Don’t Worry, Marnie’s Still The Worst

There’s always been something vaguely insufferable about Marnie Michaels on HBO’s Girls. While all the characters on the show display more than a twinge of narcissism, Marni is consistently the most easily despised. This week’s episode of Girls, “The Panic In Central Park,” spent the better part of its 34 minute running time attempting to show Marnie through a more sympathetic lens. Audiences and critics were surprised they didn’t hate it. Shockingly, Marnie may have actually learned some things. But don’t worry, she’s still the worst.

Marnie balances her naïve sense of self-importance with a side of judgment for anyone whose decision-making process differs from her own. The fact that she leaves a trail of terrible decisions in her wake wherever she goes makes the critiques she doles out less than charitable.

There’s also the fact that she seems to openly dislike the other characters that she purports to be friends with. And the feeling seems to be mutual. Not only do Hannah, Jessa and Shosh seem to dislike their friend Marnie, but the show’s creator finds joy in humiliating her. Lena Dunham has expressed a sort of pleasure at putting this conventionally attractive actress in, well, less than conventional situations. After the infamous Desi/Marnie rimjob scene in the Season 4 premiere, Dunham told Cosmopolitan:

“If you look across the seasons, we’ve put Marnie in a number of humiliating sexual positions that you wouldn’t necessarily expect based on her shiny, shiny hair.”

Parts of Marnie’s character have always been a bit of a long con. When the series debuted, Judd Apatow said that as soon as he saw Allison Williams singing lyrics to the Mad Men theme song on YouTube, he knew that she was right for Marnie.

But it wasn’t until the ninth episode of Girls‘ second season (“On All Fours”) that Marnie actually sang on the show, and her simultaneously self-conscious and self-satisfied grin from that YouTube video finally made an appearance.

From the beginning of this series, Marnie has had cringeworthy delusions of grandeur. But unlike the other characters, who have almost relentlessly tried to make it on their own —by choice or by force— Marnie continually gravitates toward men she thinks will propel her life into the suspended dream state she thinks is her due. She dumped her college boyfriend Charlie (Christopher Abbott) when he seemed like a dead end, then went running back to him after he created a successful tech startup out of the rubble of their relationship. She slept with the artist Booth Jonathan (Jorma Taccone) hoping that it would propel her into his social circle, only to quickly realize she was just one of his hired hands. And her entire relationship with Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) seemed to be powered more by a potential boost to her singing career than actual emotional connections. The only men who actually seemed to care about her — Charlie the first go round and Ray — were summarily dismissed when she deemed them unable to propel her life forward in a significant way.

Despite its title, Girls is often most successful when it drops the foursome of characters and keeps the camera close to one character/plotline. And this weekend’s episode, “The Panic In Central Park,” followed Marnie. Viewers of the show have not been shy in their disdain for this character, and Allison Williams herself was concerned that audiences would not be excited about an episode focused solely on Marnie. But they were quite pleased.

The Observer called it Girls’ “Defense of Marnie.” According to Time, “Girls Just Radically Revised a Long-lost Character.” And Slate said “That Lovely Marnie-Centric Episode of Girls Was Exactly What the Show Needed.”

In the episode, Charlie came back after his rather abrupt disappearance a few years ago. It turns out he’s left his startup for a life as a drug dealer, and his new, more masculine energy appeals to Marnie. Most likely because he presents a potential escape route from her short-lived and totally doomed marriage to Desi.

From the beginning of Girls, Marnie has thought she was destined for greatness and was more than happy to hitch herself to someone else’s cart if it would get her there faster. But in this episode, she learns that the dream of being rescued by some man probably isn’t going to come true.

In this case, it’s because she finds out Charlie is using heroin right before their planned escape together. If it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else down the road. Because life doesn’t have a happy ending, where all of life’s problems suddenly resolve themselves. But even in this episode, which portends to show Marnie finally finding herself, there are all sorts of reminders of how annoying this character is.

Take this aside, where Charlie leaves her alone for a second with a shopgirl. For a second, it seems like they might bond. But then Marnie goes and pulls a Classic Marnie:

“I know you must be thinking” she said to a stranger (who was pretty clearly not thinking much of her). “’How does someone fit that much action into such a short amount of time?’ Yes, I am only 25 and a half years old. But somehow I’ve managed to live so much.”

No, Marnie, that woman was not thinking that. And what started as empathy quickly hardened into disdain. Which is Marnie’s most impressive gift.

Marnie did learn something in this week’s episode, though. Specifically, that lofting up a general wish for a better life and then putting it on someone else’s shoulders to make it come to fruition is not a sustainable life choice.

But this is Marnie. It won’t take long for her to turn that goodwill into disdain.

[Watch the current season of Girls on HBO Go or HBO Now; past seasons are also available on Amazon Prime]

Meghan Graham (@keanesian) is a writer/editor in NY who fully supports Lena Dunham’s outro music choices this season.