I went off watching Lena Dunham's 'Girls' a couple seasons back as I felt it had peaked and didn't appear to have any place left to go. Also, the internet drama over her real-world feminist politics had started to sour the experience for me, it all seemed off-topic and served only to muddy the waters, to obscure the genius of her best work.
For some reason, though, the other day I ended up watching the third episode of this final season and was once again hooked: as with her other best moments, stuff happens in that episode you won't see played out anywhere else, which surely is what all of us want. Well, me, anyway.
So I ended up watching the whole season 'til the end, which brings us up to today.
Let me add here that one of the reasons I thought I didn't want to watch the final season was I thought I knew how it was going to end: all Sex & The City fantasy, with the increasingly aged 'Girls' swearing allegiance to each other and partying ever more desperately, with one of them having a baby and the rest all gathering 'round to promise to help her raise it so she can go out partying like nothing's happened, and nothing really changes. You go, girl.
But instead of all that Barbie-doll wish fulfilment we get THIS, a harrowing, bleak future, isolated and alone, with only a baby that cries all the time and a friend you can't stand for company.
This is it for Hannah, this is where the road stops. Guys aren't going to hit on her again - not for a long time, not 'til her baby's all grown and at school at least, and by then it won't be boys but middle-aged men holding their breath and taking the risk of getting involved with a single mother. If she's lucky. We can see it all laid out before her.
It's always puzzled me that, because of Dunham's great sense of humour, so many of Girls' fans miss the inherent critique of modern female solipsism and entitlement that is really at the core of it all. But everything in this episode - and really the whole show - leads up to the scene where Hannah, after running away from her own mother (telling her that motherhood is the first time Hannah has faced something she can't quit, can't give up on, can't drop out from), runs into the spoiled brat in the street she tries to help, even giving the clothes off her back, thinking she must have been abused in some way, only to discover the selfish girl is making a scene for no greater reason than her mother tried to make her do her homework.
Hannah then realizes the girl in front of her is herself, that she - Hannah - has been that spoiled brat all these years, but that those days are over, and that they have to be, because now her job is only to think of someone other than herself.
And that's the meaning, as far as I can make out: that Hannah has to grow up, and this is the point where it happens.
This moment here is the end of her girlhood, and so, therefore, the end of 'Girls'.