I don’t think I ever really appreciated “Girls” fully until I saw Sunday’s episode.
In fact, I may have to end the whole series on a high note and never watch it again after this scene:
Sorry for the shit quality; I couldn’t find it on Youtube, so I had to ‘gram it.
It’s loveable for the obvious reasons: a gay guy with amazing hair, zero filter, and a stereotypical dumb blonde living inside of him is waxing philosophical on something cameras were designed to do originally – take pictures of other things. Obvious, right? Right? That’s the thing. It’s really not in these strange modern times. I mean, I got sucked into it the moment I got a camera phone back in two-thousand-and-early and never looked back until recently. But when the world of discovering all your best angles, smiles, and signature Blue Steels starts to lose the fulfillment it once brought you – what’s there left to do?
Isn’t this an excellent metaphor for what the whole show centers on to begin with?
A self-centered protagonist?
Hannah, an egocentric writer, is a character after my own heart for two very obvious and painful reasons I literally just pointed out. Egocentric. And writer. It’s like Elijah indicates during a grocery aisle row in some other scene in some other season: “Did it ever dawn on you that it wasn’t about you?” Granted, he was talking about hooking up with someone, but I think that’s a thing a lot of people need to hear: It’s not about you. And what I love about this scene, is that for all his vexed hand waving at Hannah for being oblivious to the fact that other people live in worlds where she doesn’t even cross their minds, he realizes it himself in the symbolic anti-selfie epiphany of the above video.
And as she sits there stewing, Elijah’s words aren’t going in one ear and out the other.
In fact, she uses it to tell off the rest of the authors in her group who’ve been putting her down. Once among them, she “flips the camera around”, and tells each of them how they’re the frauds. That’s why, while her exit of a backward somersault flip over the sofa might’ve seemed kinda rando, it wasn’t . It was a theatrical hat tip to Elijah’s brief “flip the camera” monologue. And an answer to our earlier inquiry. What’s there left to do when you’ve found all your good selfie angles? Why, flip that camera around. And discover your enemies’ bad angles.
And then call ‘em out. In front of everyone.
It’s like I’ve said before:
Empathy is a superpower.