Just 10 episodes later, the second season of HBO's "Girls" is over, and for regular viewers of the show, you'd be silly not to sit there scratching your head. If you're not an obsessed devotee, you've undoubtedly heard of creator Lena Dunham and her "voice of a generation" show that is transcending norms, focuses on white girls and is a signal of inventive television. After completing this season, I refrain from trying to abide by any established receptions of the show as "Girls" does not need a label. Really, it's quite simple: "Girls" is good television, cramming just about every emotional response toward its 20-something characters in its 20-something minutes. And oh, how riveting Dunham has made it.
Though season one left us with Dunham's character, Hannah Horvath, in a midst of a borderline existential crisis, eating cake alone on the beach, season two loomed promising, with everyone getting a little bit of what they wanted: Jessa's proclamation of being oh-so happy, Hannah's procurement of an e-book deal, Shoshanna finding herself in love and even Marnie, though on despair's doorstep and who "can't dress like a magician's assistant for very much longer," romping around as the not-girlfriend of pompous artist Booth Jonathan.
Yet the show nose-dived into uncomfortable territory (even more so than it usually prescribes), with episode five, "One Man's Trash," in which Dunham's character was cooped up in a swanky Brooklyn apartment with a conventionally good-looking, successful doctor (who can grill steak!). This venture into fantasyland was odd, though the romp was peppered with just enough truth to make us wonder whether we were watching Hannah living in real-time, or if this was an essay her character had written. Either way, the episode stands out and perhaps marks the beginning of Hannah's mental decline with its borderline metafictional skullduggery.
It's from this point forward that everything goes haywire and the show keeps you glued, if for no other reason than that all the characters have become rather appalling. It's been said before that "Girls" is a millennial reincarnation of "Sex in the City," and I went so far in a previous column as to say that viewers can choose, American Girl-doll status, which character he or she might embody the most. However, if this second season is any indication, Dunham does not instruct you to choose whether you are a Jessa, Marnie or Adam. Rather, "Girls" shocks you, makes you squirm, because every character unearths some nugget of behavior that you at one time exhibited, or reveals some thought you yourself might have had once, however horrible.
Which of course means that we don't have to like them. Quite frankly, I dislike Hannah immensely. In the season finale, her ex-druggie neighbor Laird sums up: "You are the most self-involved, presumptuous person I have ever met. Ever." I think most viewers will agree with this statement. And don't forget, these characters are flawed, perhaps troubled. I'm still struggling to forget the deeply unsettling sexual events of the penultimate episode "On All Fours," which the title describes well enough. But the beauty of Dunham's show is that she has created characters who are not your friends or people you want on speed dial, yet you end up feeling for them simply because they are humans making mistakes.
The characters have regressed despite their capacities for change. Jessa runs away (again), Marnie defaults, convincingly, back to Charlie, her on-off again ex-boyfriend, and Shoshanna, the "least virginy-virgin ever" is now decidedly not so and abandons Ray in search of her cookie-cutter prince. Most strikingly, Dunham's character has become more terrifying while wearing oversized shirts and homemade haircuts than when she's wearing her trademark nothing at all. Perhaps because the self-confidence and entitlement she's normally parading around is heartily out to lunch, her deep anxiety and OCD has resurfaced, becoming the only thing pulling her up by the bootstraps and leaving her once again stuck in limbo between the womb and writerly success. Then there is Adam, who, after a failed "normal" romance, literally runs back to Hannah, shirtless, rescuing his hairless Rapunzel from her anxiety-ridden tower.
And so, the images we are left with are Marnie embracing Charlie, Shoshanna macking with a blond dude in a suit and Hannah being cradled by Adam, leaving the audience to determine whether these outwardly "rom-com" tropes of happy endings are pawns in Dunham's satire, or simply a continuation of the blurring lines between gender norms, reality and fantasy.
Lying on the floor in Laird's apartment, Hannah says, "You know when you're young and you drop a glass and your dad says, like, Get out of the way' so you can be safe while he cleans it up? Well, now nobody really cares if I clean it up myself. Nobody really cares if I get cut with glass. If I break something, no one says, Let me take care of that.'"
These "happy endings" don't really provide any sort of closure season three of "Girls" has been ordered and there will be (thankfully!) 12 more, plenty of time for Dunham's gang to figure out how to clean up their metaphorical glass without injuring themselves emotionally, mentally and physically in the process. It won't be easy for them, and probably won't be easy to watch, but it will be entertaining.
