Hannah vs. Chuck is a groundbreaking ‘Girls’ milestone, even this late in the game

If it’s hard to notice real change at work, it is similarly hard to distinguish between the world circling the drain, and improved political consciousness. And these assessments are only more nuanced as you get older: You’re more obligated to honestly read generation gaps, acknowledge legitimate historical urgency, and to defer expertise in whatever direction is required.

So, it’s humbling to admit that the enthusiasm of young feminists of whatever identification — however late to a game in which the entry is always overdue — is shockingly en pointe about some pretty basic stuff you’d like to think we’d already exhausted. One of those outstanding items is sexual consent. And its resistance to our “working-through” seems to argue that knowing about it — how it works, what it says — doesn’t actually protect you.

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Girls’ “American Bitch” is unusually thoughtful about this matter. Written by Dunham, the episode walks the viewer through Hannah’s first meeting with an ostensibly Gen X writer, Chuck Palmer, whom Hanna has lambasted — in a “niche feminist” blog — for his allegedly non-consensual “sexual involvement” with college students. The remainder of the episode is a face-off between both characters over the legitimacy of Hannah’s accusation, its current cultural context and where personal experience is implicated. At the same time, recalling Mamet’s “Oleanna,” Hannah and Chuck’s encounter enacts the very practice of violence Hannah originally visited Palmer to address.

The episode is artfully paced, visiting every talking-point, checking every box for the conversation: Am I old, or just guilty? Am I precocious, or acting in intellectual poor faith? Am I relying on the urgency of a discourse, or truly invested in my position? Am I ruining desire by reading it politically and, if so, whose desire am I ruining? Is it ever mine?

And is all this moot if we like the same great books?

“American Bitch” balances the tension between earnestly asking these questions, and examining how these very questions make up and are made up by the structure by which Hannah feels oppressed. Chuck and Hannah’s meeting is cordial, their dialogue punctuated by Chuck’s sanctimonious disbelief at “being alive right now,” and Hannah’s guard against precisely this exasperation, with her disaffected perception of whatever generation gap makes up the dull conversation about, and on, the internet. And too, both characters lean in to their own vulnerability when it suits them: Hannah tells a story about her own sexual victimization, and Chuck reveals his marital situation where it concerns his depressed daughter.

Of course, key to the exchange is that Hannah walks into this meeting vulnerable, and literally introduces herself as a mostly unread writer whose works requires a finely tuned Google search, while capping it off with her own molestation and the impossibility of it being admitted into the real world. Chuck, on the other hand, is only inadvertently exposed by a phone call, and only ever exposes himself by mediating this vulnerability through his very own text, which he has Hannah read aloud… That is, of course, until he actually exposes himself.

It is at this point in the episode that the nudity of Hannah and Chuck’s exchange, the very script in which Hannah’s complaint is embedded, is revealed to Hannah as cruelly inescapable, at least as far as knowing better is concerned — that even in coming to discuss the matter of “not consenting,” Hannah is somehow consenting.

Sure, on one hand, it’s a long con, typically practiced between agents with glaring power discrepancies, in which Hannah is explicitly victimized by a liar who is also better at this than she is. After all, Chuck worked Hannah into a state of familiarity, identifying her weaknesses, her desire, and even her culpability — insofar as Hannah has certainly projected desire in place of her own desire to be known (as we do). And while Hannah’s past self-exposure is generally slanted to protect her from her own vulnerability, it can still be read straight — that is, outside of her world, and her language, Hannah is simply vulnerable. So Hannah’s shock that she’s been lied to, that a prick has been lurking the whole time, is legit.

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Part of this long con is an understandable and sympathetic confusion between intimacy and violation, those “grey areas” of which Hannah has grown tired of being expected to negotiate. There are certainly moments where Chuck and Hannah seemingly connect. They share a world, a mental illness, a thing for Michigan, the desire to be read. And Chuck moves considerately, above-board enough, always sort of asking “Is this okay? Can we go further?” And, Hannah, in a sense, is consciously agreeing.

