Via: Tuned In
Spoilers for last night’s Girls follow: A lot of people, including me, have drawn comparisons between Girls and Louie: TV-auteur projects with a distinctly personal sensibility, driven by the voice of one writer-director-producer-star. “One Man’s Trash,” though is the first Girls episode that really felt like an example of what it would be like if Lena Dunham actually made an episode of Louie. I don’t mean that as a comparison one way or another of the two shows’ quality (though I thought the episode was disconcerting, sad and lovely). Nor did the episode share Louie’s surrealism or dark, self-loathing humor. But like a half-hour of Louie, it played as much like a short story–a short film–as an episode of a TV series. It didn’t have the same anarchic disregard for continuity as Louie does; it reminded us, in small ways, that it was still part of the same larger timeline as the rest of Girls. But at the same time, it took Hannah outside her own story–separate from Hannah, Jessa and Shosh–and stood apart from the series while hitting the same raw themes (a little like last year’s “The Return,” also the fifth episode of that season). The realization that this will be a departure from Girls’ usual structure dawns gradually. The showdown between Josh (sorry, Josh-UA!) and Ray is a typical Girls conflict that spirals upward (“Take a big fucking bite out of that information!”), but it goes on unusually long for an opening setup scene. When Hannah walks into Joshua’s fabulous gut-renovated brownstone, it’s a little like she’s stepping onto another planet–real-estate science-fiction–and we won’t be leaving this alternate plane of existence until the episode’s final sexit. It really is another world Hannah is getting to visit: a clean world of neatness and order, of lazy topless ping-pong with a doctor who looks like Patrick Wilson. And a world, let’s be honest, of money. From Jessa’s short marriage to Hannah’s parents to Elijah’s sugar-daddy relationship, Girls has been frank about the fact that somebody has to pay for
Read full story at: Tuned In
Posted: February 11th, 2013
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