SEX, BETRAYAL, POV
I just want to talk Girls with Lynn Steger Strong
This is a continuation of a conversation begun last week between me and novelist Lynn Steger Strong about a show we both love and admire, Girls.
AED: Hannah generally seems to have okay sexual experiences that she mostly enjoys or is engaged by, whereas Marnie’s are wholly awful, she is forever rolling her eyes over some guy’s shoulder, especially Desi’s. (My favorite character.). Jessa and Shoshanna don’t fare very well either in relationships or sex. Adam and Jessa have a really bad first sexual encounter. This seems so realistic to the stage of life. It’s not great sex for the girls. Even when Hannah and Adam are in love they never seem to be deeply in communication through sex the way the characters in Normal People do. Lena Dunham seems committed to exploring young people who are essentially self-absorbed. There isn’t much in their lives that can penetrate the caul of solipsism, not even other people, not at first. Shoshana is the exception but we don’t really see enough of what that side of life is for her to be a counterbalance to Marnie and Hannah and Jessa. I generally find on screen sex unwatchably embarrassing but I love all the sex on Girls. The reason goes back to your point of artistry—it feels far away from the maker and about shapes and metaphors and all that good stuff. The actresses are enacting what Dunham wants to say about youth and inexperience and groping and self-consciousness and connection. Whereas when I watch Megan Markle kiss Patrick Adams on Suits I have to look away, I feel like I am watching how she also kisses Prince Harry, and it makes me cringe. Keep it in Montecito! There’s too much of Megan in those kisses whereas I never feel like I’m getting anything of Dunham in her sex scenes. Or nothing personal, let’s say. Her discernment, yes.
Lynn, how about the sex in the show?
LSS: You said this in the previous post: “I mean, who cares about my actual life? Everyone has a life. What is so successful about Larry David and Pamela Adlon is their highly developed moral sense and how they apply that to slices of life.” In addition to making me laugh out loud, I also thought of this again here. Lena Dunham’s (or yours or my or Pamela Adlon’s) sex lives are real life, and therefore likely largely predictable and boring to an outside viewer, too much like something we all already know. But then within each of our experiences are these flashes, or at least that’s what it feels like to me, moments, impulses not explored but imagined, fleeting moments of surprise, stories that you overhear, fantasies, that have that prickle of narrative complexity or possibility that you then snatch at, that you might fold into your work. That’s what the sex feels like here.
Like the characters: it is just shy of life-like, too overblown and performative, but also, with that whiff of representing and being made of something true. I’ve been thinking so much, watching this show, and also diving into a new book, about fun and pleasure. As you say, these scenes are wonderful to watch, not cringe, in part because the show and the actors seem so aware of these scenes as performances, heightened in all directions: in their agony and abjectness, but also in their humor, their absurdity.
I’m interested in what you say about the girls’ solipsism and how that relates to the watchability of the sex. I’m sort of guessing here, but I wonder even about this idea of girl groups and how the show allows the primary intimacy to remain with the girls, and with us–the viewers–even as sex is meant to be the most intimate of all. We don’t feel like we’re imposing, because we’re not watching a couple sharing something primarily, intensely intimate–we’re watching two individuals, one of whom we’ve come to love, or at least know very well, fumble around with one another. We, in lots of ways, know these characters more intimately than the people that they fuck.
For all the ways sex when you’re young might be fun and thrilling, also abject, awful, and strange, it is difficult for a new relationship to feel as high stakes and intimate as a long held friendship. This reminds me too of how obsessed I am not only with the sex in this show but with the girls’ bodies interacting, overlapping; Hannah spooning Marnie, the baths they take together; that impulse that feels deeply familiar to me, of wanting to and having sex with someone new, but wanting almost immediately to curl up with a girlfriend to get to talk about it afterward.
AED: I love this so much, Lynn. I realize that is how I feel when I watch these sex scenes, as if they are being told to me afterwards by a best friend and we are laughing about it. We get so many shots of their faces during sex that tell us how they feel, and those reactions pull me in. You make me remember how much of my youth was spent narrating my experiences to the friend in my head as they were happening. It's like leading a double life, isn't it, the experience and the simultaneous shaping of it for a friend's delectation. Different than shaping it for a journal or a letter or a story—writing. For the friend's laugh or shock! The scenes have the quality of being reenactments for our benefit. We are the friend who wasn't there but must be completely filled in on what happened. Yes, that seems exactly right. Now that we have gotten to this, I do think it's the POV of the show, at least the early seasons, and perhaps the haters just don't feel friendly enough with this particular set of girls to want to hear about their escapades. I'm trying to think of another show with this POV. Sharon Horgan is like this, isn't she? There's a bit of this quality in Bad Sisters.
