Senior staff writer Dean Essner says it’s “gorgeous, irritating, flippant, ponderous, impossible to stand yet oh-so-invigorating.” Did you agree?
Lena Dunham’s Girls has felt rather manic and overstuffed this season; a lot has happened, but not everything has been particularly poignant. So when she thrusts such a strange episode as “One Man’s Trash” upon us, where we find Hannah’s loud, overbearing verbosity nestled in a 30-minute sequence of mostly silence, the effect is jarring.
There’s no Marnie or Shoshanna or Jessa. It’s only Hannah and her conscience.
The plot itself is pin-thin: A strange man named Joshua (Patrick Wilson, in full-on debonair mode) shows up at Grumpy’s coffee shop, accusing Ray of dumping the shop’s garbage in his can. But in reality, Hannah is the perpetrator. Apparently, she lost the dumpster key and was too afraid to ask the ill-tempered Ray for a replacement. Wanting to confess, and maybe a bit entranced by Joshua’s charm, she stalks him back to his apartment, where the two spontaneously begin an episode-long affair.
To describe how the random romance assembles would be near-impossible. As with many of the characters in Dunham’s narrative, Hannah is impulsive, damn-near nomadic even. She’s in her sexual prime, and she loves to talk about it, in her pseudo-intellectual, Mary Wilkie-esque way of verbalization. The intercourse scenes in “One Man’s Trash,” because of this, are uncomfortable and vapid, almost mechanical. There’s no passion, but who cares; she’s a conquistador, a walking-screwing-talking Don Quixote at the helm of an ever-churning brain that is both her savior and her weakness.
But she’s also lonely and loneliness breeds experimentation. This script, perhaps born out of boredom or writer’s block or budget constraints, is ultimately a microcosm of Hannah, and perhaps the entire series as well (despite the fact that it resembles no other episode so far): gorgeous, irritating, flippant, ponderous, impossible to stand yet oh-so-invigorating.
Hannah and Joshua spend most of “One Man’s Trash” either having sex or doing something, such as playing ping-pong in the nude, to suggest that they’ve just had sex. But by the episode’s end, after she has spilled her guts about her insecurities, right when you think she’s hit a self-confidence breakthrough, leading to Joshua’s decision to — we think — end their short-lived affair, we get to see the real Hannah. And the real Hannah, maybe to our dismay, is a bundle of contradictions.
In the beautifully-constructed closing moments, backed by a sparse piano score, Hannah fetches the morning paper and reads it with a slice of toast, all alone in Joshua’s massive apartment while he’s at work. It’s a blunt, feminist statement; Hannah has usurped him of nearly everything, and now she’s in control. But, without warning, we see her in the next frame slumped glumly over the table. She ends things with a trash bag in hand, still half-undressed, walking out into the Brooklyn sunshine the way we always knew she would: with uneasy, self-conflicted integrity.
