In Surprise Twist, HBO's Girls Adds Likable Character
When Mimi-Rose made her debut on Girls two weeks ago, she was an easy character to spit at. A tall, thin, blonde and beautiful artist swept Adam off his giant feet while Hannah was away at grad school for barely a month and practically MOVED IN to her apartment without Hannah’s knowledge? The nerve.
Shoshanna’s reaction was that of the collective audience – your average American girl who, like Hannah, does not look like a super model, in one form or another, and would like to think that her boyfriend (real or imaginary) would not stray after just a brief period of time apart for someone with a name like Mimi-Rose, thank you very much.
(image source: Girls Tumblr)
But let’s be honest with ourselves, fellow non-model-identifying Americans. Adam and Hannah’s relationship was already, and totally, fucked. Yes, he loves her. Yes, she loves him. But theirs is a relationship based upon deep, dark codependency, an issue that becomes all the more clearer in the presence of the refreshingly feminist, laidback, independent Mimi-Rose.
Mimi-Rose is in possession of something that none of the other female characters on Girls possess. It’s a gold nugget that 80 percent of us would probably never find if we panned for hours and hours: self-confidence. When the series began, the same could have been said of Jessa, but I think Lena Dunham’s writing has revealed Jessa’s true state-of-being as incredibly and rawly lonely and very much dependent on others to make herself feel whole, beautiful and confident. When you take away the adoring friends who realize she’s full of shit, or the dude of the moment who’s decided to move on to spread his seed elsewhere, she crumbles.
As evidenced by her surprise announcement to Adam that she cannot have sex, or do any number of other activities associated with her vagina, because she has just come back from aborting what would have eventually become his child, Mimi-Rose needs no help with decision making. Adam’s outrage prompts her to later explain that, in fact, she does not need him at all.
(image source: Girls Tumblr)
Dunham might as well have painted a shocking streak of white over a canvas of black with that dialogue. While the other female characters on Girls are beautiful, if exaggerated, renditions of flawed and real women, not one of them possesses the kind of self-confidence and independence that they aspire to. And as they have relentlessly dug themselves into deeper and deeper holes as they struggle with their own neuroses, they have remained relatable but grew, and continue to grow, somewhat less likeable.
Not that I’m against flawed and not wholly likeable characters – I love House of Cards, the Sopranos, Mad Men, and so on. But it’s refreshing to find a character who – at least in this introductory phase – is sound in her identity amongst a throng of people who are not.
Plus, Ray is great and I adore him, but having the most likeable character be a man on a show entitled Girls without even giving him a run for his money had gone on long enough.
I will acknowledge that whether or not you find Mimi-Rose as likeable as I do is may depend on the intensity of your stance on abortion on either end of the spectrum, and that’s fine.
And now, for Lena Dunham’s assessment of Mimi-Rose: