S06.E09: Goodbye Tour

[DianeDobbler]

On ‎4‎/‎12‎/‎2017 at 9:59 AM, qtpye said:

 We all know Lena can look good, but Hannah rarely does and often purposely wears things that are unflattering.  It is kind of a mind frack because we are attuned to women dressing for attention by dressing well or in an outrageous fashion, like a goth or punk rocker.  Hannah does neither.  She dressed badly as her attention getter and do be quite frank, on this show it works.  She stands out from both all the pretty well dressed girls and the more cutting edge ladies, as well.  I am sorry not to separate my post out into paragraphs by topic, but every time I hit enter it eats my post and I can not go though that again.  I think the reason we are getting so little of Shosh and Jessa is that Lena has actually decided this show is about Hannah (who is the main character, but we also care about the supporting cast) and everyone else is tertiary.  We have tons of time with Hannah and her sassy gay friend.  It is true, Lena realizes that Marnie is not the scene stealing character that Shosh and Jessa can be and maybe that's why she and her stupid relationships are the only things getting the main focus this season, outside of the Hannah pregnancy.  We all also noticed that Marnie has actually devolved from a put together, vain, but pretty girl to a self absorbed nightmare, whose looks do not make up for a shallow void of a personality.  It saddens me, because most of us like the whole cast and the fact that Shosh's life changed so much off screen was disappointing. 

I completely agree with this. I can also do without Lena Dunham trolling the audience with some of her b.s., like "Shosh is a core character and having her off screen off season was an important storytelling point."

She says she doesn't expect to be acting much in the future - I wonder if this uber focus on Hannah - she's Mary Suing Hannah to beat the band - is just making the most of an opportunity she doesn't expect to have again, so she's getting it all out of her system. I was super distracted by her tears when Adam asked Hannah to marry him - the entire scene seemed more about getting that long take on film than anything else.

As far as Hannah being more kindhearted than the rest - I've considered this and I'm not so sure. I think she is better mannered than the rest can often be. Marni can have nice manners but her tone and demeanor make it clear she's doing you a favor. Hannah is ingratiating but not particularly considerate, IMO. Manners and how you treat others aren't the same thing.

Edited April 13, 2017 by DianeDobbler

[Lily247]

On 4/11/2017 at 6:12 PM, Eyes High said:

Has she changed all that much? Shosh used to put up with Jessa's toxic bullshit because she was obsessed with the beauty and glamour Jessa possessed and which she lacked. Now, she's worshipping at the altar of people like the Jamba Jeans girls because unlike Shosh, they're pretty, glamorous, and also successful, because that's all that matters to her now, to the point that she fails to acknowledge that the Jamba Jeans girls seem like worthless human beings who were still holding a grudge over having to pay for Shosh's share of the hotel room. 

In the Jamba Jeans episode, Jessa hit the nail on the head: she called Shosh a starfucker. Shosh is someone who just wants to bask in the glow of more glamorous, beautiful, successful people without being particularly glamorous, beautiful or successful herself. This is the reason she got sucked into Jessa's orbit in the first place: Jessa and even the others once seemed glamorous to her, when she was younger and more naive. That glamour was worth the cost of Jessa's toxic bullshit at the time (since Jessa would make her graduation photos look better), and, later on, the other girls' whiny narcissism. Now that she's older, though, she has moved on to newer, shinier objects of worship (pretty girls with nice purses and great jobs). The fact is, though, that she remains as superficial as ever. If anything, she has become even more superficial, since she has the gall to bitch about a very pregnant Hannah wearing overalls.

