A Thread About Girls (HBO)

The friendliest place on the web for anyone that follows U2.
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
Last week's episode changed my view of Marnie. I thought she had some common sense, but when that artist freak locked her in that TV screen tower for, what? Three hours? He pretty much forced her into it and tormented her for hours, and when he finally got her out, she was like, "Whoa, you really are an artist! I totally want to fuck you now!"

Please, anyone with a half-brain wouldn't do that. I just fail to see how that is realistic. :shrug:
 
I thought it was more like 15 minutes (which was 14 minutes and 59 seconds too long). I have known quite a few women to be that stupid, to be honest.
 
The song played in the TV chamber deal is 4:15 long, so I don't know why it's assumed she was in there forever.
 
The song played in the TV chamber deal is 4:15 long, so I don't know why it's assumed she was in there forever.

The artist (I forgot his name) seemed to be doing a lot for a little over four minutes, that's why it seemed Marnie was in there for a long time.

I thought it was more like 15 minutes (which was 14 minutes and 59 seconds too long). I have known quite a few women to be that stupid, to be honest.

I guess I need to get out more. :shrug:
 
Uhm, what was with tonight's show?

Yeah, many women have a fantasy of having amazing sex with a hot guy they just met and they have an epiphany. But this episode annoyed me, mainly because it was an all-Hannah episode. :down:

So, is she going to grow up finally?
 
oh. my. god. that. house.

and patrick wilson.

:drool:

i thought it was a good episode -- it was all Hannah, and i thought her insight when she started crying was genuine and honest, but as she does she took it too far and pushed people away after opening up.
 
the truth is the show really is terrible when it is about the character Hannah,
the other characters are much more interesting and likable
nobody really believes a doctor that looks like patrick wilson and has a house like that would have anything to do with a person like Hannah
truth is, that character would not have relationships with any of the men she has been paired with in this series

at lease in Louie CK, when he writes himself with attractive women, no one has any problem admitting that Louis is a loser and unattractive.
 
the truth is the show really is terrible when it is about the character Hannah,
the other characters are much more interesting and likable
nobody really believes a doctor that looks like patrick wilson and has a house like that would have anything to do with a person like Hannah
truth is, that character would not have relationships with any of the men she has been paired with in this series

at lease in Louie CK, when he writes himself with attractive women, no one has any problem admitting that Louis is a loser and unattractive.


The truth is that this is one of the best written and acted and honest shows on TV, and Lena Dunham has balls bigger than just about anyone, including Louie. She doesn't care if you like her, if you see her flabby body, if you are brsve enough to remember and own up to the period on your life when you started to realize that you actually weren't special, nor does she spend the episode convincing you what a great guy/dad he is.

And I'm a big Louie fan.
 
I missed the first 15 minutes, so I may want to revise

I just caught her in bed with patrick wilson and him seeming to be really taken with her. and how many episodes do we need to see that Lena is not afraid to show her naked body having sex with random reasonable looking men, just about everyone?
 
I missed the first 15 minutes, so I may want to revise

I just caught her in bed with patrick wilson and him seeming to be really taken with her. and how many episodes do we need to see that Lena is not afraid to show her naked body having sex with random reasonable looking men, just about everyone?

I think there's such a thing as a 36 hour hook up, and many 42 year olds are fascinated by 24 year olds. He was a device, and exaggerated like everyone else on the show. It wasn't realistic, but it was a critical moment in Hannah's narrative. And he clearly got bored with her.

I think most of us don't like it when less than perfect people take ther clothes off on TV. And we need to get over that.
 
The shot of her putting her shirt-n-shorts combo back on was so unflattering that she's clearly making a point beyond "real women have curves."
 
The truth is that this is one of the best written and acted and honest shows on TV, and Lena Dunham has balls bigger than just about anyone,

I have written in here that I think Lena Dunham is a good writer and she has looked good at recent award shows.

I don't consider Lena Dunham and Hannah the character she portrays as being one and the same. I consider Hannah one of four characters on Girls.
Having the least attractive actress naked and having sex with random good looking men every week is not ground-breaking and brave. It is just self-indulgent and boring, I suppose some people might find these repeated sexual conquests hopeful and encouraging.
 
Pretty lame that the majority of criticism for this episode is focused on Dunham's body.

I found the episode completely unrealistic, but it wasn't due to any perceived hotness disparity between the principal players. I didn't buy that an arbitrary meet cute, followed by a few minutes of talking then a very awkward pass would set off a two day bangfest complete with topless ping pong.

