There Is No Lena, Only Zuul

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Dear Lili, Jane, and Evan,

And it is in the humble opinion of this narrator that strange things happen all the time. And so it goes, and so it goes. And the book says, ‘We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.’

– Magnolia

Well, Lili, I am currently preparing a book-length manuscript on the subject of bad sex on Girls, and I hope we can get around to talking about that soon (I’m no Nostradamus, but I think I can safely predict that these aren’t the last mortifying carnal interludes Dunham has in store for us), but right now I want to take your lead and talk about Hannah the Monster.  How do we know she’s a monster? What kind of monster is she? Are people finally getting that Lena Dunham is not unequivocally endorsing the behaviors of her heroine?

Like you, Lili, I was watching this episode with dread in my heart, and, at first, I couldn’t tell why. I think you’re very right to say that Dunham is playing with and then negating a lot of horror movie tropes. There’s the de facto high school party that shouts out Carrie; there’s the ghost of Laura Palmer hovering about; Hannah’s late night creep into the kitchen that’s one chef’s knife away from the cold open of a slasher; the understated Psycho reference in the shower sex scene; and even the shot of Eric the Pharmacist sneaking up on Hannah as she sits in the car, rocking out to Jewel.  As they say a few hours earlier on HBO, the night is dark and full of terrors.  But the episode is also full of small, seemingly spring-loaded moments of potential danger, chief among them the shot of Hannah attempting to back into a parking space. Was anybody else sweating that one? I certainly was.

Adding to that sense of dread, I should note, is the spectacular musical score of Michael Penn. In the aforementioned kitchen scene as well as the pharmacy sequence and elsewhere, Penn plays with toy pianos and other whimsical sounds, laying them over death rattles of all sorts and pulsating, other-worldly kick drums.  It’s the kind of swirling, ill-at-ease carnival music Paul Thomas Anderson used to get from Penn and Jon Brion and that he’s now apparently committed to requisitioning from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, as is abundantly demonstrated in this week’s thrilling trailer for The Master.  And, in that sense, it is the PTA style of horror Dunham is trying to evoke here.  Car crashes, kidnappings, crushed dreams—as much as this is an homage to classic seventies horror, it’s also a nod to the terrified, banal crapscapes of Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love.  Hannah might be living out the “epilogue to Felicity,” as Dunham’s sister says in Tiny Furniture, but her old friend Heather is about to walk into Boogie Nights.

Part of the horror, then, I think is the very ordinariness Dunham is trying to portray.  And if anxiety has been a frequent subject on this show, this was like a theme episode about out-and-out fear.  Hannah Horvath’s Treehouse of Horror I.  And that fear is manifest in very humdrum, but strangely existential ways. At dinner, Hannah’s father asks, ominously, “What does a person like that turn into?” A Person Like That. Hannah’s father is speaking about his daughter in the way that unsuspecting neighbors speak about the serial killers they lived next to.  Hannah’s prediction for Heather’s Roller Girl future is that she’ll end up, “scared and sad and lonely and weird” in LA. This is clearly also a description of Hannah in New York, but that doesn’t diminish it as an admission of anxiety.  Then, there’s that song:

My name’s [Carrie]

I’m so very

Fly oh my

It’s a little bit scary

A little bit scary, indeed.

But that brings me back to Lili’s point about Hannah being the monster here.  If, as we’ve both noted, this episode is full of fright, suffused with cues that are meant to encourage us to read it as a kind of horror show, then the big reveal is very possibly that Hannah herself is the old farmer behind the mask at the end of Scooby Doo.  But if Hannah is the monster, what are her monstrous actions?  She ditches her parents.  She takes an unconscionably long time retrieving emergency menopause prescriptions for her panicked mother.  She sticks a finger up Eric’s butt and assumes, since he won’t tell her what he likes, that he’s into light pedophilia.  She shits on the shallow but sincere gestures of her old friends.  She dismisses working at a florist as not a “real job” even while she just quit an equivalent job in Manhattan.  Selfishness, narcissism, superiority complex.  It seems like the particular kind of monster Hannah has become is…a New York Chauvinist!

