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The Reinvention of Jenny Schecter

Given the fact that series creator Ilene Chaiken is said to personally identify most with Bette and Jenny, it’s not surprising that in Season 2 there has been a well-orchestrated campaign to make Jenny a more popular character. This has occurred on several fronts: by redefining Jenny’s identity as a writer, by casting the well-liked Shane (Katherine Moennig) as Jenny’s new best friend, and by creating an overt coming-out storyline for Jenny. Whether or not these steps will result in a fanbase for Jenny has yet to be determined, but judging by the changing tone on internet message boards, it seems to be working so far.

From the very beginning of the series, Jenny Schecter has been portrayed as a moody artist and author of literary fiction-particularly in contrast to Alice (Leisha Hailey), a professional writer who works for the fictional LA Magazine. When Jenny arrives in L.A. she is writing a story titled “Thus Spoke Sarah Schuster,” an obvious reference to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, one of the most well-known works of philosophy ever written.

After reading a somewhat unintelligible line from her manuscript (“Because Sarah Schuster came down, and now she reviles you, like you revile your own craving”) early in Season 1, Jenny’s boyfriend Tim (Eric Mabius) comments, “You scare me sometimes. I see you going right to that edge. And I think I’ve lost you. And then you come back with… [gestures to her manuscript] And I know why you have to disappear on me like that. I’m so fucking proud to have you in my life.”

In contrast, Alice’s work for LA Magazine often consists of Top Ten lists or articles about beauty treatments that her friends consistently ridicule. Alice’s writing is portrayed as silly and lacking in artistic merit, even though Alice herself never claims to be working on the Great American Novel. Nevertheless, this sets up a dynamic in which Jenny Schecter, a partly-employed unpublished writer of literary fiction of dubious quality, is situated as the “real” writer-someone who is constantly in emotional turmoil, loves fiercely and without moral boundaries, and turns out gut-wrenching prose about, well, her guts. In other words, Jenny Schecter, from day one, has been the perfect stereotype of the Tormented Artist.

This icon generates both yearning and revulsion; the Tormented Artist is someone who can create wonder and beauty through their work, but can also occasionally end up cutting off their left ear. In combination with a labyrinthine coming-out storyline in the first season that involved lying to Tim, who was widely perceived as honorable, it’s no wonder that Jenny didn’t generate a lot of fans.

In Season 2, Jenny-the-artiste has been taken down several notches with the introduction of the sharp-tongued Charlotte Birch (Sandra Bernhard), a writing instructor who teaches a class that Jenny desperately wants to join. When Jenny doesn’t get into the class, she chases down the instructor and demands to know why she wasn’t admitted. Charlotte Birch responds for the majority of viewers when she says:

The producers have also changed the way they portray Jenny’s writing in the show. In the first season, Jenny’s writing was often shown literally, as lines of text scrolling across the screen or fading in and out over images meant to represent Jenny’s “fiction.” In Season 2, the producers seem to have realized that showing text on the screen should only be done minimally, if at all; after all, The L Word is a television show, not a novel.

Rather than showing Jenny’s words, which could be easily mocked for their overdramatic quality, this season producers have chosen to show surreal scenes from Jenny’s stories filmed like art-school projects, often in black-and-white or with lurching, oversaturated colors. These visual explorations of Jenny’s writing are still a little precious, but are much more sophisticated than text scrolling over images of beluga whales. They do represent a step forward in Jenny’s evolution to being a professional writer, not merely an aspiring one.

Not content to merely workshop Jenny into popularity, the producers have also recruited Shane to help them integrate Jenny more fully into the group of friends on The L Word. Unlike Jenny, Shane has a significant fan base and has been situated from the beginning as the cast’s resident heartthrob; this status carries a particular weight when it comes to making Jenny one of the gang. Essentially, Shane is the epitome of cool, and if Shane thinks that Jenny’s cool too, that goes a long way toward making Jenny more acceptable.

A recent conversation between Shane and her sometime-lover Carmen (Sarah Shahi) overtly outlines the producers’ hopes for Jenny:

The introduction of Mark (Eric Lively) as Jenny and Shane’s straight male roommate further serves to solidify the growing buddy-buddy bond between Jenny and Shane. Jenny’s sarcastic responses to Mark’s offensive questions about lesbian sex in the Season 2 episode “Labyrinth” help to situate her as someone who’s on “our side.”

Finally, producers have written a clear coming-out storyline for Jenny in the first few episodes of Season 2. In comparison, Jenny’s Season 1 coming-out arc was confusing and fragmented; she went from one extreme (Marina) to another (Tim), and seemed to date anyone who expressed an interest in her, including marine biologist Gene and trapeze artist Robin (Anne Ramsay). Despite joining the gals on a trip to Dinah Shore in which Jenny delivered her “coming-out story” to an audience of partying dykes at the White Party, Jenny rarely engaged with actual lesbians about what it meant to be experiencing these kinds of feelings for the first time. Instead, the series writers attempted to deal with Jenny’s mixed emotions through her writing.

In the Season 1 finale, “Limb From Limb,” Jenny writes, “Jennifer I… JDS Jennifer Schecter… Jennifer JD am not too sure of who I am because there are several of me. a/k/a Jen They float up from me like phantoms. Sarah Schuster And slink off to commit acts for which I may or may not be responsible.” This attempt to demonstrate that Jenny felt as if she were different people all at once—one who was straight, perhaps, one who was gay—didn’t work.

The writers have taken a different approach in Season 2. Rather than exploring her coming-out issues through pretentious literary acrobatics, Jenny has been dealing with her life in person. In the first episode of the second season, an exasperated Gene tells her, “I’m sorry to break it to you, but you are a girl-loving, full-on lesbian!… Well, deal with it.” Jenny deals with it by unexpectedly breaking up with Robin, who has fallen in love with her and wants to move into a more committed relationship. Jenny explains with brutal honesty, “I promise you…that you do not want to get sucked into my fucking bullshit.”

Freed from the limitations of any relationships, Jenny now has the opportunity to find out who she is as an individual, and how she fits into the lesbian community. She tests the waters by edging into Shane’s group of friends and observing the way they interact with each other; she talks with Mark about what makes a woman look like a lesbian; and she takes the plunge that many women take when they are first coming out: she gets a haircut.

Some viewers may think that Jenny’s haircut—with lothario Shane presiding as the gatekeeper to authentic lesbianism—is a superficial stab at an overused coming-out symbol, but the scene is a truly pivotal one in the development of Jenny’s character. All that came before has been symbolically cut off along with her unruly mane; what comes after—embodied in a sleek, short cap of well-controlled hair—will determine whether Jenny’s reinvention has actually been successful.

One thing’s for sure—with the addition of the straight male pornographer, Mark, to the show, Jenny’s definitely not going to be the most offensive part of this season.

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