. These are buttons of orthodoxy that only the truly rebellious have the desire to push. It was a provocation, not an accident. Girls has the kind of split appeal that Paul Morrissey's Trash/Flesh/Heat trilogy has--Morrissey is a social conservative that was operating with the specific aim of making Warhol's coterie and the hippie generation at large look depraved, stupid, and unappealing, but the films have a camp sensibility and homoerotic transgressiveness and an association with Warhol and "coolness" that attract the left.  Some social conservatives even like Girls because it depicts the promiscuous lifestyle of urban millennials as dreary, disease-ridden, spiritually bankrupt, and miserable.

Since Girls' inception, I noticed that Dunham remained relatively silent about the content of the show and her intent. She is adept with handling press and remains admirably stoic in the face of continuous criticism. Because of the relentless attacks from liberals, however, she has cultivated a social media presence that seems to have nothing to do with her art and feels like it is curated by someone else. On it, she curries the favor of the liberals that despise her or like her work for the most facile of reasons and issues robotic pronouncements that appeal to the left's lowest common denominator. She has fashioned herself an ill-fitting identity as establishment feminist symbol and Democratic party operative, releasing a series of "Rock the Vote"-type awareness ads that are rightfully ridiculed and seem to resonate with no one. Her leftist lesbian sister Grace, whom I've always thought was an insidious influence on Dunham and who ironically is the reason for Dunham's current "sexual abuser" ill fame, encouraged her to turn her book tour into a partnership with Planned Parenthood and a "place for women to share their stories."  I recoiled when I saw the tour positively described as a "chatty feministy party" somewhere, wondering how the maker of something like Girls could be responsible for such an atrocity. She was not always like this, as I recall reading not long ago that she was a registered independent (but was now proud to identify as a Democrat). Her hatred of men, which is abundantly obvious from both her filmed work and her book and which I have no problem with, is mobilized in the form of feminist tweets about the stupidity of men, how her castrated feminist boyfriend is the only man she likes, how "creepy" and "rapey" all vestiges of male sexuality are. I have no problem with man-hating in her work, just as I have no problem with so-called "misogynist" art that expresses the artist's negative feelings about women, but in the context of Dunham's Stepford Wife Twitter presence and passed off as feminism, it's annoying and alienating to much of her audience.

Since the release of Duhnam's excellent memoir Not That Kind of Girl, there have been two media talking points, and both involve the current popular obsession with "rape culture." The first was that a story in the book about a gray area bad sex situation of the type depicted on Girls was reported as Dunham "coming out as a rape survivor" by the media. Nowhere in the story does she say she was raped, but she silently went along with this media reading of the event, which coincided in a timely fashion with the tireless left-wing hysteria over rape on college campuses. The other controversy was set in motion by Kevin D. Williamson in National Review and ironically utilized leftist/feminist "rape culture" dogma to assert that Dunham molested her sister when she was seven, based on a passage where she looks in and touches Grace's vagina paired with a joke about being a "sexual predator." I had guffawed at the boldness of this passage when I read the book but I didn't imagine that it would come back to get her, focused as the media was on her new status as "rape survivor." I read the Williamson article before it was aggregated and turned into a big thing and greatly enjoyed it because it was trashing my idol in a new and original way, and because it gave Dunham a taste of her own leftist medicine. I've resented that she only cares what Jezebel types think of her, her casual dismissals of men, and her constant framing of her work as some sort of exclusive club for women only.

I instantly knew what Williamson, who hates Dunham for his erroneous perception of her as a universally beloved liberal symbol, was doing: lobbing a bomb at her that would turn the left against her using its own nonsensical ideology. It worked, and the Internet has been aflutter with anti-rape activists taking Williamson's insincere accusations with leaden seriousness, as they take everything, because none of them know the source of the controversy and few of them have read the book themselves. Even those defending her are investing their words with a wildly silly "Perhaps we should investigate these events further" air of sensitivity and seriousness and concern. Her brief response in Time was abysmal and missed the point; she merely apologized to rape victims for using the phrase "sexual predator" as a joke. The problem is that she's a radical artist, and the left with its dogma does not understand this, or want to. Her vision of human sexuality is infinitely more realistic, sophisticated, funny, politically incorrect, and complex than liberal censors will allow. She is so mired in her identification with corrupt establishment feminist ideology and rich East Coast liberalism that she cannot see (or will not state)the injustice in this situation beyond her having possibly offended rape activists. She should have told everyone that if they think small children touching genitals is an example of sexual "abuse" worthy of investigation that they are idiots.  She should have told them that anyone who doesn't admit to doing strange sexual things as a child is plainly a liar with selective amnesia and no understanding of human nature or sexuality. Sadly, few have the courage to say this, even fewer who identify themselves as liberals and thus must kowtow to the ideological whims of anti-sex, anti-art, anti-man Puritans or else be publicly shamed and defamed. In the present climate, all it takes is one nutcase arbitrarily framing a "creepy" sexual behavior or incident as abuse for it to become an unquestionable fact. The victim-obsessed see abuse everywhere, want to see it everywhere. Lena Dunham and most people my age are still fighting an outdated battle of left (good) versus right (evil). Having become politically aware during the big bad Bush administration, millennials cannot conceptualize or identify the signs of totalitarianism from the left.

Dunham's work is sadly bereft of references to perfume and I'd imagine she doesn't wear anything--socially responsible progressive young people are mortified of fragrance and especially prone to psychosomatic reactions to it. A small square bottle of something that looks fleeting, expensive, and natural is seen on the bathroom counter in Tiny Furniture.  In Girls, Marnie is the only character stated to have a smell, and this is used to mock her and point out how square and fake and repressed she is, something Dunham subtly does to Allison Williams in interviews; in one commentary, Dunham says how perplexed she is that Williams "still smells like vanilla" after a long, sweaty work day. As for Williams's character, Ray tells her rudely in the first season that she's making the coffee shop smell like a Bath and Body Works and to get out.  The familial origins of Marnie's abundant use of fragrance are seen when her mother, even more extreme than Marnie, lights an abundance of scented candles to fumigate her new apartment and Marnie comments that it "smells like Sephora," that it's too much even for her. Adam makes a reference to being disturbed by Marnie's perfume. I'm sure he and Hannah are an especially dirty, gross, "natural" couple. Imagine what their bedroom smells like.