Dreams, Doors And Dick Moves: Girls Drops The Bomb

This is a recap of this week’s episode of Girls. Spoiler alert.

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A month.

That’s how long it took for Hannah to move to Iowa, become thoroughly disillusioned with Iowa, and bail on Iowa. With all the people she alienated, bikes she lost, and scraps of her identity she discarded in those few short weeks, it seemed as though it should have been longer. But last week’s shot of her inhaling NYC’s familiar pollution in the cab from JFK instantly made her adventure in flyover country feel like a bad but brief dream. (“Ugh, I had this bizarre nightmare where I moved to Iowa and lived in this absurdly massive house and everyone hated me, and Elijah was there for some reason and my bikes kept getting stolen and I was all blue for a bit and then I got a ride home in a Mennonite guy’s horse buggy?”)

So it’s been no more than four weeks between the first episode of this season. The signs of Adam and Hannah’s break-up are clear as day in hindsight, though at the time they could have meant anything, because that’s how Girls rolls – and if you remember the scenes when Adam was fantasising about Hannah being an eleven-year-old girl while they were having sex, or when Amy Schumer destroyed Adam for his treatment of Natalia in front of Hannah, then being a full four states apart for a while looks like a shirtless sprint through Brooklyn.

But in the first episode, both Adam and Hannah show a weird mix of ambivalence about the relationship (her disengagement during their dutiful sex; him shrugging off her pleas to make A Plan for doing long-distance) and real, intimate affection for each other. The final scene, where Hannah tries and then decides not to wake Adam up to say goodbye, but then Adam gets up to stare lugubriously down at the Horvaths’ departing car, is still nearly impossible to parse. Are they both fully aware that the relationship is doomed, and trying to put off the inevitable end? Did that awkward moment sign the death warrant? Did it just vindicate or unearth feelings they were both pretending not to have?

At any rate, the whole Mimi-Rose debacle is an unequivocally devastating dick move on Adam’s part, and this show is a bit of a jerk for making us sympathise with him in the end — even as it makes it painfully, cut-glass clear that he and Hannah aren’t right for each other any more. I might be naïve, or just spoiled by my excellent taste in friends and man-friend, but I have trouble seeing Hannah’s move to Iowa as the massive betrayal Adam and Jessa seem to think it is. She’s done plenty of things that have earned her a swift bitchslap to the head, but “taking a prestigious opportunity interstate and not wanting to end her fading but loving relationship” doesn’t really rate. And there’s certainly no degree of being “bad on the phone” that excuses Adam from calling Hannah and saying “I can’t do this weird together-but-also-not thing”, instead of shacking up with some artist friend of Jessa’s (who specifies that she’s going out for cold-press juice) and then moving all Hannah’s stuff into storage. Within a month.

There isn’t usually much of a reason to comment on the visual style of Girls; it tends to be lit and framed in unromantic shades of Normal, to go with the warts-and-all-realism vibe the show’s shooting for. But ‘Sit-Ins’ lets director Richard Shepard play with moody lighting and cinematic motifs, contrasting atmospheres and weird little exchanges in various places around (mostly) the same set. Shosh tries to keep things practical (“You should definitely call your super”); Jessa fills in a few details, and dismisses Hannah’s hurt on the grounds that Jessa was totally right all along anyway; Old Man Ray blows in to fry bacon and jerry-rig burn treatments and rant about the moral arc of municipal politics, like the total dad he is; Caroline and Laird, who are now amazing, haunt the couch in a touchingly grotesque tableau of parental warmth.

Apart from the golden aura of that one scene, the episode is full of blues, greys and greens: Hannah’s outfit, the apartment walls, the storage unit, the glow of her phone and laptop screens, all add up to a dreamlike sense of visual cohesion that underscores the emotional weight.

The surprise doorway between the bedroom and the workshop appears from behind that gross tapestry so suddenly it’s almost surreal; as anyone who’s lived through even minor renovations knows, a new chunk of negative space in a familiar wall can be unnerving. The light’s all wrong, the airflow is different, the same old room framed in the hole looks not-quite-right from this new perspective. Shepard ramps up the weirdness by framing reverse-angle shots from either side of the cutout; Hannah and Jessa may as well be having their conversation in different countries, which is apt enough as they slowly realise how differently they’d interpreted Hannah and Adam’s arrangement.

Sometimes a door is just a door – a girl’s gotta get from one room to another somehow – but just as often it’s a big flashing-neon capital-S Symbol, evoking new beginnings, significant endings, decisions, progress, opportunities, closure, dead ends, or some combination of all of these.

The main action of ‘Sit-Ins’ is bookended by Hannah’s arrival at the apartment in the last minute of ‘Cubbies’, when Mimi-Rose opens the door, and her eventual exit near the end of this episode, where Adam closes it behind her. At the beginning of Hannah’s sit-in, Adam waits at the bedroom door, knowing it’s not his place to go in; her friends’ arrivals are framed quite deliberately in doorways.

And then Hannah wanders forlornly into the fluorescent-lit corridors of the storage unit in Fort Greene – a symmetrical, Kubrickian gauntlet of identical mint-green doors.

The remains of her Brooklyn life are heaped in one of these strange little rooms, stacked in boxes marked “Fragile” (not to put too fine a point on it), and the inside of the door has this giant X on it.

No wonder she lies there with the door wide open – I wouldn’t want to close it either.

The off-kilter progression of Hannah’s day and night of protest makes sense – that bad-dream feeling tends to settle in around those moments of shock and pain. This isn’t real life; if I close my eyes, or stare at my phone, or hide under the covers, or refuse to come out of my room, I can wait it out until it all goes away. Hannah’s procession of friends and minders feels almost like some bizarro A Christmas Carol: a series of surreal visitations inflicted upon a recalcitrant subject, who eventually emerges from the ordeal, transformed.

 

This was, I’m willing to bet, the fulcrum episode of this season we’ve been waiting for: the dreamlike, stationary emotional hinge on which the rest of the season will turn, directly and explicitly or not, the same way the episode and characters revolved around Hannah’s righteously pigheaded act of protest. Hannah’s given away or lost almost everything that defined her life just a few weeks ago; and while a grand creative romance with Marnie isn’t necessarily something to look forward to, a blank slate might be.

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Girls airs on Showcase at 7.30pm Mondays, with a re-run at 9.35pm each Thursday.

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Caitlin Welsh is a freelance writer who tweets from @caitlin_welsh. Read her Girls recaps here.