As a resident the great city of Philadelphia, often referred to by people who’ve lived in Brooklyn for no more than three months as “the Sixth Borough,” I am no stranger to the attitude of the post-collegiate domestic immigrant New Yorker.  While native New Yorkers often express a Horvathian patriotism about the city of their birth, nowhere is this pride more loudly expressed than in the recent graduate of Oberlin or wherever who feels he or she has just successfully “escaped” somewhere else only to finally arrive where the lights are so much brighter. The extent to which Hannah Horvath embodies this stereotype is raised to a new level in this episode. All of the aforementioned crimes aside, when Hannah delivers the monologue into the mirror about the worst things she can say being better than the best things other people can say, it’s like she’s becoming Travis Bickle.  New York has made Hannah almost violently insufferable.

This scene, in the context of the scary movie vibe that this episode sets up, gives us a real glimpse into both the threat this series dramatizes and the love story that this series is willing to give us.  That is, any legitimate fear Hannah has, outside of the previously mentioned leisure-class nervousness, is that she will be unsuccessful at remaking her life. She has “escaped,” she is taking the girl with the mismatched socks and trying to bring that girl to her apotheosis, and New York City is the key ingredient.  She is possessed, in some way, by this particular version of the rags to riches tale of upward mobility.  To become who you are is to become a New Yorker.  Success and happiness have no other geographical coordinates.  It is to rise to the top of an apartment building filled with improbably small and expensive apartments. But it is also to become, in some sense, monstrous to those you left behind. There is no Dana, only Zuul, to quote another great film about becoming somebody else in New York.

It’s also true that there’s no love greater in Hannah’s life than her love for the darkness, as Lili puts it, of New York City.  So what did Hannah learn in this episode?  What did we learn?  I think, first of all, that anybody still clinging to the idea that Lena Dunham approves of all the actions of her protagonist needs to stop clinging.  If she wasn’t one before—she was—then Hannah Horvath is without a doubt a full-on Al Swearengen anti-hero now.  At the same time, Dunham seems really invested in forcing us into an uncomfortable loop of sympathy and revulsion with Hannah. The show is criticizing Hannah for thinking her hometown is so small-time and backward, but damned if that town isn’t actually a little bit small-time and backward on occasion.  This is a tricky episode, but a really important one, for this show.  Too far on one side, and you end up with American Beauty-style, teenage wasteland commonplaces.  Too far on the other side, and you get the soft-lit romance of Dawson’s Creek (an observation I owe to Emma Straub).  This is a big dilemma of the past decade or so of quality TV. How do you make a show about a monster without either withering that monster with satire or becoming monstrous yourself?  In the interest of length, I’ll just say that I think the way out, the way of dealing with this character in a humane and kind and smart way, is to make a show, not about satirizing the follies of the young, not about the glories of New York, and not about criticizing the narrow-mindedness of the flyover states.  Instead, you make a show about something that Hannah’s mother and her best friend have given her in abundance. You make a show about forgiveness.

Never Don’t Worry: In Which Dunham Kills Horror

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Dear Phil, Evan, and Jane,

Wish hard enough for misfortunes to befall the girls in Girls and the very next episode will nod understandingly but finally shake its head no. In Episode 6, Something Terrible Happens. Or rather, happened. Carrie Lawrence is Girls‘ Laura Palmer, but fails to launch as the mysterious dead girl whose death will expose small town America’s seamy underbelly. Nor, despite the callback to Carrie, can she hold a candle to that kind of high school horror. Instead, Carrie affords her former classmates a much-needed opportunity to develop the grief-stricken personae they’ll serve each other over restorative coffees. “She basically has PTSD,” says Heather’s coworker-boyfriend. Heather makes out with him, sighs, and enumerates Carrie’s virtues, the only example of which is her broad-minded acceptance of Hannah’s mismatched socks.

