‘Girls’ Recap: Okay, How Much Are We Supposed To Dislike Marnie?

This is a recap of Girls. Spoilers!

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On the spectrum of human beings, there are worse people than Marnie Michaels. Her mother’s probably up there; Chuck Palmer would be too. Booth Jonathan is probably a worse person than Marnie. Until someone explains to me why they couldn’t just call in someone with, like, a tranquilliser gun, I’m going to count whoever made the call to shoot Grizz The Airport Dog as well, but only just. Those are all worse people than Marnie.

But boy, if Marnie isn’t the worst person on this show in basically every episode this season. Set up for an inspiring journey of self-discovery after ‘The Panic In Central Park’ last season, thrown back under the bus of Bad Sex With Desi and then briefly redeemed during the end of the Poughkeepsie excursion, she’s now just being, as Hannah puts it, a horrible cunt. (And let’s remember how much worse a word that is in the US — these characters might throw it around at near-Australian levels, but it’s still considered both nastier and more gendered in an American context.)

Marnie is a person who, when she’s supposed to be supporting her grieving boyfriend as he packs up his dead friend’s belongings, sulks like an 11-year-old forced to leave her Game Boy in the car during a visit to Grandma’s. She objects to the La Vue DJ going to pick up his girlfriend from the hospital, blankly suggesting he book her an Uber. She drags her best friend along as cover so she can cheat on said boyfriend with her estranged husband. She sits in a counselling session with Desi and his support worker and, with a straight face, compares an opiates dependency to the pain of having to get multiple deep tissue massages to deal with stress.

Are Marnie and Desi as bad as each other? As much as I wanted her to shake free of him — mostly so we never had to deal with his shit ever again — this season has done a strangely effective job of convincing me that she’s actually done him some damage. Not by, say, failing to detect or prevent his addiction or anything (Mama Michaels’ only sound advice probably ever: “Marnie, you should really know what a high person looks like by now”) but just because they are both shitty people and their relationship is based on shitty foundations: sex, wanting to be famous, shallow validation of one another’s egos.

Let’s look at their song titles: ‘W-W-Wonderful’ (or ‘Wah Wah Wonderful’, equally bad), ‘Song For Marcus Garvey’ and a song about war called ‘The Boys At Home’. If that unholy triptych of phony profundity doesn’t give you a full-body cringe, nothing will.

It also seems like for all his talk about acting instead of actually being, Desi is really throwing his weight behind his new role as The Addict. No need to fake being under the influence, of course, but his ostentatious feebleness suggests he’s either amping it up or just giving it his all because it allows him to draw attention to himself and make excuses for things he doesn’t want to do. Addiction disrupts lives and recovery drains energy, but Desi remains an absolute stain no matter where he’s at in life, and this phase is no exception.

Anyway, it seems such a strange choice for the show to send Marnie’s whole character to live out the rest of the season in a wet bin full of half-eaten bananas, wilted flower crowns and cat food tins, but there she is for the foreseeable future. Hannah’s referred to Marnie’s love life as a “man-drama cycle” as well as the instant classic “psychosexual hamster wheel”. The implication is not subtle: this is a pattern for Marnie, one Hannah expects to see repeated. It’s entirely possible for the show to squeeze in a redemption arc for Marnie in the last four episodes, but is anyone really desperate for that to happen at this point? Let’s spend that time establishing a happy, fulfilling path for Shosh and Ray and let Marnie keep spinning her shit into post-credits eternity like the top from Inception.

At the same time as it’s just trashing the shit out of Marnie, the show is doing a heavy rehabilitation job on Adam. This is the guy who literally moved Hannah’s stuff into storage and shacked up with Jessa’s pompous artist mate approximately ten days into the Iowa arc. Hannah seems to have actually given up on Jessa, which seems both fair — I mean, she’s a self-identifying sociopath, and Hannah can’t remember when or why their friendship ever seemed genuine — and unfair, given that Adam was equally involved in the whole debacle.

But if there was any doubt that the show is pivoting back towards the Adam-Hannah relationship, the final scenes from Adam’s film Full Dis:closure (which is a teeeeerrrrrrrrrible title, dude) seem to settle that. Not only does the new Robyn song that leads into the credits establish an emotional tie back to one of the first season’s most famous music cues, we also get the show’s first ever flashback, of sorts.

Apart from the six-month time-jump at the end of season four, time always works in a lumpy but linear fashion on this show, so finally showing us how Adam and Hannah originally met lends the current arc a rom-com-level air of romantic inevitability. We are given to understand, through Adam’s pleading with Hannah to watch the movie so she can confirm whether it’s accurate as well as the actress’s naturalistic performance and resemblance to Hannah, that the film is intended as a fairly historically accurate reenactment of the relationship.

Perhaps we’re heading towards a Girls version of a fairytale ending — which in its most basic form involves the princess getting the guy. And there’s certainly the groundwork there for a reconciliation: the Adam who took on the care of his niece, who can’t help but be warm and tender towards someone pretending to be Hannah, who defends her to his current girlfriend, who sprinted across the city shirtless when she needed him, is certainly an Adam who might suddenly be feeling the urge to take care of her again, fucked-up history and all. The real question (and the conflict that’s now set up for the last few episodes of their story) is if she’ll let him.

If that’s not what the show is gunning for, I’ll eat a mesh tank top. But if not, at least Hannah and Elijah have made up (even if he didn’t technically apologise) and set some clear parenting goals. It’s telling that Hannah brings up the teacher-massaging incident again in passing; it’s the second time this season, after she told Chuck the story in ‘American Bitch’. After all, Chuck was a terrible person, but his daughter seemed sweet and well-adjusted. Not every shitty human raises a Marnie.
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Girls is on Showcase at 8.30pm Wednesday nights and available to stream on Foxtel Play.

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Caitlin Welsh is a freelance writer who tweets from @caitlin_welsh. Read her Girls recaps here.