Even in 6x09, she's bragging about her successful, beautiful friends and her nice fiance. Her new friends and her fiance, as far as I can tell, don't even seem like people to her: they're status symbols validating her worth as a human being, much like she would view a nice purse. She all but announces to Marnie, Hannah and Jessa that she's now better than the rest of them because of she has pretty, successful friends and a nice fiance, suggesting that pretty girls with nice purses and great jobs are her crowd, not Hannah and company (ignoring, of course, the fact that Marnie and Jessa are far more beautiful than she is). Amusingly, Shosh also makes a lot of noises about rudeness and inappropriateness, suggesting again that she is the classy one while Marnie and Hannah are being the inappropriate ones, while treating Marnie, Jessa and Hannah extremely rudely and being very nasty to them. She may think that her mercenary acquisition of pretty, well-dressed new friends and her kindhearted fiance means that she's now a better person than the rest of them--by association, I guess--but she's very much mistaken.

Shosh hasn't done any sort of inner work in Season 6 that we can tell. She kicks herself for wasting time being led around by the nose by Jessa, whom she worshiped for her beauty and glamour, when instead...she could have been led around by the Jamba Jeans assholes. If anything, she has become just like the Jamba Jeans girls, because she rubs what she views as her success (friends, fiance) in Marnie, Jessa and Hannah's faces, just as the Jamba Jeans gleefully rubbed Shosh's decision to ditch them for Jessa way back when in her face.

Her priorities and needs (for more glamorous friends to make her feel special by assocation) are the same as ever. The only difference is that she has come to the conclusion that Marnie, Hannah and Jessa don't fit the bill. She hasn't evolved past her need to associate with prettier, more glamorous people to make her feel better about herself; she has just changed her mind about who those people are.

7

There are some good points here, about her being superficial. However, none of the people in the room seemed like the Jamba Jeans girls (just to make a point). Also, she did mention that the other girls in the room had "nice personalities." I think she was most pissed off at Hannah because she never bothered to inform her of her pregnancy when she told lots of others - which means that Hannah just doesnt care for her. I think that what Shoshana was pissed about was that save for Jessa, the other Girls were never really that nice/inclusive to her. I mean, Marnie did have a relationship with Shosh's ex, who she gave her virginity to as well to boot, and Hannah has always seemed like she never took Shoshana seriously. Also, for the record, I do think that Shoshana is in the best situation of all the Girls, as she does have a job and is in a happy relationship, and while she is not beautiful, she has always been pretty cute. 

[lunaseas1122]

1 minute ago, Matias130 said:

I do think that Shoshana is in the best situation of all the Girls, as she does have a job

What is Shosh's job now? I missed something, I think.

[Lily247]

Just now, lunaseas1122 said:

What is Shosh's job now? I missed something, I think.

she mentioned in episode 2 that shes an assistant for some marketing company i think. 

[Lily247]

44 minutes ago, DianeDobbler said:

As far as Hannah being more kindhearted than the rest - I've considered this and I'm not so sure. I think she is better mannered than the rest can often be. Marni can have nice manners but her tone and demeanor make it clear she's doing you a favor. Hannah is ingratiating but not particularly considerate, IMO. Manners and how you treat others aren't the same thing.

2

I remember the episode where Hannah stole someone's bike outside a cafe, and I also remember how she said she was just using Fran to get over Adam. I dont consider Hannah's character to be a particularly nice person, she is just so self-absorbed to an extreme. I actually think that Jessa is by far the kindest person on the show. 

[txhorns79]

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Also, for the record, I do think that Shoshana is in the best situation of all the Girls, as she does have a job and is in a happy relationship, and while she is not beautiful, she has always been pretty cute.  

I would say she appears the most "settled" out of the four friends meaning she is the one whose future appears to be the most set.  We don't really know if her situation is the "best," only because we know essentially nothing about her fiancee or their relationship outside of the few minutes we saw them together.

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I actually think that Jessa is by far the kindest person on the show. 

 

Didn't a friend of Jessa's fake her own death to get away from what she viewed as Jessa's toxicity?  I think that says something.  

Edited April 13, 2017 by txhorns79

[Mojoker]

1 hour ago, txhorns79 said:

I would say she appears the most "settled" out of the four friends meaning she is the one whose future appears to be the most set.  We don't really know if her situation is the "best," only because we know essentially nothing about her fiancee or their relationship outside of the few minutes we saw them together.

