Review: Girls ‘Video Games’ – Camry Drivers Are Cunts

For all those hoping the four Brooklynites would break out Mario Kart on tonight’s episode of Girls, color yourselves disappointed. ‘Video Games’ is an out-of-NYC adventure composed around a central idea: perception. Perception of ourselves, our parents, the world we live in, and how we as humans let all these perceptions affect our self-image. Posited as an episode about Jessa – but as always, really being about Hannah – ‘Video Games’ is a strong episode, but one that rests on the laurels of its least-developed character at times.

There are little moments throughout ‘Video Games’ where a person’s perception affects them internally: Hannah feeling gross and ashamed after she has ‘sex’ with Frank (“You came on my thigh crease”, she tells him the next day), Jessa’s mother and her view of life as a video game, and most importantly, Jessa’s relationship with her father. In the episode’s most important scene, Hannah asks why her father was such a failure, fucking up her life and maturation in the process: “I’m the child” she tells him repeatedly as they sit on the swing set.

In reality, they’re both children, unable to accept responsibility for who they are, and the things they’ve done. Jessa’s father blows off the daughter and girlfriend he left behind, and Jessa blames her failed marriage on a man who wouldn’t “work on it”. And yet, they both think to themselves that they are adults, when in reality, none of them are handling any situation with any kind of maturity, both running away in their respective directions at the episode’s conclusion.

Train tracks are a very common narrative device, but they’re used well in ‘Video Games’, both representing how Jessa and her father’s lives parallel each other’s (and are moving in different directions), and the crossroads that every mid-20’s character is going through. They all think they’re adults, playing the video game of life, but they aren’t. Hannah is still hooking up with random guys and flaming up her UTI, Jessa’s leaves Hannah in upstate New York to go do something Bohemian, and Petula thinks she’s playing a video game, but is just eating a shit ton of rabbits and grits, sitting around with a man who’ll leave her at the drop of the dime (as he says, “country life is booooorrring”, foreshadowing his exit).

As always, ‘Video Games’ provides us with an amusing, quietly introspective character study – and like some of the series best episodes, doesn’t take place in the concrete jungle of urban life. It’s a tall task, anchoring something that heavy emotionally to the floaty, aggressively off-color Jessa, but it mostly works, another chapter in the life of the young and delusional.

Grade: B+

Other thoughts/observations:

– Hannah’s phone call home was great, and again played with perception. Hannah is being genuine, but her mother just thinks its a ploy for money or something, and she gets angry.

– Hannah starts making out with Frank, and immediately asks “Are you eighteen?”

– more delusions of perception: Hannah goes into the gas station for “yogurt and almonds”, and walks out eating Doritos. She also calls herself an “undiagnosed hypoglycemic.”

– “I’m the cushion? You sure?”

– some of Hannah’s off-screen lines are hilarious: “I like the way you fold your turtleneck down.”

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