Girls recap: Hannah’s attempt at roleplaying turns sour
Last night’s Girls (Season 3, ep. 10) opened with 99 Red Luft Balloons (awesome) and Hannah Horvath pounding shots of liquor until she puked herself in the street. The real trouble began when she comes home after spending the night with a male coworker (who nursed her while she puked her guts out in his bathroom and gulped down water from his showerhead,) and Adam doesn’t seem to care. He doesn’t care that she had spent the night with a dude, and doesn’t care that she had been violently ill the night before. He is fresh out of cares except for huge cares about the jacket he now has to wear around the apartment to help prepare for his Broadway role.
Later, after Adam is uninterested in sex before rehearsal, Hannah decides to spice things up for him by putting on a blonde wig, about 30 different accents, and some sort of underwear thing no one understands. Adam gets into the role-playing with Hannah’s coaxing but it’s a bit awkward, especially when her refusal to break character gets Adam punched in the face in the street.
But they go back home and things seem to be okay. Adam gets serious with the role-playing, asking Hannah to shove an entire strawberry in her mouth, saying a line that seems to have greater metaphorical meaning for Adam beyond the strawberry, and beyond what’s in his pants. “You can’t just have part,” he tells Hannah. “You have to take the whole thing, or nothing.” It seems like an apt description of what Adam seems to be asking for from Hannah, for her to commit to him completely and stop living in her head. The whole thing eventually blows up when Hannah changes the role-playing narrative from older married lady to high school cheerleader in the middle of sex. He seems frustrated that Hannah is constructing this whole thing from a calculated level. She’s just trying to give him what he things he wants based on their early sexual experiences when he made up elaborate and disturbing scenarios in the heat of the moment, but he sees those times as a way to cope with his alcohol addiction. He says when she committed to him as his girlfriend he wanted things to be different. After they fell in love, he wanted things to be different. “You have an old idea of who I am . . .I just wanted to have sex with just you, as us. Just f**k and be sweet, or whatever,” he says before informing Hannah that he’s moving in with Ray so he can focus on rehearsing for his play and really commit to it. Hannah brings up that he didn’t really care about the play, but yet again they’ve had a miscommunication. All Adam’s bravado about not caring usually masks a deep passion. “Here’s the thing, I did. I always did. I do. It feels amazing to finally care about something. It feels amazing and scary and I will always regret it if I just don’t do it all the way.”
And then he just walks out. Can this really be the end for Hannah and Adam? As painful as this was to watch, Hannah has been extremely selfish and oblivious to others this season, so maybe this was inevitable. Her agent died and all she cared about was her book. She even did nothing to hide her completely self-serving preoccupation even at his funeral. When Adam and his sister confronted Hannah about her lack of empathy she responded by trying to show Adam her sensitive side by retelling a maudlin fable his sister made up to trick her into feeling something. Adam is an actor, but he’s suspect of Hannah living completely in her head and acting out her entire life. Maybe this breakup is what Hannah needs to truly confront herself.
