HBO’s “Girls” returned for its fifth and penultimate season on Sunday, and there is a telling moment between Jessa (Jemima Kirke) and Hannah (creator Lena Dunham) in one of the early, upcoming episodes:
Jessa: You’re going to wake up one day and realize you wasted your entire life on dumb websites.
Hannah: You’re too late. That already happened.
Jessa: Your brain is rotting. You used to have interesting ideas, and now all you do is browse the Internet. Maybe that’s why you stopped writing.
This is obviously not the case with Dunham, whose HBO show continues to be a unique, feminist, unapologetically bawdy comedy. I read this as a pointed remark about the psychological toll the Internet, and its rabbit-hole of hate, can take on a person who lets herself get sucked into it. I found myself wondering if it was a reference to what happened with Dunham offscreen last fall, when she went off Twitter after a barrage of terrible comments on a picture she Instagrammed:
“I didn’t want to cut off my relationship to [Twitter] completely, but it really truly wasn’t a safe space for me. I think even if you think you can separate yourself from the kind of verbal violence that’s being directed at you, that it creates some really kind of cancerous stuff inside you. Even if you think, ‘Oh, I can read like 10 mentions that say I should be stoned to death,’ and kind of laugh and move on. That’s verbal abuse. Those aren’t words you’d accept in an interpersonal relationship. And those aren’t words that should be directed to you, ever. For me, personally, it was safer to stop.”
The internet hasn’t been a safe space for “Girls” right from the beginning; Dunham’s body, which she always gleefully featured in various states of undress (and continues to do this season), has been called every offensive name in the book. Even supposedly feminist sites like Jezebel became hostile territory:
“I used to read Gawker and Jezebel in college and be like, ‘I can’t wait to get to New York where my people will be to welcome me,’” Dunham said. “And it’s like, it’s literally if I read it it’s like going back to a husband who beat me in the face — it just doesn’t make any sense.”
So perhaps there is a bit of a nightmare scenario in Hannah’s comment: What if Dunham had let the misogyny of the Internet get to her? What if the trolls won?
Well, they didn’t. The new season of “Girls” is great, kicking off with the self-aware rom-com trope of a wedding — Marnie’s (Allison Williams), no less. Things are, of course, going to get ugly.
