While binging on Netflix and OnDemand over the holidays, Season Three of Louie and Season One of Girls deserve back-to-back viewing.
Itās not only the best way to get a picture of what counted as avant-garde television (Iām cringing as I write that phrase) in 2012, but also helps us see how these very different shows deal with similar themes of loneliness, generational anxiety, failed aspirations, and familial love ā often simply from opposite approaches. By watching each series in the context of the otherās perspective, we learn more about both.
To argue this, itās best to look at two of their respective seasonās highlights: two episodes that seem to mirror each other in both formal and thematic ways, while getting at the core issues that both shows address.
In āThe Return,ā Dunhamās character Hannah goes home to Michigan, where she confronts the aging of her parents, has sex with a pretty-boy high school acquaintance-cum-pharmacist, and deals with the perceived emptiness of her hometown friends, all while brooding about residual feelings for her once and future boyfriend Adam. By comparison, the āNew Yearās Eveā finale of Louie seems like a deranged nightmare. It departs from the ordinary traumas that befall our hero, taking us from a frantic Christmas morning to the most disturbing sequence of the series, ultimately leaving us in China.
On their own, āThe Returnā and āNew Yearās Eveā give us more than enough to contend with: parental love, sex, parental sex, dream sequences, gross-out doll surgery, Orientalist desire, Pinwheel Cookies, fears of aging, and one gruesome death. But the hundred things that these episodes address separately seem to cohere when brought together. Watch them in a row, and they offer starkly complementary insights about the reciprocal relationships of youth/aging, sex/death, and love/labor at the heart of both series.
From a formal perspective, the episodes mirror each other pretty straightforwardly. āThe Returnā begins with Hannahās trip home. She leaves her apartment with a garbage bag of laundry (how quirky!!), and we cut to a close-up of her parents waiting at the airport. The stifling drive home, during which Hannah gets drilled about her job will sound familiar to anyone heading home for annual dinner-table interrogations (I canāt wait: āYou broke up?!? She was so nice!ā). These exchanges mark a return, not just to East Lansing, but also to an exasperating of dealing with family.
āYou know, if youāre going to do this all weekend,ā Hannah says from the childish perch of the back seat, āJust. Donāt.ā
Itās infantilizing. Hannah canāt stand it, though neither can she come up with an articulate way to voice her objections. She feels totally stifled.
She ends up crumpled on her childhood bed, and we watch her lying there through her mirror (hold onto that reflective image for now), calling Adam, but ending the call before he picks up.
By contrast, āNew Yearās Eveā ends with Louieās journey to see the Yangtze ā an escape rather than a homecoming. We see him eyeing the departure board at JFK and in the very next shot he stands on utterly unfamiliar soil in China. Yet his trip also suggests an attempt at return or recovery. The closing scene of the episode depicts a reconnection with other people. Louie canāt speak to his new Chinese friends, but that doesnāt keep them from communicating with each other over a meal. In a season of mostly grim revelations about the inability to communicate despair, this final moment stands as one of the few instances of simple happiness.
The two episodes move in opposite directions, but both Hannah and Louie are essentially looking for the same thing in different places. They want to feel self-confident, loved (especially by their family), and connected to others, but they both struggle mightily to figure out how to get control of their lives.
Remember that mirror in Hannahās bedroom. When we first enter her room, we get brief glimpses of objects from Hannahās youth: a stuffed animal, a bubbly-shaped iMac, a wicker dresser, and ā donāt blink or youāll miss it ā a poster of Parker Posey in the 1995 comedy Party Girl.
The poster hangs above Hannahās bed, and we watch her staring at it through the mirror.
A movie poster in any childās bedroom is aspirational, pointing to some object of desire. We canāt help but picture Hannah lying in bed as a teenager, imagining herself as Poseyās confident and glamorous protagonist. The shot refers to a previous version of Hannah, one that desired a very different future for herself than the situation she presently inhabits: sheās unemployed, trying to navigate a frustrating relationship with an immature twerp, broke, and dependent on her parents. The poster serves as both a nostalgic remnant of her past and a depressing reminder of how unmoored she feels.
That we view this scene through Hannahās mirror ā a mirror sheāll later stare into, asserting, āYou are from New York. Therefore you are just naturally interesting,ā mimicking Poseyās protagonist ā drives home the mixed-up sensation.
Itās kind of a delicious coincidence for my argument here that Posey appears throughout Louie this season, effectively mirroring this scene.
In the role of Liz, sheās obviously playing a very different kind of character than she did in her 1995 breakout indie-girl role. Liz initially seems like someone Louie could build a future with ā someone who could help him move confidently forward. But the relationship fizzles, and the show does a good job of making us forget about her. When Liz reappears on a city bus, late in āNew Yearās Eve,ā the sense is of relief (āFinally,ā I actually thought, āLouie gets a break!ā). The music swells and we get ready for a sweet little reunion kiss.
And then.
Well.
She dies.
The immediate and visceral sensation produced by the blood that runs out of Lizās nostrils as she collapses into Louieās arms (some critics say they laughed here ā I was pretty shocked) reveals just how invested we get in the ecstatic relief from misery that this relationship represents. That it ends right in front of our face is pretty awful, and translates the dull malaise that Hannah feels into a straight up gut-punch.
