Bruce Eric Kaplan Summarized My Deepest Fear Long Ago....

In Defense of Girls

I understand why Girls is such a controversial show: really, I do. I get why so many people spew such vitriol about it – its characters are detestable, it’s white-centric, it gives older generations a plethora of examples to fuel their “Millenials are the worst” argument. The show’s creator and star is a divisive public personality, and the show gets flack simply for being the brainchild of Lena Dunham.

But I still and always have LOVED this show – I find it poignant and hilarious - and you can judge me without explanation or because of my explanation, but like Hannah Horvath – I simply won’t care.

I think the biggest detraction and most apt criticism is that the characters on this show – hot mess Hannah, control-freak Marnie, damaged Jessa, and quirky Shoshanna – are all undoubtedly unlikable and that for the last five years, they haven’t progressed much (nay: even digressed at times) in their efforts to adult. But I think that complaint is erroneous. One of the reasons this is such a groundbreaking show (aside from its frank depictions of sex and nudity) is that it doesn’t really play up the positive personality traits of its female (or male, to be fair) characters to make them more appealing to the audience. You may argue that this has been true of protagonists in other anti-hero shows like Mad Men or The Sopranos or Breaking Bad – but most real-life people don’t interact with moody mobsters and borderline-sociopathic executives or meth dealers; however pretty much everyone knows someone like Marnie (annoyingly narcissistic and manipulative) or Ray (cynical and opinionated) in real life.

I think one of the silent goals of the show is to provide an unflinching portrayal of what it’s like to be twenty-something in post 9/11 NYC. Newsflash: it can be ugly. People like to complain that it portrays millennials in a highly unflattering light: that we’re not all so solipsistic or aimless or naïve. We’re aren’t all that way, but let’s face facts: many of us (even Gen Xers and Baby Boomers!) have narcissistic tendencies, have struggled to figure out what it is we want to do with our lives, or have been short-sighted about a relationship. While most of us wouldn’t show up at our boss’ funeral to hit up his widow for information about our pending book deal (INAPPROPES, Hannah!) or unleash a torrent of hard truths on our self-absorbed friends while on a mini-vaca (sick burns, Shosh) or set up a friend’s ex with an acquaintance specifically so you can get into bed with that acquaintance’s on/off significant other (that was low even for you, Jessa), admit it: if put in their shoes, you secretly would have wished you could do these things, but because you have some measure of social decency, you would not have. If I were Hannah and my hard work was up in the air because my editor died, I wouldn’t have brought up my concerns at his funeral – but I would have set up a meeting in the future with whomever it concerned because hello – we don’t labor for the hell of it! Her concerns were valid, it’s just the way she went about addressing the issue that was deplorable. Although Shoshanna’s brutal honesty can pack a punch, I certainly wish as a society we could be more direct with our opinions without them coming across as insensitive. And as sleazy as Jessa’s play was to set up Adam with MimiRose so that she could get with Ace, I think given the same circumstances the thought would occur to most of us, we just wouldn’t go through with arranging it.

And it’s not as if there are no redeeming qualities in these characters: they’re all good for at least a few laughs! I simply adore Shoshanna’s bizarro fashion sense and cartoonish faces, Jessa has become more reputable as she’s slowly grown from a selfish junkie trust fund baby to a recovering determined grad student, Ray has become a relatable adult with an actual avenue to vent his societal frustrations in local government.

Ok, yes: Hannah is still just as wincingly childish and self-serving  as she ever was. But I think this correlates as a kind of commentary of or resistance to the format of television (or film, or literature), which is that the point of the series is to observe development or change in the main character(s), whether it be positive change (pretty much everything ever produced) or negative change (Breaking Bad). Hannah hasn’t really matured or improved much in 5 seasons and people LOVE to harp on this, but seriously? How many adult people do you know that have made dramatic leaps in their behavior in five years? Especially when so many external monkey wrenches are being thrown into the mix (the implosion of her relationship with Adam, her failed attempt at grad school and the botched move home, her trainwreck father coming out as gay and the criminal amount to which he involves her in his exploration of his new life and her parent’s relationship in general)? Probably not many. Do we all wish she would grow up and behave like a normal human being and not inflict awful moments on us? Surely. But that’s us wanting the format of the show to live up to our expectations of how shows work – is it realistic to expect a real person who isn’t in therapy twice a week with hang-ups and friends like Hannah’s to blossom into a stable, gregarious individual in the same amount of time? No, is my assessment. As a fictional character we expect to witness some character growth in Hannah because that’s what characters in books and movies and tv shows tend to do – that isn’t always true about real life people, even though we’d like to think that.

So I will continue to watch and defend Girls because it continues to deliver startlingly frank depictions of real world issues like mental illness and sexual relationships and modern social interactions, and because I’m not holding it up to an unnecessary standard of progression, I will likely continue to enjoy it’s uncomfortable brand of humor and affectation. I’ll end with something Hannah said in Season one which resonated with me and probably many others, and is fitting to this argument:

“No one could ever hate me as much as I hate myself, okay? So any mean thing someone is going to think of to say about me, I’ve already said to me, about me, probably in the last half hour.”

Go ahead and hate – the nature of your detraction has probably already been considered by the defendant and they’re still standing. *Shrug*