4/5/17

i'm thankful for the complexity of girls when compared to other shows that are built around making you cringe like curb your enthusiasm or it's always sunny in philadelphia, because those shows reside a tonal region where it's very clear how i'm supposed to interpret them and what i'm supposed to think and feel about the characters and the world and the show itself. i'm thankful for girls, on the other hand, where every moment my brain is having to recalibrate itself with regard to how i feel about the characters and the things they say and how they act and then on whole other level what it means that they were written and directed to say and do these things, what that choice says about the show and lena dunham and her intentions. 

i'm thankful, for example, that when the first episode of this season started, it began with a long montage of the show's characters reading a "modern love" essay that hannah wrote and being moved by it in various ways, just these long closeups of characters quietly reading the newspaper, the only real movement their eyes as they scan the lines and their faces as the piece presses their emotional buttons. i'm thankful at a certain point to have been so increasingly annoyed by this device and the gall of starting an episode with it that i couldn't hold it inside me anymore and huffed and scoffed aloud to d about the choice as the last few shots of the montage played.

i'm thankful, though, that after this (to me) incredibly self-indulgent and un-self-aware choice, the montage ends with a brief shot of hannah carrying a stack of newspapers and walking toward the camera with this very particular dumb smile on her face, which to me communicated both that a) lena dunham agrees with me that the opening montage was self-indulgent and kind of ridiculous, knows this, and yet b) lena dunham also wanted to capture the feeling of how dumbly proud and fancy you can feel when something you create becomes popular, how it feels after being unpopular and marginal for so long to have this sense that maybe really finally the fuse to the rocket of your career has been lit and you're really finally after all that work Going Somewhere, which, if you hadn't guessed from the length of this sentence, is a dumb feeling i know intimately in my mind and in my body, a feeling i have had and a face i have made while feeling that feeling. 

i'm thankful that my brain recalibrated at the end of the montage with that new evidence and then again further with the next scene, where hannah is having a pitch meeting with a vice-like editor played by chelsea peretti (who is my favorite comedian but whose place in this role i think wasn't as successful a casting decision as last season's jenna lyons cameo, which benefits from its variant on that david lynch/richard pryor thing) and where hannah says several very dumb things, which seemed because of the comic timing and the extremity to be intentionally dumb, self-consciously dumb, though under that dumb there is also a thrumming of the genuine (and something interesting about the particular individual character of the dumb things she says versus the standard magazine ideology dumb things that chelsea peretti's character says).

i'm thankful to suppose that this is the main reason i resist watching girls, because watching it and watching hannah specifically makes me confront myself and who i am and what i do and think and say more than any other television show. i'm thankful to know that this is the reason i resist watching girls, because to see yourself in a character in that way can be painful and unpleasant, but i'm thankful to know that this also the reason i need to watch girls, because it has the capacity to make me touch parts of myself that i feel ashamed to touch and to consider thoughts and feelings that i have and don't know how i feel about or what to do with. i'm thankful i'm thankful to look forward to cringing through another episode tonight. i'm thankful that if she isn't the voice of my generation, she's at least a voice of a generation. i'm thankful for when the screen is a mirror.