I have little interest in the controversy that’s always surrounded Girls.
It’s been done to death. I’m more intrigued by wondering where the show can go from the end of its 20th episode, “Together.”
(Spoiler Alert!)
Charlie and Marnie are together again, Adam has rescued Hannah from her own mind/apartment in a ridiculously intense sweeping-strings-soundtracked scene, Shoshanna is out being being a 21-year-old young woman in Brooklyn and drinking/making-out with a random dude (nothing wrong with that).
The dudes connected to those women – Charlie, Adam and Ray – are all fully tethered to relationships that exacerbate their preexisting problems or are pining for couplings that aren’t right for them at the moment. The parents are either not present or just as badly off as the offspring they’ve produced. Everyone is on an equal playing field of thoroughly flawed and fucked up.
This episode – and you could argue, the show as a whole – is a treatise on missed payoffs. We don’t definitively see anyone succeed or fail (with the exception of Charlie and Marnie reuniting), I suppose.
This is infuriating. Charlie could buy a more emotionally fulfilling robot with all his new money.
Beyond that, we don’t see Hannah meet or fail her deadline (although it’d be safe to assume she failed). We don’t really know what’s happening with Shoshanna and Ray, although they’re probably pretty done. Lastly, the show has been absent of Jessa since “Video Games,” her bottle episode that showed us her idiot-hippie, ignorant father and made me understand her, if not like her. (I’m honestly fine with her not being around. She makes Hannah seem like Mother fucking Teresa in terms of altruism/sympathy/empathy/etc.)
So where do they go? How do they change? I think/hope that Lena Dunham is playing a long game with these characters, and that they might actually come upon progress in a positive direction. However, I don’t think it’s bound to happen in season 3, and maybe not even in season 4 if the show gets that far.
Girls made a name for itself based on its frankness. It made a blatant act by eschewing the idea that its characters had to be likable by presenting women who were allowed to be as flawed as the men in the prestigious dramas before it – like Mad Men and Breaking Bad also do. It didn’t always hit its mark. I continue to dig my heels in as an anti-Jessa partisan because I think the writers can’t decide whether she is someone to be glorified or pitied, but it’s never played it safe.
Well, that is until the season 2 finale.
We’re in for a fair amount of additional frustration in the episodes to come. And, not for nothing, but aren’t those of us who belong to the generation Dunham is chronicling (myself included) spending a hell of a lot of our time frustrated? Don’t we frustrate our parents all the fucking time? Aren’t we confused as hell to ourselves and confusing to those who observe us? Would my feelings about this show be so strongly positive, despite the way its characters often drive me into apoplectic fits of fury if I were removed from this mindset or if I were one of the older, crankier critics who’s been watching/recapping/kneecapping/critiquing it?
My basic perspective on the show can, I suppose, by encapsulated by “Together’s” outrageous ending. While I highly disagree with it, I don’t find its events outside the realm of plausibility. The presentation, however, which is basically a rougher take on a rom-com ending with Adam busting down the door and answering her “You’re here” with “I was always here,” makes you wonder what Dunham thinks of her decision.
Does she want us to wallow in the dysfunction of it all and just show the characters making bad choices, or is she building towards a true and satisfying payoff? Maybe she actually thinks that Hannah and Adam are perfect together? (Easy answer: They are not.)
For now, we’ve been given a fascinatingly weird, hysterical and often painful-as-fuck journey toward an uncertain destination when watching Girls. We may not always like where it takes us. But, it’s doubtful that we’ll be able to tear our eyes away.
Liam Green can be reached at lgreen@thoughtpollution.com.