It Still Stings: Jessa’s Tragic Fate on Girls

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Editor’s Note: TV moves on, but we haven’t. In our feature series It Still Stings, we relive emotional TV moments that we just can’t get over. You know the ones, where months, years, or even decades later, it still provokes a reaction? We’re here for you. We rant because we love. Or, once loved. And obviously, when discussing finales in particular, there will be spoilers:

For those of us who fondly (or not so fondly) remember the IPA-sipping, handlebar-mustache-twirling TV landscape of 2010’s hipsterdom, one show encapsulated the distinct flavor of Millennial malaise like no other. Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls was, well, divisive. Problematic. Blasphemic even, depending on who you asked. The show about a collection of unmoored Brooklynites flailing through their mid-twenties spurred enough think pieces and incendiary Reddit posts to fill—and then burn down—the Library of Alexandria. In hindsight, much of the impetus behind these reactions has proven so rooted in misogyny and blatant misinterpretation of the show’s M.O. that it hardly deserves real consideration. But one aspect that always rubbed its more reasonable detractors the wrong way was this: the show’s genre was unpinnable.

Was Girls a straightforward satire or a realist dramedy? Was Lena Dunham Hannah Horvath, or was Hannah Horvath just a character she played? And for the love of God, were we supposed to laugh at or with these characters? The show purposefully never made these distinctions crystal clear. Its wit and cringe comedy never faltered, but its color scheme was desaturated and naturalistic. Each humiliating ordeal could be a cause for ridicule or pity, depending on what mood the creators—and you—were in that day. In the vein of other “auteur-comedian”-driven series such as Louis, Master of None, and Fleabag, the laughs and tears went hand in hand. Girls was at its best when presenting its protagonists as spoiled, cruel, grating gentrifiers and manipulators—and dared us to sympathize with them nonetheless. It was, by definition, a tragicomedy.

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According to the Aristotelian logic behind a Greek tragedy, the subject must always be a nobleman of some sort, ensnared by his hubris and forced to reckon with the ramifications of his advanced rank in society. His misfortune brews questions of morality and should stem from his own mistakes. Comedies meanwhile poke at human and social imperfections but ultimately reinforce moral codes by leaving a sympathetic character better off than how they began. If the way to assess whether a story is a tragedy or comedy relies on how it ends, we can glean everything we need to know about Girls’ genre from its final stretch of episodes—and from the narrative arc of one central character.

No one gets a typical series-finale finale on Girls—not even us, the audience (Season 6, Episode 10’s “Latching” functions more as a standalone epilogue while the preceding “Goodbye Tour” gives us our last moments with the bulk of the cast). No character earns either a fairytale ending or some sort of divine retribution for her sins. Instead, they all end somewhere in the middle of the tragicomic spectrum. Hannah (Lena Dunham) becomes a single mother and moves upstate, but motherhood doesn’t nullify her self-centeredness. Marnie (Allison Williams) has escaped her maddening relationship with Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and won the title of Hannah’s best friend, but it’s clear she’s procrastinating shaping her own future. Even Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet), who in the grand tradition of Shakespearean comedy ends her journey in marriage, may soon realize that her new friends with “jobs” and “purses” and “nice personalities” may not be the company she was destined to keep.

But of all the denouements of the Feckless Four, it’s Jessa’s (Jemima Kirke) that most closely resembles a tragic outcome and, for that reason, stings the absolute hardest. Initially, Jessa’s character is presented as the beatnik of the group, someone whose wry confidence and fuck-it-all attitude could, naturally, only stem from deep-rooted insecurities. As the show peeled back the veneer she’d constructed for herself over its six seasons, focusing intermittently on her journey through drug addiction and familial neglect, it provided moments of clear introspection—Jessa’s Season 2 snot-rocket in the tub scene after leaving Thomas-John (Chris O’Dowd) or her Season 4 arrest for public urination, for instance—that seemed to signal real transformation and growth. There’d be something melancholic in Kirke’s eyes that would suggest, Finally, Jessa’s about to come out the other side.

