I’ve never seen anything like Girls.
I started the series in my first term at university, in the strange state of mind that most people find themselves in at that point of their lives – slightly lost, confused, maybe a little delirious from the freedom of being able to eat instant noodles for any meal I wanted. It’s a strange time friendship-wise, too: the loss of those friends you drift away from once you’re no longer tied together by the timetable of sixth form, the realisation that, before you can choose what type of person you want to befriend, you have to figure out what type of person you are first.
I’m not sure what made me watch Girls, actually. My only knowledge of Lena Dunham, the creator of the show, stemmed from falling down the rabbit hole of Jack Antonoff’s dating history, and rumours involving a certain pop icon from New Zealand (entirely unconfirmed and fuelled by gossips on the Internet, but still), which led me to look into her work. It was a little after I’d first watched Sex and the City, a show that I could genuinely talk about for weeks on end without running out of steam; what I loved most about Sex and the City wasn’t the plot, but the characters. (I doubt this is news to anyone- “Are you a Carrie or Samantha?” was a question I had heard posed to me before ever even considering watching the show). The show was the characters, four women doing ordinary things (for the most part – they’re all obscenely middle class) regarding dating, career, life in a big city. So when I learned that the series Girls was also a character-driven show about four women in New York, I knew I had to give it a go. I just didn’t quite realise how impactful it would be for me.
The show revolves principally around Hannah (Lena Dunham), Marnie (Allison Williams), Jessa (Jemima Kirke) and Shoshana (Zosia Mamet), and is directed and written by Lena Dunham. One of the key differences from Sex and the City and Girls is the age of the girls – not only did it come out in 2012, making it more contemporary, but the characters have either just graduated or are still in college, so it is a lot more relatable (unfortunately, I’m not quite at the Carrie Bradshaw level of columnist, as much as I’d love to be able to say that I am). Of course, it’s still viciously unrealistic for most; it’s pretty much an all-white cast, and their parents heavily support them. But the show is more upfront about its vices than Sex and the City is, and this partly brings me onto the thought that crosses my mind every time I watch the show. How is Lena Dunham so self-aware in writing this character, so open about Hannah’s flaws, despite aligning herself so closely to the character – and how does she manage to construct characters who are so detestable and simultaneously so lovable?
I say loveable rather than likeable because I’m not sure whether I do like any of them. Hannah’s selfish, Marnie’s selfish, Jessa’s selfish, Shosh is wonderful (well, maybe Shosh can be the exception, at least some of the time). To say I actually like any of them would be a stretch. But I love a lot of them in the way that I’d love a cat even if it scratched me repeatedly – there’s something so worthy of empathy in there that you can’t quite give up on it that easily. You have to bow down, get your knees dirty, let it bother and bruise you before you cave.
Not just that, though. I think I see a lot of myself in all the characters, especially Hannah. And you can hate your own flaws and you can hate hers too – but, ultimately, when it’s all splayed on screen in a character, you see so much more than just these flaws, the blemishes and uncertainties and mistakes. You see Hannah fall in and out of love, emerge into adulthood, navigate her relationships with friends, men, her parents. Whether you like it or not, you’re immersed completely into her life. Right from the beginning, too; the first episode sets everything up so incredibly well for all the central characters so that it doesn’t feel like a pilot at all. You see intimate details, like Hannah’s parents telling her they’re going to cut her off, or her relationship with Adam (played by Adam Driver), Hannah’s boyfriend/ situationship/ man she is having quasi-experimental sex with.
You’re already in, it’s up to you to continue and fall into the messy lives of the characters, where the protagonist is an adult throwing a temper tantrum after being denied rent money from her parents because she’s been working in an unpaid internship since leaving college. It’s ridiculous, and insane, and stupid, and one of my favourite pieces of media I’ve ever come across.
One of my favourite critics, Richard Brody, describes what he places as the difference between cinema and television in a beautiful way within his article about ‘Girls’: ‘The cinema conjures a mystery that goes beyond the frame and into the realm of the imagination and the unconscious… Movies were made to be dreamed about, even written about in a visionary ecstasy; television is made to be talked about at the water cooler’. He identifies Girls as a medium hovering somewhere among the two, but ultimately as one which goes beyond television.
