The first season of Girls.
At a bunch of points over the past few months, I thought Girls was my favorite show on television. Yes, I liked Game of Thrones a lot, but since I’ve already read the books, the element of surprise was lacking; plus, it’s such sheer fantasy that there was still a lot of space left over for a show about contemporary America.
The highpoint of the show was definitely the party episode. The setting was enviable, the characters were all actually in the same place, and the various rooms of the party provided good settings for individual dramas to unfold. From that episode until Sunday’s finale, Girls has been on a slide.
Lena Dunham’s male characters are a joke. They are hugely inconsistent. Her character, Hannah, has a boyfriend who is so completely different by the end of Season 1 that if you started late you’d find the early episodes simply bewildering. He started off as a primal ne’er-do-well topping her, then became a whiny aesthete criticizing her narcissism. Her boss, the bandmate who plays with Marnie’s ex-boyfriend, has evolved from a minor douchebag into some kind of Zen master, capable of rising to any occasion and characterizing every circumstance.
I don’t know what any character besides Hannah wants, and although I really enjoy reading Sloane Crosley’s essays, I have to say that Dunham has succeeded in making Hannah such a superficial, obnoxious brat that I find it difficult to imagine voluntarily buying some collection of Hannah’s — in which she would undoubtedly do nothing but obsessively curate her own life. As for the other three women: who on Earth could possibly care whether they succeed in what they are trying to do? We haven’t seen Marnie at her job in ages, and her personal life is in tatters. The show won’t even let her have a half-decent sex life, despite making her break up with her boyfriend on the grounds that he couldn’t ring her bell. Shoshanna is a sheltered, judgmental virgin priss who apparently can call everyone she knows “dumb whores” a week or so after beating the shit out of a guy she barely knows while high on crack. As for Jessa, well, she’s suddenly married to some vacuous Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps type. So much for European sophistication.
If there’s a point to all of this, I’ve missed it. These characters have everything: money (at least running in the family), looks, youth, friends, and luck. Yet they still manage to screw up their lives in the name of rather paltry ideals: themselves (Hannah), “the little death” (Marnie), respectability (Shoshanna), and stability (Jessa). Lena Dunham is incredibly funny, but — with apologies to Tracy Chapman — I want more from life than she can give.
Leaving aside the show’s male characters, about whom we can agree to disagree on (though you don’t say anything about Marnie’s ex, who I think you’d be hard-pressed to call a joke), I think your complaint about not knowing what the characters want misses the point a little bit. The characters don’t know what they want and this show is very much about them figuring out what that is, both professionally and personally. These characters all have limited insight and self-awareness – as we all do to varying degrees – a quality we should recognize as such, not use as an occasion to dismiss the characters as awful and self-involved.
Put another way, Hannah’s an unreliable narrator. The final scene of the party episode gets at this quite nicely when Adam tells her, rightly, that she doesn’t know anything about him – a revelation that should call into question our previous impression of him. Ok, so I guess we can disagree to disagree about the male characters then.
Well there you go! Theses women are young stupid lost souls. Maybe they will mature and figure out what they want.
Sharon, yes, I might characterize them that way too, but since they’re television characters, the rules of the game are a little different. On the one hand, Brandon’s right, they can get away with more bad decisions than we might tolerate from a real, live person. On the other, they can’t really surprise us by “maturing” unless somebody writes a “maturation” story arc.
Brandon,
Funnily enough, one of my biggest complaints about the show is Marnie’s ex-boyfriend. If I didn’t mention him in the post, other than to say that he couldn’t get Marnie off, it was because his character was so unworthy that I gravitated toward critiquing the other male characters.
To begin with, I’m not “on his side.” I’m on Marnie’s side, if I have to pick. This is partly because Marnie’s the character who’s actually central to the show (along with the other three), but it’s also because I’m sympathetic to the fact that his lukewarm behavior, and lack of effort in the department of badassery, could make him pretty boring to the wrong girl. Sure, he’s an indie rocker, but he’s one of those irritating indie rockers who write songs about vintage sneakers.