Not quite. One of the pleasures (and biggest frustrations) of Girls is how, in true Seinfeldian sitcom fashion, the characters never seem to properly learn from their mistakes. Rather, their hamartia traps them in a cycle of maturity inertia. Jessa’s self-destructive tendencies consistently return, though her ultimate social suicide arrives in the form of her romance with Adam (Adam Driver). On the one hand, he allows her a glimpse into her own capacity for meaningful romance, and he supports her on her journey toward studying to become a therapist, a relatively altruistic career path that could afford Jessa the sense of purpose she so desperately needs. On the other, dating her best friend’s ex obliterates her friendship with Hannah and the rest of the girls, and her and Adam’s combustive personalities prove a recipe for disaster anyway.

After Adam leaves Jessa to help raise Hannah’s baby in Season 6, Episode 8’s “What Will We Do This Time About Adam?”, the fantasy comes crashing down and he returns to Jessa with his tail between his legs. She lets him back into the apartment, smiling while doing so. It’s not exactly a victory; one can infer that being Adam’s consolation prize won’t work out for someone as headstrong as Jessa in the long run, and neither will her usual coping mechanisms of drugs or dive-bar bathroom hookups. Their future together isn’t spelled out, but we know Jessa will not attain her happily-ever-after in Adam.

This is where we find Jessa in “Goodbye Tour.” After Shoshanna leads the charge for all four girls to “call it” on their toxic friendship, Jessa and Hannah wind up the two unwanted guests sequestered by the snack table, forced into a climactic confrontation. Making awkward small talk, Hannah asks how her therapist training is going. “Yeah, I quit,” Jessa says. “It turns out that I wasn’t as ready to help people as I thought. And I just needed to take a long, hard look in the mirror, as my mother would say.” This gut-punch of an admission, delivered with equal parts self-conscious embarrassment and dead-eyed despondence by Kirke, unravels in seconds the one glimmer of promise in Jessa’s future prospects. She goes on to apologize to Hannah “for everything,” and although Hannah says it’s okay and concedes “we were all just doing our best,” it’s evident their friendship, at least now, is irreparable. With her fate as unresolved and aimless as it began (now just with less confidantes and more emotional baggage), Jessa’s character arc wraps up in a tight bow of Aristotelian tragedy.

And yet, this is up to interpretation. It’s an ending of misfortune brought on by Jessa’s intrinsic knack for self-destruction and social masochism, but it’s also perfectly fitting. Jessa would not make a good therapist—perhaps her most selfless decision was to spare future patients from her warped definitions of recovery and self-betterment. This sobering amount of self-awareness gained is a step forward, a sign of growth as much as it is indicative of her inability to grow. The reason it stings hardest of all four girls’ endings is not that it is purely tragic. It’s because Girls leaves a flicker of hope for a happy ending in Jessa’s journey through life; if she can look inward enough to recognize her shortcomings, maybe she can look inward enough to break free from the misfortunes her shortcomings engender. But the odds are nevertheless slim.

For a series as speciously genre-agnostic as Girls, it’s appropriate that its main characters’ narrative arcs would culminate in such messy, unresolved shapes. Once the life of the party, Jessa ends her journey on the show dancing alone in the background of her cousin’s party. If Greek tragedy upholds its heroes’ downfalls as inevitable, Jessa’s denouement fits the bill—if she can be read as a tragic heroine at all. The genius of Girls was exactly how its characters are positioned: they are “noblewomen”—white, entitled New Yorkers profoundly unaware of the privilege these facets afford them—at the same time that they are commoners ripe for traditional comedy—flawed young women in a slice of society that will never deem their troubles worthy of sympathy. Now that the exasperating discourse around the show has quieted down and new audiences are discovering Girls on streaming, maybe others will come to both judge and relate to these characters, to laugh at and with them. The only real tragedy would be for viewers to miss out on Girls.

Michael Savio is a freelance writer and former editorial intern at Paste based in New York. He is currently pursuing a master’s degree in cultural reporting and criticism at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

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