There is no real reason to mesh HBO's Girls and Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty… or at least, I didn't think there was until I saw this video. Comedian Chelsea Davison has a pitch-perfect impression of Girls star Lena Dunham in her back pocket, and instead of using it to comment on the show itself-- there's more than enough of that going around the Internet as it is-- she uses it to record Dunham's so-called audition tape for the Jessica Chastain role in Zero Dark Thirty. It's kind of amazing. Take a look below.
Of course, this is more of an impression of Dunham's self-absorbed Girls character Hannah, but given how willfully Dunham blurs the line between the two it seems fair game. And in fact, Dunham is a fan of the video as well, having tweeted this last night:
Given how much criticism Girls has endured since it began airing on HBO, this video is probably the gentlest form of parody Dunham has encountered. And while the magic in this is mostly Davison's spot-on impression, there's something exceedingly brilliant about her pairing Dunham with Zero Dark Thirty-- two very polarizing stories about women, directed by women, that people can't seem to stop talking about. The joke, of course, is that Dunham is the exact opposite of Chastain's hard-nosed Maya, and would basically be the last person you'd want interrogating Al-Qaeda members. But to see two of the most fascinating women to be on our screens in the last few months is not only fascinating, but weirdly subversive somehow. I can't put my finger on it… but I will probably be watching this video many times. Mostly because it just makes me laugh.