Didn't a friend of Jessa's fake her own death to get away from what she viewed as Jessa's toxicity?  I think that says something.  

I think Jessa can be both toxic and kindhearted.  A lot of the perceived toxicity may have just been a product of immaturity coupled with a careless upbringing and lots of personal pain and rejection.  What I like about this show is that we've seen all the women actually grow and mature a bit, with Hannah and Jessa arguably in the lead on that score.  Shosh may have a job and an engagement ring, but I don't know that she's really changed or become a better, more sympathetic person.  If anything, she's more brittle than she was before.  And Marnie's just a mess.  She's come into a moment of enlightenment and managed to turn it into some bad new-age-y bullshit.  There's a girl who's racing to become her mother. (By the way, speaking of people fleeing in the face of toxicity, one of my mother's ex-husband's literally fled the the state, changed his name, and abandoned all contact with their children, just so my mother couldn't find him, he was that scared of her.  True story.)

[Keepitmoving]

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As far as Hannah being more kindhearted than the rest - I've considered this and I'm not so sure. I think she is better mannered than the rest can often be. Marni can have nice manners but her tone and demeanor make it clear she's doing you a favor. Hannah is ingratiating but not particularly considerate, IMO. Manners and how you treat others aren't the same thing.

See I don't think she is, nor is Jessa, they both have poor manners. To me, showing your boss your vagina is bad manners not to mention, I'd say it borders on sexual harassment, that was ridiculous. After that, every time he had her in his office I thought he was an idiot for not having another member of the staff in that office with him just to cover his ass. Rolling on the floor of a party showing your bare ass, even though everyone looked tipsy, is bad manners to me. Trying to prank someone and steal their bike, well that's a crime let alone bad manners and she wasn't even doing it because it was her idea. She was like some follower who tries to do stupid shit to fit in with the cool kids. It's all antisocial behavior IMO.  

But still, somehow Lena has done a good job in showing that 8 times out of 10 Hannah's intention is to be kind and open to people. She wants to give love to others and I don't see the same traits in Marnie and Jessa.  Well, Jessa just showed this to me in her reaction to Adam leaving and in her apology to Hannah, so she's starting to give a fuck, maybe it will last and will continue to grow. Marnie, I got nothing real from her in terms of feeling like she wanted to have a true connection with anyone, and I still don't.  I got nothing from Shosh either, and can barely remember her interaction with Ray.

They should do a Girls movie for HBO some years from now, I'd like a follow up. But they should do just one movie, not the stuff the SATC tried to pull. I think Lena said she was going to try to write a play next.

Edited April 13, 2017 by Keepitmoving

[Eyes High]

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Also, she did mention that the other girls in the room had "nice personalities."

Yes, but tellingly, that was the last item on her list, after "jobs" and "purses." It's pretty clear what her priorities are. And again, in her rant to Jessa about how Jessa ruined her friendship with the Jamba Jeans girls, she complains that she "could have gone on fancy trips and had people who cared about me." In that order.

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I think she was most pissed off at Hannah because she never bothered to inform her of her pregnancy when she told lots of others - which means that Hannah just doesnt care for her.

Shosh's biggest complaint about the girls has always been that they never paid enough attention to her, which again fits with Jessa's starfucker accusation. It's hard to maintain the fantasy of being part of a prettier, more glamorous crowd if the objects of that fantasy refuse to indulge you and treat you like furniture.

The funny thing is that I was prepared to cheer Shosh on for cutting Hannah and the others out of her life, but she went about it in such a nasty, bitter, condescending way so clearly calculated to hurt everyone's feelings, while crowing about her supposed moral superiority based on purely superficial things, that it was hard to feel good about it.

I don't dispute that Hannah has committed many offenses worthy of Shosh ending the friendship. I personally wouldn't have had anything to do with a so-called friend after they called me "unstimulating," and I certainly wouldn't have had anything to do with someone who attempted to force a blowjob on my ex-boyfriend, but that wasn't the sin that got Hannah disinvited from the party in a way that was calculated to hurt her (since Marnie and Elijah were also invited).

