Thursday, February 14, 2013

TV Review: Girls (2012-2013)

The HBO show Girls, now in its second season, has probably been written about more than any TV show in recent memory. Led by creator and writer Lena Dunham, previously known for her small but renowned indie film Tiny Furniture, it revolves around the lives of several young New Yorkers struggling through their early to mid 20s. Hannah Horvath (Dunham) is the lead character, an overweight, neurotic graduate of Oberlin who is cut off by her parents in the first episode (last season). Throughout the first season and a third, she and her friends engage in often unsatisfying sex, get into relationships, fall out of relationships, teeter on the edge of economic ruin by losing jobs and find moments of contentment and joy amidst the general Millenial angst. Hannah is what the Internet set call a "concern troll," a girl that ices her sneer with dignified worry. She meanders from one relationship to the next, never finding what she is looking for. Last season she had a fucky-buddy relationship with a strangely sociopathic artist named Adam Sackler (Adam Driver). As the relationship matures, we learn that there is more to Adam than we thought. But just as the relationship settles into domesticated bliss (or as close as the young faux-bohemian trust funders can allow), Hannah loses interest and dumps Adam after he is hit by a car. 

This occurs at the wedding of her flaky cousin Jessa (Jemima Kirke) who ties the knot with what turns out to be an unredeemable and innately bitter Yuppie named Thomas-John. Last episode the two had a brutal fight that ended with the dissolution of the marriage after a mere few weeks (though Jessa gets some money for their torturous time together). Jessa is the flighty type who has sex in bar bathrooms, leads on a married man until he reciprocates and seems to have no life plan but to float from one experience to the next (a sort of female Beat for the 21st century). She is accompanied in the show by Hannah's other two friends -- Marnie (Allison Williams), the beautiful girl whose life unravels before our eyes as she loses her cushy job at an art gallery, breaks up with her boyfriend, gets him back, breaks up with him again and then entices him into a kiss before telling him she is seeing a famous artist (who she engaged in absurdly bad sex with a few episodes back -- after even worse almost sex with Hannah's ex, who is gay and dating an older man who he uses to pay the bills) and Shoshana Shapiro, the newly ex-virgin Jap, who is dating Ray, a 30-something loser that works at coffee shop and does little else. Thus the show is filled with young adults struggling with life in the city, trying unsuccessfully to pursue their art and/or establish some financial footing.

What interest me about the show is the fact that the four main characters are not terribly likable and yet the show draws you in. I mentioned this to my students last week, focusing on the self-possesion of Hannah and her tendency to cloak her selfishness within the actions of other characters who are only measured by their relationship to her. My students responded that self-possesion was about right for their generation and she actually was a decent representative. Shoshana fits only loosely into the surrounding narrative, and is probably the most likable character, but Marney also seems selfish and self-possessed and Jessa's attractive flightiness starts to feel more cruel as one delves deeper into her character. Many have thus criticized the show for treating the lives of the young and privileged as deep Greek tragedies, forgoing the reality that most have a back-up plan if things really go wrong. Others have been drawn into discomfort by the fact that the show deals so explicitly with sex and that Hannah is not the typical girl you see naked on television or in movies. 

The first critique does hold some water, but why should we ignore the plight of the young, privileged who are also feeling the effects of the financial downturn and collapse of the American dream? In some ways, maybe their story resonates even more, as we recognize that them struggling is part of a grander narrative of the general decline of quality of life in America and signifies more trouble to come. Maybe the show captures the nature of life for the Millenials, who grew up fully immersed in the spectacle society of Debord and thus only have recourse to affection and exaggerated psychological responses to the daily machinations of their lives. The second critique seems to cloak a firmly anti-feminist meme that has long existed among male critics to books, plays and movies that explore older iterations of Hannah Horvath and her friends. There is a certain perversity in criticizing a show for actually taking on the absurd ideals that are fed to young girls and women by advertisers and media execs today. There is a certain braveness to capturing the lives of these young women without sugar-coating them or ensuring that the characters are all likable -- a television verite approach (well maybe I exaggerate). While I am often troubled by the underlying message of the show and the craven, materialistic, self-involved nature of the characters, isn't that what youth is for? Rather than simply conforming to the vanilla dream of hard work, early success and comfortable consumerism, the characters are trying to forge an identity outside the normative (though one could argue their form of "bohemianism" only reinforces the notion that it is gone). They take a further step than Sex and the City ever did, capturing the women at an earlier stage of their New York City angst -- and allowing a more honest rendering of the hopes and disappointment that so often materialize in the space between expectation and fulfillment (making the case for a Lacanian rendering of lack and desire). In any case, it is a show that certainly pushes the boundaries of what kinds of women we see on television and the limits of the acceptable. And that is always good for art, even if art on television might still be an oxymoron.

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