I completely agree with this, too, that you said: "it is difficult for a new relationship to feel as high stakes and intimate as a long held friendship." It's the tree falling in the woods problem. Isn't a great deal of the fun and importance of the new relationship based on the analysis of it with the BFF? And the BFF is taken into account. We had a code at school to never choose a boy over a friend. If you had plans with a friend, you shouldn't break them if a boy curled his finger and beckoned you. The friendships had primacy. The girls are this way through a great deal of the show, with the exception of Shoshanna who is part of the group but not one of the Oberlin friends and so on the outside of a lot of the development of their bond. It doesn't come as a surprise that Shoshana is the one who breaks up the group, or tries to. The bond isn't there. Adam comes between Hannah and Jessa, at least for a while, until Adam and Hannah truly break up. Then Hannah and Jessa find a way to laugh together again, ruefully, and Jessa apologizes, sincerely. Hannah and Marnie and Hannah and Elijah are solid friendships that outlast their relationships. (I love the scene when Hannah and Elijah are kissing, really kissing, goodbye in the morning and Hannah's "seemingly good guy" boyfriend Fran makes a moue of objection. Elijah says, "what, we're not supposed to do this now because you're here?") Hannah and Elijah are so naked with each other, they masturbate at the same time, they are intimate and open and different than Hannah-Marnie because Elijah is a boy and not interested in certain aspects of the girls' lives. (His disdain for the hilarious Marnie-Desi-Hannah trip to Poughkeepsie—he would never take part in something like that.) Hannah is close to both her parents so it makes sense that she has two intimates, a male and a female.
One thing I wonder about is the disinterest in politics or questions of faith or science or current events or anything beyond a slice of Brooklyn, except, and I suppose this is actually huge, the look at the lives of girls. But aren’t the girls concerned with the world? I miss that dimension of youth in the show. I know it’s not fair of me to want the girls to be more outward looking, it’s not my show. I suppose I don’t understand that choice. What say ye?
LSS: A thing I often think about, struggle with, feel saddened but also emboldened by, is how very small books, and TV shows and anything we make, are, as opposed to life. I think a lot of stories never get their footing because they aren’t able to wholly attune the reader’s attention to their interests, and I think here, the show’s interests are very much these girls and not much else. It does feel not quite right, especially for Hannah, maybe Jessa, that they have no sense of the world around them, but this also makes me think of how separate and different 2012 feels from right now. Occupy Wall Street was right there during this show, the Iraq War, so many people reeling from the recession, unable to find jobs, but there was also this way a certain type of person could be young and mostly ignore the larger world in a way that feels not as true anymore. (And, of course, Dunham got lambasted for this). The one exception to this is the “American Bitch” episode which got so many write ups and I do think suggests not only a burgeoning interest in politics for Hannah, but an attempt by Dunham to engage with ideas around power even within this small world of Brooklyn and writing.
AED: I agree with all you say, and I actually didn't notice the missing dimensions until this recent rewatch, the last of many, and perhaps this time because the youth in 2024 are so politically involved. But there is also a quality of realism to the characters in Girls that leads me to yearn for them to muti-dimensional. I've watched Friends many times as well, but would never wonder the same about the Friends, who are more cartoonish. The Girls feel quite likely, and I would like to know about other sides of them than their early work dilemmas, their group interactions, and their boyfriends. As you point out, Occupy was right there; they never walked across the Brooklyn Bridge to see what it was about? Ray was the only one who had a greater awareness and ran for local office. "American Bitch" seemed an evolution of Hannah's writing; she has gotten better at it and she goes to interview the Famous Male Writer because she has already delivered a public opinion about his behavior toward another young woman. She has awareness of sexual politics; they all do. Surely at Oberlin they had late night conversations about their beliefs and world views. Maybe it's all settled law by now, and they aren't yet in a new stage of thinking about the big issues. Adam's ethical code is a world view, and it gives him an extra dimension. Maybe it is a question of a moment in time. Or adhering to a specific purpose. I just rewatched Normal People and Sally Rooney definitely wants to talk about class, a lot, in a story about a romance. Dunham doesn't want to, or only glancingly. No religion or philosophy either.
We are both writing teachers, and it is definitely a consideration about how much to think about what can be included in a story. I have told a few students that more of a sense of the outside world would give their book an added vertical, but mostly I put stories in front of them that show the possibilities. Last night we discussed "Brokeback Mountain," another look at a romance that says a lot about the world. As you say, there are always limits. All writers are aware of their material, marks on a flat surface. How to make them offer an impression of life? There are many beautiful pieces of writing that are quite singular in focus...but novels generally include larger swaths of life, and I suppose Girls feels novelish to me.
