Lena Dunham, please release the Adam Sackler mixtape
In her new memoir, Dunham revealed that she gave Adam Driver “a burned mix CD of songs” that reminded her of the relationship that inspired Hannah Horvath and Adam Sackler’s onscreen love story.
Image courtesy of HBO
I’ve been resisting the urge to tear through Lena Dunham’s new memoir, Famesick. Instead, I’m rationing it—savoring every chapter (each one named after a Girls episode) like the multi-course gourmet meal that it is. In the third chapter, “Pilot,” during Dunham’s recounting of her first sex scene with Adam Driver, she casually mentions that she’d given him “a burned mix CD of songs” that reminded her of the relationship (and era of her life) that inspired Hannah Horvath and Adam Sackler’s onscreen relationship.
Dunham moves on pretty quickly from this piece of trivia to an anecdote about a member of the costume design team offering her a Band-Aid for her butthole—a delightful inclusion to the narrative for sure, but I want to back up a bit. You can’t just drop the existence of an Adam Sackler inspo mixtape without revealing the tracklist!
To be fair, it wasn’t really a mixtape about Adam Sackler so much as a mixtape meant to evoke a specific period in Dunham’s life—compiled to help Adam Driver not only get into character, but immerse himself in the world that birthed the show: Brooklyn circa 2008. So, we can assume the tracklist was heavy on Golden Age millennial indie needle drops—Santigold, LCD Soundsystem, MGMT, perhaps Animal Collective. Maybe some of these songs ended up in the Girls soundtrack—one wonders if Dunham gave a similar mix to music supervisor Manish Raval.
When I try to imagine what kind of music Adam Sackler would listen to, my immediate thought is: none at all. The brutish, romantic anti-hero of Girls strikes me as the type who doesn’t have a favorite artist or a favorite album—and who probably doesn’t understand why people listen to music at all (this is a guy who canonically does not like ice cream, either). If he does listen to music, it’s probably in preparation for an acting role in Major Barbara or Torpica antidepressants. Any diegetic musical accompaniment for Adam would have to serve some utilitarian purpose for him. Though he has been known to bust the occasional move at a Bushwick warehouse party, his life’s soundtrack most likely consists of a buzzsaw’s whir and the crack of the occasional hole punched into his apartment’s drywall. Anything more is excessive, kid.
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