In Girls we watch through a mirror as Hannah confronts the apparent failure of her own life to meet her expectations for the future. She lies in bed failing to connect with Adam, frustrated and alone. In Louie, we stare at Lizās as she dies, facing head on the termination of Louieās hope for connection. Both shots capture fear of loneliness and failure, but they do so from differing viewpoints of youth and middle age.
āIām not ready for this,ā Liz says right before she goes into cardiac arrest. And, yeah, the sense in both episodes is that none of us are ā weāre never ready for the next thing, the next job, the next relationship, the next city, the next year, the next whatever. Too often the next thing feels too soon, and weāre too frightened or lonely to face it.
Confronting that ānext thingā alone stands as the central theme of both episodes, again dealt with from mirrored perspectives. For Hannah and her friends, the next thing has to do mostly with uncertain employment, living situations, and relationships. In Louie, itās almost always about death and failure as a man/father/comedian.
In both episodes these themes emerge in representations of family relationships.
Hannah returns home from a wholesome Midwestern romp with the pharmacist and finds her father on the floor, the victim of a āsex injuryā suffered in media res. Together with her mother, Hannah lifts her father off the bathroom floor. As with Lizās death, the immediate bodiliness ā the feeble fleshiness ā of the character strikes us right away (though Iāll admit itās not nearly as disturbing ā maybe itās the fact that Judd Apatow had a hand in writing this episode that we donāt get as much of a scary kernel here).
When they get Hannahās father to bed, he says heās fine, ājust realizing that Iām getting older.ā He looks tiny and mummified in his comforter. Hannah replies āNo, no,ā and blows him a kiss, comfortingly denying the simple truth that her father is getting older. Sheās not willing to admit openly that her father will die. Nor does it seem that her family situation necessitates this kind of confrontation. After all, Hannahās dad is happily married with a kid who comes home to visit.
In Louie, this fear percolates in the unconscious wanderings of our ginger protagonist. During the dream sequence in āNew Yearās Eve,ā Louieās daughters meet at a cafĆ© a few decades in the future.
āWow, weāre like, probably in our twenties,ā Lilly whispers. The two sound and look like uncannily distorted characters straight out of Dunhamās Girls. Perhaps more accurately, theyāre what twenty-somethings look like to a middle-aged father with young daughters ā fragile, uncertain, and full of pathos for their dad. Shot in soft focus, and speaking in sorority-inflected tones, Lilly and Jane talk about their jobs and about Louie.
āUm. I have like a career-y thing,ā says Lilly.
Jane replies āIām probably an artist, and hopefully itās going well.ā
Hereās Louie articulating some of the same vague aspirations for his daughters that Hannah probably wanted for herself when she stared at Parker Posey as a kid. When the topic turns to their father, the girls start to worry aloud about his loneliness, and a shot of a decaying Louie sitting in an armchair with a plate of cookies in his lap fades in.
āHeās so alone. All he does is sit in that big old chair and eat Pinwheel Cookies.ā
This is super dark stuff, but itās also one of the funniest images in the episode, as Louieās self-pitying unconscious runs wild. He looks like a fatter, lonelier version of Hannahās dad, each man confronting the pathetic decay of the body in his own way. And what we get from Lilly and Jane sounds exactly like the kind of fear that Hannah canāt express: the fear of being without her parents, or parents having to confront death without others around them.
Both episodes dwell on fears that parents harbor about their own lack of fitness to raise kids. Louie jolts awake, not because of the sight of his own decaying body, but only after Janeās suggestion that āWeāre probably kind of fucked up from having that kind of dad.ā
Hannahās father similarly worries āSheās such an anxious person. Sheās like me. Sheāll just jitter her way through her twenties.ā
Neither Louieās daughters nor Hannah see the kind of labor that goes into parental love. They canāt understand where their parentsā fears come from. The behind-the-scenes work gets done away from the eyes of children. In Girls, itās a frustrating, but loving conversation. In Louie, it manifests itself not only in the dream, but also in the episodeās absurdly comic opening sequence.
āNew Yearās Eveā opens with flashbacks to a hilarious series of images as Louie tries to fix a doll for Lilly ā perhaps none funnier than him drilling into the back of the dollās head in an attempt to extract its eyes. This is a literalization of the labor that Hannahās parents perform over their anniversary meal. But Jane and Lilly have no idea. They have a seamless Christmas morning that ends with Louie reading The Story of Ping, which in turn becomes a factor in his flight to China.
In both episodes, we see anxiety over what will happen to oneās children; the labor it takes to raise kids and ensure that theyāll grow into more successful, less alone people, better than us at living life un-self-consciously in the company of people they love.
Girls and Louie tackle this desire from different starting points, and itās up to us to make sense of where they meet.
So, watch the rest of these two seasons. And for Godās sake hug your parents if theyāre around. Thank them for their fancy cable package. They love you.
A-J Aronstein teaches at the University of Chicago. He lives in Chicagoās Noble Square neighborhood. Tell him heās not a real writer on Twitter.