Girls Recap: Don’t Do It, You Awful Idiot!

WARNING: This is a recap. That means spoilers.

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The discussion about whether the characters on Girls are likable is point-missing of the highest order. Anybody who wants to have that conversation must recuse themselves if they watch Mad Men or Breaking Bad or anything starring a male anti-hero — or Curb Your Enthusiasm or Always Sunny, for that matter — lest I imply that they are maybe less comfortable with a slightly dumpy young woman being kind of a shit person than they are when it’s a conventionally handsome middle-aged man, or a rich old man, or several good-looking young men and a hot girl and Danny DeVito. Anybody who’s tuning into Girls to have their cockles warmed hasn’t been paying attention.

Now, whether you’re inclined to spend half an hour of your time watching people being hilariously terrible is another thing altogether. The internet has been awash with smart people questioning the demand that characters, particularly women, be likable; read Roxane Gay’s excellent essay on Buzzfeed last month; Rebecca Mead’s profile of Jennifer Wiener in the New Yorker; or the quote that started it all from novelist Claire Messud, who reacted sharply when an interviewer remarked last year that the protagonist of Messud’s latest novel was not someone he’d want to be  friends with: “For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘Is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘Is this character alive?’”

“You will never write a thing that matters,” Caroline tells Hannah, “because you don’t understand the true struggles of humanity because you just slipped right out of your mother’s pussy like a nice little golden egg, ya spoiled little fucking brat.”

Caroline is half right there (and everything about Gaby Hoffmann’s line reading in that scene was perfection, just so we’re clear). The thing stopping Hannah from writing things that matter — and from being likable — isn’t her privilege: it’s her self-absorption.

Of course Hannah doesn’t understand humanity. She only (and barely) understands herself. She wants to be a memoirist, which requires her to believe that her unique experiences will be interesting for people to read; editors seem to love her because her storytelling style is just “TMI, all the time”, because she goes where Mindy Kaling apparently won’t, and shares things most people don’t. ‘Unique experiences’ is the key phrase here, because the incidents she rattles off to Caroline – the kidney-stone hand job, the time she fell asleep on a pile of pizza boxes, when she slept with a Cuban refugee, and then that whole thing with the glitter gun — seem chosen for their very randomness, for the statistical unlikelihood that anybody else will have had those experiences, and for their suggestion that the person living them is living life to the fullest.

Similarly, Dunham writes Girls as a sort of privileged-hipster picaresque: a string of occurrences that don’t always have thematic coherency, but on the whole suggest an interesting, believable life. She’s disdainful of easy moral causality, often leaving incidents to stand on their own, rather than framing them with neat lessons learned or making them a cog in Goldbergian plot machinations. Characters aren’t always punished for their moral or personal transgressions, context is kinda optional, and this confuses people.

Perhaps that’s part of the reason that some people get so up in arms about the awfulness of these characters: because they so often go unpunished, at least indirectly, for their emotional and social crimes, and so they never learn their lesson, and are doomed to repeat them and thus continue to be horrible people. That’s one of my worst nightmares – to go my entire life never learning how to not be the shittiest version of myself; to be my own worst enemy forever. There’s nobody sitting there watching me make my mistakes, yelling DON’T DO IT, YOU AWFUL IDIOT before the words leave my mouth.

This episode highlights how each character is their own worst enemy, not by having their mistakes come back to bite them, but simply by having them make those mistakes, even as we’re sitting there yelling “DON’T DO IT, YOU AWFUL IDIOT”.

Marnie and Ray indulge their respective insecurities with some real talk followed by some seriously ill-advised table banging. (Side note: Marnie is just a pick-up artist’s wet dream: a regulation hottie with relatively limited sexual experience, wildly fluctuating self-esteem, and a truly embarrassing susceptibility to negging? Be still, my beating fedora.) Marnie keeps getting pretty good ideas and then fucking them up in her own special Marnie way. Chasing her dream is a great idea! Constantly grabbing microphones in public, less so! The scene last week where she tosses half a banana in her smoothie and the other half in the bin just killed me; a pet is not actually the worst idea either, but maybe she should have started with a house plant and then worked her way up to adorable things with squish-faces.

And Hannah, who apparently learned nothing from all the horrified reactions to her callousness over David’s death, sees his funeral as an opportunity to schmooze; she’s polite to David’s Surprise Female Wife, Annelise, until she mistakes Hannah for someone who used to be fat, and then Hannah browbeats the poor woman into giving her the name of another publisher. (Judging by the braying adoration for Hannah’s ability to Go There, Annelise was gracious enough not to introduce her as “this total psycho who can apparently string a sentence together”.)

And then again, she’s more concerned with her book’s fate than her Dad’s “procedure” (death is everywhere, you awful idiot, pay attention), and kicks Caroline out of the apartment for offering advice that’s somewhat less tone-deaf than telling a recently-widowed woman that your eBook is DEAD and you would like it to be ALIVE again. She was so welcoming to Caroline before, so lovely with her parents at her party — is Hannah only capable of being good to others when her own life is going well? Does she have to have a certain level of happiness and equilibrium set aside for herself before she can do anything but steamroll over whoever’s nearest with her More Important Problems?

The fact that Hannah’s not asking herself these questions is telling, because this is the shit that interesting writing is made of. She thinks that she needs another 25 years’ worth of silly anecdotes before she can write anything more, while Dunham shows that the very things that are happening to Hannah can make for interesting writing. She’s looking directly at her unhinged houseguest and dealing (very badly) with the consequences of her book editor’s mysterious death, while complaining that she needs more experiences before she’ll have anything else to say? That, to me, is the most frustrating part of this whole episode.

Meanwhile, I’m really worried about Marnie’s cat, and Hannah’s dad, and Caroline. Hell, I’m worried about Moe and his uncontrollable laughter. Death is everywhere.

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Girls season three screens on Monday nights on Showcase.

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Caitlin Welsh is a freelance writer. She has written for The BRAG, Mess + Noise, FasterLouder, Cosmopolitan, TheVine, Beat, dB, X-Press, and Moshcam. 

Follow her Girls recaps here.