Les Demoiselles de Ridgewood, Queens

My five favorite episodes of HBO's Girls, reviewed.

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Lena Dunham’s serialized millennial magnum opus Girls entered into my life suddenly, like an awkward two-month fling filled with messy mutual obsession, slow eye-contact sex, and one person ghosting the other at the end of the summer. I didn’t really know what I was getting into when my roommate and I watched the pilot, only that Marnie’s character had given rise to a number of really funny internet memes, and that most people either loved it or hated it. As someone well-versed in loving twee media that catches ire for being too navel-gazing and unrealistic, it didn’t take me long to be won over. 

As a creative, Dunham’s career was irrevocably marked by her extremely intimate, often cringe-worthy commitment to exhibitionism, and the national smear campaign by what would become the nascent Pizzagate conservative young male Internet mafia, whose knee-jerk disgust reaction to a fat white woman talking about her sex life candidly was to throw death threats as liberally as a drunk guy in Appleton, Wisconsin throws darts trying to impress his Hinge date at TGI Fridays. I don’t always feel as connected to Dunham’s later work, and I completely understand why, as a public figure, she is just as divisive and controversial as her on-screen counterpart Hannah — but, if nothing else, it is undeniable that galvanized by the success of Tiny Furniture (2010), Girls was her closest and most triumphant attempt at capturing the cultural zeitgeist of young American women in the nascent 2012 Obama era. It’s a time that’s definitely too easy to romanticize: the end of the nation’s brutal terrorization of Iraq was bleeding into a general spirit of innocent, sheltered progressivism that grew into the peak prevalence of hipster electroswing mania. I think of lighting-in-a-bottle, early-career MGMT playing “Time to Pretend" to a tiny audience on a grainy digital camera. If you put on a dangly owl necklace and distressed skinny jeans in Brooklyn, in the rosy visage of nostalgia, they practically handed you the keys to the city.

Needless to say, I blew through the show and was left extremely touched, and often ashamedly infuriated, at the immature, awful behavior of the characters, coupled with how I secretly saw my worst impulses in response to the challenges of young adulthood reflected in them. If my beloved Sex and the City is about positively identifying your journey to maturity in a gang of four hilarious thirty-somethings, Girls is very consciously about negatively identifying your regression into impulsiveness in four emotionally stunted twenty-somethings. Some things are exaggerated, yes, but Girls sees Dunham’s shocking and characteristic candor turned onto the rites of passage of American, decisively upper-middle-class white girls navigating life in NYC on their own. I could write an entirely different thinkpiece on whether Girls should be called a “post-feminist” work of television, and more so, what that descriptor means for art made in the 21st century. This problem exists with Sex and the City, too, but I do think Girls is more intentionally engaging with the social reality won for young women by the tooth-and-nail advances of the Second Wave, and neither rejects nor confirms any of those progressive tenets wholesale. At its best, however, the show is unflinchingly bleak and merits value by connecting to embarrassing, awkward, and shameful snippets of how women use a relatively newfound generational independence. There are many episodes I love that didn’t make the cut, but in short, I think the set of these five episodes embodies how hilarious, upsetting, and tender Girls can be.

005: "Welcome to Bushwick A.K.A The Crackcident" (S1E7)

This was the exact moment I began to understand the cosmic forces that hold this show together. Sex and the City’s action is predicated on routine. There is a standing brunch date the girls can use to expound on the current monster-of-the-week guy that’s entered one of their lives, Carrie will always be overspending at Barney’s, they all have relatively stable jobs, etc. It is exactly the opposite in Girls. The only thing these four have in common is that their lives are all a complete mess. The first time we see them together in one place is here, at a grimy warehouse party in Bushwick — where Shoshanna accidentally does crack, Marnie pines over the boy she dumped a few weeks ago, Adam adorably dances with his lesbian friends, and Jessa is loosely involved with a lonely older man for the first of many times. This episode is also notable as the inception of arguably the best relationship in the series, where Ray takes Shoshanna’s virginity after wrangling her home safely. I could say a lot about their trajectory throughout the show as a “the one who got away” couple, but it’s safe to say that in Season One, they’re still very sweet together, and it makes me happy. 

