‘Girls’ Recap: Oh Shit, The Secret Is Out

Titled ‘Hello Kitty’, you’d be forgiven for thinking this week’s episode might be checking in on Shosh in Tokyo’s second-best cat cafe. Instead, after last week’s all-Marnie stunner, we saw the main cast wisely brought together in one place, avoiding the messy feel of some earlier episodes where they were more scattered. Also, the titular feline is actually Kitty Genovese: the 28-year-old gay woman whose 1964 murder is a staple of urban true-crime mythology and the inspiration for the site-specific theatre work Adam is in. (And, look, let’s be honest, it is also 100 percent a reference to Hannah Basic Instinct-ing poor Principal Toby in the cold open.) 

If you, like Ray, want to go Deep Internet on Kitty, the best thing is to go straight for the Googles and let the nightmare wash over you. The gist is that she was stabbed outside her apartment building in Queens with dozens of her neighbours failing to come to her aid — an observation which propelled much research and discussion on the bystander effect. If you’d like to go further, here’s a sharp-as-heck New Inquiry review of a recent book on the crime, a sternly horrified contemporary NY Times article, Wiki, and some various obits for the killer — who, in a spectacularly eerie bit of coincidence, died in prison just last week. 

This is also an interesting theme to follow on from Desi’s hilarious comment to Marnie last week about how she’s gonna get herself murdered through her sheer naivete and tendency to be maddening. Genovese was around the same age as the girls are now and — though she, as a queer woman, may have been more of a target in other circumstances — was by all accounts simply in the wrong place at the wrong time when a man wanted to do some woman-murdering. 

There’s both more and less to Genovese’s ghastly death than the popular narrative about urban apathy often suggests, and it’s interesting to see how the show picks and chooses from the manipulative moral extrapolations the immersive/interactive “play” is based on.

On the one hand, the theatremakers go straight for the “audience as complicit observers in the unfolding drama” trope from the get-go. But Sarah Heyward’s script, and the slightly self-conscious performances of the actors in each apartment — Adam’s possibly-closeted working-class henpecked husband, the concerned teen in the nuclear family, the hilarious bickering sisters — also show how easy and understandable it is to be wrapped up in the petty dramas of your own life even when worse things are happening, right outside your window. (Also, not to mention that awkward, immersive modern theatre format where you’re never sure where the boundary between performance and participation is.)

The ‘apathy’ version of the story of Kitty Genovese’s death took hold as a sort of reverse Rear Window, because of the then-growing idea that cities, and by extension ~modern life~, anonymise us and distance us from one another. As inappropriate as it is for Hannah to compare her friend fucking her ex to a guy stabbing someone to death, the parallel is actually kind of there from the viewer’s perspective. We know how Jessadam ended up happening; once distance has been established, it’s easier to skip out on responsibility for the wellbeing of others because you’re so wrapped up in your own shit.

Because of this — with Girls keeping Jessa and Hannah largely apart for most of the season aside from Marnie’s wedding and their fight a few weeks ago — it’s been easy to accept that maybe Jessa hasn’t crossed as significant a line as we might think. Maybe Jessa is, as Marnie puts it, a second-tier friend and there are degrees of fucked-up-ness at play; taking up with Adam is only, say, second-degree fucked-up. But it’s clear from Hannah’s face when she gets visual confirmation that Jessadam is a thing — and, oh boy, does Lena Dunham do some stunningly good, sad things with her face this week — that this is a full-thickness burn.

It’s certainly one that hits Hannah on two flanks — the friend betrayal and the ex betrayal. If your ex hops into bed with one of your best friends, or possibly former best friends because you’re in a terrible fight, and if that friend is your willowy hippie mate who’s been your guide to the life of an adventurous woman since you were 19, and you see her standing on a fire escape gazing at your ex and looking like a girl-next-door dream, well, that’s gonna hurt, and you’re going to wonder how long he wanted her, and you’re going to wonder how you feel about that, and you’re not going to know straight away.

Look at the way Adam steps towards Hannah on the street and then no further, and leans forward, as though over a precipice. Hannah and Fran wave awkwardly and shout over the distance. Jessa hangs further back, and then keeps that distance between herself and Adam as they walk away, even though they’re clearly pulled towards each other, already a habit. Hannah, on the other hand, forces herself to be conciliatory to Fran so as not to be alone; they stalk off, as far apart as they can be while still holding hands.

Hannah’s problems with ignoring or defiantly stomping over boundaries are well-established. In fact, they’re getting a little on the nose, considering how adult and functional and even sweet she can be at times — what is she really hoping to achieve by constantly flouting even the most basic element of the modern social contract, like not showing your boss your vagina? (She HAS to get fired now, right? The cool young teacher all the kids love always gets in trouble if they can’t keep it profesh — she tells Fran “it worked”, but poor Principal Toby has a pretty cut and dried harassment case now, at the very least.)

Hannah’s combination of chronic lack of self-awareness while knowing exactly what she’s doing means she’s a fairly unreliable witness to her own problems, and as Ray says, this means she repeats her mistakes. Part of Marnie’s breakthrough last week was due to being forced to step outside herself and see her life for what it was instead of trying desperately to stay inside it; Hannah’s might not be so simple, but she’s certainly due for a moment of clarity.

Speaking of unreliable, I was ready to toss out my #PickleJah friendship bracelets and curse out Dill when he went from too good to be true to too-cold so quickly — it’s still a significant red flag, even though he showed up in Greenpoint later all drunk and needy. Darling Elijah, in your impeccable Pete Campbell suiting (interesting that he has a bit of a ’60s vibe in this episode, or maybe he just looks hella establishment when you put him next to Hamish Bowles): when you’re fucking (and falling for) a guy who keeps an Emmy in his bathroom you’ve gotta take his attentions with, well, not so much a grain of salt, more like a giant fuckoff Himayalan salt lamp, so you can see what the situation actually is. That said, at least he nicked all those gorgeous toiletries. A good klepto-rage when scorned is a wonderful thing.

And Marnie and Desi: man, I could almost enjoy an arc where they pull a Scarlett and Gunnar and maintain super grown-up boundaries for Alexandra Patsavas’ sake, as long as they never break into their own songs spontaneously ever again.

…And if Ray finally gets to punch him.

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