The series finale of Girls airs Sunday, April 16, 10pm on HBO.
Girls is, essentially, over. There’s still one episode left to air, but according to several sources the season finale may be a sort of fast-forward coda. If true, this annoys me, as I have always disliked series-finale time jumps. I prefer it when a show closes the doors on a world I am familiar with, on characters I understand (if not love) – as opposed to a future that I barely recognize. So this past Sunday’s episode “Goodbye Tour” is essentially Girls‘ true swan song. Like the rest of the series before it, it is frustrating, funny, uneven, annoying, and often gut-punchingly poignant.
I think it’s fascinating to go back to the start of this show, when Girls was more of a millenial ethnography. It took a more detached view of Hannah, her world and her friends, while simultaneously exploring their flesh and blemishes and cramped apartments with such an intimate camera gaze. Lena Dunham unapologetically wrote social commentary and diary-like confessions into the mouths of the characters, and that expository self-portrait style is what made a lot of people really hate the show. I think Girls has many, many problems, but the first season is very unique in its approach to character-piece television, and it’s grown on me more and more as a modern classic.
Then Girls began to change. More and more, it moved away from representing realism through dialogue, situations, and tangible bodies. The show evolved into a more HBO-ish series: plot-based, forward-hurtling, with “very special episodes” and an emphasis on the visual aesthetic of quality. There’s nothing realistic about the people and the stories on Girls anymore, if you’re using the rubric it began with. Kathryn VanArendonk wrote an excellent piece for Vulture that explores this point:
Girls has always had a fraught relationship with realism. It’s been a fundamental part of both the show and the critical response to it — is the series trying to argue that this is what millennial life is really like? It’s a show that’s laudably and unusually grounded in elements of realism you don’t often see on TV, especially stuff to do with women’s bodies, with how it feels to break up with someone, with the kinds of jobs someone might have in her mid-20s, with the food people would actually eat, with what sex might actually look like between two people who feel awkward with one another. Its realism is physical, bodily, fleshy…Hannah’s writing is all about gritty physical realities…It’s a realism born out of conceiving of women as both bodies and minds. It is not a realism that’s grounded in economic or social reality.
In reflecting on the episode “Goodbye Tour,” I think Girls‘ evolved, warped concept of “reality” is at its most obvious. The plot literally makes no sense, from Hannah’s pregnancy to her improbable new job as a professor of Internet studies at an upstate New York college. Shoshanna denounces every choice she’s ever made during the course of the series, essentially erasing all character growth. Ray is nowhere to be seen at the engagement party for his ex-girlfriend and, presumably, closest friend.
I don’t believe all this sloppy wrap-up writing is intentional, but juxtaposed with the absolutely beautiful final scene and montage (above), it does achieve a striking “late ’20s” feeling. The story makes no sense, but there is still a moment of transcendence reached through style and feeling. I was really touched by the sensory editing and heart-rending soundtrack (Julia Michaels’ “How Do We Get Back to Love” and Banks’ “Crowded Places”). Very telling are the cuts between Hannah’s gaze and Marnie, dancing for the delight of anonymous men; Shoshanna, goofily reeling in her fiance; Jessa, mocking fancy cupcakes with strangers. I’ve had a lot of moments like this, when I look around and see, with sudden clarity, where I and my loved ones might be in 10 years – who we’ve always been and who we will be. What was Girls doing for the last 6 seasons? What was I doing? I can’t remember for the life of me! But suddenly, all at once, we (and these characters) are closer to 30 than we ever thought we would be. I love the way this last silly, sad, joyful dance represents this show’s final grab for girlhood; it’s a moment of emotional realism that is internal and beautiful, and representative of all this show achieved.
Girls wasn’t perfect, but it was always better than bad, and it was sometimes very f*cking good. I’ll really miss it.
TV and City 