I was probably OK with everything through the hilarious breakup-during-sex-scene. But then what was going on with the rapidly unfolding events that followed? One week he has this new, crunchy-or-groupie-or-both girlfriend climbing him like a jungle gym. The next week, she’s away, Marnie’s suddenly decided that his new girl is a good blogger (who cares?), and yet he still finds time to hit on her and still manages to trip over his own feet. How can they possibly be re-using that dynamic, is what I was asking myself. I thought he was a great minor character who was going to replaced by Virile Ze Artiste after a couple episodes.
It’s a fair point that, given the age of these characters, there’s no reason to expect that they’d be done “figuring stuff out.” It would be nice if somebody besides Hannah believed in something, though. What do they care about? Are the other three just trying to make ends meet? (Yes, Jessa grandstands about a nanny union, but the show turns that into a short nanny version of Half Nelson.) Partly because they don’t care about anything, the first season seemed full of plotlines that either vanished right away, or else ended not with a bang but a whimper. For example, they really dragged out the question of How Will Hannah Pay The Rent, which is surprising, since the answer is “she can just work at that coffeehouse run by a guy in her same social circle.” More interesting characters, like the backup dancer (woman from Suits) or the writing professor (enterprising young man from The Sopranos), seemed to get cut short, given that this isn’t 30 Rock. (Actually, even 30 Rock has done more with its guests.)
As for the issue of whether Hannah is narrating the story: that is just very unclear to me. It seems like she is, because the show ignored the other characters when she visited back home, and because of the surreal aspects of her relationship (“I’ve never even seen you wearing a shirt!”) Despite this, even with four friends gossiping about each other, it’s not clear to me how Hannah would be able to tell the story of Shoshanna getting rejected for being a virgin. She never talks to Shoshanna, and I’m not convinced Sho-sho would share that with Jessa or Marnie.
So even though I totally agree with you that the show is trying to create the very literary effect of a first-person narrative, I don’t think it’s being consistent about it, and the result is of course that “Hannah’s subjective POV” just becomes Dunham’s excuse for things that don’t add up.
I’m not capable of the same level of sophisticated discourse taking place here, but I wanted to throw my hat in the ring.
This show is bad. It is a bad, bad show. I don’t simply mean bad in terms of quality, I mean it as a moral distinction.
First of all, yes, you are. Second, I’m intrigued by the idea that you found the show morally bankrupt…but then you don’t explain! If you were any more of a tease you’d be in The Breakfast Club.
Fine.
Okay.
First of all, I have watched every episode. I have enjoyed it in the way you enjoy cotton candy that is also going to give you cancer. So I am a ‘fan’ in the sense that I help their ratings (or would if I didn’t just steal it online).
There are moments when I find the show dirty and intellectually mastubatory in just the right way. It was obviously written by a young person, and sometimes that roughness makes it even more enjoyable.
But in my final estimation, I hate it. It is morally bankrupt because there’s nothing true about it. Like a lot of hipster literature that I love-hate – Safran Foer, Krauss, Eggers – I think it compromises its own integrity in favor of feeling edgy and raw, and aiming for a sort of hyper-truthiness (with apologies to Stephen Colbert). If I had to compare it to something historical, it would be Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero.
There’s a disgust as a writer that comes from seeing that, because it feels like profoundly disingenuous pandering – I don’t mind Twilight, because it’s obviously pandering, and it isn’t trying to be anything else, but masquerading as profundity when you’ve long since made the decision that the appearance of truth is more important than truth gives me a stomach ache.
There’s also a danger in works that attempt to speak for a generation, and then give up their integrity right out of the gate. An entire older generation will watch that show and think it’s the experience of young people, and I think that’s horseshit. I don’t even think this show is the experience of a rarefied group of entitled Brooklynites.
The internal reference to Sex in the City is apt – this show bears about as much relation to reality as that show did. The problem is that the entire framing of this show is that it is an accurate representation of life, not simply escapism.
I’m repeating myself. Maybe that’s because I don’t quite know how to make the point I’m trying to make. I can’t really articulate why I think this show is wrong. But I feel it in my bones.
In different ways, Brendan, you and I are saying similar things. We’re both saying that there isn’t much at stake here. I first said “I don’t know what these characters want to make of themselves,” and now I’m saying “I don’t know what they believe in,” since as Brandon correctly observed, they’re a bit young to be settling down.
