Review: Girls “Deep Inside” – Mourning Quietly

I’ve always thought one of the problems Girls ran into with audiences is it’s ambitious attempts to envelope Lena Dunham’s ideas about identity and self-discovery with larger social commentaries on the same ideas. Being a show about 20-something, white New Yorkers is what makes this so difficult: it’s such a specific world that its musings only work in the context of those circumstances. This is true of almost any show, yes, but throw in the female-led creative team and acting ensemble and it becomes easy to see why it can be such an easy target for public scrutiny.

Knowing that, an episode like “Deep Inside” is inherently a lightning rod for this kind of reductive discussion: it’s an episode about how Hannah (and by proxy, her friends) deals with death, specifically the death of David, her publisher and personal creative “champion”. From the opening scene, it’s a perfect opportunity to bring out the worst, self-centered tendencies in Hannah, teasing us with the images of people running around concerned about the sudden news of David’s death (which isn’t known until the final seconds of the cold open) while she tries to interrupt the secretary to inquire about her own personal safety.

The first half of the episode unfurls as one might expect: most people are dumbfounded by Hannah’s seeming lack of empathy upon hearing the news of his death. Adam is appalled that Hannah isn’t distraught, even more so after she mentions that nobody gave her any information about her e-book’s future, and even Ray (who got punched in the face by a coked-out David but a week ago) feels a bit off after hearing of his strange, probably drug-fueled death (though Hannah and other in the “literary community” are left “shaking their heads”). Neither of them can comprehend Hannah’s reaction, which is contained to the effects of her book and the juicy details surrounding her death.

Halfway through, it becomes something much more than Hannah’s musings on mortality: at one point, her and Adam get into an argument over the validity of something like Gawker and Jezebel, and what their actual function is in society. At first, it might be easy to dismiss this as a continuance of last week’s “I don’t read comments” bit – but the argument Hannah and Adam are having really isn’t about the newsworthiness of someone’s decaying body: it’s about how numb we’ve all become to the idea of death, how our smartphone and laptop-obsessed lives have turned us into compassion-less animals who can only view life events in a series of selfies.

Or maybe we’ve always been that way: even Internet-free characters like Adam live in a world where someone’s death turns into a conversation about them and their feelings. We all react to death differently: for him, it makes him wonder what would happen when he died, if it would bring some emotional rise out of Hannah that he didn’t see with David. It’s a silly question for him to ask her: but one indicative of the episode’s pathos, which pokes fun at the societal notion that we’re supposed to do something when someone dies. We don’t really know what it is – and so we turn it into something about ourselves, be it mourning, questioning the point of life, or realizing that we live in a world that cyclically bombards us with so much shit, it’s hard to have any kind of reaction to anything at all, unless we take some serious time to process our emotions (and even when we do… it’s always going to be about us, isn’t it?).

After Adam questions her lack of emotion, Hannah finds herself reaching and forcing herself to feel something – a search exacerbated by Caroline’s (who I am now convinced is the seer of Girls) fake story about Margaret. In the end, Hannah’s only reaction to David’s death is retelling the lie Caroline told her: she knows what kind of emotions she’s supposed to reflect, and tries to project those in a false way to be accepted as normal. She wants to be viewed as a selfless person – a wholly hiliarious idea, and one that so many people try to express when the death of a family member or friend becomes public knowledge (Shoshanna mentions Facebook memorial pages, which are a completely ludicrous, self-serving idea if you take a minute to think about it).

This idea evens sneaks into Jessa’s little isolated adventure to visit a “dead” friend, brought on by Shoshanna’s insistence that she reaches out to the family of her best friend Season, who died of an overdose years back. Turns out Season isn’t dead, sending Jessa a fake invite so she could get away from her enabling ways and into rehab. When Jessa has an opportunity to go visit a real live ghost, it turns out she’s the ghost herself (and dressed in a long, loose white dress, she looks like one too), a stranger in the home of Season and her family, rebirthed into a world that Jessa may not desire for herself, but certainly can be envious of, given her recent luck. And Jessa’s so dumbfounded by it all, all she can do is toss out some weak insults (“this won’t last”) as she walks out into the street: she can’t believe that someone would fake a death to save themselves from her – but that’s what we do sometimes when we can’t face telling someone the truth about ourselves… we lie (just as Hannah lies to Adam about Margaret at the end of the episode).

Really the only thing working against “Deep Inside” is Marnie – but we’ve all been banging on this drum for seasons, as Marnie’s continuous spiral continues, quitting her job after she finds Ray and his boss (who is dying himself, let’s not forget) laughing at her “bold creative expression” on YouTube, and spending the rest of her day obsessively working out and eating uber-healthy (nothing like a trend to help one out of a depression, right?). In an otherwise philosophic episode, Marnie’s straightforward, consistently awkward scenes feel disconnected from the rest of the show, as she often has in the last two seasons.

Thankfully, she’s largely relegated to this background in an otherwise fascinating half hour: “Deep Inside” is another episode of Girls firing on all cylinders, catalyzing a fascinating self-dissementation with an unlikely twist that will likely have implications throughout the rest of the season, as Hannah’s now-stable mental state is challenged with a new set of professional challenges and uncertainties to deal with. Further more, “Deep Inside” explores the rippling effect of death through a community in the modern world: and how everyone’s reaction to a death is selfish, no matter how poignant, noble or respectful one thinks they might be.

Grade: A-

Other thoughts/observations:

– poor Laird and his runny nose.

– Boy, Jessa is depressed: “I can’t believe I’m still alive, either.” “I look forward to the day I die.” Damn girl, go enjoy a sunset or something!

– Caroline looks like she stepped out of a homeless shelter in the middle of 1991 – and it’s absolutely hilarious.

– Hannah: “I want to die, and then like five minutes later, be like ‘What the fuck just happened?'”

– Adam: “How’s doing absolutely fucking nothing with your life?” Jessa: “How’s your penis?” Adam: “Great; want me to put it on your shoulder?”

– who else is ready to ‘ship the shit out of Caroline and Laird?

– Jessa again: “Death is just something that happens, like jury duty or floods.”

– “Faster! Better!” Oh, Marnie.