“Act like my life is
real. Because my life is real.” This line from Lena Dunham's Girls,
delivered by a young man to the girlfriend who's broken his heart and
then seduced him into getting back together, while she's straddling
him in bed, is not a good example of realistic dialogue, but it is
thematically central to the show. The white, middle-class, liberals
arts-educated modern Emma Woodhouses of Girls, who've reached
their 20s with very little to distress or vex them, are monsters of
narcissism, which the show plays for laughs and shock except in the
rare, differently shocking moments when they and the viewer become
momentarily aware of another (usually male) person's reality. The
girls of Girls are so selfish, competitive, and critical in
their friendships and so obsessed with maintaining the upper hand in
their interactions with men that it's difficult to feel much sympathy
when things go wrong for them, but if we can't feel it for them, we
can occasionally feel it for their victims.
Not that the
recognition of another person's reality always takes the form, in
Girls, of a flash of empathy from someone whose life you've
been treating like a game. Something similar occurs when Jessa, the
most unapologetic predatory sociopath of the group, suddenly decides
not to go through with seducing the married man she's been
babysitting for, although her recognition that his life and his wife
and children's lives are real is preceded by a different kind of
recognition of his reality: her reaction of revulsion when he starts
sobbing on her shoulder, overwrought from their adventurous evening,
in the course of which she got him beat up. Dunham's acute interest
in and fascinating treatment of sex is what distinguishes her most
clearly from bleak, self-conscious male comedians she resembles, like
Woody Allen, Larry David, and Louis C.K., and one of the ways in
which sex permeates Girls is that the characters are (like
their creator) pornographic fantasists who, however, are constantly
confronted by a reality that does not perfectly assume the shape of
their desire. So Hannah offers to fuck the boss who's been groping
her only to have him demur and point out that he's a married man; or
a venture capitalist picks up Marnie and Jessa in a bar and persuades
them to come back his apartment, only to have them refuse to let him
join in when they start making out.
The fabric of Dunham's
universe is made up of this constant tension between the characters'
fantasies and the stubbornly independent existence of other people,
their lives, and their contrary wills. It doesn't matter whether your
boyfriend is peeing on you in the shower in a mistaken belief that
you'll find it funny instead of a bizarre violation, which happens to
Hannah in one scene, or whether he's loving you when you're not ready
to be loved. The latter situation occasions an hilarious exchange
where Hannah tells her victim, as a lame excuse for ducking out of
living with him, “I didn't think you were into that,” and he
replies sarcastically, “Into what? Love?” Love can be a bizarre
violation in the universe of Girls. Hannah might want it in
theory, but she doesn't necessarily want the responsibility that goes
with it, the heaviest part of which might be the responsibility to
love back.
The girls of Girls
veer between shrinking from a reality that's too demanding or too
unresponsive and trying desperately to make their lives more real to
themselves. To that end, Jessa, realizing that her career as a femme
fatale is a dead end, suddenly gets married to the “venture
capitalist,” whom we last saw flipping out when she and Marnie
spilled wine on his priceless rug and lecturing them hysterically on
the hard work through which he's achieved his material success. He's
a real, grown-up man with a real job and grown-up money, representing
everything that Jessa has rejected and thinks, for now, that she
needs, and the joke is that this attempt to achieve stability is
Jessa's wildest move yet. No matter how hard she tries to start
living a real life, it just turns into a more elaborate game. Growing
up doesn't involve learning how to treat other people's lives like
they're real; it involves starting to treat your life, too, like a
game.
