Girls

Someone told me that the Hannah Horvath character in "Girls," was informed at the end of the last season that she had been accepted into the Iowa Writers Workshop at the State University of Iowa in Iowa City.  Since that is my hometown, although now mostly a faded memory of the thirties and the forties, and SUI as it used to be styled, my alma mater, and faculty of the Workshop, such as Paul Engle and other legends were family friends, I felt obliged to take a wee interest. My husband and I had been much intrigued at the start of the first season, having only the most minimal contact with the type of persons depicted, but fascinated that such people were objects of interest, and also, of course, startled and charmed by Ms. Dunham's fearless display of her tiny tits. But we grew bored and disgusted with the young ladies, and stopped watching. Some of my projected fun collapsed when I learned that the administration at Iowa banned filming on the campus; still I was curious to see how the character would behave herself even in a faux Iowa and an imagined Workshop atmosphere.  To get ready for the Iowa experience we overcame our distaste  to try a few of the final episodes, .  The four girls have grown even more tedious than they were in years gone by, having become--hard to believe this possible--even more shallow and self-obsessed than before.  One named Marnie, the pretty one of the bunch, has kept her nice girl personality that goes well with her stunning looks, and is evidently so desperate for approval that she takes up with the former boyfriend of one of the other girls, not for a relationship but to get some sex with complicated motives.  Nothing like fucking a friend's boyfriend, someone you have known well from a different perspective, and better yet barging into his apartment and telling him to put up or shut up while marching into his bedroom and removing her clothing.  I know men do this all the time, and therefore to object or to criticize this woman is male chauvinist piggery.  And it really is not that big a deal, it's just that she is so "nice."  Actually sort of that brittle, good looking hard nice that I associate with sorority girls that I knew in the forties.  Much more fascinating was the Hannah character who got into the Writers Workshop.  For instance, it is evening, she is at the theater for the opening of a production of "Major Barbara" in which her boyfriend Adam has a big role, and of course his big chance. This is his big break and he has been avoiding her for weeks living at a friend's so he could work on his lines without distraction.  She has been enraged and stalks him constantly during this period.  Now opening night as he sits at his dressing table in a last minute moment of calming and centering, she marches in, and breaks his mood to tell him of her new triumph, she will be off to Iowa, and an entire new future will develop for them.  Moments before opening!  Oblivious!  At least thank god the Adam character has been given by Lena Dunham the lines he needs to deliver, telling the Hannah Horvath character how disruptive, manipulative, and subversive she is being.  And she does not understand!  I have to ask myself: Who are the people out there watching this series?  Do young women identify with these four dreadful girls? I say girls, because they all behave like five year olds.  Am I in some parallel universe?   The bigger mystery to me is how Lena Dunham could create this nasty, self-serving vacuous girl which the public thinks and she sometimes rather implies is based on herself, when as her artistic work proclaims she is not this girl.  Well, of course that is the parallel universe, Hannah Horvath, Lena Dunham, but why does the author do this?