Voice of a Generation
The girls are okay. They might not seem ok, and they might not be ok now, but they are, like, okay.
This past Saturday night, for the first time in nearly a decade, I watched the pilot of Girls.
I was fourteen or fifteen when I binge watched and was obsessed with the much-debated HBO sensation about four dysfunctional twenty-something friends struggling to find direction for their lives. I found Lena Dunham showing cellulite on a magazine cover inspiring1 and believed Adam running shirtless through the New York City subway system was the most romantic thing a person could do.2 I watched the series in secret on my laptop late at night or when I was supposed to be doing homework. I read the think pieces about why the show was genius, problematic, and profoundly overhyped. I saw the girls’ proposed life in Greenpoint as both my future and a far off fantasy.
As the seasons went on, my love for Girls began to sour. I was still invested in the show, but the central characters’ self-centered, destructive tendencies became harder to watch. My disappointment was validated by the critical consensus that the show had gone downhill by season five with the exception of “The Panic in Central Park”.3 I found the show’s final season, which I watched live, to be the ultimate betrayal. Girls’ version of what it meant for Hannah Horvath4 to grow up didn’t align with mine.
[***SPOILERS AHEAD***]
To get into specifics, I never accepted Adam and Jessa as a couple no matter how much the show begged me to. It was an unforgivable violation of girl code, and I hated that the writers decided to preserve their relationship rather than Jessa’s friendship with Hannah. I also didn’t buy Hannah finding peace and purpose in accidental motherhood. It felt random and depressing. A way for the show to go out with a whimper rather than a bang.
The central friendships I’d spent six seasons following were fractured beyond repair. By the final episode, the girls were scatted and no longer in touch. What even happened to Shosh? How could a show about female friendship and being lost in your twenties end with no one being friends and everyone still being… lost?
[***SPOILERS ARE OVER***]
In my early twenties, I’ve frequently returned to Sex and the City for a comfort watch but never to Girls. Sex and the City is at its best in the later seasons when the central characters begin to evolve and learn from their mistakes. I’d argue that each character (apart from Carrie) ends up as a better version of themselves compared to season one. The strength of their friendships is also beyond question. When these women call each other soulmates in opening episode of season four, you believe it.
I like that the women of Sex and the City are women. They’re lost (especially when it comes to dating), but also ten years ahead of me in their lives. They have careers, apartments, and nice clothes. They take cabs whenever they want.5 They struggle with many of the same relationship problems as their younger counterparts in Girls, but their flaws seem to stem less from immaturity. Selfishness? Sure. But these characters are past their initial stage of adulthood.
They’ve already survived being girls.
When friends have told me to revisit Girls, I’ve often dismissed the idea with various excuses and complaints about the later seasons. I can revisit my favorite scenes6 on YouTube whenever I want, so why go through the pain of the entire series. Deep down, I know the reason I’ve put off Girls for so long can be attributed to something else. A sneaking suspicion that was confirmed this Saturday night when I watched while folding laundry in my apartment at 10:30 at night.
Somewhere between my junior year of high school and my twenty-fifth birthday, I’ve become one of these girls.
The pilot episode of Girls opens with Hannah at dinner with her parents. She talks about a book of personal essays she’s in the midst of writing and how things are going well at her unpaid internship. She talks about how she still needs to live to come up with more to write. The conversation sent a chill down my spine. I recognized myself instantly, across the table from my parents and friends, assuring them about the progress of an unseen, unread, incomplete book. Promising creative and career progression that is thus far intangible.
In later scenes, Hannah and Marnie’s dynamic was equally relatable. It wasn’t the specifics as much as their intonation and mannerisms. The way these girls speak to each other and laugh together is the same way I speak to my friends. The way relationship dramas play out on a large scale is too true to life. In the first three episodes, the girls come together over a pregnancy scare and panic over STDs. Shosh idolizes Sex and the City, and each girl gives the others horrible advice from a place of zero wisdom. So much of their time is spent hanging out and wasting away, yet there’s never enough for one of the girl’s to “figure her life out.” My friends and I may be a little more employed and responsible than Hannah, Jessa, Marnie, and Shosh, but the dynamic on screen felt far too close for comfort.
I also must admit I’d forgotten how funny this show is. How smart. At twenty-five, I do love Girls. Maybe even as much as I once did. The difference is that at seventeen, I couldn’t appreciate the show’s accuracy.
I don’t have wonder how I got here.
In his documentary Brats, Andrew McCarthy interviews various people on the impact of the Brat Pack. There isn’t much to take from it unless you’re a die hard 80s teen movie or John Hughes fan,7 but there is quote from Malcolm Gladwell I haven’t stopped thinking about since seeing the film back in July. While speaking about Pretty in Pink, Gladwell says:
“I was team Duckie… Of course… My idealized sense of what my role was in my high school was Duckie. I wasn’t actually that, but that’s what I would have liked to be. And I’m going to use that to build my own identity. So, when I’m watching the Duck Man, there are things in him that I would like to acquire. So, when you look back twenty years later, you do see yourself in the movie, but you’ve forgotten that you acquired it… You took it from the movie!”