A reason for that is that the series has an arc, the characters grow, their lives and relationships change, they go their separate ways, they move on. This is built into the whole six seasons and isn't a sudden rush to a wrap as it is on most sitcoms. It's another audacious aspect of the show to write so novelistically not based on a novel. Thoughts, Lynn?
LSS: I think, in many ways, the answer to this question is very much in conversation with the question about politics. I teach a novel class and we talk a lot about "making the parts touch more", aka, finding opportunities for different aspects of the novel to be in more constant conversation; continuing to make each scene or choice or interaction engage with other aspects of the book. In the case of GIRLS, it feels particularly useful to the storytelling that there seem to be so few men in Brooklyn: Shoshanna and Marnie both sleep with Ray, who also seems to employ almost all of them at some point; Hannah and Jessa both sleep with Adam; Hannah and Marnie both sleep with Elijah: this not only creates tension between the characters it allows us to keep tethered to these male characters we've already invested in; characters we already know a lot about. Even Desi arrives via Adam and is not only Marnie's lover/husband, but also her bandmate.
As you talked about above, in the context of the intimacy of the girls retaining primacy, each of these overlaps feel so much more complicatedly high stakes because of this: we are not watching Jessa and Adam just because we’re interested in Jessa and Adam (though we are; I LOVE watching them); but we’re also watching Jessa and Adam, thinking about how devastated Hannah is going to be, thinking about how validated Marnie is likely to feel when she hears about this. We’re watching Marnie and Ray, thinking about Shoshanna and Marnie. It allows our relationships to these men to deepen, but, even more importantly, it allows these relationships to these men to more actively complicate and rupture the relationships between the girls.
This makes me think, too, of our talk earlier about all the ways these girls are types: you describe a girl code that feels engrained in most girlhood friendships: you are not supposed to betray the girlfriend for the boyfriend, except, somehow, too often, even if it's not so blatant as sleeping with the boyfriend, you don’t always follow the code. Maybe, in part, because the friendship feels more secure than the romance, you can be quicker to betray it, until suddenly, somehow accidentally, it’s no longer what it was. It’s sort of incredible too how actively Dunham engages with the narrative possibility of this sort of foundational betrayal: Hannah’s essay about Jessa and Adam is her professional breakthrough; Adam’s movie about the same topic forces him to reconsider his and Hannah’s past. We tell the same stories over and over because when we live them they feel fresh and new and painful. It’s equal parts devastating and a comfort when you realize how much like everybody else’s your losses and betrayals are.
I love to think about this "deliberately built in arc", as you say, as audacious. It feels that way, and also very novelistic. I am a little bit obsessed with the middles of novels. Almost always, when I'm teaching, I set time aside to direct students' attention to the direct center of the book to see what's there. I just went back and looked at some of the summaries for season three and saw how much of the end is planted there: Marnie meets Desi; Shoshanna has broken free of Ray; the girls go on their trip to Long Island: reigniting their friendship sufficiently to get through the next three seasons but also making very evident that some of the cracks won't heal; Shoshanna gives a less consequential version of her final breakup speech on that trip (a very easy and fun way people often talk about the middle is that it's the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end, and that all feels built into this trip); Hannah goes to the hospital to see her grandma and her mom warns her that Adam isn't the right choice. Hannah also gets her first grownup job writing ad copy at GQ. The seeds are planted here, in other words, the cogs are set in motion, to propel us toward the end.
As you say, most shows (and plenty of novels) don't have enough sense of their more macro-level movement (it's not built into the sitcom model) to plant seeds like this this early. I also sometimes, especially when my insomnia gets very bad, re-watch Friends, and I remember seeing an interview once with the showmakers about how they only let Monica and Chandler continue to sleep together because of how thrilled the audience was once they did. I think there's something there in how pleasing it is to watch characters and tensions not only interact in consequential ways, but the way that interaction and consequence is so much more pleasurable and impactful when it happens over longer swathes of time, more episodes.
AED: I love middles too, now that I understand how to get through them. I think we carry an almost mystical sense of the exact middle, just as we have a sense when it is noon. I always look at the exact middle page of a book to see what is happening and very often it is a pivot, a schism, a before and after, a turn. I love your analysis of the pivot in Girls; all the changes that will go forward, the big pivot being that Hannah is going to leave New York to go to Iowa to get an MFA. This is a big shake up for everyone. She backtracks early in Season 4, only to find everyone else has moved on, and she can't make things go back to the way they were.
