Why do the women of Women act that manner? That’s the query underlying 5 years of baffled cultural responses to Lena Dunham’s epic of questionable selections, cruelty, narcissism, and charm. Women has by no means given a simple reply to the query. Regardless of unflinching confessional dialogue and occasional backstory improvement and sharp cultural satire, Hannah Horvath and her pals nonetheless have an air of Athena, sprung into existence totally fashioned. Asking why these women spill drinks and impulsively marry and vomit off of bunkbeds is like asking why anybody exists in any respect.
This has made Women uncommon in a cultural panorama the place the tragic flashback is the go-to decoder of particular person motivation. To take two latest examples from HBO, The Younger Pope related Pope Pious’s childhood abandonment to his grownup torment, and Westworld’s so-called “key perception” was that to be human is to recollect struggling. In society extra broadly, ongoing dialogues about trauma, triggering, and privilege—dialogues that Dunham typically wades into as a public determine—insist that private historical past must be taken as significantly as current conduct does.
On Women, parental points often floor—Jessa’s flaky dad, Hannah’s closeted one, Marnie’s controlling mother—and mind chemistry got here to the fore in Hannah’s OCD plot line. However generally it has appeared just like the present desires to satirize the notion of explaining character by means of trauma. As soon as, Hannah recalled telling her mother that her babysitter touched her vagina at age 3—however added that she had most likely been mendacity at it. On the Iowa Author’s Workshop, her friends insisted her brief story about violent intercourse will need to have been nonfiction from an abusive previous; the joke was that it truly mirrored her adventuresome current: “the time that I took a pair Quaaludes and requested my boyfriend to punch me within the chest.”
This week’s sure-to-be-provocative episode “American Bitch”—posted to on-line platforms now and airing on HBO Sunday night time—sharpened the present’s standpoint on psychological trigger and impact. In it, Hannah visits with a well-known writer, Chuck Palmer (Matthew Rhys), after writing an essay about accusations that he’d serially preyed on college-aged feminine followers. Chuck makes his case for innocence, Hannah relates some particulars from her previous, and the 2 appear to come back to an understanding—after which Chuck takes his penis out and presses it towards Hannah. It’s a narrative of private monstrousness and trauma, however it’s additionally a narrative a couple of system: a gender dynamic that ensures a typical expertise of degradation for girls, whether or not of their pasts or within the current.
Chuck Palmer has a shocking quantity in widespread with Hannah. His fussiness hints at OCD. He proposes that writers want tales greater than anything, echoing Hannah’s experiences-at-all-cost outlook all through Women. The 2 bond over their love of Philip Roth, agreeing that “you possibly can’t let politics dictate what you learn or who you fuck” (Chuck’s phrases). And most tellingly, Chuck professes to wish to perceive the individual he’s speaking to however always interrupts together with his personal observations—maybe a sexist tic, but in addition a narcissistic one loads acquainted to Women viewers. In all of these items, Dunham could also be sketching some concepts concerning the intrinsic traits that make a author.
However most of their dialog is a conflict of biographies. Chuck emphasizes his loneliness, his daughter’s melancholy, his ex-wife’s hostility, and the disappointment of book-tour life. When Hannah suggests an inappropriate energy steadiness in him hooking up with women on the highway, Chuck shoots again that the true imbalance is that “she appears like a Victoria’s Secret mannequin and I didn’t lose my virginity until I used to be 25 and on Accutane.” He’s the sufferer on this studying. The ladies complaining on-line are exploiting his fame and desperation in addition to the ability of the web to amplify dangerous claims.
It seems that this model of occasions almost persuades Hannah, who apologizes for having written one thing that upset Chuck. However the apology is coloured by all of the buttering-up that has come earlier than. Chuck repeatedly tells her how good he thinks she is. He provides her a signed copy of Roth’s When She Was Good. And he claims that he invited her over to attempt to appropriate his true error together with his accusers: not “pushing” sufficient to get to know them as individuals. When he then asks questions on her life, Hannah giggles and blithely solutions.
However throughout an earlier, tenser level within the dialog, Hannah relates a much less glad little bit of her historical past. In fifth grade, her English instructor Mr. Lasky took a liking to her primarily based on her expertise as a author:
He preferred me, he was impressed with me, I did like particular artistic writing, I wrote like slightly novel or no matter. Generally, when he was speaking to the category he would stand behind me and he’d rub my neck. Generally he’d rub my head, rustle my hair. And I didn’t thoughts. It made me really feel particular. It made me really feel like somebody noticed me and so they knew that I used to be going to develop up and be actually, actually specific. It additionally made children hate me and put lasagna in my fucking backpack, however that’s a special story.
