Sorry, Girls.
Written by Miranda Vidak
2/19/20138 min read
Late to the party, hey? Agree. Good reason, thought. Scouts's honor. Didn’t even want to do it in the first place. Girls. TV show. Second Season. Season Finale. I quit. I feel bad, nonetheless. I made so many of my friends watch it and get hooked on it, and then I bailed. And everyone started to fuck with me: “What’s going on, did you watch it, what did you think about it, why don’t you want to say anything....” and so forth, wondering where my ardour that twisted their hand disappeared.
I feel like an asshole, but I just can’t, at the moment!Everyone that knows me well knows how big of a TV-show freak I am. I don’t read newspapers and I don’t watch regular Television, ever. I literally never turn it on. It’s my objective to stay away from oversaturated info that clog my brain and fill it with way too many useless information. In order for me to stay on track with all the creative things I’m able to produce, I have to be “empty” of unnecessary stuff. But to balance out the work that’s based on constantly having to have new ideas, on weekly basis, I need to “escape” into some other story, daily, to release the brain and prepare it for the new load. Hence the TV-shows. And I watch everything. Not talking about hit shows we all watch, I’m talking EVERYTHING. And the speed is abnormal. I can watch 30 episodes of something in like 3-4 days, I’ve must have seen 70 % of all TV-Shows made in last 20 years. Great ones, bad ones, old ones, teeny ones, just all.So you can imagine my enthusiasm when GIRLS first released. It’s great to use TV for escapism, away from our every day lives, but having a such realistic TV show on air, that’s just priceless. A gift! We all love a show that’s entertaining, yes, but realistic one that gives us real life issues packed in a made up story, that’s the whole another frontier. Shows like that, we don’t just watch them. We reference them. We reference ourselves through them. We talk about them next day at work or dinner, they’re not just shows, they are part of our social circle, we feel like we’re one of the characters and the characters are one of us. They circumscribe the generation and voice the times we live in at the moment.What made me go crazy for GIRLS is that it’s pitched as today’s more realistic Sex & The City. Even though I enjoyed SATC immensely, I was also always bothered with some majorly unrealistic aspects that made people never setting foot in New York think it’s that easy. We all watched and escaped our problems with the Power button, even though we all, well at least the ones that lived in NYC, knew you can not buy all that designer clothes & shoes, nor you can live in those apartments in those areas, with paychecks coming from writing a Daily News column. But we did not mind, we looked at shiny stuff and we indulged. I lived in New York when the show was taping and we all lived that, done that, but we all had REAL problems; mindblowing Manhattan rents, hard earned incomes, unbearable tuitions, and 30 percent of the Manhattan population had another one, the worst one, added on - immigration. All those issues wore us out so much, we didn’t have a luxury stressing about men to that degree. Men were the LEAST of our troubles.I saw the Pilot of the GIRLS on a plane, and I was hooked. Came home and swallowed it all! The first scene in the restaurant and this unbelievably familiar discrepancy we all experience with our parents who rarely get the fact we live in gravely different times then they did, and the brutal realization; you are truly on your own, because even if they have the means to help you, they just see you through their experiences in life and judge you by it; it made me cringe with relatedness. You sit there and you know there’s nothing, no one. Just you.And the first sex scene, I mean the sex scene! The way the Show’s completely stripped of any TV magic is just so damn refreshing to me. The idea to see Hannah all the way through trying to take her stockings off, before having sex with Adam, and the camera on her the whole time trying to do it in real time, no editing, (well, smart non-edit edit), the awkwardness of the moment, just how many times it happened to all of us? You want to be sexy, breezy, quick, but most of the time you’re just awkward. It was fantastic! As well as the way they showed the whole relationship between them, girl wanting one thing, the guy wanting something completely different, and the denial of both sides and the cat & mouse game of each trying to get what they want out of the another, just how many times THAT happened to all of us? The last scene in the cab, in the 1st Season Finale, the way he finally succumbed, her face of victory and relief; the struggles, the money, the little things that make up for constant blow-ups the life is shining upon us, it was just something else. I’m no expert, but I’ve seen a lot, and this show was just another frontier. Something we needed in these times. I don’t suppose all those Golden Globes bag to differ.So what happened then? What happened between the GIRLS and me? How can I 180 myself from all that to literally having troubles watching at all the way through? Let me just say, I didn’t want to. I really tried. I just