The Hypochondria of "Girls"

In the season 2 finale of HBO's Girls, we see Hannah wake from the nightmare of rupturing her eardrum to dealing with the morning-after wave of medical paranoia. In the cold, cyberspace hands of the omniscient search engine, she types in questions dealing with mundane health-related inquiries which the viewers can only construe as manifestations of Hannah Horvath's unanswerable anxieties.

"How does your body know not to stop breathing?"

In a way these arbitrary bouts of anatomical curiosity seem like pointless if not rhetorical questions. Obviously, it's a simple matter of looking into the autonomous nervous system and the other quotidian functions of the brain, but it doesn't take much effort to realize that Hannah isn't genuinely curious about how her body works. She is also not so much curious as she is nervous. She is nervous about her health because she is pushed to the crossroads of her liberal arts' dream. She is a twenty something forced to break free from her ennui and pass the obstacles of the corporate-infested world of literature. If anything, her unexpected and inquisitive bout of hypochondria can be generalized as the fear of being "unanchored."

Hannah Horvath has been floating in existential vagrancy of "struggling to find herself." For the past two seasons, we see her doing so and now her "self" (a socially constructed persona Hannah aspires to be) is presented in the form of an e-book deal. Of course, she can't take the bohemian Jessa's advice that the deal isn't her and that it doesn't change anything. She has to face it and grab life by the reins, but she can't. Instead she is riddled with the possibility of failure. Or worse, the possibility of succeeding ie becoming published as a name on an e-reader shelf only to be cast off as a useless scrap of obscurity lost in the merciless jungle of New York. Hannah is the ego unable to come to terms with a smaller-than-life existence.

No wonder the sudden OCD, the hypochondria, and the time-wasting queries on Web MD. In dealing with stress, she is caught right between the "flight or fight" response, dangerously being pushed to "flight."

"At what age does your body start melting down?"

At what age do the senses fail? The crux and appeal of Girls lies in watching a bunch of woman-children wear their grown up clothes and constantly trip on the long hemline and unable to grasp things with the long sleeves. They are photo ID wallet-sized portraits trapped in a spacious, over encumbering frame. What they do with the space they are given, with the fabric they are left with is up to them, and it keeps us on the edge.

Are you like Jessa? The typological rebel who tears the lace so decoratively placed on her skirt? Are you like Marnie who wears 5-inch heels to compensate for her lack of stature in wearing her business suit and business skirt? Are you like Shosh, who admires her grown up clothes, her over encumbering frame from a distance and thus living an unlived existence (only to have it come in bursts of an insatiable sexual curiosity and hunger for stability)? Or are you like Hannah, the quirky and crude anti-heroine, staunchly and failingly feminist, seeking recognition from a world who refuses to acknowledge her?

That is the lesson to be learned from the end of Season 2 (apparently). At twenty something, you don't have to have it figured out. You can be presented with once-in-a-lifetime opportunities only to realize that you still need a safety net, a dream of having a prince charming rescuing you, or even that when there is no where else to turn, you can say fuck it all and leave. Isn't that what Hannah hypocritically accuses Jessa of in the end?

The hypochondria presented to us is this: "I don't have anything figured out. There is something wrong with me. Therefore, I will live life manifesting the things wrong with me." It's a little bit like: I am broken ergo I exist.

I think one of the biggest flaws and failure of Girls is the lack of a synthesis. We see a problem; we see them tackle it; but they only fall back. Hannah insists she deserves a better boyfriend than Adam, but she inevitably falls back into his arms because she cannot stand on her own. She would much rather subject her existence to the safety of his, "re-purposing" him into her life as the backdrop for her self discovery. It's a practice so self-involved and so depressing, and I hate to think it will go on ad infinitum in television. You'd think after gems such as The Prisoner, a late 60s flick completely different in genre but similar in the general underlying motif of self assertion, Lena Dunham could construct a realistic, quirky comedy not showing the viewers the "answers" to life (which is the typical girl and guy get married and have babies in a suburban home) but instead giving her own answer to life.

I almost wanted Hannah to tell the editor, "Fuck your book deal. Fuck your fraudulent, parasitic corporate rape of art - my art." But she didn't. Instead, she cowers and drowns in an abyssal ocean of self-pity, waiting to be rescued by the heroesque mariner who can't resist a good damsel-in-distress-type tempest. We are then left wondering when the tale will end; when will the heroine realize that to grow up, you must eat your disgusting vegetables and sail into the open sea in Camusian-fashion - unseeing and constantly waylaid but keeping on nonetheless. That's for season 3 to answer...