Nonetheless, the power imbalance is apparent. Not only does Chuck half-remind Hannah, every step of the way, that her insight is only valuable to the extent that she can “know” Chuck — that is, Hannah and the audience are warned — but what is happening between Hannah and Chuck is not the negotiation of grey areas that Hannah needs it to be. It is not even a conversation.

So, when Chuck pulls out his junk, pulls the curtain, pulls on the loose thread, Hannah automatically grabs it in kind, thrown by this reflex, and jolted from whatever fantasy of parity and exception she indulged until this point. Looking to Chuck for an explanation, his sheepish grin reflects back to Hannah the dynamic’s inherent shamelessness, an intractable stupidity, that turned out to be much harder than Hannah ever expected.

While Dunham plays it comically, Hannah is sick with the inadequacy of her own defenses: Couldn’t she have called this? Hadn’t she? It’s why she was there, after all. But then too, wasn’t she summoned, herself called, inadvertently positioned? That Hannah’s defenses prove inadequate or alien simply deepens her powerlessness — giving another face to her violator, both an agent of cruelty and the effect of a diffusely indifferent script that doesn’t even know she is there.

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Horrified, Hannah looks to escape — but only in time for Miranda, Chuck’s daughter, to return home, excited to debut a flute solo for dad. And while Hannah fumbles for the door, Miranda asks Hannah if she, too, “wants to hear?” The question lands painfully for Hannah — who has been flailing to argue on behalf of women being heard. Unable to abandon Miranda, Hannah agrees to stay for the recital.

Mouth in place, Miranda begins to play the flute while Chuck smiles joyfully and rapt; vicious and idiotic. Hannah sinks into her chair, again absorbing, as does the viewer: Everyone knew the script, certainly Hannah did. And even in agreeing to negotiate it, Hannah was victimized, which begs the question: How much is really negotiable — what part of any of this conversation deserved Hannah’s ear? What should’ve been crushed from the outset?

Miranda’s flute solo fully aligns itself with Rihanna’s “Desperado,” which urges Hannah to “get up out of there,” promising the viewer that leaving means never returning — which as we’ve learned thus far is not guaranteed: As Hannah hurriedly and purposefully leaves Chuck’s apartment building, she is nearly swallowed up by a trickle and eventually a wave of ladies, in skirts and heels, filing into the building to take their turn.

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But maybe it is a promise. The episode’s parting shot and song choice gesture to ensuing repetition — but also a desire to move on, to really believe and act as if there is nothing left in this script that compels revisiting. Yes, repetition of old tyrannies and the perception of renewed consciousness overlap: Hannah’s self-aware, nearly self-loathing admission that she can’t help but love Philip Roth’s writing, encouraged and groomed by Chuck’s admonishment to separate art from artist, pleasure from context, is the ultimate signifier of a system so heavily tilted that white men’s genius is not just the ground we walk on but the polestar we follow. And until that hairy, hungry, horny little God comes down off his pedestal we won’t be able to stop putting him at the center of every story — even our own.

Girls’ seminal “American Bitch” — the next in a series of power-move bottle episodes in which Hannah contends with a series of singular white dudes, holding herself up for measurement against their reflections in one way or another — suggests that rather than fixating on these instance of overlap, this endless negotiation and its working-through, we must refuse its engagement entirely, its questions that imply their own answers, its framing of the situation with its own self-sustaining gluttony, its requests for us to smile and defend our positions, its belief that its demands are only ever simple requests.

To compare is not to equate, but: See also the new Allison “Marnie Michaels” Williams joint, Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” now in theaters, for another system built on the bodies of its victims, built out of questions whose only possible answers are split hairs dictated by the question, and which is impossible to approach from any position other than defensive: This is how it wins. Every time. There’s a reason the movie’s titled “Get Out” — and there’s a reason Miranda plays us into this song, magically carrying us out into the extradiagetic world.

You’ll never go wrong following Rihanna’s advice, we know this to be true. But when the game is so solidly and actively cheating on behalf of your opponent, the only sensible thing to do is the easiest, and hardest, in the world: Simply get the hell out — and never come back.

“Girls” airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET/PT on HBO. The series finale will air Apr. 16.

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