Alice and Lynn Talk GIRLS, part three

Iowa, time, and boys

This is part three of a long and very fun (for me/I hope for you?) I’ve been having with the writer Alice Elliott Dark about the (extraordinary) TV show GIRLS. We’ll be bringing this to a close next week. I am going to do my very best to try to convince her to re-watch Pamela Adlon’s “Better Things” with me next.

AED: As for the Iowa episodes...have you ever been in workshops like that? I haven't. My students are kind and generous souls. But I loved the skewering of what was held up as sacred in that milieu. And I agree Hannah could have done with a confidante; the importation of Elijah and his easy Iowa friendships was a broad touch. It was over too quickly; it would have been gratifying to see her figure out how to function in that environment. But possibly the general audience was happy to get her back to Brooklyn and the challenge of Mimi Rose. 

LSS: I think let’s start with Iowa and your point about those classrooms feeling not quite right. Like you, I have been in many, many workshops, certainly many of which were not perfect, but all of them had more humanity, variation, and complexity than the ones that Hannah is in in Iowa. Of course, as you say, they’re skewering something that is held as sacred, and workshop is, of course, so much messier and more flawed and blind than that. But those scenes weren’t given the space or time to be anything other than cartoon-ish, which is (in my totally made up sense of the gradations of fiction) a tipping of the scales into a space that is too reductive and expected to be interesting or engaging as a character or idea. 

Again, it feels worth considering how one of the strengths of the show is its intense and singular focus on these girls and this tiny ecosystem that they move through. Any time they leave that, the pressures, tensions, investments become more diffuse. The show feels only very superficially interested in the ecosystem of the graduate program because it wants to get Hannah back to New York, so that feeling that every interaction is weighted and complicated and high stakes sort of goes away. No one in that workshop feels enough like a person, besides maybe the instructor, for us to feel either the desire for Hannah to make more connections, or even the pain of their rejections when they come. It’s telling that Elijah has to come to keep those moments lively. And I LOVE Elijah and also his very true-feeling desire to regress into being an undergrad again, but it even further takes the pressure off of the relationships that Hannah is or might still form in grad school and therefore undercuts her (and our) investment even more. 

This actually feels connected to what we were talking about in terms of the show’s novelistic sense of movement and how difficult it is to have that balance: we love that the story feels that it has a more macro-level project, but the more micro-level pressures and investments have to feel alive as well. It feels like the writers knew already they were leaving Iowa so they never dug into its narrative possibilities and/but those episodes feel less alive and engaging to me because of this.

How do you experience those episodes? It feels inevitable that over six seasons there will be dips and shifts, but it’s interesting to think, not least in terms of how hard middles can feel, where and how the show both loses hold of itself and then gets hold again?

AED: I agree completely. Those episodes do not have the same tone as the Brooklyn episodes, which are invested in the characters. The MFA students and the attitudes of the classroom invite sneering and create distance, and we are put in the position of seeing our Hannah as an outsider artist among these conniving wolves, which doesn't work. She's an ambitious New Yorker now and would find a way to establish herself in the group. The moments in those episodes I like best are when she's alone, finding her huge cheap apartment, skyping with Marnie, being woken by the bat, and as always dancing with Elijah. Our Intrepid Hannah! It isn't plausible that she'd be so different from everyone else. Definitely a missed opportunity to see her connect with other people who have the same ambition and interests. The one month time frame was also implausible, and it still bothers me that Jessa set Adam up with Mimi Rose in that time and he put Hannah's furniture in storage. The compression did not work. Once we get into Mimi Rose though, and Hannah is interacting with her, the show picks up again. Adam and Mimi Rose are wonderful to watch—he's wonderful with all his girlfriends. Everyone but Hannah seems older; it's not her turn yet. There is a definite awareness of being in the middle of an arc, and the turn that entails, but it doesn't work as well as much of the show does. It's a risk, always, to fill in background and tease out possible motivation. Tempting when you know the characters to want to see their families, or see them in other spaces, but it's a temptation to be resisted. I think it was worth a try, but in Girls the opening out of the story ends up teaching us that if we loved seeing all our favorite characters together in one place combining and recombining, that is where the dramatic interest lies. It's not a novel, after all. I watched Bear recently and I couldn't even get through the Feast of the Seven Fishes episode. Get me back in the kitchen ASAP!

Is it possible that Girls lost sight of its sitcom underpinnings and became too novelistic? Or are country house novels sitcomish in their parameters? Maybe Lena Dunham could write Aspects of The Sitcom. Did Girls violate the limits of the genre or expand it?

