'Girls' Gone Where?

There has been a lot of ballyhoo about HBO's new series Girls, so in the interest of investigative criticism I decided to do just that. Investigate critically.

If you remember your early 20s at all, what you may remember is a terrible sense of discombobulated discomfort. One never really knew what one was doing, whether that meant relationships, money or work. Your 24-year-old self bumbled along, down sexual dead ends, awful jobs and vainglorious hopes of somehow being the next big thing. There's a reason they call it wasted youth. Everyone, or at least mostly everyone, had to learn the hard way; there is no other way to learn. I am far enough away from those heady horrible days to watch Girls without wincing. Well, almost anyway.

The show is about a group of young women coming of age in New York City. The ghosts of Carrie Bradshaw and crew float over any story about a group of female friends set in the big city, and so it is here as well, where Bradshaw et al. beam down from a poster on the wall. Girls has been likened to a younger version of Sex and the City, which is perhaps a cautionary tale if you remember what happened to that show. If you don't, simply watch an episode of Sex from the first season next to an episode from the last and be aghast at what happened between those two points. Anything acerbic and actual became a giggling Grand Guignol of shoes, bags and blowjobs. But I digress.

It takes a while to warm to the characters on Girls. At first you don't really like anyone, and certainly not the show's schubbly protagonist Hannah, who drops trou almost immediately and grabs her ankles to prepare for anal violation by her sometime-sort-of boyfriend Adam. After this bravura opening quite literally I thought, "This is a show that is prepared to go to new locales." Once this fact was established, I settled in to see exactly where its rocky road might lead.

Voices of a generation

The show's four main protagonists are Hannah, her best friend Marnie, their occasional friend and English interloper Jessa, and Jessa's tiny buzzing cousin Shoshana. Each girl is on a personal path of discovery replete with various humiliations, the kind that singe and sear when you're too young to know better. Despite a fair amount of evidence to the contrary, Hannah maintains that she may be the voice of her generation, or at least a generation. While she waits for fame to come tumbling out of the sky, she interns for no money, lives on a stipend from her parents and tries to figure out the mysterious male mind.

Hannah shares an apartment with her best friend Marnie, a girl who initially seems as smooth and placid as a piece of marble. But appearances belie, don't you know. Underneath Marnie's perfect complexion is a crumbling pile of insecurity and despair. Trapped in a suffocating relationship with a man who apparently lacks a penis, Marnie fancies herself the grownup in the group, the reasonable, rational one with an actual job, able to make abortion appointments for her friends and pay the rent every month. The rest of the girl gang is rounded out by Jessa, a free spirit who wears see-through dresses, seduces random men in bars and generally behaves like a one-woman hurricane, and Shoshana, a virgin who occasionally smokes crack.

So there you have it. Being a girl isn't easy but at least you have your friends. Or do you? The women in Girls actually have some resemblance of real female friendships, the kind that bite you on the ass when you least expect it. This is because these relationships are ripped off from reality, like only the best fiction can be.

Indignities of age

Lena Dunham, the show's 25-year-old creator, admits that her life experiences often end up in Girls. This autobiographical impulse is explicit, and really when you're 24 what else do you have to write about but yourself and your friends? It's only when the show strays from the tang of the real that things begin to go awry. The more clumsily handled bits come about when there is an abrupt shift in tone or focus. In the episode where Hannah goes home to visit her parents in Michigan, the voice of the show's creator gets muddled and obscured. Blame Judd Apatow, one of the show's producers, who apparently imposed scenes from on high. This actual clash of aesthetics isn't actually that far removed from the fictive world of Girls, where oldsters and youngsters struggle for control.

It is interesting to view the inter-generational contract at work. While the 20-somethings are subjected to multiple humiliations and hard lessons, it is the old folks who get a right kicking. The hypocrisy, regret and despair of the next generation is eviscerated with little mercy, from a venture capitalist who pouts and frets like a sulky child when excluded from Jessa and Marnie's Sapphic play, to Hannah's male boss who pets the bums of all his female employees. In fact, every older male character on the show shares the same fading sense of relevance and pathetic lust.

The indignities of age are harsh, whether that means hot flashes or sagging parental bodies falling out of the conjugal shower and bonking their heads on the cold tile floor of the bathroom. Silly old people, sex is for kids! The presence of older women is particularly nominal throughout. The only female characters of a certain age, other than Hannah's mother, are office workers who put up with a touchy-feely employer and a harried documentary filmmaker with a philandering husband. Perhaps this isn't a fair critique, since the stock characters are meant to be just that.

Much has also been made of the whitewash of the show, with nary a person of colour to be seen. While Dunham's feet have been held to the fire over this aspect, it is the conflict between one generation and the next that forms the central struggle. In this it is difficult to muster much sympathy for either side. When the venture capitalist (a.k.a. major doofus) who picks up Jessa and Marnie in a bar and attempts a three-way sex session is thwarted, he packs a world of antipathy into one eruptive speech. So says the doofus:

Do you even know what it's like to work hard? I've been under a lot of pressure, my whole life to succeed. Daddy didn't buy me this rug. Or this apartment. Or this nose. That's not your nose. There's no way that's your fucking nose -- there's no cartilage in the world that exquisite. So it kind of ticks me off when I come to Williamsburg after working hard all fucking day in the real world and I see all these stupid little daddy's girls with their fucking bowler hats -- what are you doing wearing a fucking bowler hat, you stupid -- and then you come over and you flirt and flirt and flirt and flirt and kiss and kiss and listen to my amazing tunes and drink my beautiful wine and then spill it all over my gorgeous rug. And laugh about it.

Still clueless

Everyone hates snotty kids and when the girls flounce out the door, leaving him to clean the rug, it's hard not to dislike everyone involved. The disconnect between one generation and the next has always made for rich and loamy material. I suppose every generation looks askance at another, each thinking, "I just don't get you." Perhaps that's how you know you're finally a genuine grownup -- you don't relate to those coming behind you.

The particular angst of the millennial generation, both obscenely entitled and saddled with vast reservoirs of anxiety and insecurity, informs the flavour of the Girls. I can relate, if only from a distance. The episode where Hannah visits a clinic to be tested for STDs and forces the examining doctor to listen in weary exasperation to her constant stream of consciousness, strikes home. The older woman voices probably what a good portion of the audience are thinking: "You couldn't pay me enough to be 24 again." I hear that. The maddening and occasionally endearing cluelessness of these young women needs to be going somewhere, but exactly where I don't know. Adult reality in all its boring quotidian ordinariness is slouching towards the future, a grey beast, its moment come at last. But before it arrives, what's next?

A show about a young woman who fancies herself the voice of her generation, written by a young woman who has already been lauded for being just that is replete with material. If you write about being poor and misunderstood and are showered in riches and glory for doing so, what then will you write about? If Hannah (the sometimes writer and doppelganger for Lena Dunham) actually ends up being celebrated for her millennial angst on the show, maybe Girls will disappear right up its own ass, or maybe something else entirely might happen. It is to the show's credit that one wants to tune in and see where these girls actually go.