Jane, your point about characters failing to rise to a script rings true here. Heather’s half-baked bereavement notwithstanding, it’s obvious that Carrie’s disappearance or death (the withholding of salacious detail is yet another way in which Dunham un-Lynches America) isn’t a case of finely-wrought high-school torture; it isn’t anything so comfortingly intentional. Instead, Heather’s long list of things Carrie’s travel-buddies thought “the bitch” might have done—which includes sleeping with a stranger, being so drunk/hungover that she couldn’t function, and other activities the girls in Girls engage in with impunity—confirms that the explanation of her disappearance is a mixture of selfishness and insufficient fear. Carrie’s story, from which a lesson could easily have been extracted, after-school special-like, inspires none. In no way does Heather blame Carrie’s friends or imply their actions and conclusions were wrong. Fear and worry shouldn’t have been their responses, she seems to say; to the extent that Carrie’s cohort is coextensive with the upper middle-class girls, they’re used to the world cushioning their fuck-ups and keeping them safe.

This makes the benefit, held so that Carrie’s parents can hire a private investigator and “get some closure”, an emptier gesture than even this cynic supposed. From the community’s point of view, Carrie’s actual fate is irrelevant; what matters is that her parents achieve closure. In this bizarro-Twin Peaks, Heather’s choices in telling the story demonstrate the extent to which the town has experienced  “closure” and moved on to other things. Who benefits from the benefit? Well, the Twistarounds, for starters.

I want to linger on that benefit for a minute because it had all the ingredients to go Blue Velvet dark. I found myself watching every move in that scene with too much attention—noting how long it took Eric to bring the beer, whether Hannah drank it, how the Twistarounds were tempting fate with their beauty and untested sexuality. I had, it turned out, a bucketful of expectations for that scene, but I kept coming up empty. It’s possible I’m just paranoid, but I think those expectations were the result of some sneaky directorial choices.

I was rewarded for none of my detective work. Instead, Heather (Heather, ye gods! yet another toxic high-schooler attenuated) gyrates while rhyming Carrie with Very and Scary, thereby sanitizing the whole tragedy and making it neither. Stupid innocence abounds: Pharmacist Eric tries to sneak his arm around Hannah. Hannah notices but is working up to melt down over Heather’s performance. Heather’s not good enough to make it in LA, which speaks to Hannah’s own worries about not being good enough to make it in New York. She’s angry, but not because the benefit is a ghastly non-tribute to a dead girl.

I don’t mean to suggest that Dunham is taking all our 80s horror tropes and reworking them as innocent. Tunnel-vision, that inability for anyone in that scene to see anything but their own desire, including the Announcer-Boy who bops along with a hopeful rictus, is darkness of a sort. But it’s emptier and more realistic than the stories in which Terrible Things Happen.

This brings me to my bigger point: the last two episodes of Girls are anti-Lifetime movies. What happens when you don the righteous armor of the female victim and the predator refuses to play his part? Jane, your verdict on Hannah telling Charlie not to hit them—“it places dramatic conventions in a context where they sound absurd”—applies also to her encounter with her boss, which, as you say, is another instance of a man failing to “follow script”. Episode 6 just keeps stacking guns on the mantle. The moment when Suspiciously Handsome Pharmacist Eric follows Hannah out to her car to offer her some complimentary lubricant for her mother? That’s off in a very Lifetime-y way, and viewers familiar with the genre will recognize it and scream at their television sets for Hannah to run. Lifetime is based on not just the fear but the certainty that Bad Things Will Happen. It’s a standing order to remain paranoid readers in a horror-encrypted world. Leave the free tights, woman! Dark and murderous impulses lurk beneath, and they will eventually be revealed!

The evil man’s impulses are revealed: Pharmacist Eric doesn’t want to analyze people too much, doesn’t want to pressure her into sex, and doesn’t want a finger up his butt. “Why won’t you tell me what you want?” Hannah asks, a little annoyed. What if nightmares and dreams never come true? asks Phil, and here, in the aftermath of a moment gone flat, is a kind of answer. The only “real” fear—real in the sense that people spend emotional energy on it—is that Hannah isn’t good enough to make it. Next to that, even the real stuff of nightmare, like Carrie Lawrence’s murder, becomes safe and anodyne in this pleasant town where the handsome pharmacist is genuinely concerned about your mother’s vaginal dryness and wants to have fun and tender sex.

