Girls: Season 4, Episode 6

On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 10:12 PM, Leandra Medine wrote:

Stream of initial thoughts below — pick up where you’d like!

“You can’t just waltz into town and eat someone’s cereal” — Hannah projects, either her own behavior or Adam’s.

Marnie and Dezi having sex to their own music. Why is she always wearing a shirt during intercourse? Window into her insecurity or inability to get to the BARE bottom of who she is?

“How can we have completely different takes on a band that we are both in?” Kind of like your relationship.

Mimi Rose drops the a-bomb — heavy. Did Adam deserve to be involved in that decision? My instinct is to side with him because I’m rooting for Hannah but Mimi-Rose Eleanor’s confidence and conviction in her own decision does make me wonder if it was her moral obligation to share with him the abortion previous to it. She didn’t lie, she just withheld information until his opinion was…kind of futile.

Then again, though, she is kind of manipulative, no? This — “Wanting you is better than needing you because it’s pure” was weird to me.

Meanwhile, Hannah is now selfless. And using the word flummox. Which makes sense seeing as she now wants to be a …teacher?

The plot thickens — at the hand of real meat! I am very pleased.

On Feb 23, 2015, at 1:18 AM, Mattie Kahn wrote:

Okay, we have to start with Mimi-Rose’s abortion. (And that means all of us–I expect you people to “chime in” asMRH would say, below.) As a longtime defender of my own uterus, I am more or less biologically obliged to side with my gender in issues of what my high school guidance counselor would call “reproductive health.” I have a hard time saying that Mimi-Rose did the wrong thing. The womb is hers. The choice is hers.Yay. Feminism. But I do think that the callousness of how she went about it is tough to celebrate. And when Adam tucks her in to bed again at the end of the episode, the whole relationship–so pure! So adult! So strange!–feels a bit like an act. For all of his foibles, Adam has always seemed to insist on more transparency than that.

And while we’re on the subject of consequential decisions, let’s discuss the seventeen million steps forward that our Girls and guys took this week. Marnie sounded like an almost real person at brunch. Jessa managed to speak without offending a single profession, ethnic group, or religious sect. Elijah dated a politician, and Ray elected to become one. And our Hannah is going to be responsible for the general happiness and fulfillment of teenagers. This is probably the most misguided plan of all time. But my soul sang a little bit. It really did. The music was so jaunty and her dress was so nice and her resume looked real.

I got the teeniest bit excited for her. I really did. Besides, shouldn’t kids learn to have absolutely no expectations of anything or anyone? That seems like a valuable lesson, right?

But shall we discuss the cereal moment further? And can we talk more about pajamas on the show, in general? Between Mimi-Rose’s and Hannah’s matching sets and Elijah’s deeply uncomfortable underwear, I suspect there is a lot there. You know?

On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 7:36 AM, Leandra Medine wrote:

Pajamas as a window into the soul. Abie likes to say that I am a “versatile sleeper” because some nights I sleep in nothing but underwear and others in sweat pants, or pj sets — the whole enchilada. I just say that I am acutely reactive and air conditioner conscious.

I’m too tired to draw metaphors between the matching sets of MR and HH and the tighty navys of Elijah (so glad he’s back) but worth bracketing within their night cloth choices is Marnie’s long sleeve t-shirt. In the wise inquisitive words of Kenan Thompson’s DeAndre Cole, Wussup with that? Kind of makes me feel like Brian Williams may or may not be the silent fifth girl — manipulating her motions from a higher plane.

If he is, I wonder whether it’s respectable or juvenile. And speaking of the delicate line that demarcates respectable and juvenile: Will Shoshanna ever find a job?

On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 9:18 AM, Mattie Kahn wrote:

You know, the thing about Shosh–and especially Shosh last night–is that she’s in the exact stage of life that I’m in. She’s looking for a job, trying to figure out what she wants from her life, making dramatic speeches, mixing prints. So, I get what she’s going thorough and so do my friends.

Lately, I’ve been giving probably more thought than is normal to trying to figure out which of my friends will stop working after they get married. Motherhood is a pretty high calling, and I have only the most respect for women who choose to pursue that as a career. But it’s strange to imagine people that I have only known in the context of competitive academic environments taking a step back to mind the homestead. When Shosh suggested that she might not want a job, I started to think about how the Girls measure success and achievement. How bad do they really want it? Does Shosh want to be a kept wife? Does Marnie really want to make it as the female half of the next She & Him? Will teaching satisfy Hannah, who has always seemed to model herself after, like, Zadie Smith? And what the hell does Jessa want? I have truly no idea.

On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 10:49 AM, Leandra Medine wrote:

So you’re touching upon a really interesting and important question, which is what defines success, right? It’s such a unilateral question, though, because it varies so intensely person to person and then again from life stage to stage. If you’d have asked me what I saw as success when I was 17 and recently broken up with, I’d have said getting him back. If you’d have asked me that question six months ago, I may have said x amount of steady page views per month for Man Repeller and if you ask me that now, I’ll probably say a big ass healthy family because I have babies on my mind.

So, I find it hard to look at the question of how badly any single one of them really want “it” because “it” is such a volatile entity. The only character I imagine as not quite invested in achieving, well, anything, is Jessa. Which is probably worth talking about in and of itself. Also, though, re your penultimate question: teaching could very well satisfy Hannah in the short term because she will be among to kids who have no choice but to take her rhetoric as fact, and all she wants, really, is a group of cheerleaders among her.

On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 11:01 AM, Mattie Kahn wrote:

Is that what “helping people” is really a euphemism for? Is that what she craves? Gratitude? Because maybe it suggests that her existence has actual consequence? It’s sadder, but more interesting to think of this professional development in those terms.

Then again, maybe that’s true of all of us. Phoebe Buffay tried to hunt down the selfless good deed. She never found it. Most of us do good for at least some kind of positive reinforcement. According to Marnie, Mother Theresa just wanted to have more Twitter followers than Kim K.

Anyway, I think you’re probably right. At any given moment, we think we know what “it” is that we’re after. The truth is we have no clue. But does it help us to internalize that and stay humble about our ambitions? Or is it better to pretend that we have it all figured out? That whatever we think we want really is “it”? Effort is so damn hard. It takes so much work. I sort of need to believe that I know what I want right now. Otherwise, I would rather sleep a few extra hours each night.

But maybe that’s just the millennial in me.