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For those of you who missed it, and are better off for
having missed it, Sunday’s episode of Girls
saw Hannah Horvath living a dream.
The episode revolved around a weekend tryst between 24 year
old Hannah and an older man, a 42 year old surgeon named Joshua. They meet cute
when Hannah knocks on Joshua’s door to explain that she has been dropping the
trash from the coffee shop in the trash cans in front of his brownstone. Very
romantic, don’t you think?
From there they fall quickly into a weekend of lust,
punctuated by topless ping-pong and other suitably domestic activities. It’s as
though Hannah and Joshua had known and lusted after each other for some time.
Beyond the lust, very little is going on between these two.
They have little in common; they do not understand each other; they never really converse. They are acting out a fantasy and doing what they need to do to keep the lust alive. Their
communication is markedly one-sided. Hannah bares heart and soul. Joshua reads
the Sunday paper.
The communication is so one-sided that you suspect that it
hides a darker truth. The absence of reciprocity, signaled by the trash dump,
suggests that Lena Dunham, a girl who has been in therapy since she was 8, is
dramatizing a dream of having an affair with her doctor, that is, with her therapist…
and discovering that the therapy relationship does not translate into a real
relationship. The disparity between what she confides in him and what he
confides in her is too unequal to be brought into balance. It’s as though
someone had been throwing trash in your garbage can, only you do not know who
has been doing it and the person who has been doing it does not know whose cans
they are.
To my mind, that counts as an excellent description of what
happens in orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis. Kudos to Lena Dunham for seizing
the essence of psychoanalysis.
Of course, there is always a possibility that Dunham is
writing about something that really happened. Yet, the episode feels so unreal
that it seems to want to show our fearless heroine working through
an unrealistic dream and discovering that some kinds of lust are not really
love.
1 comment:
I'm part of the largest demographic that watches "Girls". A White Middle Aged (charitably) Male.
I had a different take on the episode. It was a passionate weekend Tryst. There simply wasn't enough Time for Both to bare their souls.
However, Hannah, as is the wont of her girlfriends, turns the situation into a reason to disparage and Dump the man.
Emily Nussbaum in NYorker review implied the "Life Experience" baloney was Her Insight. She also says she "cries" during episodes.
I cringe in Pity. -- Rich
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