Dear Lili, Evan, and Jane,

Sorry to have been absent last week. Let’s get back to it! I’m structuring this post as a series of points/topics/questions because I’m all over the place on it right now. In any case, the common theme is support.

1.  Is Hannah’s writing any good?

As is often my wont, I’m picking up this query from the end of Evan’s last posting in which he talks about the show’s funny relationship to artistic production.  Since the first episode, it has been an open question whether Hannah Horvath’s grand masterpiece, her Key to All Mythologies, is, in fact, worth anyone’s time—including her own. It’s even an open question whether she’s writing at all. One of the more underplayed jokes in the pilot is that the manuscript she hands to her parents could not be more than 30 pages long; the story topics we occasionally hear referenced (about her hoarder boyfriend, for instance) seem designed by Dunham to be laughed at; Marnie is tolerant, at best, of her friend’s prose; and we never, ever, see Hannah working on the book that is, presumably, her prime occupation. The only people who compliment her on it are her father, who loves her unconditionally, and Professor Christopher Moltisanti, who, as Marnie points out, may just be macking on her.

Hannah’s book is a classic problem for a show about the creative process.  Do we read the book?  Do we hear what she writes?  That approach worked for The Larry Sanders Show because The Larry Sanders Show within The Larry Sanders Show was great. It didn’t work for Studio 60 because the show within the show was hot garbage.  But Dunham doesn’t let us see her book. She shows us the ripples it makes, the way that it functions as a placeholder for any number of other issues in her life.  Hannah talking about her book is Hannah talking about herself.  And this is partially what throws Marnie over the edge: Hannah’s ability to make everything, including Marnie sometimes, a metonym for herself.  The book is about her life, Marnie’s heartbreak is about her newfound romance, Tally’s recognition is about her lack of recognition.  This has the unique function of allowing Hannah to always be talking about herself, but it also functions to alienate everyone with whom she is close. When is the last time Hannah was in a scene with anyone other than Marnie or Adam for more than a minute?

Despite the fact that both Hannah and the show usually treat her book as a plot device or emotional trigger, Dunham is continuing to pursue the idea of Hannah as an actual writer by having her go to the reading.  And I’m confused.  Is Hannah really a writer?  Or, rather, are we supposed to take Hannah’s writing seriously, or is it a smokescreen? The way I see it, the fight at the end of this episode (spurred by Hannah’s anguish about the reading) exposes Hannah’s writing for what it is: a pretense for every situation and human being in her life to be funneled into a narrative that is about her.  From the hotel room in the pilot to her showdown with Chris Eigeman to this episode’s various refusals, Hannah’s writing is no longer winning her the support it used to.  If her old prof really is just trying to get in her pants, then that leaves nobody supporting her art.  Is Hannah really a writer, or is she, as the phenomenal Kathryn Hahn tells Jessa, “doing it to distract [herself] from becoming the person [she’s] meant to be”?

2.  How good is Kathryn Hahn in this?

So good! Over the past year, Kathryn Hahn has been turning in the kind of boffo guest spots—on this and on Parks and Rec—people do before they hit it big.  Somebody give this woman a series! Her face, the slightly low angle shot of her talking to Jessa, and the way the focus leaves Kirke’s eyes—this scene could have been a major whiff, but it read in the same vein as Hannah’s parents’ anniversary dinner, as one of the most sincere and actually insightful moments on the show. In any case, her monologue about the dream in this episode is both a perfect Dunham line-reading and a kind of valedictory speech on the show’s main themes.

The line I quoted above recalls Hannah from the cold open to the pilot saying that she’s “busy trying to become who I am.”  If this series is about growing up to some extent, then the model of growing up it endorses has a lot to do with pragmatic self-understanding.  College is over. Charlie is a college boyfriend.  Understand what you can do, understand what you need. Katherine, in this scene, needs a good babysitter more than she needs a faithful husband.  But Dunham doesn’t mock her the way she mocks her ladies sometimes.  Jessa telling Shoshanna that she needs to “make some changes” and then saying that she’s starting by re-arranging the furniture in the apartment is a perfect example of this.  Jessa understands that she needs something, that her life is, more or less, a shambles, but her instinctual move is to displace.  Why reflect when you can re-decorate? Jessa tells Katherine that she doesn’t need her help, but that’s not strictly true, emotionally or financially.  As Lili and I have both noted, Hannah’s mother has been perhaps the most supernaturally understanding person on this show, and I think Katherine just joined that club.  There’s something about this gorgeously shot scene that transcends all the second-guessing and anxiety and reassures us that, even though life may continue to a mess for Jessa and co.—as it is for Katherine herself—there is hope in the idea that, one day, they will understand exactly what it is they are doing.

