Dear Jane, Lili, and Phil,

Thanks, first of all, to Phil for getting us started this week.  For some reason, this was a difficult episode to get a handle on, and thus to blog about: I thoroughly enjoyed it as I was watching it, but was swayed enough by the (largely negative) reactions of the friends who watched it with me to doubt my initial reaction.  I then watched it again, and started to agree with my friends: it was funny, but a bit awkward and forced in places.  But now Phil’s post has me reconsidering all over again…  Let’s see if I can work through this ambivalence here, before your very eyes!

I agree with Phil that the episode, like “The Return” before it, felt once again off-model, though in fact we are returning to the locale (New York City) and the supporting characters (Marnie, Jessa, Shoshanna, Adam, Charlie, etc.) whose absence accounted for the “offness” last week.  Yes, Bushwick definitely functioned (as it does actually function for New York’s middle-class twentysomethings, or at least did when I lived there in the mid-2000s) as a sort of hipster hinterland, a place just far enough removed from the normal run of things and the rule of law that Anything Can Happen.  For those who may not be familiar, Bushwick is a fairly desolate area of northern Brooklyn with a high crime rate and a lot of abandoned warehouses, many of which have been taken over (legally or illegally) by enterprising hipsters for parties/concerts/gallery shows etc.  Marnie’s cry of exasperation — “I’m never going to Bushwick again!” — is something I can easily imagine one of my friends saying after a particularly hair-raising (or just subway-intensive) night out.  It’s a symbolic space of both possibility and abjection.  We get some of both in this episode.

Another key difference, as Richard Brody points out in his blog post on the episode, is that the director on “Welcome to Bushwick” is not Lena Dunham but her go-to DP Jody Lee Lipes, who evidently has a distinctive visual style all his own.  Brody mentions Lev Kuleshov, whose work I don’t know; the density of detail in the crowd scenes put me in mind of Stanley Kubrick and Peter Greenaway.  After six straight episodes of fairly small-scale gatherings, it’s kind of overwhelming to be confronted with so many other people: this episode is lousy with extras, and they frequently threaten to crowd out the regulars.  While this was certainly jarring, I actually think I like the technique: it reminds us that Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna are, in fact, part of a much larger crowd of people very much like them, a sociological reality that’s easy to lose sight of when we’re focusing so closely on their individual dramas.

Still, as Phil so nicely points out, there’s more than ethnography going on here: the party didn’t, to me, feel exactly accurate (the “vibe,” as Jeff would put it, was a lot more Burning Mannish than I remember the average Bushwick rager being, though maybe things have tilted in that direction since I left New York three years ago), but it did conjure up its own sense of space in a way that, say, the benefit for Carrie in the previous episode didn’t.  To invoke Kubrick again, it was sort of like the masquerade in Eyes Wide Shut: a little bit laughable from one perspective, but haunting and nightmarishly right from another.

The most bizarre subplot in “Welcome to Bushwick” is Shoshanna’s “crackcident,” which I think was perhaps played a bit too much for laughs — exploring Shoshanna’s genuine terror over having accidentally lowered herself in the social pecking order (and the eyes of her mom) by doing a ghetto drug would have been a more emotionally rich way to go, I think.  I’m also not quite sure where they’re going, if anywhere, with the relationship between Shoshanna and Ray: was this all just a contrived way to have them meet-cute?  I am impressed by Zosia Mamet, though, who really nails a certain kind of high-strung obliviousness; I also think it’s funny how, when she smokes crack, she starts talking like a typical David Mamet character, all fast and stuttery and defensive.

The surprise for me, though, is how resonant I found the Jessa storyline.  As I said last week, I still struggle a bit to care about the three protagonists other than Hannah, and up to this point Jessa’s easily been my least favorite character.  But I thought the way her flirtation with Jeff was developed in this episode opened up some interesting new possibilities.   Like Adam, Jeff is another guy that’s been characterized, but that we don’t really know: the discovery in this episode is that he’s not “a good guy,” as Jessa thinks, but kind of a creep, especially when he reminds Jessa at the end of the episode that she’s his employee, not his friend.  For a show that’s been (rightly) praised for its emphasis on female friendship and subjectivity, it’s interesting to see the way Girls is handling its boys: manipulating us into thinking we know who they are, and then surprising us.  (Something similar happens, maybe less convincingly, with Charlie in this episode: like Marnie, we expected him to be hung up on their relationship for at least the rest of the season, but he’s bounced back almost immediately with “a tiny Navajo” named Audrey.)

Oh, Dear Television!  I don’t know what to think.  This felt like a pivotal episode, and not only because it’s The One Where Hannah and Adam Finally Get Together; among other things, it’s a test case for whether the show can really handle sensibilities and aesthetics other than Dunham’s.  (Hannah was a pretty muted presence in this show, in stark contrast to her total domination of “The Return.”)  I think it’ll be a challenge: Dunham’s made such a virtue out of intense self-scrutiny, and is so out-of-the-gate good at it, that the attempt to fold in other people and their concerns is, at times, a noticeable strain.  But I’m glad she’s taking the risk; if she pulls it off, the show — and her subsequent work — will be all the better for it.

Blowing my anonymousness,

Evan