Your observation is that “there’s nothing true about it.” Now, on the microscopic level, I’d disagree. There are lots of interactions in every episode that ring quite true for me. Take something like the parents watching Million Dollar Baby on Netflix and chiding Hannah for having her laptop out, or “you modern career women, I know what you like” from Episode 1, or maybe two-thirds of the big Hannah/Marnie blowout fight.
Of course, there are lots of little things that are ridiculous as well. The sexual harassment boss was not real. (I mean, in his particular mixture of nonchalant lucidity, friendliness, and extremely inappropriate behavior.) “You threw a great abortion” was an amazing line, but not real. Pretending to re-hire Jessa in order to lecture her was not real, and the marriage made zero sense because IT WAS THE SAME GUY FROM THE ALMOST-THREESOME.
Nonetheless, I think most of those are not fatal. Some of them are exaggerated for the sake of the humor, and that’s reasonable — so is a lot of Woody Allen. Others, like the lecture which leads to the marriage, don’t work as a sequential chain of events but — considered one at a time — have something going for them.
What really worries me about the show is that it lacks a theme, which goes along with characters who lack principles. Even Bret Easton Ellis, who has never written a good novel or a bad movie in his life, works on-screen because there’s consistent, underlying moral outrage. The message is always, “We’re wasting our brief existences on this earth!”
Sex and the City did have four incredibly complex, annoying main characters, but it also had more than that. It was, in its own slick way, about modern romance. It was even earnest enough to feature “person on the street” interviews in Season 1. In the second-to-last episode of GIRLS, Dunham essentially made her case that ten little truths can equal one big truth, which is why Hannah should have read her hoarder essay instead of some dashed-off thing about mortality.
But — in part because Dunham herself called attention to this issue — as Michael Imperioli explained the moral of the episode (“you should have read that great essay you sent me”), I couldn’t help but wonder: Is it possible that in cases like these, the whole is less than the sum of good parts?
YAY! PUNS!
You’re right that Hannah is not literally a narrator – my point was that the show still filters the audience’s perception of the world through the characters. In that sense, they’re all unreliable narrators, and I think Marnie and the ex provide a perfect example of this. She wants a guy who won’t ask permission to do what he wants in bed, but she has no self-awareness about how her uptight, control-freak nature makes that impossible. It seems a bit inconsistent to, on the one hand, want a guy to plunder like a Viking in bed and, on the other hand, be such a prude that she hates something as vanilla as doggy style. (Apparently she doesn’t enjoy feeling like she has udders – a line that, by itself, justifies the entire existence of this show) Their post-break up confirms this contradiction: he propositions her at the wedding, acting like the bad-ass she apparently always wanted, and she balks. And then she makes out with a Disney version of Jonah Hill who will be so grateful for her attention that he will be even more deferential than her previous boyfriend.
This is what I mean when I say none of them know what they want. The only one who does seem to know is Zosia Mamet, and she is easily the most one-dimensional of all the characters (though her hook-up with Ray is promising, I think). We also knew what all the SATC character wanted – and it’s no accident that Zosia Mamet is a SATC obsessive. I don’t think you’ll ever find anyone who’d say “I’m a Jessa,” in the way that people would say “I’m a Charlotte” and I think that’s the point. Nor would one ever actually say “I’m a Joe,” or “I’m a Brandon.” What you cite as their lack of principles is what makes these characters feel like real people to me and not, well, characters. (That said, comparisons to Ellison are entirely unfair – these characters are decidedly not nihilists even if Hannah threatens castration as part of some sex game with Adam).
I think the characters’ various flaws and contradictions have a strong emotional truth even if the show isn’t sociologically true. I particularly thought the episode when she visited her parents was great for how it got at the weirdness of going home in your early ’20s and how, if you’re returning home from a bigger more cosmopolitan city, you can feel simultaneously superior and infantilized. I think if you separate the show out from its buzz and the media hype about it being the ‘voice of a generation,’ and take the show on its own terms, it won’t seem like it’s pandering so much. That complaint seems more directed at the show’s audience than the show itself; Lena Dunham’s not responsible for people who mistake Girls for an ethnography of contemporary Brooklyn-based hipster culture. In the end it’s a sitcom. It’s not The Wire. It doesn’t have to get at a specific, sociological truth to be truthful. Otherwise, that would be like dismissing Seinfeld for not being an accurate depiction of life on the Upper Westside.