Girls can’t be talked about casually, ‘at the water cooler’, as Brody puts it – you have to delve in, think, explore, let these characters and their desires and emotions and modes of thought infiltrate your brain. Dunham creates characters and situations which are at once touchingly witty and startlingly intense. There are whole podcasts dedicated to dissecting the series; it feels like more than just a show. It’s a a fictionalised exploration of Dunham’s desire to learn more and grow up, to understand herself and the world around her, and ultimately to write and create something powerful.
I don’t believe that a widely-hated character can ever be an entirely bad thing. Things people hate are often just reflections of themselves, and the same goes with things people create – the spectrum of the characters in Girls is akin to that of psyche, from the simultaneous self-criticism and lack of self-awareness in Hannah, to the juxtaposition of the extreme carelessness of Jessa with the uptight nature of Marnie. When a character does selfish things and argues with their friends and speaks badly to their loving parents, they stop being a wholly likeable, ‘good’ character. I’d go as far as to say that they stop being a character at all, and start being human, instead. I’ve always thought this rang true with Christine/ Lady Bird in the film Lady Bird, too, how some consider her unbearable and rude and abrasive but that’s what draws me to her the most. No-one is entirely good, no-one is able to float through life without ever hurting anybody’s feelings, even in the most minor ways (as much as we may all wish that these things were possible). Dramatic, exciting water-cooler television tends to have characters that are either perfect, or bad, and if they’re not an easily identifiable one, then they’re a plain secondary character who resides in the middle.
But all of the characters in Girls feel purposeful, even the ones who are only there for an episode. Nothing goes unnoticed. You can find meaning in the way the characters do a variety of ridiculous things. The characters feel intensely real, too, especially Hannah, who is tied very closely to Dunham herself. It’s hard to not see the similarities drawn between them, particularly as the protagonist is, like Dunham, a writer of personal essays, determined to share her work and become the voice of her generation – ‘or at least, a voice of a generation’ (as she puts it). I do honestly think that Dunham did succeed in becoming the voice of a generation, in a way, despite her character professing this line in a comedic scene. And in creating these self-involved, self-indulgent, and ultimately realistic characters, Dunham not only confronts her own vices and behaviours but forces the audience to confront theirs, too. We’re all a bit annoying like Hannah, a bit judgemental like Marnie, or a bit reckless like Jessa.
I thought of Hannah’s character when I first read Susan Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation’, an essay in which she discusses how we are ‘stuck with the task of defending art’ and the contemporary form of interpretation which tends towards simplification, consequentially placing limits on our responses to art. The essay is only growing more relevant with the rise of AI and people stepping away from using their own thoughts to carry out everyday tasks, and the common ground is often a lack of autonomous critical thinking. Just because a character is unlikeable doesn’t mean they are wholly bad – sometimes viewers place too much emphasis on a handful of actions and use that to define a character or artwork in its entirety (I think that the same has happened with Carrie Bradshaw’s character on TikTok at the moment; people despise her before actually experiencing the show and the character as a person).
For me, the complex characters are what makes a work interesting, especially the messy, self-involved characters of Girls. Sontag places emphasis on the fact that valuable art shouldn’t ‘soothe the anguish of modern life so much as refract and magnify its agonies’, saying that she didn’t engage with art to distract from the world but ‘to bring herself closer to it’. When people shy away from mediums that encourage them to look at ‘bad’, annoying, or unlikeable characters, they are restricting themselves from understanding the human experience in its entirety, hoping to see reflections of a world that doesn’t actually exist.
There are pieces of all of us refracted across the characters of Girls, and there’s definitely something sanctifying about seeing these unlikeable, realistic characters portrayed on screen. It’s shows like these that make us feel normal, human – so if you are lost, having odd sex with weird men, arguing with your friends, or trying to become the voice of your generation, I’d recommend giving Girls a go. You might hate it, you might love it. Or, if you’re like me, you might spend the next year and a half oscillating between the two.