3.  This…

Love,

Phil.

Jane! Phil! Lili!

It’s been an atypically slow week here at Dear Television, despite the fact that Episode 8 was, for my money, one of the more successful and provocative episodes of Girls to date — probably just a function of how busy we all are.

What I have to contribute today is less an original interpretation than some annotations to Jane’s brilliant reading of the scene between Marnie, Jessa, and Thomas (like Lili, I failed to catch his name and just thought of him, as the girls probably do, as “the venture capitalist”):

Jessa thanks Thomas “for handling the cheque” [Editor’s Note: I love this Canadian spelling] who, as a venture capitalist, knows his share about risky investments. His logic here might not even be entirely unfamiliar: buy two girls some drinks and they’re more likely to come home with you. Open an expensive bottle of wine and, accordingly, they’ll certainly be more likely to sleep with you. Following such investment logic, Thomas translates spilt wine on his $10,000 rug–a rapid escalation in the cost of the night’s events–as meriting some serious sexual payback: “If you’re really sorry you better be planning to make this a very special night for all of us.”

This riff reminded me of something else I read recently: Christian Lorentzen’s great essay in the new Bookforum on finance in twenty-first-century fiction.  Lorentzen quotes a line from Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask which elegantly summarizes the current state of upper-class/middle-class relations: “She was from the people who kept everything.  I was from the people who rented some of everything for brief amounts of time.”  In the erotic scenario Jane sketches above, Thomas is, clearly, the person who pays for — and thus, by rights, keeps — everything; Marnie and Jessa, using the credit line of their sexuality to lease a taste of the good life, are the people who rent.

But, of course, the class dynamics of the scene are a good deal more complicated than this: Thomas reads as, if not exactly working-class, at least a worker (“Do you even know what it’s like to work hard?” he asks), while Jessa and Marnie are children of privilege — “Daddy’s girls.”  To take another example from Lorentzen’s Bookforum article [by the way, I haven’t read any of the novels Christian cites], Thomas’s rant here seems akin to the musings of the banker in Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic on the hypocrisy of twentysomething anti-capitalist hipsters:

He saw these people everywhere now, these aging children who had done nothing, borne no responsibility, who in their bootless, liberal refinement would judge him and all he’d done as the enemy of the good and the just, their high-minded opinions just decoration for a different pattern of consumption: the past marketed as the future to comfort the lost. And who financed it? Who loaned them the money for these lives they couldn’t quite afford with their credit cards and their student loans? Who else but the banks?

This is like an institutional version of Thomas’s “Daddy’s girl” resentment of hipster hotties with trust funds: in this case, “Daddy” is not the girls’ actual fathers but the banking system itself, which puts bankers like Doug (and venture capitalists like Thomas), regardless of their actual age and virility, in the position of lecherous, disapproving senexes.

So Thomas’s frustration is, at least in part, exasperation that these two girls whose lifestyles are, from his point of view, made possible by the kind of work he does — by capitalism, in other words — don’t play by the rules of the game.  They rack up debt — let him buy them drinks, play them mash-ups — and then default on the loans.  Irresponsible!  Reprehensible!  If they’re going to spill wine on a $10,000 rug, and refuse to have sex with its owner, they’d better look a lot sorrier than that.

All of this, obviously, has as much to do with gender as it does with class and money, but, again — as so often in Girls — the stereotype of the oppressive, aggressive, dominating male is troubled, if not quite reversed.  Lorentzen points out that female characters in fiction written by women (like the heroine of Rivka Galchen’s story “Appreciation”) are often trying “to avoid risk, something male characters in fiction written by males seem constantly to be seeking.”  But if that’s the case, what to make of Jessa’s continual courting of sexual risk, an act Marnie unexpectedly gets in on in this episode?    “We’ve all discussed how Dunham’s girls run this world,” Jane writes,

—without consequences or violence; with minimal risk. O’Dowd’s over-the-top character (tipping into caricature) makes him a weirdo, but it doesn’t make him a rapist or an assaulter. He doesn’t scare the viewer, and he certainly doesn’t scare Jessa. How much will this incident come to haunt Marnie really? He never made them pay. And where did I learn to think like this?