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Shoshana is in the best situation of all the Girls, as she does have a job and is in a happy relationship

I'm sure Shosh thinks that way, as many people do--job + fiance = better than U--but she's in fact mistaken. It's easy to think that Hannah, Marnie and Jessa are losers based on Shosh's type of thinking, and indeed some posters on this very thread have expressed such sentiments: Hannah got knocked up during a one-night stand and will be an unwed (!) mother, Jessa quit school, Marnie married and divorced a drug addict and moved back in with her mother, etc. Unlike Shosh, however, they've made some real progress. Hannah took responsibility, accepted a job offer that provided some stability, and refused to let herself rely on a man to rescue her from her own self-made crisis. Marnie realized that she had to stop blaming everyone else for her own problems, and Jessa realized she was in no shape to help other people yet, stopped trying to manipulate Hannah into taking her back as a friend, and owned up to her own shitty behaviour. Some people take a lifetime to come to those sorts of epiphanies. A lot of people never do.

So even though a superficial way of thinking might view Shosh as better off than Hannah and the others because she has a job and a (seemingly) happy relationship, that's not the case. Marnie, Hannah and Jessa have faced some difficult truths that will enable them to move forward and thrive, but Shosh is still stuck in her starfucker fairyland where she mistakes superficial accoutrements like beauty and nice purses for markers of substance and worth. Shosh, unlike the others, stubbornly adheres to her shallow principles and continues to make the same mistakes. She will likely become disillusioned once more when her pretty girlfriends with jobs and purses fail to live up to her expectations just as Marnie and company once did, leaving her no better off.

In some ways, 6x09's characterization of Shosh is the logical continuation of the ugly building/gorgeous view riddle from 6x08. Shosh gave the "wrong" answer, saying she'd rather live in an ugly building with a gorgeous view than the reverse. Remember what Ray said about this? "...Actually, it's shallow in a weird way because it implies that you're fine being structurally flawed as long as you never actually have to see your true self."

This little throwaway exchange is key to Shosh's character and explains 6x09, in my opinion. Like the ugly building, Shosh is "structurally flawed," i.e. she has personality issues and fucked-up priorities, but she's fine with it as long as she never has to look at her true self. If she surrounds herself with a "gorgeous view"--pretty girlfriends with nice purses, a handsome fiance, etc.--she can convince herself that she's a great person and she'll never have to engage in any self-examination like Marnie, Jessa and Hannah were forced to do in Season 6. As we see in 6x09, Shosh has made her choice about her preference.

Edited April 13, 2017 by Eyes High

[Keepitmoving]

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In some ways, 6x09's characterization of Shosh is the logical continuation of the ugly building/gorgeous view riddle. Shosh gave the "wrong" answer, saying she'd rather live in an ugly building with a gorgeous view than the reverse. Remember what Ray said about this? "...Actually, it's shallow in a weird way because it implies that you're fine being structurally flawed as long as you never actually have to see your true self."

Yeah, I chose the beautiful building/apt. and the ugly view like Ray. But I was looking at it from my OCD point of view, so no way in hell would I want to live in some cruddy building just for the view. Yep, that would in no way work for me at all. I gotta sleep, eat, etc. in this place, I'm not going to have time to stare at the gorgeous view all day it's a bonus; so my comfort in the apt. building is far more important than watching beautiful mountains or the ocean from its windows. 

Edited April 13, 2017 by Keepitmoving

[Lily247]

1 hour ago, Keepitmoving said:

Yeah, I chose the beautiful building/apt. and the ugly view like Ray. But I was looking at it from my OCD point of view, so no way in hell would I want to live in some cruddy building just for the view. Yep, that would in no way work for me at all. I gotta sleep, eat, etc. in this place, I'm not going to have time to stare at the gorgeous view all day it's a bonus; so my comfort in the apt. building is far more important than watching beautiful mountains or the ocean from its windows. 

 

I also chose the beautiful building/ugly view, however there is not enough information in this question to be informed enough for a good answer. Are the buildings identical on the inside ? How ugly is this building ? etc. 

