Deconstructing "One Man's Trash"
As Girls returns, perhaps, to its usual ensemble format this Sunday, the TV intelligentsia was atwitter — and rightfully so — over last week's episode "One Man's Trash." A departure from the usual enmeshed story-lines, the episode departed into a lost weekend for Hannah that smacked of a Louis C.K.-styled interlude that was at once ordinary and simultaneously, utterly unsettling. (Spoiler Alert: we're discussing some, but not all, plot points of the episode here.)
To be perfectly honest, there was nothing definitive in the initial viewing that pointed directly to the entire episode being Hannah's dream, except for its minor sense of discontinuity, and the departure from the show's usual format. It was essentially played straight, with no odd cuts or interjections to show the audience otherwise. One tip-off, maybe, being the minor opening trick of Hannah and Ray (Alex Karpovsky) kneeling by the chalk-lettered sign in front of Grumpy's Cafe warning, "don't ever sleep again." The other, vaporously, being another bizarre Hannah wardrobe choice — a pair of ill-fitting print short-shorts, maybe suggesting the dream where you find yourself in public in nothing but your underwear.
Girls' Hannah character (played by the show's creator, writer and director Lena Dunham) is a deviously smart, sometimes reckless young writer, and her encounter with a handsome doctor some 20 years her senior would be just the Raymond Carver-esque piece she might impulsively hammer out as a fun short story.
And so, the internet was a virtual monkey house acclaiming "One Man's Trash" as a dream sequence, or one of Hannah's short pieces, in the style of the Louie 2012 finale, "New Year's Eve," in which Louie impulsively flies to China for the holiday among other nonlinear, nonsensical plot moves. And thinking back on it, it's hard not to disagree. The episode was that odd in its subject and structure.
It was also that good. With Dunham's uncanny knack for pace, coupled with her liberal use of intimate nudity, it was squirmy-smart to watch, and remarkable for the literary tone it achieved in its allotted thirty minutes.
The episode is a virtual one-act play of a lost weekend lovers tryst that Hannah initiates with an awkward, forward kiss. She beds a handsome, young doctor (Patrick Wilson) within minutes of being invited in to his tastefully renovated Brooklyn brownstone. (She is there to confess to being the culprit repeatedly dumping the coffee shop's trash into his trash cans.)
The risque hook-up is credible for a young, twenty-something writer given to chewing off hunks of new experiences as a future backlog for material. (And as an argument for it being purely one of Hannah's creative projects: who hasn't had the impulse of, I'm just going to kiss this person right here, right now, and live with the results?)
As Hannah and Joshua begin to spend the entire weekend together, reading the newspaper, barbecuing — and of course, having more sex — the episode departs from the usual Girls pace and structure.
Quietude ensues, night turns into day, into another night, with the two embedded in an interior world. It has the off-kilter feel of a character and a series we thought we knew taking a left-hand turn into new territory, like a difficult, but worthy growth spurt.
And then you wonder if Hannah's friends are wondering where she is — and why no one is calling her to find out where she is.
This departure from the usual Girls world makes us think about the boundaries for scripted work, and how, as with Louis C.K.'s daring leaps, they often don't matter. The characters' "fiction" and "reality" are one and the same, scripted art that goes where it needs to, to work on its own terms. If it violates its own time and space (as Community does each week) does it suffer for that choice, or does it transcend?
At the least, the departure of "One Man's Trash" from the show's usual format is a refreshing detour. Some of a series' better moments result from these swerves, such as the recent episode of Enlightened that focused on secondary character Levi's (Luke Wilson) time spent at a Hawaiian addiction rehab far away from the show's central character, Amy (Laura Dern). None of the other regular Enlightened characters were seen in that episode. It was Levi's lost trip.
At the end of "One Man's Trash," the magic of Hannah and Josh's spell is finally broken, and the perfect world Hannah found herself in cannot hold. The camera captures Hannah's long walk away from the brownstone — a memorable, continuous long shot of her ambling down the sunlit morning street in the same clothes she wore when her adventure began two days before.
The streets are the same, but everything else has changed.
So much has been written about Dunham's youth, the incessant narcissism and self-referencing of her characters, her privileged access and meteoric rise in the industry. But few stories address the quality of Dunham's work. Woody Allen's characters could often and rightfully be cited as the more unctuous, self-absorbed examples, completely obsessed with their own disaffection and lack of fulfillment.
With "One Man's Trash" you get the feeling Dunham could be writing and directing a cooking show, and after unraveling the genre, and putting it back together, it would be just as rewarding as Girls to watch. As would anything else she wants to try.