Anyway, final 12 months I’m at a warehouse social gathering in Bushwick, and this man comes as much as me and he’s like, “Horvath, we went to center faculty collectively, East Lansing!” And I’m like, “Oh my god, keep in mind how loopy Mr. Lasky’s class was? He was principally attempting to molest me.”
what this child mentioned? He appears at me in the midst of this fucking social gathering like he’s a decide, and he goes, “That’s a really critical accusation Hannah.” And he walked away. And there I’m and I’m simply 11 once more, and I’m simply getting my fucking neck rubbed. As a result of that stuff by no means goes away.
If that is Hannah Horvath’s long-awaited revelation about her previous, it’s a comparatively delicate one: no rape, no violence, just a few neck rubbing at school. However the insidiousness of it’s in the way it suits a sample of warped gender relations. Chuck is like Mr. Lanksy: an older, highly effective man praising a youthful girl’s mental abilities—but in addition tying that reward to flesh. Hannah’s worth as a author and her worth as a physique have been way back swirled collectively by a gatekeeper, and Chuck did one thing similar to the younger would-be authors he had intercourse with. In the event that they consented, what have been they consenting to? A validation of their thoughts, or the notion that what actually issues is their physique?
The trauma right here just isn’t merely what occurred, both. It’s in how sincere expressions of discomfort by ladies are met with hostility and invalidation by males on legalistic pretenses. Consent is massively vital, however the subject isn’t solely a authorized one on this case. It’s a ethical one, a social one, and an emotional one. Hannah doesn’t appear to need both Chuck or Mr. Lasky in jail. She simply desires to inform the reality a couple of troubling, degrading dynamic, and he or she is instructed—each by the man on the Bushwick social gathering and by Chuck—that she is flawed to take action.
The sick twist is that the trauma has now been amplified and reenacted on Hannah for talking out. Chuck flatters her, convinces her he’s no monster, after which unzips and thrusts towards her with out warning. For a second, Hannah appears confused; for one more second, she appears to think about going together with it—she grabs him. Then she freaks out and screams at him.
He provides her an evil grin. All of the respect he had beforehand paid her has been rendered a joke. His reward of her thoughts was foreplay to the reminder that what he actually preferred was her physique. And in Hannah’s second of her contemplating whether or not to offer in—for the frenzy, the fake validation, and the avoidance of battle that might include saying “sure”—she was in the identical inconceivable scenario as so many ladies earlier than her.
As a public determine, Lena Dunham has written so much about trauma, particularly about how a rape in early maturity has had a concrete impact on her life through the years. However she additionally, just lately, apologized for saying she “wished” she had had an abortion in order to assist destigmatize the apply—a really inartful expression of the concept that an individual and their worldview just isn’t merely a results of biography.
Women appears to be attempting to reconcile the necessity to honor the previous’s affect on the current whereas recognizing that no particular person’s historical past is an island. Did the Mr. Lasky expertise change Hannah endlessly? Perhaps. He may very well be the explanation why she desires “to put in writing tales that make individuals really feel much less alone than [she] did,” the precise sort of story that introduced her to Chuck’s house. However that earlier trauma, in itself, didn’t create the brand new one she skilled on this episode. Nor was it, theoretically, obligatory for Hannah to have gone by means of what she went by means of as a way to care about Chuck’s accusers.
Why is Chuck such a creep? Women doesn’t say that it’s due to any particular circumstance in his previous. It’s not simply because he’s what he calls a “sexy motherfucker.” It’s just because he can be this fashion. As a result of he’s profitable and male, he can put ladies in spots just like the one he put Hannah in. He can anticipate them to typically consent, queasily or not. He may even anticipate that different males will inform the ladies to not complain about it later.
What he can’t anticipate anymore, Women suggests, is for the ladies to really stay silent. Within the remaining moments of the episode, Hannah watches Chuck’s daughter play flute. She alternates her gaze between the lady and her father, maybe weighing the implications of what simply occurred and what she ought to do about it. If Hannah writes about his actions, she might damage him in a manner that harms his daughter. However she retains staring on the lady. She might be at some point put in a scenario just like the one Hannah was simply put in. She might have already got been.
As Hannah leaves, we see a handful of girls strolling the wrong way up the sidewalk, after which turning to enter his constructing. It reads as symbolism: a nod to the entire ladies previous and future who can relate to what Hannah simply went by means of, as completely different as their particular person backstories could also be.