That kind of town is a blessing for a good person, a tragedy for a good reader, and a hell of a challenge for a fledgling writer who wants to read everything, including her roommate’s breakup and the benefit for a classmate’s death, as a reflection of her potential to “make it” or not as a writer in New York. Hannah’s the monster here. Of course she ends up talking to Adam at the end. Of course she asks him to tell her what he sees outside his window. She needs his darkness desperately, and New York supplies all the darkness Hannah’s life won’t. Are you boring? Step outside and maybe you’ll meet a crack addict shaking you down for cashews. Bam! There’s a story!

This accounts for why Hannah keeps coming back for bad sex. in Episode 5, Jessa helped Hannah figure out that she’s into sex for the story. (Jessa’s also the one who realizes the erotic potential in every story, and who gets her highs at last as much from story as from the sex the story demands.) Is this why, up until the unwelcome finger, Hannah’s breathing much more heavily with Pharmacist Eric than she ever has with Adam? If—despite all our vigilance, and the early promise Eric showed with that creepy lubricant—there’s no story here; if Eric is just a nice guy and not a budding serial killer or an old boss or a caveman who wears a lacy green sleep-mask, Hannah can’t pillage her sexual experience for material.

I submit that this is the most turned on we’ve ever seen Hannah, and that she’ll never be able to have an intense sexual experience with someone she finds narratively interesting. Good sex, for Hannah, is fine, but interesting material is more rewarding than orgasm.

That’s a smart move, and it puts paid to some of the hand-wringing over sex in Girls, some of which laments that young women are somehow regressing and fulfilling the man’s pleasure while annihilating their own. That’s not what’s going on here. None of the four protagonists is plagued by selfless impulses. Hannah is a motivated reward-seeker, just as people seeking sex are; it’s just that, in her case, there are bigger turn-ons than sex. Selfishness and selflessness aside, it’s refreshing to see someone value story highly enough to recognize it as a source of real power and real satisfaction. (Remember, she tells Eric about sex with Adam and Adam about sex with Eric. Those, for her, are seriously erotic moments.)

Isn’t it interesting, in a show with such a variety of realistically unsatisfying sexual encounters, that this episode featured two successful ones that went off-kilter at the end? Were you guys as surprised as I was to see Hannah really into a sexual experience until she ruins it by importing one of Adam’s scripts?

So what do we do with all this worry that can’t quite coexist with an embodied person? Phil, you wrote that Girls is at least in part about “the luxury of anxiety, a kind of twenty-first century heir to neurasthenia,” and I love that for how beautifully it captures this distinction with a difference: Hannah is always anxious but never afraid. That her anxiety isn’t generational is a nice touch  (and a reminder that Dunham shares a sensibility with Woody Allen): Hannah is like me, her father says. Like him, she’ll “jitter her way through her twenties.”

There’s so much more to discuss–the parents! The sex scene! The possibility that parents do know quite a lot about how their children work! The parental suggestions that Hannah refuses to listen to, because (to quote the lovely Heather in that scene where Hannah plays her own mother) “I know enough to know that you don’t really have to know anybody, you know?”

There’s a job opening at the florist,

Lili

American Nervousness, 2012

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Dear Jane, Evan, & Lili,

Glad to be here.

I too have been thinking a lot about terrible things happening to the cast of Girls.  Evan just mentioned this as a thought experiment. What if things went woefully and irrevocably awry for The Ladies on Girls? Before that, Jane drew our attention to the threat of violence in her discussion of what Hannah identifies as Charlie’s domestic abuse spectrum behavior. And Elaine Blair, before us again, spoke eloquently about the idea that part of what is extraordinary about Girls, and what has been so infuriating to critics, is that Hannah and her friends live in a kind of bumper bowling version of Manhattan.  Nothing bad would, nothing bad could ever happen to these privileged people. Nobody’s going to die in a gutter, because, in this world, there’s no such thing as a gutter. La di da, hakuna matata.

