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*
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