Sunday night’s “Girls” finally took us to Iowa with Hannah, the now grad student (yes, it’s really happening). Besides unsuccessfully riding her bike through campus, the episode marked one of the biggest parallels between Hannah and Lena Dunham that the show has seen yet. There’s a lot to discuss and unpack, so HuffPost Entertainment editors Lauren Duca and Erin Whitney are here to hash it out:
Spoiler alert if you haven’t seen “Girls” Season 4, Episode 2 “Triggering.”
Lauren Duca: Okay, we need to discuss the Lena Dunham meta commentary that went down in Sunday night’s episode. This is a *TRIGGER WARNING* for anyone currently experiencing Lena Dunham at critical mass. For me, the whole writers’ workshop was a deliberate dissection of criticism and the role it plays in the way Dunham perceived as a public figure. Dunham has explicitly tried separate herself from Hannah before (despite being ambivalent about conflation when the show first started). Although, now — perhaps more than ever — there is a clear intersection between the semi-autobiographical character of Hannah Horvath and Lena Dunham, the happy to share author of Not That Kind of Girl and a rapidly-rising celebrity figure (who is constantly responding to controversy surrounding her work).
What do you think that writers’ workshop scene in “Trigger” had to say about how Dunham sees herself through the vessel of Hannah, and how she publicly and privately deals with the onslaught of backlash (which we’re somehow still seeing in response to her book)?
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And that idea brings us back to criticism (here we are again!). When I think about it through that idea of unfairness, we can get at a nugget of the message Dunham is trying to float in this scene (and later in the season, though let’s not spoil it here). If there is a thesis statement for “Triggering” it may be that through Hannah, Dunham feels an obligation to listen to criticism, because she feels it can be important to her art. But she ultimately struggles to listen to it when it seems to be coming from the effect of her being “pigeon-holed” by her reputation.
EW: I agree that Dunham exhibits her need or obligation to listen to criticism through Hannah, but I don’t think Hannah (because of her reaction) agrees with it — and here is where the character and the “real” Dunham differ the most in this episode for me. Again, Hannah continues to be the much more immature, naive college version of Dunham. But this is only the start and our first episode in Iowa. The coming episodes will definitely lend more light into the direction Hannah is moving, and perhaps what that says about Dunham as well.
LD: Well, apparently, there’s nowhere to grow but up.
“Girls” airs Sunday at 9:00 p.m. ET on HBO.