couldn’t. The 2nd Season completely and utterly destroyed me. And by the sound of it, I’m not the only one. The cool kids are calling it “The Girls Backlash” these days.I started the 2nd Season with such enthusiasm. I watched. I wasn’t feeling it. I didn’t want to admit for the first 2 ep’s, you know that feeling when you’re with someone and you realize you don’t want to be with them anymore? Your mind already decided, you just have to wait for your body to follow. You smile to their faces regardless with a dash of denial mixed in, waiting for it to cook fully, so you can put it on their plate. That’s how I felt. I endured first 2. But the 3rd ep cut me open. Small wound, but it cut me.The 3rd episode, "Bad Friend", famously dubbed - Coke Episode. Gawd. Doing cocaine for the first time? Running around town like a mad woman on couple of lines of COKE like it’s godamn LSD? Come the fuck on. All while wearing a mesh see-through top, without the bra, running around, bouncing those not really bouncy, bouncy boobies? To show the real bodies on TV? Hey, I don’t have a problem with real bodies. Hell, I even welcome it. But a body like that will most likely not put the mesh top on, all whilst running down, jiggling. What’s the REAL aspect in this equation, the body or the situation? Cause neither worked.[gallery columns="2" link="file" size="2x2" ids="21386,21387"]But the Coke Ep was nothing what followed in the 5th Ep, “One Man’s Trash”. The internet burned with that one and everyone has their opinions about it, mostly negative, because of the pairing, and I can just say, paring was not even the part of my sexit. If bald, ugly, chubby men on TV can be with gorgeous women, things should work both ways, ok. Got the message. And if Dunham stayed there, it would actually be a pretty decent episode, however unrealistic it might or might not be, paring an Adonis with frumpy Lena Dunham. See, I’m not even going to jump on this “o my god he’s so handsome and she’s, well.......” train, because I don’t even need to. She made it that easy with this one, you don’t even HAVE to go there. Awkward pairings, both ways, they happen all the time. But when they do, they surely do not happen that a wealthy, handsome, athletic doctor begs an homely looking, lazy, broke chick with the most annoying, neurotic, entitled personality and behavior to stay with him for 2 days, all while telling her she’s so beautiful. Not ask, BEG.Lena Dunham is so brilliantly lucid. That’s what pisses me off the most. She wrote the line in the pilot episode, for her character - “I’m the voice of my generation, or at least voice of A generation”, and she got a tons of flack for it. What followed was her trying to explain to media that was meant for Hannah, her character, and not her personally. She apologizes for that, while she really IS the voice of this generation, her writing is just brilliant, she's brilliant, but instead of fighting her critics with her words, she fights them with shoving the grotesque nudity down everyone throats, one has to wonder what is she really trying to display here? Her talent? Ego?The ping-pong scene? I have never ever seen anything like it, and it’s not the look that bugs me, it’s the fact of REALNESS that the show’s riding it’s whole existence on. Even when she’s not having sex, she’s tweezing a piece of wood out of her ass while the camera is shoved all the way in it. It gets so distracting it makes the whole plot seem insubstantial to me. Other HBO’s gems, shows like Hung or Game Of Thrones, their graphic sexual encounters and all the nudity they display, they’re actually REQUIRED for the storylines. With GIRLS, its forced, shoved. Almost like she wants to torture everyone that ever said something unflattering to/about her.[gallery columns="4" link="file" size="2x2" ids="21382,21383,21384,21385"]See, you become a little acetic about looks, living in mighty ol' Hollywood. Every aspect of life here is based on looks, it's so substantial you want to vomit on daily basis. I get wary when it's emphasized too much, even if the reason is a completely opposite message, and that is how this town ruins you, ruins your perspective. I lost myself in the naked pong scene that I almost missed what really bugs me about this ending - Hannah has her little monologue how she didn’t realize she wants all that, the Brownstone, the comfort, the money, things, and seeing all that in his life, she DECIDED she also wants it. Like we only have to decide we want it all, the things every single being on the planet aspires & dies to achieve in life, and minority only does, but no, Hannah is that cool she only needs to CHOOSE to want it. Lena, Hannah, whoever, needs to quit the nekkid game and keep up the world game. After all, I;m in a dire need of another Diablo Cody in my life.
“There are certain people who are meant to remain in your past. I made a mistake trying to REPURPOSE you!”
See that than and there, bam! Repurpose? How lucid but hilarious that was? We need repurposing here at this show. WORDS. We don't need a butt, a boob, whatever the size and shape it is. We need your words, woman. And when the words are side-kicking all the butt showing, instead of other way around; that’s my fucking cue. For now. See, me, i do like to repurpose.