Ah, right. Once upon a time, I wanted to be this girl.
Before I knew better, I aspired to the young adulthood of Hannah Horvath.
I also suspect watching Girls when I was young and impressionable allowed me to avoid a few of those girls’ pitfalls. One scene from the pilot that’s stuck with me for the past decade is when Hannah explains her tattoos. She tells Adam she got a bunch of tattoos in high school as a way to regain control over her body after gaining a lot of weight. He doesn’t understand the impulse, but I remember being scared as a teenager that I did. That story, in some strange way, offered me solace at times I felt out of control of my body and self conscious about my weight. I didn’t need to copy Hannah’s behavior to be comforted by it. If anything, it encouraged me to put more effort into making peace with my bare skin.
I look at Marnie’s relationship with Charlie in the pilot episode or Hannah’s willingness to put up with Adam’s poor treatment and feel a sense of relief that I’ve avoided those fates. I oscillate between feeling like I am these girls and looking for ways I can see myself as a level above them. I line up my achievements against theirs, as if Hannah’s loss can be my victory. It’s only because the show can be like looking in a mirror under florescent lighting. It’s difficult to look for too long.
Being a slight self-centered mess of a person in your twenties might just be inevitable for some of us. Lesser beings who aren’t immune from insecurity, jealousy, immaturity, and bouts of self-sabotage. One of the strengths of Girls is how ugly the girls can be. In real life, we do let ourselves down, friends disappoint us, and mistakes have consequences we can’t come back from. Many of us go through phases of being depressed, selfish, and less than our best selves. We grow only to regress. I can’t criticize Girls for telling the truth just because the truth isn’t pretty. Ten years later, it’s still rare to see cellulite on a magazine cover.
And just as I was deep in the throes of lamenting how horrible it is to feel like a girl and not yet a woman,8 I reached the final scene of episode three.
After crying over her first boyfriend being gay and learning she has HPV, Hannah returns home to complain on Twitter. Instead of publishing the killer draft, “You lose some, you lose some,” she skips to the next song on her playlist and pivots.
Cue the best needle drop of the 2010s: “Dancing on My Own” by Robyn.
When Marnie returns home to their shared apartment (which Hannah is behind on rent for, of course), she finds Hannah dancing with abandon alone in her bedroom. The best friends laugh about the two years Hannah wasted on her ex, and Marnie joins the dance.
A tidal wave of feelings hit me while watching Hannah and Marnie throw themselves into the song with zero coordination. Memories of watching this episode as a teenager. Memories of scream singing this song in my middle school bedroom. Unplanned dance parties with best friends and former roommates. Times I’ve cried about something only to be laughing about it thirty minutes later.
The song is perfect. It’s the same song I still sprint to the dance floor for every time I hear it in the wild. It’s a karaoke crowd pleaser. I never skip it when it comes on shuffle. It’s a key part of Chuck and Blair’s love story on Gossip Girl.9 A true anthem for a generation. This past New Years Eve when I heard the familiar opening, I sprinted out of a new acquaintance’s bedroom to find my friends. “Can you believe what they’re playing?” I yelled. “I know!” my best friend shouted back over the music, and we stood in the hallway holding hands and jumping up and down like we were still eleven years old.
Beyond the music choice, the scene is perfect. It captures the euphoria of finally choosing not to care after you’ve spent hours, days, or months caring way too much. I could rewatch it a thousand times. I’ve lived that scene and hope to keep live it another ten thousand times. Nothing is better than that feeling.
All girls inevitably grow up, and some of us are more eager to than others. I would never want to be a kid again. You couldn’t pay me enough to relive my middle school years. I spent them all wanting to be like the teenagers I saw in John Hughes movies. Once I hit my teenage years, I started looking ahead to the early twenties…
Before I set my sights on a Sex and the City-esque 30s,10 I’ll do my best to embrace this cringe inducing, half-baked phase of life I once dreamt of. Having so much freedom and choice I often don’t know what to do with it. Being lost is a luxury, after all. It’s a privilege to squander one’s girlhood in a miserable state of arrested development.
If you can, take advantage. It’s what all adventurous women do ;)
Recommendations for This Era:
Girls Season 1
Mood boards
Younger binge watch on Netflix
Intermittent snacking
Rings
Anora (2024) - So late to the game but I’m here now.
Fur coats (sustainably sourced!)
Abandoning the fear of being cringe
Chicken noodle soup
Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own”
What could be more 2014 of me?
I haven’t reached this scene from the Season Two finale in my rewatch, but I’m pretty confident I’ll still feel the same.
A perfect piece of television.
For the uninitiated: Hannah is the show’s anxious, narcissistic aspiring writer and primary “girl”.
Albeit a little unrealistically with Carrie’s finances.
The last scene of the Season 2 finale, you already know.
Which I am.
Any true fan will remember that post-Blair birthday party make out on top of a piano.
Which are not guaranteed to bring any more success, stability, or direction than the 20s. Just saying.
I love this post so much and you’re really making me want to rewatch girls
Wow I have realllly been considering watching girls for the first time and now I will (thanks for the spoiler warning)