Girls Composer Michael Penn Thinks Hannah’s Millennial Angst Is Really Baby Boomer Angst

Millennials just can’t seem to ever get their shit together. They’re probably the first generation in, I don’t know, FOREVER to feel a sense of directionless angst when they enter young adulthood and have to stop ironically collecting action figures and frequenting their local orgy pits. Certainly the trauma of emotional maturation is wholly unique to the generation that created Girls, a show about male and female humans living their lives in humorous ways?

Not according to Girls composer Michael Penn. In typical egomaniacal, baby boomer fashion, Penn (who scored Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights and Hard Eight) thinks that Girls doesn’t capture the narcissism, angst, and aimless ambition of the millennial generation — it’s totes about baby boomers:

Well, I don’t really have a problem with it. You know, there’s that line in the first episode, where Hannah says she thinks she might be the voice of her generation. And part of me thinks that it’s really more the voice of my generation. That entitlement and the sort of – I think that’s just perennial. I just think that’s constant. And it’s part of the American experience of the 21st century, period. And then everything else about it is just – it’s just humanity.

Ugh, the baby boomers have yet again appropriated something else that has caught their fancy, which really isn’t fair considering they already have Seinfeld.

Michael Penn: “Part of me thinks Hannah’s really more the voice of MY generation [Salon]