[Keepitmoving]

7 minutes ago, Matias130 said:

I also chose the beautiful building/ugly view, however there is not enough information in this question to be informed enough for a good answer. Are the buildings identical on the inside ? How ugly is this building ? etc. 

LOL, I thought so too. I thought to myself wait, is this a condo?  How bad is it on the inside? If it's a condo, I own it, maybe I could afford to fix it up enough where it would be suitable for me live in and get my view too. But then thought, this is one of those tests and that's all the info. you get, so think fast and make a decision.

Edited April 13, 2017 by Keepitmoving

[lucindabelle]

yes, My best friend lives in Cold Spring and routinely she says she lives upstate. Well, since it's still commuting distance, (1.5 hours by direct train), I don't agree. Albany, Saratoga, the Adirondacks-- tht's upstate.

[DianeDobbler]

It's impossible to answer the ugly v. beautiful building because what does ugly mean? Ugly as in the aesthetic? Or ugly as in one is a dump and the other is nicely maintained? No way Shoshanna would rather be in a dump and look out at a nice building, so she must have assumed it's aesthetics, and the conclusion about what that means is just absurd. It's fake psychology.

[lampwick]

Trick question indeed.  I thought that if you answered that you'd rather live in the pretty building and look at the ugly building it could mean that you enjoyed looking out at the ugly building from your pretty perch knowing that you're better than those that reside in the ugly building - that you've made it so to speak, like a status symbol.  It seemed to me that living in the pretty building was the more shallow response.  Besides, chances are the ugly building will be redone to be prettier than the one you live in over time, who knows?  The uglier and rundown the building, the more likely it will get overhauled, no?    That question was absurd, but what bothered me was their insistence that their answer was the "right" answer.  That spoke volumes to me.  Argh.

[qtpye]

I am going to look at this episode as the finale and pretend "latching" never happened.

[Stallion12]

Did I miss a scene, didn't Adam go back to get his stuff? It felt like he just disappeared after that.

[humbleopinion]

He went back to Jessa.

He didn't have his key so he yelled up to her to let him in....

He disappeared back into Jessa's arms.

[auntiemel]

On 4/15/2017 at 1:01 PM, DianeDobbler said:

It's impossible to answer the ugly v. beautiful building because what does ugly mean? Ugly as in the aesthetic? Or ugly as in one is a dump and the other is nicely maintained? No way Shoshanna would rather be in a dump and look out at a nice building, so she must have assumed it's aesthetics, and the conclusion about what that means is just absurd. It's fake psychology.

Yeah, I had Shosh's answer to the ugly/pretty building, too. But I didn't think of it as "dump" vs. a "nice" building, otherwise my answer would have obviously been that I'd rather live in the well-maintained building.

Looking at the meaning being purely an "attractive" building vs. an "unattractive" building, my rationale is that I'd only have to see the exterior of my own building for about two minutes every time I came home from being out, which (for me, as a work-from-homer) happens two or three times a week. So, if I live in the unattractive building, I'm looking at it less than ten minutes a week, while I stare at the gorgeous building for hours and hours on end. I'd much rather do that!

[qtpye]

The whole point of the question was that it was a stupid pretentious and was made up by people who are a little bit too impressed with themselves.  However, we were supposed to think it was great and be confused about how Shosh's old boss and Ray were stupid and pretentious in the same way, when they seemed so different.

[SlovakPrincess]

This is pretty realistic for many friendships from college / post-college.  The four girls didn't really have a ton in common, and since they were all insecure and immature and flailing at life in the real world, they were obviously not going to be at their best as twenty-somethings.

Jessa is the kind of friend you think is cool in college but eventually realize is kind of tiring.   

Hannah and Marnie are the closest and equal parts self-obsessed but wanting to support each other ... so they will drive each other nuts until one gets married and then disappears into a married-people friend group.  

Shosh ... apparently hates them all now, which is probably fair since she was always an after thought to the others, anyway. LOL.