The last, melancholy episode of Lena Dunham’s infamous HBO hit “Girls” aired in April 2017, closing a unique chapter in millennial history.
On Tuesday, showrunner Dunham broke the news (and broke the “Girls” section of the internet) that the show is coming back for a five-episode sequel, set in the current day. Before it relaunches in 2027, the series’ devoted and delirious fans will have many questions.
Will Hannah Horvath’s son, Grover, who should be about 10 years old now, spend his winters in the Hudson Valley (where Hannah’s college teaching gig took her in the final season)? Is the boy, like his mom, a master of back talk and lacerating asides? Has Hannah’s best friend, Marnie (Allison Williams), resumed her fledgling music career, or has she become a real estate agent (or maybe a tradwife)? Is Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) still married to that Byron guy, and has she honored her vow to rid herself of Hannah, Marnie and Jessa forevermore? As for Jessa (Jemima Kirke), has she found any joy in her life outside of those moments when she is actively trying to destroy it?
My biggest concern won’t be how these women will engage with each other, but how they’ll engage with the show’s male characters.
But when the “Girls” reboot actually airs, my biggest concern won’t be how these women will engage with each other, but how they’ll engage with the show’s male characters. The show ran from 2012-2017, the entirety of former President Barack Obama’s second term and the first seconds of MAGA’s interminable dominion. In that giddy period of hope and change, Dunham and her writing partner, Jenni Konner, could freely splay the messiness of female erotic desire across cable television screens. That messiness made “Girls” a wildly controversial show, as did its insistence on drawing attention to the blurriness of sexual consent.
How will that messiness and bluriness be rendered in 2027, an era of radically reconfigured sexual and gender politics?
Months after the final episode of “Girls” aired, the #MeToo movement burst onto the scene, drawing global attention to workplace harassment and sexual assault. In 2022, Roe v. Wade was overturned. In 2024, buoyed, in part, by the rise of the manosphere, President Donald Trump came back for his endless Act II. Presently, an alleged gang rape at Cornell University has reopened a national discussion about consent and systemic gender-based violence.
Many millennial, zillennial and Generation Z women are experiencing not only a shrinking pool of desirable or even eligible male partners, but a palpable erosion of their civil rights. Accompanying their feelings of heteropessimism is a heightened sense of fear. After all, a man can sexually abuse a woman, subsequently defame her, and still become our president.
All of which is to say, Ms. Dunham will be writing her characters into a very different cultural moment.
The original “Girls” charted the professional and personal escapades of four overeducated, underemployed, 20-something-year-old millennial women. As befits fictional heroines in the optimistic Obama years, they fully owned their sexual exploits. Hannah, Marnie, Jessa and Shosh rather joyfully flirted, experimented, dated and hooked up (sometimes with one another’s ex-boyfriends).
With a candor that continues to astonish,“Girls” serially portrayed women making problematic romantic and erotic decisions. In “One Man’s Trash,” Hannah spends a weekend with a total stranger. In other episodes, Jessa works through her emotional difficulties by sexing up randos in the bathroom of the local bar. Marnie meets an impossibly pretentious artist named Booth Jonathan (Jorma Taccone), who verbally demeans her and repeatedly calls her by the wrong name. None of this prevents her from accepting an invitation to his studio, where he proceeds to lock her in a box as part of an art project.
The heart wants what the heart wants and all that, but scenes such as these are going to strain credulity in 2027 (a Gen Z student of mine expressed disbelief that these women entered male lairs without sharing their location with 400 girlfriends). Then again, it’s not as if Dunham didn’t see the #MeToo movement coming. The sixth season’s “American Bitch” (you can read my analysis of it here) chronicles Hannah’s afternoon in the home of a recently canceled novelist. Writer Chuck Palmer has been accused of sleeping with fawning coeds on his campus visits. Hannah has used her blog to call him out. What makes the episode so unsettling is Hannah’s own arousal during the visit — at least prior to the moment Chuck exposes himself to her.
The straight men of “Girls” were mostly a mix of narcissists, artistic posers, finance bros, pervs, pill poppers, smack addicts and profoundly unserious fellows.
The straight men of “Girls” were mostly a mix of narcissists, artistic posers, finance bros, pervs, pill poppers, smack addicts and profoundly unserious fellows. Interestingly, the male heartthrob at the center of the series, Adam (Adam Driver), is not slated to return in 2027. Whether that is due to his fame, his reported tussles with Dunham on set or something else is not clear. Narratively, that’s too bad, because Adam is one of the few gents on “Girls” who I could imagine: 1) converting to Orthodoxy, and/or 2) joining the manosphere in a plot twist. Brooding, hot, moody and at points unusually emotionally vulnerable, Adam is also given to violent outbursts. One graphic scene led many to believe that he had likely raped his girlfriend, Natalia.
The women of “Girls” are nearing 40 now. They will inhabit a culture whose sexual norms are rapidly changing. Will they be pursued by younger men, a trend breathlessly chronicled by outlets like The New York Times? Or will they strike up romances with artificial intelligence chatbots?
Knowing Dunham, it will likely all go very wrong for her characters; in her narratives, our ideals and aspirations are always wont to be mangled (by ourselves). As Hannah once fretted about her newborn: “What if I raise him perfectly and he does everything right and then he rapes like a jazillion people?”
The post Why a ‘Girls’ reboot feels so risky in Trump’s America appeared first on MS NOW.
Author: Source Author
From MS Now.
Leave a Reply