The wider storyline comes to a head at the end of the episode, with the revelation of a key piece of Adam’s character: Hannah had no idea he was a teenage alcoholic, and has been working hard in AA for years. In many ways, early to mid-season Adam is the moral center of the show, because he is consistently the only person who makes an active effort to get better, and is the only person who can recognize the thinly veiled cries for help in a mutual bucket of crabs environment in which everyone is content to let everyone else around themselves flounder in dysfunction. I think a tiny but meaningful glimpse of Adam’s character at his best is when he drives Shosh and Hannah to pick up Jessa prematurely from rehab, and is the only one to matter-of-factly remark that it is absolutely a bad idea to enable your close friend to jump ship on treatment and fall back into life as an addict. Adam is absolutely messed up in his own special ways — he’s violent, he’s troubled — but he has a history. Much like Jessa, these points don’t necessarily excuse his behavior, but they ring a far cry away from the very privileged and supportive household environment that bred neuroses like Hannah’s. The episode ends with maybe the best jump cut of the series. During an explosive fight in which Adam gets hit by a car, he shouts, “What do you want? Me to be your fucking boyfriend?” — cut to Hannah and an injured Adam in the cab home, Adam covered in bruises, and Hannah with a childish smile. Thus begins one of the most storied relationships in the show. Adam and Hannah are officially a couple.

004: "Japan" (S5E3)

I don’t think you could make this episode today. Not because there isn’t an easily lampooned market for American-oriented “cool Japan travel,”, but because Japan in the American imagination was such a different kind of Orientalism in 2015 than it is today. Both are rooted in a similar infantilization and techno-futurist idealization, but now everyone is obsessed with pretending they’re somehow getting the inside scoop on what’s “really traditional” — as if to seemingly all dunk on each other for their lack of cultural literacy. This episode, which mostly devotes itself to Shoshanna’s chaotic life after moving for a marketing job in Tokyo, has all the explosive superflat-meets-Funko-Pop design stylings of the early Internet. Shoshanna is patient zero for the Tokidoki Girl renaissance, which was maybe the first thing to loop cooler American girls who turned their nose up at the actually nerdy Vocaloid-tuning fujoshi into the realm of global Japanese culture. 

I’m not shy about the fact that Shoshanna is my favorite character in Girls, and her characteristic peppy but wry social Machiavellianism is on full display in a city very accustomed to office ladies working long hours and dishing out bright pink, overly insincere greetings. The main point of note here: the flowering romance with Yoshi, her protective and innocent coworker, who rescues her from a seedy sex bar in the Ginza district. They all but share their first kiss with Shoshanna in programmer socks and a maid outfit, and wrapped up in the fantasy of living abroad, she virtually abandons her upwardly mobile and utterly boring long-distance boyfriend back home. What makes the Japan episode fun is not that it showcases a complete departure from the show’s routine, but rather that, immersed in a culture she only seems to engage with at a surface level, Shoshanna seems most like herself here. Like many Americans, she went to Japan in search of fantasy, and in doing so, only pushed herself closer to the parts of her life she was trying to avoid. Like Gwen Stefani’s Harajuku Lovers perfume line, the glimpse we get at Shoshanna’s life in Japan is bright, mass-produced, and extremely disorienting to look back at in hindsight. Bonus points for watching her Japanese slowly get better over the course of the episode. Yoroshiku onegaishimasu!!

003: "Video Games" (S2E7)

Jessa is a difficult problem for this show to solve. At times, she’s been on the brink of dangerously manic overactivity that holds lasting consequences for the entire show, and sometimes she’s completely absent from the narrative with very little explanation. Jemima Kirke’s character acting (and sublimation of her own personality into her character) is second to none, save for perhaps Adam Driver. Season Two, Episode Seven, “Video Games” (Lana reference?) is among the most vulnerable moments for Jessa on screen. Prompted by an unexpected invitation from Jessa’s estranged father, she brings Hannah on a train upstate to meet his present-day dysfunctional family. It is immediately clear that Jessa’s hyper-independence was a forced consequence of just how immature her father is. He frequently leaves them to walk back from various locations with no indication of when he will return. He is emotional, vengeful, and tied to the whims of his new, completely insane, but well-meaning New Age-devotee wife. Strangely, this is kind of an episode about Hannah, in which her sheltered and very much coddled sensibilities conflict with a home environment that is not built to revolve around her upper-middle-class, only-child whims. I think about her, in a moment of clarity, reaching out to her parents to express an awkward appreciation, only for her mom to blow her off, presuming she’s leading up to asking for money again. 

