Lena Dunham in “Girls” and Oscar Isaac in “Inside Llewyn Davis.” HBO/Everett Collection; CBS Films/Everett Collection

The eponymous hero of the Coen brothers’ latest film, “Inside Llewyn Davis,” is self-absorbed and aimless. He indulges in casual, careless sex, the consequences of which are inconvenient for him and dire for his female partners. He abuses his friends’ hospitality, wanders around in his underwear and loses cherished pets. The film is set in New York in 1961. If it were your sole source of information about that time and place, you might reasonably conclude that there were no nonwhite people living in New York City in 1961. One very minor character is Asian, but she merely serves as a target for bitter Llewyn’s scorn. The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane calls Llewyn “a grouch and an ingrate” whose “company can feel like a burden.” “The catalog of Llewyn’s lapses,” wrote The New York Times’ A.O. Scott, “fills the spectrum from casual bad manners to epic jerkiness.” Ian Jack of The Guardian wrote that he is “frankly dislikable” and New York’s David Edelstein dubbed him “an asshole.” “Inside Llewyn Davis” has nevertheless been nearly universally praised. The film has earned a 94 percent approval rating on RottenTomatoes.com, with only three negative reviews out of 48 from top critics. Its unpleasant protagonist and whitewashing of New York have not been cited, in any review I’ve read, as reasons to avoid seeing it. Plenty of movies have unlikable heroes, and white directors tend to make movies with all-white casts. These facts don’t automatically mean that their work is without merit. But the praise lavished on “Inside Llewyn Davis” is particularly striking when compared with the critical reception of Lena Dunham’s television series, “Girls,” and its protagonist, Hannah Horvath. Like Llewyn, Hannah is famously unlikable. She is self-centered, obnoxious, incapable of a sincere apology and fails to learn from her mistakes. (The song “Same Mistakes” plays in the background in an early episode, underscoring this aspect of her character.) Apart from her gender, she’s quite similar to Llewyn Davis. When you look at how these characters have been interpreted, a fascinating double standard emerges: While Dunham’s show has been lampooned since its debut as an insufferable glorification of white-girl privilege and unearned angst, the Coens’ latest film has been acclaimed — and not in spite of its main character’s dislikability but in part because of it.

Things that matter

Men write about Life and Art and Things That Matter; women write about domesticity and themselves.

Most critics had no trouble disliking Llewyn without hating either the film or the Coen brothers. Even assuming that Hannah Horvath is odious — which is arguable — why not extend Dunham the same courtesy? One reason is that male writers and directors are thought to be creating characters and art while female writers and show runners are presumed to be passing around copies of their dream journals at staff meetings. At a panel discussion I attended several years ago, the novelist Heidi Julavits complained that no matter what sort of novel she writes, it’s invariably described by reviewers as a book about family. Men write about Life and Art and Things That Matter; women write about domesticity and themselves. And as Emily Nussbaum observed in a New Yorker essay on “Girls,” women’s stories are “critiqued as icky, sticky memoir — score-settling, not art.” What offends these critics (and dozens more, both male and female) about “Girls” is not that Hannah is awful. It’s that they assume she is a stand-in for Lena Dunham — and the character’s perceived flaws give them license to hate Dunham. By contrast, Philip Roth has produced dozens of novels, nearly all of which feature a Jewish male protagonist from New Jersey who fears death and thinks about sex compulsively. The same is true of Woody Allen, with Manhattan standing in for New Jersey. It wouldn’t be crazy to assume that Roth and Allen have, to some extent, mined their own experiences and psyches for artistic inspiration. Most critics still think they’re colossally talented, and few people are so put off by Alvy Singer’s neuroses or Alexander Portnoy’s perversions that they would openly insult these men or their work. Lest anyone suggest that books and screens are incomparable media, consider the example of Judd Apatow. When Apatow, the executive producer of “Girls,” wrote and directed “Knocked Up” in 2007, much was written about the fecklessness and immaturity of Apatow’s male characters, particularly Ben Stone, a sweet-natured but childlike stoner who becomes a father after a one-night stand. But they weren’t treated as facsimiles of Apatow’s innermost self, and although their flaws were noted, they were also described as relatably human. Nonwhite and nonmale characters are rarely considered relatable, on the other hand, because they are usually seen as “others.”



My generation