Brandon,
You’re absolutely right that the show doesn’t have some sort of moral obligation to be bigger than it is, in terms of subject matter or plot arcs. It’s an important point, and related to what happens to Hannah at the reading.
I actually don’t care all that much about sociology per se; Sex and the City and The Wire happen to be sociological shows, but the themes of Six Feet Under were (for the most part) not necessarily sociological (e.g. mortality, the nature of dreams and the psyche).
(Plus, for all the credit that SatC and The Wire get, what do they really argue? Sex and the City says ultimately that everything we fear about remaining unmarried is true, and marriage is still *the* ultimate happy ending. The Wire says that things are terrible in Baltimore, but doesn’t seem very convinced that a program of radical change could succeed.)
I interpret the wedding scene quite differently, actually. As I saw it, Adam comes fairly close to being the aggressive, cocky man Marnie is looking for, but then he falls apart. I can’t put it all on Marnie: when she asks him if he’s joking, he lies and says yes. But Steve McQueen would have pulled a face and asked her if she thought he was joking. Plus, even if they did hookup, so what? I don’t know enough about Adam’s new relationship to have a clue whether they should.
It may be that people don’t map themselves onto us wholesale yet, but if we get famous and/or successful enough, they absolutely will. Somebody will come up to you and say “I want this job because I’m you twenty years ago,” just like in an Aaron Sorkin show, and even if they don’t say it, they’ll be thinking it. Even now, there are plenty of qualities that various social groups consider “Joe-like” or “Kugel-like” and that they reference as such, including in front of me, with no regard for the sheer uncanniness of it.
I do consider myself a Shoshanna, but I think your term “emotional truth” works well for what feels like the genuine insights that come along several times per episode. At the same time, if these women are atypical I don’t like them, and if they’re typical, so much the worse for us. My friends are, to a person, better at life and kinder and more idealistic than any character on Girls, and were that way at 24 as well. I can watch a show with characters I don’t like, just for the verbal brilliance and generally applicable (if rather cynical) truths. Whether I can rewatch it, though — except by chance as happens with Seinfeld — is another story.
So, Michael Imperioli actually says “you should have read that hysterical essay you sent me.” I remember because a Creative Writing professor who doesn’t know the difference between hysterical and hilarious is so deeply troubling as to be unforgettable. Of course I don’t reject wholly the possibility that Hannah’s essay was not hilarious, but in fact hysterical.
“These characters have everything: money (at least running in the family), looks, youth, friends, and luck. Yet they still manage to screw up their lives in the name of rather paltry ideals.”
Isn’t that the point?
You seem to be hating on the show for creating characters that are inadequately “relatable.” But I think the point is to see something of yourself in the flaws of these characters. I think that’s how you’re supposed to relate to them. But if you hypothesize that the flaws of these characters are not in any way “characteristic,” then you will be disappointed by the show.
This is actually something that’s come up for me recently with the book The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell: namely, that every character, no matter how despicable, is somehow a deep reflection of oneself (if one is honest enough to admit it).
At any given point, that’s absolutely true. I could be one of those characters. Furthermore, it’s true that my life rarely bears much resemblance to my highest ideals. But, all the same, I have those ideals, and the mistakes I make, I make trying to realize them. These characters are astoundingly complacent, and while that does create opportunities for Dunham to be trenchant, and scathing, it also makes them a little less than real. I’m not going to flagellate myself or my friends in the name of cardboard cut-outs like these. Real human beings simply expect more out of life and have slightly better coping skills. Saying that doesn’t (automatically) make me dishonest, for the simple reason that honesty can’t be measured by the intensity of someone’s contempt for themselves.
Is the problem with the characters that they don’t have ideals? Hannah wants to be the “voice of her generation.” Adam has absurdly serious moral red-lines he will not cross. The problem is that reality utterly defeats their ideals, to the point that it feels absurd even to avow them any longer. I just don’t buy that it’s implausible. To the contrary, it’s a much harsher and more honest, albeit stylized, depiction of real life than most TV on the same subject, and that’s what people seem to be responding to.