The crux of this episode is Jessa and her father’s conversation on the swingsets, where, after turning back her accusation of not being someone she can rely on, Jessa snaps back: “You shouldn’t have to. I’m the child. I’m the child!” It relies on one of the central theses of the show: everyone is just a scared little kid doing their best to cope with uncertainty, and yet the people these people haphazardly choose to bring into the world deserve so much better than what they get. While Hannah is busy kind-of-having sex with an off-putting high schooler, because that’s just the kind of person she is, we’re left stuck with the weight of Jessa’s knee-jerk avoidance. Just like her father, she chooses to leave the people she loves without a trace. Only later on do we learn she had brought herself to rehab. It’s a bittersweet choice. She assumes the role of the people who hurt her in order to make a genuine attempt at healing. It was a show decision no doubt informed by Jemima Kirke’s IRL pregnancy, but one that really does make sense. The episode itself is as funny as any other, but has this very specific grown-up ennui that makes it one of the defining moments in Jessa’s character arc — one that, ultimately, I do think gets one of the more conclusive and satisfying endings, especially with regard to her relationship with Hannah.

002: "American Bitch" (S6E3)

I do think this is probably the most important episode of Girls, and the one that is best regarded as a standalone work of television. My own personal reaction aside, it’s insane that this was released mere months before the infamous exposé of Harvey Weinstein in 2017. “American Bitch,” another one-character focus, this time on Hannah, begins in media res, with Hannah having written a disparaging op-ed about a very important writer named Chuck Palmer for what is implied to have been a pretty unimportant Internet magazine. Having invited her to his ritzy city condo personally — under the air of transparency to settle her misgivings about his character — the entire episode is essentially an exchange of dialogue between the two. 

What is so brilliant about the episode’s structure is how the audience’s own prevailing feelings are manipulated via Hannah’s subtly shifting opinions on this well-read, manipulative, and pathetically charming man. We begin in explicit tension: Hannah sees him as a creep and a sellout, and Palmer acts as if he sees Hannah as a spunky but naive younger writer, blissfully unaware of the familial strife Hannah has brought into his charmed life by spotlighting multiple allegations of grooming from younger fans of his work. In the present-day political climate, we go into this dynamic already expecting a conclusion. He’s an asshole, Hannah won’t budge on her condemnation of him, and we are just here to watch the comedy produced from rubbing these two diametrically and equally narcissistic characters against each other. But 15 minutes in, that isn’t what happens. Hannah, rarely at her most astute and empathetic, wanders around hypothetical corners with him and falls into a broken camaraderie built on two neurotic writers with abysmal self-esteem and an awkward sexual interest. Palmer makes his case (seemingly) clear. These women all threw themselves at him, and perhaps only a little bit knowing better, he briefly indulged their whims as intellectual equals — taking them at their word and not digging deeper into any underlying power dynamic. It’s a defense that seems scarily familiar to anyone who runs in any close-knit, contemporary subculture. And all of Hannah’s initial doubts about this narrative are gently eased by cheeky exchanges of first-edition, signed Philip Roth books (get it?) and pejoratively negging praise. 

What’s scary about this episode is how good this gambit gets you. You really do begin to think about this episode as a redemption arc for the flawed-older-man writer archetype. You think that Dunham might indeed be arguing for a rehabilitative inclusion of so-called “cancellations” into public life, following lofty leftist standards like restorative justice. And then, so smoothly you barely even notice it, his penis is poking out of his jeans. Hannah is shocked back to reality and immediately disgusted with how subtly she had allowed herself to be manipulated. Like a cartoon villain, Chuck Palmer smiles. Having now tentatively touched him, lying in bed together, she has allowed him to place her into this strange gray area he’s unwittingly used against young women for years. Any future recounting of this incident would immediately make this story about her. She would be the clout-chaser, the wide-eyed ingenue, only ever loosely credible and only capable of wielding any real power against this man at the cost of driving her own cultural reputation completely into the dirt. 

