Girls ‘Leave Me Alone’: Who’s The Wound?

I really enjoy Girls willingness to challenge its own characters, painting them in less-than-flattering tones at times in order to deconstruct the personalities of the three women on the show, without painting one or the other to be universally correct, moral, or thinking in an intelligent manner. Unfortunately, these pointed criticisms can lead to episodes like ‘Leave Me Alone’, which wander around different topics and sensibilities without ever really digging its teeth into anything beyond the surface – something the fight at the end struggles with, ending Marnie and Hannah’s disagreements with a whimper to set things up for the season finale.

At times it feels like Dunham enjoys beating on her on-screen persona, and ‘Leave Me Alone’ continues to establish this trend. It’s becoming hard to feel any compassion towards Hannah’s professional and personal struggles, because her character isn’t being drawn with any sort of ambiguity. In this episode, she goes on a jealous rant at a fellow writing classmate’s book release, she throws away an opportunity to share her writing in a useful manner, and then finishes things off with a long-building argument with Marnie that only furthers our knowledge of Hannah’s continued delusions.

The way she tries to manipulate the fight with Marnie is a great example of the problems with Hannah’s character. There’s no nuance in her selfish nature: when Marnie tries to point out some of the problems in their relationship, Hannah jumps into defense mode, turning every criticism into an unrelated insult about Marnie. And for a fight that’s been building the entire season, I need to see more than a ping-pong match of deprecating comments about each person’s view of reality. They both made very justified points, but was all quite obvious and didn’t achieve much besides acting as a subdued crescendo to their story line.

I also found the parts re-introducing Hannah as a writer to us to be quite unappealing. Being a creative non-fiction writer is not an inherently selfish activity, as the show would paint it out to be. Nor does it have to be some super-important social commentary, like Ray so un eloquently points out in one of the laziest dialogue exchanges on the show thus far. His comments attempt to undermine an very important genre of writing, that when done right, dissects the minutiae of everyday life and relatable life events, and turns them into a revelation about something larger than self.

As creative non-fiction writer myself (one who studied the art deeply throughout college), I found the whole situation off-putting, especially when it came to discussions about the reading of the material. It’s clear to me Hannah isn’t a very good writer: she’s too self-centered to be able to make intelligent critiques about the world around her, without coming off as whiny or privileged (something Marnie manages to address quite eloquently in their fight). It’s not a surprise to me that she isn’t published, nor am I impressed or intrigued by her one-noted reaction to someone else’s success.

All things considered, ‘Leave Me Alone’ felt like it existed to establish two things; memoirists are inherently selfish people, and set up a dramatic situation for the finale. Hannah’s tenuous (at best) grasp of reality grows more off-putting with every week, and when there’s nothing interesting going on around her with anyone else, the show simply falls into a lull of predictability and over-the-top jokes that don’t fit in with the rest of the episode (like Kathryn’s violent dreams). Tonight was Girls at its least entertaining, a half-hour of overt character statements playing on loop.

Grade: C

Other thoughts/observations:

– why does Kathryn care so much about Jessa? Jeff’s been dismissed with a mere sentence, and Jessa’s still drifting around the show, attached to nothing, reduced to curious eyebrow furrowing and fancy accent talk. But here’s a good question: who purports to be more self-aware, all while being the most clueless… is it Jessa or Hannah?

– Allison Williams is really good at making bitch face. A little TOO good, sometimes.

– the contents of the Hannah/Marnie fight bored me, but the camera direction was fantastic throughout as it carried from room to room. Great work.

– why is Shoshanna a character on this show? She gets one scene an episode, and serves no purpose except ridiculous bits of dialogue and silly situations. Pointless, and a waste of the actress’s clear comedic talents.

what did you think of ‘Leave Me Alone’? Feel free to leave your thoughts/comments below!