Finally, after a bratty fit in which she once again acted out her misery and victimhood on Marnie and her own mother, she found her legs and began to walk.
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The first show of the Brooklyn-gentrification era, a pre-Trump celebration/critique of female brazeness, an endless think-piece generator, Lena Dunham’s launching pad from indie filmmaker to celebrity, one of the most enduring signifiers of that nebulous concept known as “the millennial” – love it or hate it, Girls has been an undeniably potent piece of popular culture during its five-year, six-season run. The girl runs off with Hannah’s jeans, so she’s stuck walking home with neither trousers nor shoes on. And then it just kind of.ended, leaving plenty of room to wonder what ultimately will happen to the four girls – Hannah, Marnie, Jessa (Jemima Kirke), and Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) – and their male compatriots Adam (Adam Driver), Ray (Alex Karpovsky), and Elijah (Andrew Rannells).
Later, Marnie privately tries to have FaceTime sex with a guy named Delvin. Dunham has always an acute eye for capturing character types – from Adam, a character so gruff and consistently shirtless you could practically smell him in the early seasons, to Shoshana, the fast talking, crazily dressed girl approaching NY like an excitable tourist.
So when Hannah returns home and goes to breastfeed Grover, she knows that she’s capable as a mom.
Hannah then leaves the house and runs into a teenager in her underwear, whom Hannah assumes is in trouble, but is simply refusing to do her homework. In this scene, Hannah has her “aha” moment – this isn’t about her anymore, it’s about Grover. It’s not a Thing, it’s just another show I’m just not interested in watching, like Game of Thrones or This Is Us. She has been transplanted from Brooklyn to leafy upstate NY, having rejected a marriage proposal from Adam, her complex on-off boyfriend.
Marnie becomes the sort of practical co-parent (though her vaping in the pediatrician’s office was way off and gave us a glimmer of Marnie potentially cracking). Like I look at my mother, who is in her 60s now. Having followed its key characters as they drunkenly stumbled (sometimes literally, usually not) through their 20s, any ending seemed destined to represent merely a moment in time, what with so many years and so much self-absorption ahead of them. And when the two women are together, Hannah and Marnie’s scenes are tense with unspoken bitterness, each unsure if they want the other to stay or shut up and leave forever.
The series finale sees Hannah coming to terms with motherhood while Marnie finally realizes she needs to forge her own path, and didn’t even include Jessa and Shoshanna-so there’s definitely a few threads left to tie up.
In spite of being a mom, Hannah managed to make everything all about her.
When Marnie calls in Hannah’s mom for back up, Loreen (Becky Ann Baker) arrives with the thin-ice temper of someone who won’t be fooled.
Konner: Me, too. I also don’t think she’s the first narcissistic mom in town. And just when she started to turn her life around, she went and fell in love with her friend’s ex – not just any ex, either, the most important relationship her supposed BFF had in her adult life. She’s constantly doting on Grover and giving Hannah optimism, even and especially when she doesn’t want it. When Hannah relays the doctor’s assessment that her baby is the ideal weight, Marnie coos to him, “That’s like the greatest compliment a person can get!” At her new home, Hannah is accompanied only by Marnie, who has a cloying desire to help parent, and her mother, Loreen. “We realized, ‘These two weirdos had to spend time together and bang bits, ‘” Dunham said in an interview in February. She pushes away her newborn son, her best friend and her mother. But it did give reason to hope that she, and Grover, will be OK.
In a way, it’s typical Hannah – every time she has a breakthrough, she regresses.
And what part of Hannah, this late in the series, still reflects her? The final shot of the series (shout out to Konner’s marvelous direction) pulls up close on Hannah’s face as Grover latches. She can handle this new chapter of her life. That doesn’t feel super self-actualized, so it would be amusing because the audience would be like, “Hanna and Adam are my one true pair, that’s my platonic ideal of love”, and I would be like, “I want to get together with you and talk this trough with you”. As the credits role, we hear her singing Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” – the song that Marnie was singing earlier in the vehicle – to the baby.
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Despite Hannah and her mom’s rocky beginning in the pilot episode, Hannah’s mom offers encouraging advice.
