The Panic in “The Panic in Central Park”
I started watching Lena Dunham’s Girls on HBO for the first time after moving into my apartment two years ago. I unpacked boxes and held my new, fuzzy kitten, her skin still smelling of humane society, and loosely paid attention to what I guess I deemed as a less glamorous Sex and the City. I didn’t really get it, but I kept it on, and familiarity made it sort of comforting. I was in need of comfort at the time. I wasn’t compelled by much of it.
There’s a moment in the second episode of season one, titled “Vagina Panic,” where Lena Dunham’s character, Hannah, has an intense, irrational spiral that she’s contracted HIV. I self-identified immediately here. But the more I watched the more it became obvious that it wasn’t a good thing to identify with Hannah, or any of the girls — they’re all characterized by their privilege, their audacity, their tone-deafness. They’re selfish. I grew uninterested, I didn’t want to go any deeper. I was slightly afraid that if I looked harder, some of this could look back at me. I didn’t watch past the middle of season two.
A year and a half later, on a bitter November evening, I’ll say very plainly that I was with a man I’d decided to not see ever again six months before. There was no discussion of the nature of our reunion – no acknowledgement of anything – but as soon as I’d dropped my overnight bag onto the floor he said: “Let’s watch Girls.”
“No,” I answered, reaching into my purse for a cigarette. “I hate that show.”
“Come on.” He ignored me, already queuing up the TV. “There’s something I want to show you.”
*
I’m sitting cross-legged on the white shag rug on the floor of my apartment, a year and a half after I first moved in, four months after November. I’m almost done with Girls now. I don’t know. I went quickly through Succession and then The Sopranos. I've seen Sex and the City a thousand times; it felt like the natural progression of my HBO journey. And I’m moving to New York City at the end of summer to study publishing and hopefully keep writing. I can hide from Girls no longer. I’m folding laundry and packing it away into a suitcase for a spring break trip to California for a few days. I know as soon as I realize I’m far enough in, this could be the episode. I know as soon as the opening shot. I keep packing, my eyes averting contact with the screen, as though if I don’t look then I am uninvolved in what’s going on, or like the episode can play for the rest of the empty living room if it wants but I don’t have to be a part of it. Here you are: “The Panic in Central Park.”
*
Back in November, the couch is huge and gray and I’m half-heartedly protesting but it’s on anyway. “I don’t even know what’s going on now,” I reason. “I haven’t seen this far into the show.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he returns, the side of his face glowing blue in the light, the opening shot reflected in his glasses. He is impassive. He is never sorry. He is very sorry.
*
I’ll tell you what happens, but maybe you already know. Girls is back. There’s a podcast dedicated to the revival of the show, HBO Girls Rewatch, with 59.1k Instagram followers. Luke Winkie penned an article for the Daily Beast: “Girls on HBO: Online Fandom Revival Was Bound to Happen.”. The New York Times also has asked, “Why Are So Many People Rewatching Girls?” Still, if you haven’t seen it and may want to — spoilers ahead.
Another protagonist, Marnie (Alison Williams) known for her uptightness, her victim mentality, and her saccharine singing voice, is a few episodes into her marriage with Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). In the early morning, she slips out of their shared studio apartment with headphones around her neck after Desi won’t stop “aggressively playing guitar” at her. “Open your heart to me!” he demands, as she’s already out the door and onto the subway alone, The Internet’s “Just Sayin/I Tried” over this beginning of Marnie’s one and only solo episode: “I don’t love you no more / I don’t love you no more / I don’t love you no more.”
She’s walking, headphones still on, when she passes her ex-boyfriend, Charlie (Christopher Abbott). “I remember him,” I say. Most of Marnie’s first season arc is about her trying and failing to get Charlie back after admitting that she’s no longer in love with him. I didn’t notice in November how drastically Charlie had changed, having not seen the show in over a year. It is far more glaring when the series is watched sequentially. His hair is cut, his style and manner of speaking different, his body stronger, harder, bloated. I look over at him. “He kind of looks like you.”
What is really going on is very obvious in hindsight. I’ve rewatched it twice now and it keeps making me ashamed to admit that I missed it the first time. Charlie is erratic, slipping away to the bathroom frequently, patting down his pockets, his demeanor entirely changed. He lives in a squalid apartment, having lost the fortune his entrepreneurial ventures brought him earlier in the series. Marnie is oblivious as well, as they spend the next forty-five minutes adventuring around New York and dreaming that in the morning, they might run away together after all. Until Marnie finds Charlie’s jeans on the ground the next morning, a needle hanging out from the pocket.
*
I’d like to stay on the couch for a moment, both very far away and perplexing and foreign and suddenly so near, so confrontational, so audacious and so spiteful. Was this his way of coming out about something – insulting me, testing me, confessing? If we’re using HBO as passive aggressive valentines, I recalled an image of Tony Soprano’s mistress, Gloria, spitting in his face.
I don’t remember much of what he said after. I know that he explained each moment to me, these obvious signs that I missed. Had I been more observant, I would’ve caught on – perhaps I wasn’t in the space for observation, my previous reluctance to watch the show at all impeding my observation, and his knees so close to mine. Or perhaps I really was like Marnie, so obsessed with my own narrative and nonsense that I could miss what was happening right in front of me to a person who I had once loved. And here I find myself, now, seven months later and on my second rewatch of Girls, still decoding parts of art and people I love again, and again, and again, and still missing and finding things each time.
I wonder, when I do think about him, what message he was trying to send by showing this to me. If it was intentional, it’s a cryptic and passive-aggressive way to behave. I have used art to hide, but he was hiding through someone else’s. Is that cowardly, or is it a stroke of creative genius? If you read it that way, you could also find us in this depiction, hiding from one another. Dishonesty was such an integral part of our relationship. This abstract, roundabout method of both confrontation and confession was odd but also perfect. And if it wasn’t intentional, then all of this is nothing – it’s me chasing my own tail, trying and trying to understand everything the first time so that I don’t feel like a fool, wading around in my own blind spots forever. Either way, I don’t know if I learn more. Either way, I have to rely on my own intuition to hear what someone else won’t say.
In the end, Marnie finds Desi at the stoop of their apartment and tells him it’s over. Her hair is wet and her face and feet bare, still wearing the gown from the night’s festivities. Suddenly, I did care about Marnie – and Charlie, and the gray couch, and choices and the passing of time. Marnie was being honest, which nobody here ever was, and the excision of truth from her was cathartic as a viewer. I recalled the specific crack in her voice: “I don’t know what I’m doing here, or anywhere else.”
There are many ways that people do or do not touch each other. Is this indirect display of a feeling really so different than when I placed my hand on his, meaning something but not saying it? Or when I would wake from a dream beside him at night that I would keep to myself? There are a few ways to think about this story, and I try them all on: there is the frustration in the obliqueness, a shame in what is overt, a smugness we share on our faces but for different reasons, the subtext and a tension between wanting to hide and wanting to be seen and the admittance to any kind of wanting. But now I just think of it more succinctly than any of that. Now, I think it’s kind of precious.