Like Evan, though, I think this is all part of the plan.  Lena Dunham, whether she shares this mindset with her character or not, seems very interested in the idea of the luxury of anxiety, a kind of twenty-first century heir to neurasthenia.  Don DeLillo has a line in Underworld: “It’s the special skill of an adolescent to imagine the end of the world as an adjunct to his own discontent.”  DeLillo, of course, is not just speaking about adolescents or boys here, and it seems to me that this is equally applicable to Hannah Horvath and her sisters.  Traumatic events only serve to displace anxieties about other, more mundane, or at least less global, concerns. The idea of Charlie lifting a hand to Hannah displaces her guilt over betraying(?) her bestie; the idea of contracting AIDS displaces Hannah’s anxiety about the emotional toll of her polymorphously unrequited affair with Adam; the idea of dying in a gutter like Flaubert displaces Hannah’s anxiety that her writing might not be worth dying in a gutter over.

So that, I think, is the perspective of the show to a certain degree. If Girls is an ethnography of a very circumscribed class of person, then this kind of apocalypticism is a big part of what defines Dunham’s subjects. But, to come back to what everybody always has to come back to with this show, just because Dunham has trained her eye on this kind of magical thinking doesn’t mean she’s not reproducing it to a certain extent. Now, I believe enough in Dunham’s self-consciousness about her work that I also can believe that this is all leading somewhere, but that’s not a sure thing.  Why, for instance, doesn’t anything bad happen to these people? To take an example from last week’s episode 5, why doesn’t Hannah get fired for coming on to and then berating her boss?  On most HBO series, all you have to do is wake up in the morning to warrant an axe in your brain, but Hannah Horvath’s intentional and energetically performed self-destruction simply won’t stick.  The same goes for Jessa’s immaculate lack of conception.   Hannah and her friends are engaging in a kind of recreational anxiety that is only possible because, deep down, they believe that their fears are unfounded. This is a phenomenon certainly worth looking into, a panic widespread enough to be a notable feature of modern life. Trouble is, Hannah and her friends are right. They don’t really seem to have anything to worry about.

But, again, Dunham is doing a pretty humane job lovingly articulating all the ins and outs of a particular kind of delusion, and I don’t want to begrudge her empathy.  Marnie doesn’t need to die of Roman Fever like Daisy Miller in order for Dunham to effectively critique her behavior.  Likewise, TV showrunners needn’t behave like the Old Testament God, meting out justice to the sinners down on earth, to be responsible social critics.  If Tony Soprano always got what was coming to him, there wouldn’t have been a show, and, thanks to Matthew Weiner’s merciless skewering of Betty Draper, I think we’re all sufficiently familiar with exactly how grimy it can feel to see a television writer punish a character for all of her bourgeois vanities and transgressions. Girls doesn’t need to be a Jeremiad to be a valuable work of social fiction.

Dunham, for her part, seems to be laying the groundwork for something, and I’m excited to see what.  Jessa’s relationship with the father of the kids she babysits is a bit of a time bomb, and one that could have actual consequences if it goes off.  And, even though she didn’t get fired, Hannah’s whimsical forfeiture of her job could come back to haunt her in fiscally real ways.  But what will happen then? To amend Evan’s question, can something bad happen on this show that does not lead to a moment of self-discovery?  In other words, is Girls beholden to the Apatow rule that trauma begets wisdom, reckless stupidity begets enlightenment for the worthy?  Or is Lena Dunham committed to shielding her characters from disaster?  What if neither nightmares nor dreams ever come true?

As usual,

Phil.

Testing, testing…

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Dear Jane, Phil, and Lili,

Very pleased to be a part of this grand experiment!

I’m going to try to keep this post relatively short, in part because I have a bunch of friends coming over in a few hours to watch Girls (and Game of Thrones and possibly Mad Men as well) and I need to get the apartment cleaned up before they arrive.  (Is that too personal?  Too dull?  This is a blog, right?)