The whole thing felt like a writing exercise and I'd like to think it was just one of Hannah's short stories. At any rate, I'm going to pretend this episode just didn't happen.
 
If Hannah doesn't re-evaluate herself and her life after this encounter, then yes, this episode was pointless for the show.
 
I didn't buy that an arbitrary meet cute, followed by a few minutes of talking then a very awkward pass would set off a two day bangfest complete with topless ping pong.


agreed that the meet cute was strained, but i think bangfests with strangers can and do happen. so i've heard.



If Hannah doesn't re-evaluate herself and her life after this encounter, then yes, this episode was pointless for the show.

i think this is the point -- i found her insights to be very painful for her to realize, that she's really no different from anyone else and she thinks she needs to be "a voice of a generation." maybe i'm too sympathetic to her and overlook her obvious flaws, but i think a lot of her problem is that she places an enormous amount of pressure on herself to be something big, something important, to make something with this talent she's been told that she has by her parents (remember, she's an only child) and as a member of a generation that's been told since they were born that they can be and do anything they want to be. and i think that's a lot of pressure, even for educated white girls with white friends living in hipster brooklyn.
 
but i think bangfests with strangers can and do happen.

They definitely do.

I found the episode sort of painful to watch on many levels yet also strangely compelling.

But not as compelling as last night's episode of the still-brilliant Enlightened (yeah, wrong thread, but nobody seems to care about that show but me).
 
Oh sure, I'm certain bangfests with strangers are not uncommon, I just felt the prelude to banging didn't really work. I actually thought Jessa's pre-abortion bathroom stall hookup in S1 was more plausible.

I've heard good things about Enlightened. The only episode I've seen was Luke Wilson going on a coke binge whilst in rehab (combined with the Girls episode that was HBO's All Coke Sunday Night). Seemed ok, but maybe not enough to compel me to go catch up with the last season.
 
But not as compelling as last night's episode of the still-brilliant Enlightened (yeah, wrong thread, but nobody seems to care about that show but me).

Saving this for after Game of Thrones, glad to hear its still good! I caught up with the first season late and just don't have time for another weekly show right now.
 
good read:

I heartily object to the “Guys on Girls” reading of this week's episode of Girls, and particularly to their very literal minded complaint that this episode was “unrealistic.” That was a fantasy, guys, and fantasies are often unrealistic. You could tell because it stood apart from the rest of the series, like a standalone play in three tiny succinct acts. In fact I thought it was a near perfect episode, an Alice Munro story in sitcom form.

The pin-up neighbor played by Patrick Wilson was intentionally too good-looking, and his apartment was intentionally ripped from a design magazine. You were meant to be thinking the whole time: This isn't real, this can't really be happening. Hannah's line where she forces him to beg her to stay makes their sexual dynamic just about plausible, because it clearly turns him on to have to beg. But still, Hannah in silken sheets? That's Carrie Bradshaw, not Hannah. She is practically dreaming. Turn on the shower fog machine and she faints—poof—like Sleeping Beauty.

Our guys got some of the details right—this is like a Sex and the City episode; she isn’t quite mature enough to handle it. But that was the whole point. Hannah has a very immature idea in her head of what it means to be a grown-up, what happens when you give up the boyfriends who live in 10th-story walkups and who seem to be always around during the day. A mature girl’s fantasy would involve a normal relationship with, say, a guy at work. Hannah’s fantasy would involve this ridiculous parody of a “grown-up” who works as a “doctor” and has a “wife” (intrigue!) but she lives 3,000 miles away.

Over at Paste, Garrett Martin also finds the episode annoying but at least for the right reasons. The episode picks up a common Louie theme of two people who should hate each other talking until they figure each other out. “It felt like another one of Louie’s frequent tricks, dropping moments of fantasy into the show’s 'reality' without announcing them as such,” Martin writes. But even he perked up at that key moment, “when the magic between them dies.”

This moment when Hannah turns psycho on him, and he has to set his face to pretend that he isn't noticing or isn't disappointed that she has turned psycho—was just perfect. That's both a universal moment in many relationships and very particular to this one. The whole episode was in fact like the long arc of a relationship compressed into 24 hours. (Over at The New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum agrees about the genius of the unraveling, and adds her admiration for one particular sex scene.) By the end of it, Hannah reverts easily back to her old narcissistic self, convinced that her childhood trauma rates higher than his, and that he is cold and shallow and unable to recognize her distinct pain. Hannah has successfully confirmed the self-justifying view she always had anyway, which is that the everygirl fantasy of being swathed in silken sheets and living with a Harlequin hero, or even the fantasy of just being happily married and having fresh fruit in the bowl on your marble kitchen island, is suffocating and forces a woman to deny who she really is—in her case someone who likes to experiment with being kicked in the face during sex and then write about it.