A great point — clearly in the scene in Thomas’s apartment, as in the mock-horrific Michigan episode, we’re being set up  for some American Psycho shit that never materializes — but, with all due respect, I don’t think “with minimal risk” isn’t quite on the money: risk — but managed risk; hedged, if you will — appears to be precisely the principle on which Dunham’s girls run their world.  Does that make Marnie and Jessa more like venture capitalists, in their sexual lives, than the hapless Thomas himself (who seems to be the very embodiment of rational homo economicus in his expectation of sexual return on economic investment)?  While one assumes that the allegorical point of the scene is something like “Thomas’s perviness = the logic of capitalism,” O’Dowd’s character is in fact figured less a capitalist oppressor than a sap, a victim of the market’s vagaries: he speculated on Williamsburg hipster chicks, and took a bath.  (Without cupcakes, one assumes.)

As for Jane’s rhetorical question — “How much will this incident come to haunt Marnie really?” — I do wonder if Dunham and the writers intend to bring the character of Thomas back eventually; to be a bit inside-baseball about it, one doesn’t normally cast an actor as sought-after as Chris O’Dowd for a glorified cameo (although maybe you do if Judd Apatow is your executive producer).  I frankly hope he does return, because I think there’s a richness to the class conflict in this scene as written that the scene, as directed, didn’t quite exploit.  (I agree with Jane that O’Dowd’s portrayal of Thomas veers a little too close to caricature; Jessa’s contempt for his turntablist pretensions, for instance, are too closely shared by the camera/implied audience.  This is a problem Girls has been running into again and again: how to depict performance/artistic expression without mocking or minimizing it; cf. Heather and the Twistarounds, Ray and Charlie’s crummy indie band Questionable Goods [whose music is, indeed, questionable].  Maybe Adam’s performance in the theater rehearsal in this same episode comes closest?  But that’s a topic for another post, by someone else.)  There’s more to say here; at least, I hope there is.

Speculating wildly,

Evan

P.S. Apropos Jane’s evocation of Norman Bates: do you think Marnie is named after the Hitchcock character?  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that movie all the way through, but according to this synopsis, she has some ambivalence about her relationship, too.

“I’ve got a world of chances for you, / I’ve got a world of chances, / Chances that you’re burning through.” – Demi Lovato, “World of Chances”
 

Yo Lili, Phil, Evan,

When you’re young, you want to do everything. Even if you don’t, you still believe you could. I’m not so young anymore—foreclosure is now something pondered daily—but my desire for possibility has hardly waned. Having, or wanting, it both ways is as close to a credo that I possess. Like Dunham’s girls, I’m at a juncture where I (still, still!) expect a lot without understanding really how much one must give in return. That’s privilege, yes, but it’s contingent on a model of privilege practiced by the generation that raised us. In a recent Times interview, Dunham explains her parents’ response to her post-college decision to move back home: “Do you realize that none of us would have accepted help from our parents?” Their time isn’t Dunham’s time, however, so I wish people would stop making that comparison as justification for “Gen-X” laziness.

How much to give in return? I’m weary of hearing adages about getting what you give, about no free lunches, about aspirational narratives that begin with ascent and conclude with achievement. People are learning, earlier and earlier, that you can do everything right—you can, goodness forbid, give more than you need—and you might still feel shortchanged. That’s part of existing in a privileged society too. “Your integrity is all that matters,” Adam tells Dunham. Well, yes and no.

It seems like everyone is contemplating reciprocity right now, and perhaps it’s due to the current impossibility of any adage-promised reciprocity. Sometimes you give and you don’t get. Like an abusive relationship. Like an abusive relationship with New York City. How difficult it is to know one’s worth when standards for rewarding that worth might have little to do with effort or ability. How lucky that “discovering one’s worth”—and maintaining integrity while doing it—even gets to factor into Hannah’s and Adam’s respective ideas of growing up, which is, to become artists.

Girls, as well as our relation to it, is about investment. Adam thinks his time (or, more exactly, his creative talent) equals someone else’s $2,000. He tells Hannah in the pilot: be no one’s slave, except mine. Except, now  in a mutually dependent—genuinely striving-to-be healthy and happy—relationship, Adam needs to return his ear to Hannah:  “you have to teach them how to please you. Or you have to compromise.” “She’ll show you her tits if you give her some ice cream” no longer flies. Sometimes you’ll have to pull $5 from your shorts instead of your dick with the trust that your bond is stable enough for the other to reciprocate similar love in future.