I wanted to pick up on Jane’s calling attention to Hannah’s line “Adults try things. That’s what I’ve learned” from Episode 5, which seems to be kind of emerging as the motto/keynote for the series (more so than the oft-quoted “a voice of a generation” line from the pilot, which was kind of a red herring, in my opinion).  It’s really an interesting line, both because it obviously encapsulates, in its first sentence, Girls/Dunham’s commitment to tentativeness and exploration (can you be “committed to tentativeness”? if you can, then she definitely is) and, in its second, ironizes that commitment by showing how quickly Hannah’s rushing to sum up her still-developing experience.  In other words, she’s announcing: “I am so mature that I have reached a point where I can see that what I’m doing is extremely tentative” — a statement that self-deprecatingly undercuts itself its own authority, as so much of Dunham’s writing does, while still allowing her (and the show’s narrative) to heave itself forward.

To put it another way, Hannah is testing: testing herself, testing other people, testing boundaries.  This allows her to act at once bold and reckless and to disavow the consequences of her actions (because it’s just an experiment; if it doesn’t ultimately turn out, no harm done).  And Dunham, too, is testing, I think, both herself and the audience.  I’ve been surprised by all the negative press — people attacking the show, and often Dunham herself, for being too blithely white/privileged/frivolous etc. — but, as Malcolm Harris pointed out in his excellent piece on the first episode for The State, Dunham is a very self-aware and self-conscious artist who knows exactly what she’s doing by depicting such blitheness.  She is, I think, testing her audience to see how much blitheness, unawareness, and unpleasantness they’ll accept.

One last thing I’ll throw out, re: testing limits and safety.  My favorite part of Elaine Blair’s fantastic NYRB piece is this paragraph:

Many critics have noted that the girls, all from seemingly financially secure families, are members of a privileged class. A slightly different aspect of their privilege is the relative confidence we feel that they can seek sexual experience without being in physical danger, that any revelations they receive will be useful and interesting rather than damaging or crushing, and that the people in their world will not punish them for their curiosity or high spirits. The girls feel confident of this too. They have an air of extended innocence, a girlish exuberance (behind a scrim of polished good behavior) that is the characteristic bearing of American upper-middle-class young women. The young men exude their own version of innocence. Adam’s sex fantasy may be off-putting to some, but part of the deeper humor of the scene comes from our knowing that he is basically an overgrown boy—and probably a pretty good boy at that—whose grandma sends him monthly checks for his rent.

I found this incredibly astute: part of many viewers and critics’ disapproval of Hannah’s behavior seems to be a kind of weird jealousy that she’s putting herself in potentially perilous situations (economic as well as sexual) that we all know aren’t really going to turn out too badly.  I wonder how the show’s tone would change, and its reception would change, if something really terrible happened to one of the primary characters — something along the lines of David Fisher’s traumatic carjacking in Season 4 of Six Feet Under?  What if Hannah had learned she really did have AIDS in Episode 3, for instance?  Or Jessa really had lost the kids she was babysitting?  (Not that I’m wishing for anything bad to happen to any of the girls; just proposing a kind of thought experiment.)  Would any of this alter any of the righteous critiques of the first five episodes, or not?  I guess what I’m saying is that behind some of the hate and anger directed at this show seems to be a sense that safety — and, therefore, the ability to conduct tests with one’s own life — is unevenly distributed in our society.  Which is, indeed, an excellent point, though I’m not convinced it’s one that Dunham’s unaware of.

OK, that was not that short!  I’m sure there will be plenty more to say, about this and lots of other stuff, after Episode 6 airs.  In the meantime, these dishes are (probably) not going to wash themselves.

All best,

Evan

“Act like my life is real, y’know? Because my life is real.”

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Dear Dear Television Club,

First, hello, welcome! Thanks so much for agreeing to start a TV club with me. I’m really excited.