Fantasy over. She throws his trash out, and we are right back to the mess that is Hannah's life. The trash, get it? Its not really a subtle metaphor.

Slate's "Guys on Girls:" What they get wrong about "One Man's Trash."
 
also spot on:

There’s something else in the episode, too, which I’d never seen on television, and it felt more graphic than the theatrical kink delivered with numbing regularity on cable television. (And here I’m going to describe the scene graphically, because it’s the only way to talk about a sex scene of this type.) The first time that Hannah and Joshua have sex, we don’t see it, just the aftermath, as they dress and exchange data (mainly, that he’s married but separated). Their second time is different. Joshua tugs off his shirt then lies back on his bed. Hannah unbuckles his belt, and she ducks down to the right of the camera out of the frame. Joshua gazes at the ceiling, closes his eyes, and mutters: “I want you to make me come, O.K. Make me come, Hannah.”

Patrick Wilson is a gorgeous guy and it’s a sexy scene. It’s also a reasonably familiar scenario, since we’ve seen plenty of men get blowjobs on adult dramas and comedies. But Hannah flips it and reverses it. She rises into the frame and softly asks Joshua to make her come instead. He does, using his hand. The camera doesn’t cut away: instead, it drifts even closer to their faces as they kiss. This is the opposite of the sex we’d seen between her and Adam, in which Hannah scrabbled to follow his lead, or to negotiate (“not there!”), or pick up clues to his fantasies. Hannah may be self-centered, but in bed she’s almost slavishly generous and, in a superficial sense, the model of “good, giving and game”—Dan Savage’s playbook for grownup sex.

With that nice pharmacist in her home town, she took that bravado so far that he finally had to growl “come on” to get her to stop spooling out fake fantasies. And while Hannah apparently told Adam that he “made her whole body feel like a clit,” you have to wonder whether that was the truth, or if it was Hannah’s way of convincing herself that even though Adam never paid all that much attention to that part of her body, anywhere he touched was O.K.

Either way, this short, potent sequence was a departure from any sex we’ve seen so far on “Girls,” because it wasn’t played for laughs. It stood in contrast with the first-season scene of Marnie rolling her eyes at her attentive boyfriend, and also with the second-season scene of Marnie getting slammed into the starfish position by a pretentious, detached lover (and maybe enjoying the novelty, since he demands nothing). In fact, the Hannah/Josh scene was so intimate that it felt invasive: raw and odd and tender. That’s a nearly unheard-of quality in sex on cable television, which consists largely of the same cynical motifs recycled again and again: perfect lingerie, interchangeable young female bodies (while male body types vary wildly, in age and shape), the sort of “porn with purchase” that studs prestige cable series from “Boardwalk Empire” to “House of Lies.”


Read more: That Sex Scene on Last Night's "Girls" : The New Yorker
 
The episode was a good fantasy, and the sex was sweet, ideal and shot well. But I fail to see how an all-Hannah episode and her dream-come-true fling is good for the series as a whole. So far this season, we haven't seen much of Marnie and Jessa, and very little of Shoshanna. Last season was mainly on Hannah, but we saw more of the other three.

Then again, it's Hannah's world and the others just live in it. Maybe I'm expecting too much from Girls.
 
Great reads indeed Irvine, thanks for sharing. The more I think about this weeks episode the more I love it, despite my initial disappointment of not seeing the other 3 Girls. (Why have them in the previously on segment? HBO, you tease.)

But it's similar to the first season episode when Hannah went home for the weekend and we first got a clear look at who she is. Thirty minutes can get stretched pretty thin sometimes with 4 characters / stories, so one episode a season where the show can really give a premium cable drama focus on Hannah is more than ok with me.

I also think I'm enjoying this season more than the first, but that could be because the first was initially off putting. I'll have to buy the DVD at some point to rewatch, am positive it will be better the second time.
 
But it's similar to the first season episode when Hannah went home for the weekend and we first got a clear look at who she is. Thirty minutes can get stretched pretty thin sometimes with 4 characters / stories, so one episode a season where the show can really give a premium cable drama focus on Hannah is more than ok with me.

Right! I forgot about that episode. I must be the wrong person to watch this show.
 
I think I enjoyed those articles more than the episode. I like the theory that this was the short story she had Sandy read earlier in the season. The one where he complained 'nothing happened' to which she countered was about a sexual awakening. Tho I suppose nothing happening could be a general complaint about Dunham's writing.
 
Back
Top Bottom