TMI, TBH: Lena Dunham Addresses Her Critics In This Week’s ‘Girls’

This is a spoiler-filled recap of ‘Triggering’, the most recent episode of Girls.

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It’s been a while since we had an episode so wholly focused on Hannah – possibly not since the notorious Patrick Wilson episode, ‘One Man’s Trash’. We get three scenes outside Iowa, counting Marnie’s Skype call: Jessa and Shosh are watching Scandal; Marnie’s knitting; and the Horvaths are playing a game of Scrabble so intense that not an eyelid is batted when Hannah mentions a) thinking about suicide or b) alleged people named “Jonesley, Ranchony, Nagasaki and Cher”.

Like ‘Trash’ before it, ‘Triggering’ puts Hannah in a dream-come-true situation (prestigious writing program/dreamy doctor’s brownstone) where she doesn’t quite fit, and lets her bumptious, awkward charm and lack of filter bash around inside the fantasy until she eventually breaks it.

The apparent downward spiral in this episode is quick and clear: Hannah starts off in an Instagram-filtered haze of perfection. She’s renting an unnecessarily enormous house just because she can, Eating Grapes As A Snack, riding down wide paths dripping with flowers in the sunshine, maybe making a cool new friend, and not bothering to lock up her bike, because it’s Iowa! …Then she’s hiding from a bat in her giant house, late to her workshop (and still in her pyjama pants), and has her whole deal ripped to shreds by her peers before her bike gets stolen.

By the end of the episode, she’s done no work, alienated half her class via oblivious ranting, crashed a frat party, wrestled a girl in a paint pool while still wearing her dress, and generally regressed back to “undergrad school”, complete with her college boyfriend on her arm.

She’s more relaxed and probably far less prone to a full-on spiral with Elijah’s arrival, but her enthusiasm for her new adventure is already badly dented. Her plea to Elijah – “Let’s forget who we are” – might just be a way of saying, let’s slough off our old skins and be party creatures without a care, but it also echoes the “trying to become who I am” phrasing Hannah used in the pilot, serving as a vaguely overarching theme for the show in its sense of entitled manifest destiny and self-involvement.

Hannah’s impulsive, oversharey tendences have backfired on her before – again, the comparison that springs to mind is the scene where she unloads a lucky dip of neuroses on Hot Doctor Brownstone, startling him into realising just how young she is, and how this raw, fun, forward little weirdo is actually a whole person with bursting-at-the-seams baggage far beyond what he’s willing to deal with. Outside the intimate circle of equally self-obsessed friends she’s developed – and for all their faults, they certainly love and accept her more or less as she is – Hannah has little sense of how to adapt herself to the conversation at hand, rather than trying to bend others to her style. And, as noted previously, she might be lacking range as a writer beyond Brash, Brutally Honest Memoir.

Honesty might be an overrated virtue in writing, anyway. Not everything that’s true or real is interesting or useful simply because it is; honesty can be mundane and tiresome and hurtful. The question nobody asks Hannah in that workshop is, why write about this? Is it just because it happened to her?

Logan, the pinched, Type A-seeming blonde in the workshop, also doesn’t ask Hannah why she would take a fistful of Quaaludes and get her boyfriend to punch her. Logan’s already made her mind up: Anna, and/or Hannah, is a privileged woman who’s fetishised a kind of violence she’s never experienced and wants to play at it to feel edgy. It’s an ungenerous reading – but Logan also makes a fair point when she says that you can’t go around for a nice chat with every person who’s read your writing to ensure they’ve got the right end of the stick. (That goes double for responding to internet comments on your own work, just quietly.)

But that’s what Hannah’s in Iowa for: to meet different kinds of people, ones who won’t see themselves in her or fawn over her “honesty”. It’s interesting to see her at the bottom of the food chain in the workshop, and to watch her clunky, self-satisfied paragraph eliciting winces and eyebrow raises from the others. Meanwhile, DeAugust writes an evocative, if slightly cliché-sounding, childhood tale of a working-poor family, and is showered with self-satisfied, elliptical praise for its “spare” prose.

(It’s a little odd how quickly the class defers to DeAugust when he defends Hannah’s “voice”; perhaps he’s the literary love child of Raymond Carver and Spike Lee and they all worship his Authenticity in a vaguely benevolently-racist way; or perhaps he’s just always the peacemaker. He does seem genuinely decent, and apart from the workshop facilitator of infinite patience, he’s the only one who’s at all kind to Hannah.)

Either way, there’s a palpable respect there that Hannah is not afforded, particularly as his story could just as easily have been based on his own experiences and is no less “authentic”. While Hannah does seem almost proud to have written something so RAW and REAL that she feels a wordy trigger warning is in order, it’s still based on something she really experienced. If someone feels the need to inhale ‘ludes and get punched, for whatever reason, surely that suggests the character’s motivations might be worth unpacking.

Ungenerous readings of awkward, honest, largely autobiographical writing? Yes, Dunham is addressing her critics again – or at least, drawing on the experiences she’s had since becoming a significant young writer about whom a lot of people have a lot of opinions (many of them critical). Having to just sit there while people who neither know nor love her pick apart her work, and the version of herself in it, must feel a little like twiddling your thumbs at home with Twitter rages over whether you’re too fat for TV or a hack or a bad person or a child molester.

Hannah’s not a bad person. I especially like her loose, magnanimous, up-for-anything party persona (a version of her that Elijah never fails to bring out); the bright, fun flipside to her awkward oversharing. That lack of personal and emotional boundaries also makes her the kind of person who’ll throw her entire being into grinding up on her ex to ‘Get Low’ in a circle of 20-year-olds, and offering unsolicited but fiercely sympathetic advice to crying girls in the bathroom queue (before cutting in front with a confidence that almost makes you feel she earned it).

“I’ve seen a lot of things,” she says sagely to the crying girl. “I’m twenty-five years old.”

Hannah’s new frenemy Chandra, for example, couldn’t have known that that would be the day of Iowa’s first-ever bike theft, but her crappy security advice does cast a little doubt on the rest of the character’s wisdom-nuggets – if she thinks an Iowa university campus is theft-free, she might not know as much about people as she thinks. It’s a good reminder that even people who seem to know exactly what they’re doing — whether they’re 25 to your 19, or 30 to your 25 — sometimes give terrible advice.

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Girls airs on Showcase at 7.30pm Mondays, with a re-run at 9.35pm each Thursday.

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