It’s apt that this most sentimental and romantic episode of the young series begins with Hannah and Adam in bed, with the lovers’ jibes veering quickly into a joyful missionary-position pounce. One of the things that Lena Dunham shares with her executive producer Judd Apatow is the belief that the crucial spark of love isn’t friendship but sex. There are two points of view on the matter: that eros blossoms as a fair flower of the emotional affinities of friendship, and that the mystical-chemical spark of erotic attraction ignites the conflagration that ultimately becomes love. (There is actually a third possibility, the miracle of love at first sight, in which desire and understanding converge in a concentrated, microcosmic glance—dramatized so memorably by Wes Anderson in “Moonrise Kingdom” and by Jean-Luc Godard in “In Praise of Love.”) I’ve written here before about the crucial role of furious, unbridled attraction in Apatow’s films (and elsewhere). Dunham suggests as much in “Tiny Furniture” and makes it explicit in “Girls”: desire isn’t inherently progressive, rational, orderly, or constructive; it often entails ugly emotions, self-abasement, and even potential danger; and it’s the one vital source of enduring romance.
Whatever Hannah may put herself through in her sexually charged relationship with Adam, she doesn’t instrumentalize sex as do her friends Jessa (who used sex to “smote” an ex) and Marnie (who stayed too long in a relationship from which the sex had gone dead). In this episode, those two women bond over their despondencies (the reckless Jessa and the meticulous Marnie are both alone) and get themselves into an uneasy situation over a seduction that they don’t intend to lead to sex, and they’re lucky that their high-rolling seducer (Chris O’Dowd) is ultimately just a frustrated (albeit prosperous) nerd. It remains to be seen whether the women’s quick makeout was more than what Marnie said it was—a way of acting “free”—as well as a way of deflecting their host’s unwanted attentions and, unintentionally, further inflaming them. And it also remains to be seen whether the virgin Shoshanna (absent from this episode)—who, earlier on, failed to reconnect with her pseudo-soulmate from summer camp because of his sexual hangup—will live out her obvious physical connection with Ray that arose from her obliviously “nonsexual” massage in last week’s episode.
That ended with Hannah admitting to Adam that she indeed wants him to be her boyfriend, and now he is—and so, spends a night in her apartment for, seemingly, the first time. She goes running with him, reads the vintage paperback copy of Saul Bellow’s “Him With His Foot in His Mouth” that has been sitting on top of a stack of books next to his bed, sleeps with him in matching white union suits, and goes with him to a rehearsal of his first-person two-man play—in which he admits to having committed quasi-violent hate sex in high school—after which he explodes with a pedestrian road rage that’s all the uglier for his use of the word “cunt” in a rant that he bases on his ostensible crosswalk protectiveness of her. Hannah knows intellectually that to be with a man is to face his issues (thus her tender response to his onstage revelations), but, seeing him explode, she’s troubled and even scared (as seen in the droll takeoff on the “Psycho” shower scene). But Adam, an energetic and strangely self-aware young man (his brief practical breakfast-table response to the grieving Marnie betrays great introspective practicality), knows that he has scared Hannah and takes oddly, delightfully extreme action to make things good—action that nonetheless demands, in several ways, her uneasy trust and pushes her sense of vulnerability. It’s fitting that when, at its apogee, he gets her in her nightsuit against a broad wall on a desolate corner in the middle of the night, he displays his tender good will with the brusque demand that she spread her legs.
All episode long, I was unsure whether the director who coaxed so much emotion from cannily straightforward camera angles was Dunham or Jody Lee Lipes; the more blatantly demonstrative performances seemed closer to what Lipes had done in Episode Seven, but I still wasn’t sure—until the diagonal view near the end (which then becomes the final shot) that suddenly allows a moment of epiphanic grace to rise. I doubted whether Dunham would have accorded it to herself.
P.S. One of the most widely discussed lines in Apatow’s “Funny People”—a modern classic that grows in stature by the day (and how impatient I am to see his new film, “This Is 40,” coming in December)—is one delivered by Leslie Mann to Adam Sandler (her ex, who barges in on her life to reclaim her): “How could you cheat on me? I was so hot!” She doesn’t say, “I was so good to you,” or “so interesting,” or anything of the sort—because, if she hadn’t been “hot,” the question of why he cheated on her would have answered itself. The suggestion is that the comedy star who Sandler plays cheated to feed his ego, to prove his power, to seek some gratification by way of sex that wasn’t intrinsically sexual. Their spark was still there, it’s still obviously there—and the movie’s latent tragic element is the recognition that, because of his misdeeds, both of them are condemned to a life in which they have to overcome and even renounce that spark.
