UNDER REVIEW: GIRLS RETURNS

“I think I might be the voice of my generation,” Hannah Horvath tells her parents in the pilot episode of Lena Dunham’s Girls. As a writer for The Isis, I can relate. I also think she may be right. 

Hannah is a mess. Throughout the comedy-drama which ran from 2012 to 2016, the protagonist (if we can even call her that) is consistently unfathomably selfish and self-centred. The show’s most comedically brilliant and iconic moments derive, more often than not, from her absurd dialogue (“Oh, so now I’m not supposed to show my vagina to anyone but you, Fran? It’s about to be summer!” ). With her unshaved legs, appalling social etiquette, and performative, selective feminism, she is one of the most brutally honest and vital depictions of girlhood I have seen on screen. 

Fans of the show find her exhausting—the Girls sub-reddit sees daily a new rant about how her unbearable character ruins the show for them. Though ‘frequent Reddit user’ is usually synonymous with ‘deranged, friendless internet fanatic’, these frustrations reflect a wider intolerance for imperfect female protagonists. She, like all of Dunham’s characters, refuses to comply with the expectation of women in media to be morally untouchable, two-dimensional characters. Audiences desire female characters that are easy to objectify and romanticize, denying them the same space for complexity afforded to their male counterparts. When denied the ability to place fictional women on a pedestal, viewers become hostile. 

A new generation, however, is beginning to re-examine Girls. Hannah particularly seems to resonate with the Gen Z audience. At Hannah’s core is the tension between self-loathing and self-worship that makes young adulthood so ridiculous, so messy, so wonderful. The remarkable lack of grace with which she handles awkward sex, academic mediocrity and an unstable sense of self are a comfort to all of us going through the same trials at the same time of life. Unlike millennial viewers before us, Gen Z viewers can empathise with Hannah’s neurotic belief that everyone must be obsessed with her: her attractiveness, her repulsiveness, her stunning personality and her irredeemable flaws. While for Hannah strangers’ preoccupation with her life may have been imagined, for us it is much closer to reality. 

The delight we find in Girls, I think, epitomises a distinctly Gen Z yearning for a time when occasional messiness could be forgotten. A time before the lowest point of each black-out, each slobbering kiss in a club, each kebab dropped on the floor, picked back up and eaten was documented in someone’s end of the month dump; before peer surveillance immortalised our most embarrassing moments. Girls scratches this itch because it refuses to be embarrassed on its characters’ behalf. Dunham doesn’t ask us to judge nor justify her characters’ self-sabotaging, emotionally stunted behaviours; she merely shows us that life goes on despite it all. It is a time capsule of the last generation to enjoy a truly free youth. A period close enough for us to feel a sense of longing, but just far enough that the grasp of our actual lived memory can’t quite reach.

Girls is, of course, an ensemble. The joy of the show is that it is near impossible to decide which of these young women, each full of privilege and devoid of self-awareness, is most insufferable. Aside from Hannah, there’s the selfish and shallow Marnie; Shoshanna, naive and overly energetic; and Jessa, the chaotic, narcissistic femme fatale. We crave for these characters to grow past the same flaws we are unable to confront in ourselves; Dunham denies us this, forcing us to watch them make the same mistakes over and over, a mirror to our own fallibility. 

Dunham herself is just as central to the mystique of Girls as any of her characters. Her decision to revive the series for a further five episodes, with production set to start in 2027, follows a year which saw her second memoir Famesick become the subject of viral internet discourse. In the book, Dunham unapologetically broadcasts the gory depths of her personal life, detailing her struggles with OCD, PTSD, endometriosis and addiction. With equal fervor, she dives into her often strained relationships with co-stars, family members, and, perhaps most notably, alludes to the rumored affair between her ex-partner, Jack Antonoff, and Lorde during the recording of Melodrama (2017). She, like her characters, occupies a grey area between self-awareness and self-obsession which we can’t seem to look away from. 

I wonder, though, whether Dunham can supply the representation Gen Z desperately seeks in her characters from the distance of her early forties, without the proximity to her early twenties that originally brought Girls to life. Where will she go now that she and her characters are now fully-fledged adults and no longer the show’s eponymous ‘girls’? The poor reception of the final season of Euphoria has shown how difficult it is to age-up beloved characters without losing touch with what originally made them so addicting to watch. On top of this, she now has more than one audience to contend with. Will she attempt to cater to her new Gen Z audience, or remain faithful to the millennials who watched (and lived) the show in its original run? I can only hope that she heeds the warning And Just Like That… (the widely mocked revival of Sex and the City) leaves, and decides who exactly this revival is for. 

Terrifying (or perhaps comforting) as it may be, you can only be young once. The march of time stops for no writer. Dunham will have to accept that Girls is beloved because it is a time capsule of a world which no longer exists, born of a twenty-something experience she can no longer access. As much as we may want Dunham to take us with her back to 2012, my fear is that we end up cucked as she embarks on an affair with her own youth. I expect everyone will leave dissatisfied and slightly regretful—I suppose that’s what Girls is all about.

 

Words by Aoife Williams.

Art by Naia Searight.