Just like that, his daughter is home for music practice, and Hannah sits frigidly next to his ex-wife. Awkwardly defeated in the mental game of chess and present now as simply one of many women in such a scenario, Hannah’s character feels utterly flattened; collapsing, even, the longstanding gray area between Hannah as a fictitious character and Lena Dunham’s own history as a woman. It’s a hollow and eerie ending to an episode drenched in subtlety. It’s crazy to watch this episode in the wake of how violently a similar modern-day Gen Z intellectual counterculture seems to have turned against this era’s #MeToo movement. I think what many of these women who derail the so-called cultural consequences of mass market cancellations seem to gloss over is just how much damage this very specific gray area is capable of doing to the minds of young women. It’s a list of priorities that, to me, feels profoundly selfish, as would befit a scene that attempted to make the “scary uncle at the family reunion”-type of alt-right beliefs chic and for hot girls. Needless to say, as a woman, you can only watch so many Woody Allen reruns until the penis is pointed at you. And like Sleeping Beauty’s cursed spinning wheel, it’s going to be harder than you think to stand firmly with your common sense, and not prick your finger on something that will lock you in a deep, dreary, prince-charming-dependent sleep forever.

001: "Flo" (S3E9)

This is definitely not the best episode of Girls, but I do think it’s my favorite. Its main plot point concerns a very common scenario in the emotional lives of twenty-something women: Hannah’s grandmother is dying, and the women of her family have to pick up the pieces of a woman they only knew to varying degrees of familiarity, all while navigating the difficulty of their own distant relationships with each other. Fun cameos are Hannah’s cousin, who aspires to med school greatness and clearly sees Hannah as a black sheep fuckup, and her religious aunt, who never married, taking on much of Flo’s care and advocating contentiously for her belongings. We get great one-liners from Hannah, darkly wishing her cousins could have been the kind of close relationship that stems from all being molested by the same person. She and her cousin Rebecca don’t ever really come to understand each other, but rather are simply able to acknowledge the shared necessity of working alongside each other in a moment of acute crisis. The scenes of Hannah’s mom, Lorraine, arguing with her two sisters function in a similar manner. The episode is ultimately brought to a head with Rebecca crashing her car while texting and driving, and Adam heroically rushing into the hospital when a fine-but-bruised Hannah hilariously texts him only “CAR CRASH.” 

Lorraine, a profoundly underrated character, then gives Hannah one of the most infamous lectures of the entire show. After Adam selflessly lies about an engagement to Hannah on her grandmother’s deathbed, Lorraine takes Hannah aside and muses, “I don’t know him very well. But I see certain things. He’s odd. He’s angry. He’s uncomfortable in his own skin. He bounces around from thing to thing… I don’t want you to spend your whole life socializing him like he’s a stray dog. Making the world a friendlier place for him. It’s not easy being married to an odd man. It isn’t.”

It’s a dour moment in what seems like a pretty good stretch for Hannah and Adam’s relationship. As someone who really did think they were going to be endgame for most of the first three seasons, this was the exact moment I began to see the grand arc of their ill-fated dynamic. After all is said and done, and the family reaches something close to closure with the end of Flo’s life, Hannah gets a call on her way back to New York. Her condition has miraculously improved, and she’s going to be discharged the next day. It’s a jarring comedic ending that speaks to just how confusing real life can be. Hannah gives a half-smile and walks into the city crowd as a bare-bones twee girl cover of Warren Zevon’s “Don’t Let Us Get Sick” plays us out. As emotionally intense as this show can be, it’s only made me cry once — and weirdly, for reasons I don’t completely understand, it was right here. 

At its best, HBO’s Girls reflected a very messy truth about my own life back to me — that growing older was a far cry from the linear progression I assumed it would be, and that ultimately, we’re all just fragile, sniffly, blubbering, hurt little creatures trying and frequently failing to love and be loved in return. It would feel deeply embarrassing to end with a reference to AJJ, a crust punk band with a now-retired racially insensitive name, if it weren’t so on theme for the characters in the show. Both as this band fits their novel hipster taste, and this specific song, “American Garbage,” describes the way in which their young female and female-adjacent audiences have used these characters to identify the gross, ugly human parts of themselves at their worst. If there is going to be a long-foretold indie sleaze revival, it must come at the cost of completely eliminating the novel concept of cringe from our cultural and interpersonal vocabulary. “If I were one of the girls,” the song goes, “I would be Shoshanna. Confused and rude, such a special kind of way to be cruel. Confused and rude, confused and rude.” 🌀

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Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, scholar, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and media studies. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.