I loved what we were talking about with POV, and thinking about it now I think the POV isn't as intimate as the show goes on. I don't feel the same sense of Hannah telling me about the Iowa students but have a more conventional sense of watching the show. Did that change for you too, or not?
LSS: I would never have been able to articulate it that way, but YES, absolutely, the tone does seem to get less intimate as the show goes on, especially after Hannah leaves for Iowa (and also, for later, Alice, as people who both teach in MFA programs, I think we might have to talk about the Iowa episodes?).
On the one hand, this feels like there might be external forces at play; more of an awareness of viewership, more collaborators, less of the fuck-around-and-fight-out-feel that always feels so exciting and lively in early books, early seasons of shows, etc, that I sometimes mourn when I see them replaced by a more packaged sheen. (I have a longer theory about this that lives specifically in the ways both Ferrante's Neapolitan books and Knausgaard's My Struggle books, for me, are never as perfect tonally as they are in their Book Twos).
But I also think this shift makes sense in conversation with what we've been talking about: the girls' relationships become less intimate; they're almost never all together after that Long Island trip. They're becoming warier of one another and themselves--all a part of growing up, I guess? And that somehow lives in the characters' relationships to the viewers as well?
Though, to be honest--and this makes me think of our earlier conversation about girlhood--I sort of hate the presumption that growing up has to involve less intense forms of intimacy. (And, to say, I wanted so much for Hannah to make a friend at Iowa. I hate that she didn't. It was good for the show, I guess, but it made me very sad). I still want to spend lots of days curled up on my friends' couches talking about EVERYTHING. Except, of course, I mostly can't. Except, of course, I have too much life/work/parent stuff I feel I have to do instead.
Do you experience this shift as intentional? How does it shift your experience of these later seasons as opposed to the earlier ones?
AED: It's time, isn't it? At least that has been the impediment for me to having the kind of hang out for days and see what happens friendships I used to love. I don't feel differently but I don't have time like that. Last September I got together with 6 friends from school who'd all started together in kindergarten for a weekend in Prout's Neck. We caught up, remembered, but above all hung out. I hadn't felt that relaxed in ages...we knew each other, we'd all been in each other's childhood houses, nothing had to be explained. This does strike me as being the vibe of the early seasons of Girls. Later there is tension, and the need for explanation comes in. This is why exposition is so tricky...don't you instantly abandon a TV show in which you hear dialogue like "I haven't seen her since 2012 when we were both working at a theater in Seattle and she was married to a man who later became an indicted state senator." Bye bye. There is a difference, it seems to me, between the early Girls episodes where past relationships came out in very present dialogue (my favorite scene, when we first meet Elijah and in the context of Hannah telling him he might have HPV we learn about their past relationship in a very non-explainy way) and the later episodes when they are in conflict and more defensive, more explanatory of their positions. It's never bad or overly expository, but possibly the nature of explaining oneself is distancing, and we the viewer are watching rather than identifying as much. The girls grow up and also lose their college hang out way of life. And as you say, the show is more self-aware, has more goals. We feel it. Explanation is of the mind and not the emotions—it appeals differently, if it manages to appeal at all. Don't relationships begin to die when people feel misunderstood enough to have to explain themselves? Not good. The break up scene between Hannah and Adam is so beautiful and brilliant because it avoids every ounce of that. They are planning their future when she begins to cry, this future can't happen, then he begins to cry, agreeing, and they understand each other perfectly. Such good writing. That's an intimate scene for the viewer.
One of the reasons I love Better Things and Curb is for the wonderful sense they both convey of hanging out with friends. Sam Fox has a family of close friends and they are around a lot. Curb, too; in the early seasons Larry can't do an errand without picking up Jeff or Richard to go with him. It's very funny and also a lovely fantasy, these rich successful men who can nevertheless spend the day together driving around looking for a doll.
LSS: So much of what I’m interested in as a writer is alive in what you talk about above: how actually so much of what is liveliest, most complex, most prickly and painful about human interaction is built up over years, cannot be explained in a quick dive into exposition or in straight dialogue. I have a sort of silly go-to with students about this: I ask them, when your older sister says, I like your jeans, do any of those words mean what they’re supposed to? For some, the answer is yes (some don’t have sisters), but for others, none of those words hold what the dictionary says they should; you have to read where your sister is looking when she says this, if she catches your other sister’s eye as she does. That’s what somehow a scene has to hold outside the language the characters deploy. In books you have gestures, silence, how the character’s body responds after, gradually teaching the reader the language of the family or friend group over time. In television it’s that perfect bit of dialogue, but also the equally brilliant choice to send Hannah on her HPV spiral, to make that past action with Elijah directly relevant to the present narrative.
AED: When we meet in person, I’m going to say I like your jeans!