Not every famous person was feelin’ Kanye’s “Famous” video as much as Kanye was.
Lena Dunham, star of HBO’s “Girls,” posted on Facebook on Monday criticizing West’s video portraying famous faces lying in bed together next to West and his wife, Kim Kardashian. Among those in the mix was the likeness of Dunham’s friend, Taylor Swift.
Dunham called the video “one of the more disturbing ‘artistic’ efforts in recent memory,” calling out the video’s depiction of “famous women, twisted like they’ve been drugged and chucked aside at a rager.”
The video begins with West and Kardashian next to each other in bed and slowly pans out to reveal the rest of the naked famous faces, based on artist Vincent Desiderio’s 2008 painting “Sleep.” Among those depicted are Chris Brown, former president George W. Bush, Anna Wintour and Donald Trump.
Dunham is a part of Swift’s famed “girl squad”; she said the depiction of Swift’s face on a naked body next to West “hurt to look at.”
She also called out the sexualization of powerful women, “reduced to a pair of waxy breasts made by some special effects guy in the Valley.” Juxtaposed with the Stanford rape case and the sexual assault case against Bill Cosby (who is also in the video), Dunham said watching West’s video made her feel “sad and unsafe and worried for the teenage girls who watch this and may not understand that grainy roving camera as the stuff of snuff films.”
West and Swift have an uneasy relationship, to say the least. A line in “Famous” has West proclaiming that “me and Taylor might still have sex … I made that [bleep] famous.” To include Swift in the video is adding another layer to their complicated history and one that makes it seem the feud won’t end anytime soon.
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