LSS: Oh I love this question, your whole answer, not least because it feels built into making something that you flub, that there are moments that you fail. I think the answer to, “did they violate or expand the genre” is that perhaps you can’t have one without the other, and in that stretching and expansion, it’s inevitable that you will bumble, miscalculate, fall short. It’s hard to overstate how much I prefer reading a novel, or watching a show, that is trying something, knowing and then seeing the likelihood that it won’t quite work, as opposed to seeing someone hit all their beats perfectly but never ask me to reconsider what a story can do or be. 

It’s also worth thinking about timing. I think, often, about how different your relationship with a reader is on page 167 as it is on page three or six, what you can get away with, play at, expand on, now that they are in. I wish the Iowa scenes did more, let those characters and that space be more, in part, of course, because I think that space is so much richer than they let it be, but I also don’t mind as much because I still love watching Hannah and Elijah, love her luxuriating in that massive house she has all to herself, the jello wrestling, the video calls. As you say, the act of separating felt necessary to this larger arc of the girls' further growing apart. 

Another thing you say that I'm super interested in is that "the compression does not work" this feels like a constraint of the form of TV as opposed to a novel, and also, one of the tricky things about trying to make a novelistic TV show: one of the superpowers of fiction is that time is so much more elastic. You can give a year or ten in a single sweeping paragraph; you can fill a person out by attuning your attention to the perfect gesture, the perfect memory at the right time. TV doesn't have that same capacity. It has the immediacy of the characters being three-dimensional, the endlessly useful fact of bodies moving through space, but it lacks the ability to contract and expand time in the way that novels can. It lacks the texture of language, which is perhaps always my favorite part of a (written) story. 

I have two questions here, first in what you say about leaving the spaces where the main action is happening as "a temptation to be resisted"; I think I know what you mean, and you’re talking specifically about TV shows, but I would love for you to talk more about it. Energy and movement can become diffuse when we move out of the immediacy of the main place and action, but, even thinking about girls and friendship, I often think about how--in fiction and life--I'm interested in replicating the intimacy that comes from knowing someone for long stretches of time, through many different phases of their lives. 

My second question has to do with Mimi Rose, an incredible character, and also, another artist; she feels like the move that the show makes to tether us back into the narrative, the complicating catalyzing force to both pull Hannah back and show her that shifts have occurred while she was gone: how do you think of characters like her, when and how do you deploy them? What is their power? How do you pull them off?

AED: Yes, I see, and you have opened the question out. It is true that a friendship can be a place, rendering where it occurs as more of a backdrop than a luminous character-like place like Hannah's apartment or Monica's apartment or Jerry's apartment. (One of the great jokes of Curb is a new bigger house every season, until the final enormous house where Larry lives alone, not counting Leon in the pool house.) This is actually a big question and I want to think about it more. In my own writing I like to write about place so much that I put a high premium on it and notice it when reading or watching. But I think what I was getting at about these sitcoms is that their sets are like play sets and we love to watch our characters come and go in that same arena. That iconic Brady Bunch living room! The temptation I referred to applies to drama that is confined in a play-like way, as sitcoms mostly are.  

I wish I did deploy characters for purposes, it would mean I was making conscious choices and decisions, but I don't, not like that. I can think of Mimi Rose that way as a watcher though, and I do think she introduces a new set of ideas into the show that get picked up by our more familiar characters. She does seem to act as a fulcrum more than Iowa does. Her performance art scene, her success, her independence and self-confidence (managing her abortion on her own), her very cool apartment—all a bit more grown up. She seems too old for Adam, who is still hoping for things to be sweet. (How many times does he say that?) Her ex-boyfriend Ace, a character who doesn't work for me, is clearly a tougher type than Adam, Hannah, and even Jessa, though Jessa is smart enough to walk away once Ace reveals his true nature. Interestingly Hannah doesn't seem to be intimidated by Mimi Rose's beauty, which I appreciate! Hannah is used to having beautiful best friends, after all, and accepts herself on her own terms. But Mimi Rose pushes Hannah to figure out what a successful grown up life will look like. Hannah’s surprise pregnancy seems built on Mimi Rose's abortion. Mimi Rose also echoes an earlier apparition, Tally, the Oberlin frenemy just back from Macdowell. Both women reflect to Hannah that they feel like imposters, but what Hannah sees is their more serious attitude toward their work and she learns from it. They are messengers, angels, and they are both great characters. They are not supernatural and yet they feel that way. 

Which brings me back to the first messenger on the show, the aptly-named Elijah, who swoops in to tell Hannah her Dad is gay in the third episode. Should we think about the men on the show a bit? What role do they serve on a show about girls? You made such a great point earlier about how scarce they are, so much so that the girls share them. You really don't even see a lot of men walking on the streets. It's a girlie world, yet the male actors are pretty amazing and hold their own. Thoughts?