Jessa thanks Thomas “for handling the cheque” who, as a venture capitalist, knows his share about risky investments. His logic here might not even be entirely unfamiliar: buy two girls some drinks and they’re more likely to come home with you. Open an expensive bottle of wine and, accordingly, they’ll certainly be more likely to sleep with you. Following such investment logic, Thomas translates spilt wine on his $10,000 rug–a rapid escalation in the cost of the night’s events–as meriting some serious sexual payback: “If you’re really sorry you better be planning to make this a very special night for all of us.” (That the inverse of this also applies is suggested by the fact that Jessa is no longer employed: she doesn’t put out and so is laid off.) It’s like Adam revenge sex part two and, indeed, something about Chris O’Dowd’s whine reminds me of a 15 year old’s incredulous disappointment. “This can’t be the way that this goes,” he cries. Welcome to the girls’ world, Thom. We’ve all discussed how Dunham’s girls run this world—without consequences or violence; with minimal risk. O’Dowd’s over-the-top character (tipping into caricature) makes him a weirdo, but it doesn’t make him a rapist or an assaulter. He doesn’t scare the viewer, and he certainly doesn’t scare Jessa. How much this incident will come to haunt Marnie really? He never made them pay. And where did I learn to think like this?

Lili, will you be my friend? I want to braid your hair. I want to enter into a conversational braid that involves you and Evan and Phil too, except rather than talking about makeovers and makeunders, I’m going to tease out a sentence strand you made in parentheses: “I love that Jessa is this programmatic about her distress.” How to be a friend? For Marnie, it involves patience, because Hannah is distracted (even if, as Jessa says, she’ll later repent by “apologizing for it like you’re going to shoot her”). Sometimes it involves sitting around while a friend ignores your present needs. The nice thing about braids, though, is that there requires more than two strands. Cue Jessa.

If Hannah is learning how to be a good friend, Adam is navigating how to be a boyfriend period.  For Hannah, standards might have seemed low until now but—even for a girl who has only gay men as exes (whatever that indicates)—they do exist. So, first learn to apologize. Because in relationships there are rarely do-overs, only make-overs. Lili, you wrote about makeovers as an act of love, and Phil earlier spoke about forgiveness in Girls. Forgive me for braiding my own hair, and largely ignoring yours in this post? Cue Evan? Phil?

Sorry
Sorry sorry,
Jane

Dear Lili, Evan, and Jane,

So, obviously since we last corresponded, the biggest news in Dunhamania is that James Franco, our generation’s James Dean, has finally weighed in on the show that’s been rudely Bogarting the zeitgeist for the past couple of weeks.  I won’t quote too much  from his article.  Vulture has already done a lovely job extracting it.  But suffice it to say that Franco, our generation’s Harold Bloom, utilized the lofty perch of his HuffPo blog to address Dunham’s haters, defend his own particular brand of millennial masculinity against different haters, and manage to wrestle with his inability to draw real connections between the story of Hannah Horvath and the story of James Franco, our generation’s Jean-Michel Basquiat.

What leads me to bring up JF is that the idea of recognizing or not-recognizing oneself in Girls (which has been both a problem and a selling point for the show since several weeks before its debut) has popped back up in my mind over the past few episodes. And this has as much to do with the identification of characters as the identification of place.  As Evan pointed out last week, episode six was Dunham’s first “off-model” experiment.  There were some issues, it turned out, when this show about New York became, for a minute, a show about Michigan.  While episode seven saw Hannah reunited with her fly posse in the city that never sleeps, this was also, to some extent, an off-model excursion in and of itself. “Welcome to Bushwick,” the title declares.  And while Bushwick may only be an annoyingly difficult trainride or an awkward cab fare away from where the Ladies keep their accidentally crotchless underpants, everything about this episode suggested that Bushwick was a foreign country.

My question to you all, however, is how much does accuracy matter?  How much should it matter?  It’s been a common cry of Dunham apologists—including those of us on this site—that Girls is not an ode to this group of people but, instead, an ethnography. The implication is critical distance over attachment, self-examination over self-involvement, realism over romance.  And, to that end, many viewings of Girls certainly are anchored in a kind of obsessive detail and hilarious specificity of person and place—“I totally know Shoshanna” or “That is just like a party I was at” or “That is exactly how I was fired from my internship at a literary magazine.”  These are by no means the only responses, though. My parents, for instance, know roughly 0% of the Brooklyn hipsters that I know, but they love the show, laugh at the jokes, and understand the characters in terms of their emotionality. (This is opposed to something like Portlandia, which works, to some small extent, as a broad comedy, but is really only accessible, I would argue, if you get the references.) In light of this, in light of Franco’s goofily ambivalent self-recognition, and after these two vacation episodes—especially what Evan called the Ghost World style of the Michigan episode—I’m wondering how much ethnography actually does anchor the show.  Is it an aesthetic or an actual practice?