After some back-and-forth on what show to focus on, Phil, Evan, Lili, and I have decided on Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls, which will be airing episode 6 of its first season this Sunday. Considering the number of conversations fixated on Dunham’s show, this post might be a bit irrelevant by now—especially since I want to talk about what went down last week in episode 5. But I really thought it was the smartest episode of Girls to date, and other writers have already this past week put their finger on what they thought made it work so well.

The show was seriously firing on all cylinders. I don’t know where to start so I’m going to start at the episode’s beginning, which takes place inside Hannah and Marnie’s apartment. Hannah is sitting on a couch that separates Marnie in the kitchen and Charlie in the living room. The fact that Hannah is literally coming between the couple is visualized here, but it’s also Hannah who quickens a break-up just waiting to happen. Marnie and Charlie get, for once, to argue at one another because Hannah is there are a displacement for their frustrations. This show loves triangles, which makes sense since it’s also pretty interested in communication and mediation. Here it’s not just Hannah, though, that comes in between Marnie and Charlie, but her words as well. Charlie has already sung-read the incriminating remarks Hannah makes about his relationship in episode 4, but at this moment he wants Hannah to read them out-loud herself, to “hear it in her voice.” It was such a great moment to begin an episode—with the same lines the previous one left off—because it shows Girls repeating its script (which, just happens to take from Hannah’s life experiences). It makes Hannah perform her life to show how much she’s taken her life for art.

Hannah’s art has real-life effects, and just because hastening Marnie and Charlie’s separation might be ultimately doing them a kindness, it doesn’t mean Hannah should always be so quick to trade life for fiction. Especially when life feels, well, so often mundane and, dare I say, a little too easy? After Hannah recites her own words, Charlie leaves in the angriest we’ve seen him thus far, turning over the coffee table he made on his way. This moment of heightened feeling from Charlie asks for a similar response of escalated emotion from Hannah. As Charlie drags the coffee table out the door, Hannah stands up and shouts: “That’s the kind of thing you do right before you hit us! Don’t hit us.” *Beat* “Don’t hit us!” This living room scene begins to feel like a full-on stage play. Charlie (who I’m having trouble imagine hitting anyone) is on his way out the door, but Hannah needs to play up the scene for full dramatic effect. Standing in the same spot she was previously sitting, maybe five meters away from Charlie, she tries to accuse him of potential physical abuse. It’s funny. But it’s also kind of sad. It’s a sitcom moment because it places dramatic conventions in a context where they sound absurd.

Charlie leaves. End scene. Hannah resumes as “Hannah” and turns to ask Marnie: “If you had read the essay and it wasn’t about you, do you think you would have liked it? Just as like a piece of writing.” The journal—which Hannah previously referred to as “a notebook…notes for a book”—is now an essay. (Forthcoming in Midnight Snack perhaps?) The astonishing part of this scene is Hannah asks and expects Marnie to be able to take herself out of her life—to look at her life as an impartial outsider.

In Richard Brody’s short post in The New Yorker (which has been one of my favourite entries on Girls so far), he writes about how Hannah growth in this episode is marked by her evolving understanding of empathy. Whereas Hannah needs to know to separate life from art—journals from essays—when it comes to Marnie and Charlie (lives that aren’t, ultimately, hers to dictate), she might be more at liberty to experiment in narrating and directing her own life. Brody writes about the final scene between Hannah and Adam, where the latter lies masturbating on his bed, and the former feeds lines that satisfy his fantasies of erotic submission and guilt:

Suddenly, Hannah’s art and her life are fused: what looks like imagination is actually empathy, and her careful yet passionate catalogue of her experiences and the experiences of others morphs into a spontaneous depth of understanding, the power to respond to the other in the other’s terms, to invent a moment on the basis of what she knows, to turn the often tawdry stuff of life into chasms of revelation.

Between the two scenes that bookend this episode 5, Hannah stumbles through another exercise as empathy in a moment—both horrifying and hilarious—with her boss, Rich. After some prompting from Jessa, Hannah thinks she’s responding “to the other in the other’s terms” by propositioning Rich to have sex with her. He fails to follow script, turning a planned sexual rendezvous into a scene of farce.

