These questions regard last night’s episodes of HBO’s GIRLS. Please answer the prompts with specific examples from LAST NIGHT’S EPISODE, though supplementary material will be accepted as a secondary source. Please write legibly. No. 2 pencils only. You have an hour to finish this test. See below for questions and sample responses.
As someone who has seen Now & Then approximately a billion times (including this weekend), I’m more likely to conclude that Gaby Hoffmann is less a vampire than she is a ghost: She’s the specter at the feast, who haunts the household with her real crazy. (As bad as Hannah’s OCD is, her self-harm only went as far as her bangs and an errant Q-Tip.)
Adam’s also not an emotional vampire; he’s more of a Frankenstein. If anyone would be the succubus of the girls in this episode, it’d have to be Marnie: Draining the life expertly out of a party with a well-placed “Take Me or Leave Me.”
First of all, who has the decency to implode alone? Those that do might be a self-selecting group of successful suicides. Perhaps this is the point of friends, to which Hannah refers to obliquely in the first episode, that they are there for you to bring down during your time of need? That they won’t hold it against you when you manage to humiliate them during their own birthday party, because wow, you still did a really good job putting that party together? (Seriously, when was the last time Marnie put that much effort into anything, except crying?) Or that strangers like Hannah’s editors will be far less forgiving when you decide to go on a rant about the music, leading to the first (but not last) bloodied body of the evening?
At least when Caroline implodes, she just makes you a witness, not a victim.
Oh, it’s definitely a turtle. Whether or not you think that’s a creepy gift probably depends on whether or not you think it had enough air-holes.
Ray, disturbingly, seems to have the healthiest attitude towards his ex that we’ve seen in the show. He hasn’t mentioned her name since the break-up (that we can see), and his first interaction with her, he makes an effort towards conversation before realizing that he, in fact, doesn’t want to be her friend. (Why should he?) Then he gets drunk, belligerent, and punched in the face…like an adult. Sure, the lengths to which he goes to put up an emotional wall against his ex may seem extreme, but they are doubtlessly more healthy than the tactics Marnie employs.
Marnie’s constant back-sliding into stalking Charlie on social media (see the last season two seasons,) does kind of make sense, considering Charlie’s passive-aggressive tendencies towards app-making w/r/t his ex. But it’s also indicative of our culture’s unhealthy attitudes regarding Internet tabs-keeping on people for whom Ray’s scorched earth policy would undoubtably be a more appropriate response.
Wait, this episode was told from the perspective of Ray? How so? A couple of scenes focused on him, but this was way more about the Hannah-bonding-with-a-crazy-person scenes than anything else. (“Do you want to come to my birthday?” is generally not a sane response to someone unloading all their unpleasantness onto you, but goes a long way towards explaining how Hannah became friends with Marnie and Jessa in the first place.)
So yes, Jessa might see in Caroline something of a kindred spirit–they’re both cut from the same ‘toxic hippie’ cloth–but that would probably repel them off of each other more than bond them. (There is nothing drama queens hate more than a reflection of themselves.) Seen from Jessa’s perspective, this episode would have looked like Hannah’s failure to live up to her promise from rehab to care about Jessa forevs: She’s already moved on to a new “project” friend, while Jessa’s addictions and issues are being treated like they’re so last week. Which is exactly what they are.