Michigan was certainly detailed, but was it accurate?  The conversation I wish I’d gotten into last week here was about how uncanny Dunham’s suburbia was, how much it felt like a cartoon version of a reality.  As a suburban transplant myself, I recognized a lot of the mise-en-scene, but there were also things that looked true but rang false. Is the same true of Bushwick?  In other words, it’s tempting to say that Michigan functioned as a kind of extended dream sequence, a vision of a place rooted in reality but warped and inverted by the psychology of the dreamer.  Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich.  But, back to back, are we this week invited to think the same thing of the Bushwick party?  The uncanniness of Bushwick, I think, is supposed to make us question a lot of what we take for granted as straight-ahead representation.  There is a lot of emphasis in the episode, for instance, on recognition and accuracy.  Jessa and Ray strive to precisely diagnose Shosh’s particular trip. (CRACK!)  Jessa gets into what is essentially a semantic fight with the crust punks: “You’re going to reduce us to a subculture and then not accurately name the subculture?” And Marnie gets into trouble with Jonah for failing to accurately understand her own particular friend dynamic (Hannah is the selfish one, right?)

Then there’s Hannah’s comeuppance with Adam.  For six episodes, Adam has been one of the most evocatively and consistently detailed characters on the show.  Shirtless, brutish, the child of privilege, the elected representative of a kind of post-Marx, post-Thoreau, working-class, boho masculinity.  He’s into getting bossed around and he’s got daddy issues.  He cooks fresh game, he doesn’t text, and, above all, he’s a narcissist who refuses Hannah’s attempts at intimacy. This episode, we see Adam wearing a plaid shirt and juggling lesbians like a circus act.  We also learn that he’s a recovering alcoholic. This doesn’t automatically ennoble him, but it humanizes him and, most of all, makes Hannah feel both ensorcelled and betrayed.  After being thrown from Adam’s bike, Hannah calls Adam to task for not opening up to her.  But no, cries Adam, it’s she who never asked, she who was not interested in a mutual intimacy, SHE who, as Marnie independently confirms, is the narcissist.

Whether Adam is right in this situation or whether something in between is true, I’m not yet sure. I’m certainly not eager to have this strapping hulk with a sixteen-year-old boy’s rat moustache be the righteous force, literally and figuratively throwing our “girls” around.  But, for now, it seems like Dunham is saying something about the very aesthetic practice we often use to defend her show.  Nobody on this show is more thoroughly characterized than Adam, but, it turns out, he’s also the character about whom we actually know the least.  We have a lot of information about Adam, but very little of it is accurate—or at least it’s misleading.  But it’s not just us. The show portrayed Adam in this way.  We have scenes of Ray and Charlie alone. Even scenes of Jessa’s Highlander-looking unemployed employer with his buds.  But we never see Adam alone.  The show wanted us to have the wrong idea about him because Hannah may have the wrong idea about him.

I’m sorry to continue to end these posts with the sentiment that Dunham is some kind of heroic auteur, defying expectations, shattering paradigms, evincing a godlike self-awareness every Sunday evening. But if the bloody, stupid Game of Thrones episode that preceded “Welcome to Bushwick” can be called a triumph, so too can I apply that designation to this episode.  The world of Girls has, to some extent, splintered from Michigan to Bushwick.  The cracks are showing.  As with all ethnographies, this one is not the truth. Its accuracy is not a guarantor of its realism. And whatever realism it achieves has limits.  With her taxicab smile at the end, Hannah seems to see this revelation as a big step forward—people have likened it to that of Melora Walters at the end of Magnolia—but she’s flanked by two flat affects. Adam and Marnie are the happy couple at the end of The Graduate: free, but feeling the weight of their choice.  The good news is that we have a few more episodes left to deal with what we’ve uncovered.  As the Bard (James Franco) says, “If you really want to have experiences to write about, go to work.” I hope I’m not naïve to imagine that the experience Dunham wants to write about is the one Hannah is about to have and that the work our hero will be doing is that of untangling the world she imagines in detail but knows very little about.

Also, one more time, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. James Franco!

Malkovich, Malkovich,

Phil Maciak.