Jessa tells Hannah to fuck her boss “for the story,” but Hannah doesn’t yet know the difference between doing it for the story, and doing it “just to be an asshole.” You can’t entirely blame her either—sometimes those things just aren’t easily separable. So instead of backtracking, Hannah takes the story to its logical cinematic (here Erin Brockovich is cited) end and threatens to sue Rich for sexual harassment. After that gets her only more laughs, she tries extortion. Nope. Feeling that her story has gotten somewhat out of hand, Hannah proposes to quit her job, except Rich responds (warmly, surprisingly, given the other obviously icky aspects of his personality) by asking her to stay. “You’re great!” he assures her, “You don’t know how to do anything, but you have so much potential.” In this moment, you’re really, really compelled to agree with him. Hannah, perhaps unknowingly, has also gotten her story out of this encounter, even if it’s not quite the plot she expected for herself. Leaving Rich, she pipes: “And someday I am going to write an essay about you and I am not going to change your name. And then you can sue me!” Hannah is still not very believable when she’s trying to keep to book; she’s best when caught off guard and forced to improvise. She has, after all, so much potential.

The ease with which Hannah shifts from one persona or attitude to another is all to her benefit. It’s, honestly, what I wish I had more of as a person and a thinker. Flexibility is less an achievement than it is a continuous practice. Hannah wants things (relationships, stability, someone who “loves you that much”), but in order to find them, she needs to rehearse letting go. Adam gives Hannah some pretty valid and thoughtful advice: “It’s a bummer but people do outgrow each other.” (Even if they don’t “wanna outgrow each other.”) The situation isn’t, of course, singular to Hannah. It was only after I had replayed the scene three times did I realize my own relentless desire to understand Adam’s advice. Going by memory it’s something like this:

–     These things have a timeline: six months or until someone stops having fun.

–       But you’re not having fun.

–       You’re secretly sad.

–       I kissed you because you looked sad.

–       I had sex with you because I was kissing you.

Ouch.

Adam and Hannah’s encounter is juxtaposed against Marnie and Charlie’s—another couple that, after four years, might need to try letting go too. While Marnie attemps to win Charlie back, the show flashbacks to their first encounter where Marnie is literally “stuck to a pole.” When Hannah goes off to dance, Charlie enters as the person who won’t abandon her. She asks him to hug her, again and again, while ignoring his invitation to attend his band’s show. Fast-forward four years and it’s Charlie now who can’t deal with being abandoned. But it feels a bit necessary, at least right now, that this relationship doesn’t have a happy ending.

Elaine Blair’s insightful piece in the NYRB this week looks at how sex, desire, and romance are presented in pop culture, and how Dunham has worked to expand such conventions:

Though Tiny Furniture is a comedy on a different scale from a Hollywood production like Bridesmaids, it nonetheless has some things to say about heroines. Both guys in Tiny Furniture are laughably wrong for Aura. Her romantic life is composed entirely of unsatisfying encounters and nonevents, though Dunham suggests that these are never less than interesting.

Like Blair, I agree that Dunham’s work compels because she often keeps our sympathies toward a heroine’s love interest(s) ambivalent. Especially in episode five, the concept and term “love” is tossed around so often as to open up its meaning to the point where it could signify anything a person hopes it to. At least in the moment. As Jessa tells Hannah: “Guys like that will try anything once. Even love.” Hannah vibes on this advice in her encounter with Rich: “Adults try things. That’s what I’ve learned.”

There’s more I want to talk about (but this already feels too long): what Brody said about how this “episode deepens and extends Dunham’s theme of the writer as betrayer.” Which brings me back to questions of triangles, and journals, and eavesdropping, and extortion. How I actually found Jessa’s scene with her employer-couple in their washroom (where she’s using the mother’s make-up?) the most uncomfortable, even though I find her the least easy to identify with it. Sorry this post isn’t very much of an ending. I’m looking forward to tomorrow night, and what you lovely folk have to say.

Trying things,

Jane