WHEN I WAS A KID, every girl I know played Truth or Dare. It’s a girl sleepover rite of passage, after all, which is part of the reason that, in the second episode of Girls Season Three (released in tandem with the first), Adam has no idea how to respond when a Shoshanna, operating in full vapid teenage mode, asks him if he wants to play.
When posed the question “Truth or Dare?,” however, I almost always chose the same thing: Truth. Always truth. The idea of knocking on someone’s parents door or eating 50 Oreos was always terrifying to my shy, goody-two-shoes self; plus, no 10-year-old is devious enough to come up with a “truth” question that’s that embarrassing. But I wasn’t the only “truth” girl: there were always others, just like there were always “dare” girls. Some people like to talk (and confess); others like to do (and transgress).
If you’re a Truth person, it’s not that you don’t have Dare moments — they just make you uncomfortable, and then you need to process them endlessly. Same for Dare people: moments of Truth make them itchy and, usually, make them want to go do Dare things. It’s an imperfect way to think about personalities and what animates them, but it just might work.
Or, at the very least, it might explain some of what’s happening in Girls, which, at the beginning of its third season, has reached the point where characters seem to be reifying themselves — taking a concept and making it flesh — even more intensely than before. While talking to Shoshanna about the post-grad world, Hannah claims that college is the best because “your only job is to be yourself.” But she’s forgetting about narrative television, where a character’s only task is, really, performing character — being “themselves.”
And as seasons progress, barring dramatic soap opera-like shifts, each character settles more into his/her identity: Don Draper becomes more Don-ish; Rachel Green becomes more Rachel-ish. As viewers, we generally find it annoying, but that’s probably because it’s too similar to our own life and understanding of what’s happened to our friends and family. Part of why we watch television, after all, is to meet new people.
So when we return to Girls in these two new episodes, it’s not surprising that Hannah has become more Hannah, Shosh has become more Shosh, Jessa has become more Jessa, and so on. The charismatic attributes that drew us to them in Season One and, to a slightly lesser extent, Season Two, have crystallized into something harder, blunter, more repulsive. When Shosh tells Hannah that Jessa has a great life because “she’s beautiful and guys love her and she doesn’t even really want a job,” it’s the same insecurity that blanketed her when Jessa arrived on her apartment doorstep, but there’s something sharper, more bitter about it. Same for Jessa’s frankness in “Group” and her dismissiveness of others’ trauma. Given Jessa’s behavior over the last two seasons, it shouldn’t be surprising when she dismisses the trauma of a sexual abuse victim, but there’s something so much more cruel and unforgivable about it than mouthing off to her then-husband’s snobby parents.
In the classic three-act narrative structure, characters grow. We meet them, they face a challenge, and they surmount it; the good people become better, the confused people realize their potential, and the bad people become worse. That’s not how life works, but that’s how narrative works, and when it doesn’t — when characters remain static — that’s when we start using words like “boring” and “annoying” to describe the show.
But that static can also be enormously generative, even if it’s not as pleasurable as first encounters or triumphant character arcs. In these two episodes, our characters are more “themselves,” which makes it even easier to slot them into positions as Truthers or Darers. Hannah and Marnie are both fundamental Truthers: Hannah basically lives her life so that she can write about it, and since Marnie can’t write and doesn’t have good taste, she channels her confessions into boyfriend talk (“I want to have brown babies with you”) and unfortunate (but, for her, therapeutic) singing. She loves it when Adam tells her the story about the “Columbian” who dumped him because that sort of confession is a language she can understand. We might also call them overly cerebral, or verbal, but they’d always rather talk than do, think than change. It’s also why they’re best friends whose relationship is characterized by passive aggressiveness and jealousy: they’re too alike, which is just another way of saying that their modes of being the world unite and repel them from each other.
Adam and Jessa are, of course, Darers. Hannah explains that Jessa was that girl in college who was always dancing on the quad in rain boots in a bikini, and we all know that girl — she’s also the girl who hooks up with a random guy in a bar when she’s late for her abortion, or elopes with a dude she met two weeks ago. She’s completely reckless and the most fun at the party, and the only reason she hasn’t spiraled completely out of control is the net of privilege holding her up. Adam’s no different: he hates computers and television and “Facespace” because they’re all conduits of personal confession. As he tells Shoshanna, “I don’t catalog my mind,” which is precisely the sort of thing that Shoshanna (and Hannah and Marnie) spend all day doing. His most destructive daringness was fueled by alcohol, which he’s given up, but the impulse to be constantly doing remains. When Shosh explains just how remarkable it is that he’s been able to take good care of Hannah, it’s clear that he’s never even thought of it in terms of “sacrifice,” or really even thought of it at all — it’s just what he does. Adam and Jessa are both oppositional but necessary to Hannah: they infuriate and complete her.
Shoshanna’s the only one still in college, which is why it’s appropriate that she’s figuring out if she’s a Truth or a Dare person. Two years ago, she was all Truth: her “baggage,” her sorting into various Sex in the City characters, her spontaneous word vomit. But Ray’s devotion turned her into something daresome — the type of girl who wakes up on the top bunk of a random guy’s dorm room. Her plan for senior year (hook up one night, study hard the next) is classic senior year of college, but it’s also classic identity crisis.
I could have made some, but certainly not all, of these claims at the end of Season One, but ten episodes in, those characterizations would still be too hollow to hold weight. But after three seasons, we not only know and can make claims about these characters, but feel like we know more about them than the narrative enacts. In her post-episode HBO chat, Dunham claims that there are girls on Twitter that “know more” about Shoshanna than she does, which is another way of saying that we, as viewers, ascribe characters with meaning outside of what’s offered. Given the illusion that we know the character, we fill in the blanks with our own understanding of that type.
I do this; we all do this. I’ve always felt confident predicting Adam’s actions because I knew “that guy,” and while the four girls are less easily boxed as the four protagonists of Sex and the City, there are Marnies and Jessas, in various iterations of class and race and sexuality, all over our lives. As the maxim goes, the more specific the narrative world, the more universal it becomes.
We’ve now seen a fifth of the season, and very little has happened. Table setting; reminding us of what has happened and who these characters remain. But just as it’s wrong to expect too much change or redemption or growth from these characters, it’s probably equally wrong to be as pessimistic as to their development, however subtle, and what it might communicate to those who identify with the show. The characters of Girls might not alter their fundamental natures as Truthers or Darers — but their struggles to mature, even within those modes, might be tethered to our inability to conceive of them, or any 25-year-old, as capable of meaningful change.