LSS: I agree each man is amazing, each is so specific, and, as you say, holds his own. It's interesting to return to the idea of type and how each forms out of one: Adam is the guy who doesn't return your texts, the guy you think you can save or change, who isn't willing to go into the outside world with you quite yet, except, of course, Adam becomes this wholly different thing: he saves Hannah at the end of season two and it's incredible and surprising but also true feeling. It's not the fantasy as it might appear in a 23 year old's head; it takes longer; Hannah has to break up with him first, but it is also a fantasy; it's fiction at its best. 

Ray, for whom I have an endlessly soft spot, is that older guy who just sort of appears, orbiting this group of young girls, but then, of course, they could and do eat him alive if they so choose. The Ray/Marnie relationship is one of my favorite story lines. It's the only sex I believe Marnie enjoys. There's something so interesting and compelling to me about watching her do something she knows is not impressive or appealing to the outside world and I love watching it. I love that Ray breaks up with her, that, finally, he has to admit she isn't as good in real life as maybe she was in his head. 

Dear sweet Elijah. Like you, I adore him from the jump and that moment when he and Hannah make out in front of Fran: this is friendship, this is love and primacy and the intimacy established through time and no newer man is going to easily supersede that. They masturbate together. ALL OF THE DANCING, that time they do coke and trade shirts in the middle of the club. But, again, if you pull back: the-boy-you-dated-at-Oberlin-who-turned-out-to-be gay sounds like the punchline of a joke, but Elijah is much too wonderful and three dimensional to only be that. There's an ease to their friendship that doesn't live among the girls. It lacks an edge and therefore it's always a different register to be with the two of them, instead of two of the girls. 

You said earlier your favorite character was Desi and I'm so so interested in this: Why? Tell me everything. Tell me your take on all the boys? 

AED: I love them all too. So much. Adam starts out as Adam, the first man, primitive, constantly interested in sex and breaking things, but maybe because the actor is so gifted he becomes far more complex all the way to wise. He notices everything and is present like a Zen master. He's great with Hannah, great with Mimi Rose, and sublime with Jessa. He and Jessa take a long time to find their way to each other and then it's both explosive and tender. Have we ever seen Jessa as soft as she is in the "Hello Kitty" episode, gazing across a courtyard at him as he plays a role as a bystander to the Kitty Genovese murder? Her posture and her smile! Her gorgeous hair and the striped shirt! And Hannah witnesses this electricity between Jessa and Adam and freaks out. I love this episode so much. Their fight at the end...wow. They truly got to the bottom of their deepest fears and projections and lay each other out. Few people are that fearless. It was harrowing but cleansing. I wish there had been a spin off about Adam...what an incredible character. I agree with you about Ray. He's rueful and clear-eyed, a self-aware loser, and I was very glad he got it together eventually. I agree about his relationship with Marnie. She needs the worship and responds well to it but is still too selfish to reciprocate. I love him best in the scene where Shosh walks in after being in Japan and he is so happy to see her, even after their break up.  Would that all exes be so capable of shifting to a friendship. He is older and more mature and has his own interests—a lovely guy. Elijah is the best. Just the best. Every scene he is in is vivid and fun. I love the way he’s written as a man with Hannah, not her gay sidekick or confidante. Their roommate relationship is so open, physical, honest—they really grow together. A great relationship. The viewer is thrilled when he and Hannah they run into each other on the North Fork, we have missed him. I love that they immediately gush that they don't like anyone else but each other. That's a great feeling between friends, especially friends of different genders. As for Desi...it took me a few viewings to like him best. He grew on me. Suddenly I found him deeply funny, his performance brilliant. When he is talking to the teenage girls about their zines and giving them that "are you the one?" look...it's so wrong! Could be in the dictionary as a definition of narcissism. His antics on his wedding day, his building the room for Marnie and showing her how useful the tiny shelf was, his trying to sell her on the idea that the $2000 of guitar pedals are good for her...all so deeply funny, not only because of the actions but because of his expressions. He often, very often, looks like a painting of the suffering Jesus. Nothing I love more. I was so happy he lasted so long on the show.

I really love that you know the show as well as I do! It's so pleasurable to trust that you know every brief flicker I am referring to, and I love being transported into the scenes you bring up. Before we do our favorites and what didn't work for us lightning round, please tell me what you thought of the end? And...did this thinking about the show inspire you to want to try something in your own work?

(Answers to this last question to come next week :)).