TV Review: If you give an audience a cookie

Lena Dunham’s HBO series continues to divide critics, prod viewers

Now in its third season, “Girls” is still the most divisive show on television, a lightning rod for a host of criticisms ranging from thoughtful to boorish.

On its face, the premise sounds as safe and phony as “Friends” or “Sex and the City”: a group of 20-something girlfriends and their various male counterparts struggle to succeed in life and love while living in Brooklyn. But the show aspires to an emotional realism that often manifests itself in characters who are selfish, immature and unlikable. The legitimate complaints question creator/star Lena Dunham’s self-awareness and ask why anyone would want to spend time with such spoiled, self-involved people. Meanwhile, the ad hominem attacks tend to focus on the personality and physicality of Dunham herself.

The show also has a fiercely loyal fan base, myself included. It’s sometimes unpleasant to watch, but Dunham’s writing is earnest and graceful. She clearly loves her characters, even as they behave in despicable ways. And that’s the problem for many viewers.

This season’s fourth episode, “Dead Inside,” co-written by Dunham and Judd Apatow, the show’s producer, provided the closest thing to authorial judgment Dunham is likely ever to pass down. When Hannah (played by Dunham) learns that her editor has died, she responds by fretting over the uncertain future of her e-book rather than mourning the loss of a colleague. 

“Hannah, why don’t you put one crumb of basic human compassion on your fat-free muffin of sociopathic detachment?” scolds her boss at her coffee-shop day job. “See how it tastes.”

Most of the other characters, including her boyfriend Adam (Adam Driver), express similar concern and disgust over her apparent callousness. By the end of the episode, after she is harangued repeatedly over her lack of sensitivity, Hannah reassures Adam of her humanity by conjuring tears and delivering a contrived speech about how, as a teenager, she watched a friend slowly die. The friend never existed. The same speech was delivered first to Hannah by Adam’s sister, Carolyn, in an attempt to gauge Hannah’s level of unfeeling.

It’s a chilling way to end the episode, and on first glance it appears as if Dunham is actually confirming what some detractors of the show have said since the first episode: Hannah isn’t just selfish and immature. She’s a full-blown sociopath.

Ambiguities remain, though. As Hannah herself points out, her editor wasn’t really her friend, and there’s no one right way to react to death. With each season, in ways both clumsy and clever, Dunham has shown a knack for toying with the expectations of the show’s hate-watchers, and I suspect this moment of revelation is no different. With season one, viewers complained about the overwhelming whiteness of the show. Dunham’s response was to give Hannah a black boyfriend, only to have him break up with her two episodes later when she questions how, as a black man, he could possibly vote Republican.  Internet trolls attacked her for daring to do nude scenes when she’s overweight; now she’s topless at some point in nearly every episode. The snark-bloggers at Gawker, while occasionally complimentary, have attacked her from all angles. In “Dead Inside,” Hannah and Adam debate the value of the site. Adam, who hates it, seems to win the argument, but Dunham subverts accusations of pettiness by casting Hannah as Gawker’s impassioned defender.

It’s not often that a writer or filmmaker can successfully address criticism in such a meta way without it coming across as ugly, oversensitive, or extraneous to the story being told.

Dunham is the exception, I believe, because she’s not seriously vexed by the attacks. Her responses are confident and playful, rather than vindictive; she’s clearly taking immense pleasure from fucking with the viewers.

So, does Dunham see Hannah as a sociopath? Maybe. But the false speech works as a metaphor for the relationship between Dunham and much of her audience. “Why don’t you show us nice feelings, like they do in ‘Friends’?” we ask her. And she responds by giving us exactly what we want: sentimentality predicated on a lie.