Todd VanDerWerff at the AV Club said something back during
the first season of Girls that has continued to strike me. He described Charlie
and Marnie’s relationship:
“A long-term relationship has its own kind of inertia. Once you get past the year mark, your life becomes harder and harder to picture without the person you’re dating, and it becomes easier and easier to see the rest of your life stretching on with them in it, heading off into the future. Even if the person you’re with does something really awful, you might find yourself fighting to get them back simply because having to reimagine your future without them in it can be so terrifying. It eventually becomes less about how much you love them and more about how much your life makes sense with them in it, never mind the fact that it only makes sense with them in it because you’ve reordered your cosmos to include them. Love is a part of it, yeah, and there will be times when you really, really love them. But the real success of a long-term relationship comes from constructing the most comfortable habitat for it, like a really impressive animal cage in a zoo.”
He was talking about Charlie and Marnie, but he might as
well be discussing any of the relationships on this series. Even though Marnie
and Hannah are supposedly at odds with one another, they continue to be
incredibly attached to one another at a level of unhealthy codependency. At her dinner
party in "It's a Shame About Ray", Hannah defends Marnie when Charlie badmouths her, despite the fact she’s
still pissed off by her. In “Boys”, both characters keep dancing around their
need for one another and lying to one another in the process. This is
friendship isn’t good for either; inevitably it just ends up bringing out the
worst in both. But after a certain amount of time relationships trap you
inside their weird internal logics.
Marnie isn’t the only one with a strained relationship to
Hannah. Adam returns in his own plot where we see him at an AA meeting rant
about his frustration over Hannah. The scene really elaborates just why Adam
feels so strongly about Hannah, something that never made total sense from a
character stand point. Here at the meeting an older woman is so intrigued by his
speech asks him to call her daughter, Natalia, on his date. Adam is nervous but he wants
a distraction and so calls her up. Turns out she’s gorgeous and down-to-earth, and
just as cynical about her mother’s blind date suggestion.
If Adam is starting to get over Hannah, well Hannah is unfortunately
ignorant of this fact. She’s so paranoid about Adam stalking her that it’s
kicked in her OCD, which hasn’t been triggered since high school. I didn’t even
consider that Hannah might have OCD, but once this character detail is
presented to you, it totally makes sense. Hannah always thinks she’s right, she
always thinks she knows better, and she’s often oblivious to things around her
when she sets her mind on something. While this feels like it comes out of left field, it's not entirely implausible and after the immediate reveal the show handles it surprisingly well. Her getting frantically unnerved and
freaking out as her OCD returns is made all the more amusing due to her parents
being in town on a visit. This of course leads to another occasion of
disappointment for Hannah’s parents as they're cofrced to take her to a pediatrician whose office is open weirdly late.
Marnie is also unable to shake a person still
lingering over her mind. She discovers Charlie has invented an app, started a
company, and become a bit successful. I’m not sure Marnie even wants Charlie
anymore so much as the sense of security and ease of that coupling. Charlie is familiar;
reestablishing their relationship, however, is probably not going to happen again and it
would probably be a terrible decision anyway.
Meanwhile in the only semi-cogent relationship of the bunch,
Shoshanna and Ray still have yet to work out the apparent problems in their
coupling. Ray likes Shoshanna but he doesn’t know if he sees this as meaningful
or lasting. Shoshanna has had her fairytale, Disney romantic notions undercut by
the lack of togetherness (and the age difference) of Ray. And due to the lack of communication on both their parts, Shoshanna finally
crosses over into that territory that girls so frequently takes its characters:
“NO WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!” Territory. Shosh is trying to gab to a friend,Radhika (a charatcer that comes out of nowhere) she
hasn’t seen in a long time at a party, but the girl is so thoroughly disinterested
(and no offense, I’m kind of siding with her on this one) that Shosh gets fed
up and leaves the party. Before she can leave though, she’s won over by the
charms of a rakish doorman and is hooking up in a coat closet.
Relationships are tough. They require work, investment and deep
consideration and sympathy on the parts of all people involved. Over time these
relationships can be our undoing though. We build them up and they begin to
confine and trap us. When we know they’re no good for us, we can still keep being
drawn back to them. When we want to get out but find ourselves incapable, it
can bring out the worst in us.
Stray Observations:
-“Where is she. What is she wearing? Is it linen?”
-Part of the nicely observed absurdity inherent to the series:
there’s White Castle being served at the party.
-“She’s the richest Hindi I know”
-“You learned another life lesson. How adorable”
-“You can’t dress like a magician’s assistant much longer”
-“You’re not anorexic. I’ve seen you in a bathing suit”
Grade: B+
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