Girls Recap: Everyone Is Wigging Out
Breakdowns, break-ups, binges and role play. It's all happening.
This is a recap. That means spoilers.
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For all the maturity that Hannah could muster in last week’s episode (she bore her mother’s critiques with civility, and summoned the appropriate tones for both her sour cousin and ailing grandma), this week I found it hard to see our head girl as anything but childlike. Hannah, in her fruit-print rompers, is never easy to mistake for a dowager aunt, but it feels like this episode really saw Dunham ratchet up her alter ego’s infantile qualities.
Evidence? We open on Hannah drunkenly gambolling with friends, causing fuss and mess, throwing up on herself, giving her parents’ address as her own and receiving a bath while she thanks a workmate for “taking care of me”. Hmm. After returning home, she apologises to Adam with all the guilt of a child who knows they’ve done wrong — and then proudly presents herself as having “gotten so clean” for him. Yep. Being constantly referred to as “kid” has finally sunk in.
Relationships, especially those first few you have as an adult, often drift in and out of the parental; you use pet names and silly voices and you do take care of each other, but the needs you fulfill are primarily the immediate ones. Those are the ones a child thinks about – if Mum is sad you might cheer her up with a dance or a flower, there’s no thought to the bigger picture. It feels like Hannah’s trapped in that rhythm with Adam. She comes home, he asks about her day, they eat a snack and she takes a nap. Now that Adam has something else going on in his life (a job and a coat, oh my), there’s a pretty big power dynamic shift that needs addressing.
A coat? A coat?! Please send back this clothed man and deliver us the shirtless Adam Driver that we ordered.
Instead of having the grown-up talk needed here, Hannah plays costumes. Her attempt to “spice things up” is hilarious and painful and tender all at once. Playing at some Blue Jasmine-like socialite, Dunham is hilariously over the top and floundering in the role, tipsy with tawdriness and unable to stick to a ridiculous name for her fake husband (I preferred “Marfanual”, but “Jardaniel” ain’t bad neither). Hannah tries to seduce Adam, who of course cannot stop popping the bubble of make-believe.
There are real moments of panic and trust between them as they push the boundaries of role play. You hope that this sort of reality-embedded-in-sitcom-farce seeps its way into Judd Apatow’s other work – it’s much more refreshing than a simple cringe-fest with Jason Segal getting his dick stuck in a drawer.
As soon as they actually get to the act, Hannah turns to more comfortable (youthful) territory, trying out a Breakfast Club fantasy. But Adam can’t shift gears that quick, and abandons the whole shemozzle. Maybe it’s the difference between an actor and a writer – one in the moment, the other removed and observational. Either way, it becomes pretty clear that the weird and wild sex life of the past was, for Adam, spur-of-the-moment libido-driven insanity, rather than the overly thought-out narrative that Hannah attempts to enact. These guys are talking different languages.
You know, just regular work colleague stuff.
The rest of the Girls are hitting similar walls. Marnie’s are the simplest of miscommunications, coming mainly between her expectations and reality. Firstly, her old colleague Soonjin wants an assistant, not an associate — we’ll have to wait and see whether Marnie can suck up her pride and print “PA to Galleryess, Woman, Girlfriend and Electronic Musician” on her business card. Her shock comes not only from the apparent life demotion but also from the suddenness of the interview – you can only imagine the perfect outfit Marnie has already picked out for gallery interviews, and denim-shaded beanie surely would not play a part.
Later, Desi — Adam’s co-star (and surely hired solely to eclipse any issues of over-gangly-ness that arise when watching Adam Driver act) and current one man fan club to Marnie’s wafty singing passions — makes all the motions to make a move… then fizzles with a mention of his wife. Drat her (and him)! Let’s get these bland and blue-eyed earnest errers together, please. I also look forward to Maggie Gyllenhal’s guest appearance as the mysterious Clementine (casting that has occurred only my head, sorry). She could be some sort of eviscerating folk music impresario, perhaps, or the hippy-dippy inventor of a hot new pastry. The Lammoissantington.
“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen… is a thing I say to my wife. But I also mean it when I look at you… is a thing I say to, uh, a beautiful chair.”
On the other side of town, Jessa and Richard E. Grant have settled into some sort of horrific binged-out rut. The saddest part is how casual it all is. There’s Shosh, trying to study in the corner, while her cousin lounges with some mid 50s Brit who’s thrown his life away for mid-afternoon benders. Jessa clearly needs to be worshipped in a relationship – think back to that boy she sexually ‘triumphs’ over in season one, or that bumbling brute Thomas-John. This sad sack ex-hotelier is another in a long line of those who sit beneath the shrine of Jessa. If we ever wondered why she continues to hang with the terminally naïve Shoshanna, then that might be the answer.
If we ever hope for Jessa to reach a place of serenity she’s going to have to ditch Grant, whose character name I can’t remember but is maybe something like N. Abler.
What’s sadder than a sad, sad man, Jessa? The realisation that you don’t even have a box of slippers to call your own.
The exorcism comes from the delightfully unexpected arena of Shoshanna, who armours herself against Jessa’s sneers with an insane gladiatorial hair weave and the conviction of Oprah herself. Shoshanna tricks the coked-up pair into a restaurant date, under the hilarious pretext of there being “meat”, only to surprise them with the appearance of Richard E. Grant’s daughter, Dotty. With love and patience and resilience aplenty, Dotty drags her father back into her life, and drags up all the every-day small pleasures that Jessa tends to think she’s so above, but clearly wishes she could simply be amongst.
Shoshanna’s preparation for what amounts to a bi-proxy intervention is completely in character. When in doubt, make sure your hair is perfect(ly reminiscent of a foot-high 3D model of DNA) and that you know all the important facts. In this case, it’s the personal details of a distraught daughter, details that would melt a drugged-up father’s heart. AKA notches of success. AKA, in the world of Shosh, a degree and a job and an exotic man and a hobby. If that’s Shosh’s model for success (and, oh yeah, that’s pretty much everyone’s), then it’s little wonder she gets so frustrated with the other characters on the show.
That thing on her head is so artfully constructed and confusing in meaning that I thought it was a promotional tie-in with True Detective.
Sometimes, most times, at least with the relationships we choose, it feels like we are fish, swimming together through ponds of shared experience and common emotion. And then there’s that moment every now and again that you realise someone just butted two tanks together, and you’re trying to understand each other through a double pane of glass.
You have no idea what people want from you, Marnie. Jessa is far from being the beautiful bohemian you always thought she was, Shosh. Hannah and Adam are bashing at the glass too – they might have had interesting sex once (or maybe completely weird, deeply disturbing sex – “a woman with a baby’s body”? – no judgement here!), but it seems like they never really talked about it. Communication break down.
In the end, who can say whether it was the play or the towel that was coming between them…
Adam replaced drinking with random sex, and then that with Hannah, and now her with this play — he sure does have a problem with focus, only it’s topsy-turvy to the problem he thinks he has. If Dotty has time for magical singing (and I’m pretty sure that’s what Shosh said, after multiple viewings; Zosia Mamet really pushes tongue speed and dexterity to Olympian heights) on top of working and dating and various maladies, then why can’t Adam split his focus at all? By curbing her artistic pretensions this season, Hannah’s learnt to juggle life and love, at least a little. But if her beau can’t handle the simple burden of talking, instead taking his ball(s) and going home, then Hannah’s not left with much to play with at all.
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Matt Roden is 2SER’s resident TV critic — each Tuesday morning at 8.20am; he works at Sydney Story Factory, and his illustration and design work can be seen here.
Matt is filling in for Caitlin Welsh, our usual Girls critic. Follow our Girls recaps here.