The millennial phenomenon of HBO's 'Girls'

According to Lehman, Baby Boomers chose to be overeducated housewives. Sure Boomer homemakers were more educated than those of previous generations. Conversely, Millennials — after going to college because our Baby Boomer parents promised it would lead to our independence and financial success — are single, underemployed women who are going to retire later. We may not be housewives, but we are the most educated generation in U.S. history.

Therein lies the panic of Millennial women — our lives during our 20s, which are tough for every generation, aren’t held together by success. Instead we feel like we have nothing, despite having done everything to prepare. This is where the perceived egocentrism of Millennials comes from, although Dunham undoubtedly hyperbolizes this phenomenon in Girls.

Lehman ends her piece saying she watches Girls “with great sadness because I see young women making the same mistakes that my generation made 30 years ago.” Typical sexual liberation, uncertainty of the future, and dating woes aside, the Girls episode entitled “Flo” deals with, among other things, the relationship between Boomers and Millennials.

Facing a parent’s death

In the episode, Hannah goes to see her dying grandmother, Flo. Soon after she arrives, she takes her mother, Loreen, outside for a break. As Loreen devours a sandwich, she asks Hannah to pretend that she and her boyfriend, Adam, are engaged. Hannah won’t lie, but she later tells Adam on the phone that the idea of the lie is to reassure her grandmother that she’s having a good life, by Flo’s standards.

That night, Hannah and her cousin Rebecca get in a car accident and end up in the hospital, too. Adam arrives, but before the couple can converse, Hannah’s mother and aunts noisily gather in the hallway. The conversation turns from concern for Hannah and her cousin to who has the best marriage, whose life is most intact, who is the most selfish. The bickering, foreseeably, ends in tears about the real issue — that their mother is dying.

After the aunts disperse, Hannah and Adam go to Flo’s bedside, where Adam tells Flo they’re engaged. Adam leaves, and Loreen tells Hannah “keep the job, not the boyfriend.” Hannah tells her mother that it’s none of her business — and points out how ungrateful she’s being, since Adam had just done her a favor.

The next day, Flo miraculously recovers. As Hannah tells her grandmother that she’s glad the doctors were wrong, Flo answers “People aren’t always right.”

Hannah returns to the city only to have to turn around — Flo died of a heart attack.

The relationships among women

While not the sexiest episode of Girls, it was certainly the most fascinating to me. Dunham captured multiple complex relationships among women of different generations.

There’s the ever-so-popular reverse caretaker role that many Boomers either have experienced already or soon will. There’s the relationship between Boomer siblings going though this process together. There’s the Millennial’s perspective of the reverse caretaker role — this is the first, horrifying time that many of us realize that parents die. There’s the grandmother-granddaughter relationship, which often has less friction than the relationship with our parents, causing us to sometimes be more open to their opinions of our lives.

Most importantly — and rarely seen from the Millennial’s point of view — is the Boomer mother/Millennial daughter dynamic shown in this episode. This is shown mostly between Loreen and Hannah.

Unsolicited advice

There comes a time in any young adult’s life when the parental advice he or she is getting is no longer helpful. It’s confusing at first — believe it or not, we usually listen to the advice of our elders despite not appearing to.

Hannah seemed disturbed by Loreen’s suggestion to fake an engagement because it’s the first advice she seems to doubt. But the comment to ditch the boyfriend added to her feeling of betrayal. Though Adam had a history of being strange, uncomfortable, and angry, as Loreen pointed out, he had shown great improvement in a short amount of time. Loreen didn’t know about that improvement, but there were hints that Loreen seemed to relate to Hannah’s situation of being with a “strange” man — suggesting that this was, perhaps, a mistake she made in her own life.

When Hannah was talking to Flo, the viewer got a sense that the conversation in which she declared “people aren’t always right” was not just about the misjudgment on Flo’s demise. The statement is what both Baby Boomers and Millennials need to understand.

Lehman’s Broad Street Review narrative proclaiming Millennials are making the same mistakes, being unoriginal, and copycatting feminism is just that — unsolicited.

Millennials must ignore the static

My 60-year-old father insists that I heed his advice because he knows what’s what. That may perhaps be so sometimes. But I discovered, after an incident in which I took career advice that went over poorly, that sometimes I really do know what’s better for me — and I shouldn’t let noise get in the way.

If Millennials take advice — which may or may not produce the same results Boomers saw in their lives — without making their own mistakes, they will not be self-reliant. Regrettably, someday I’ll be in a hospital agonizing over my parents’ demise just as Loreen was. Then who will advise me?

The struggles of Millennials, while in some ways similar to the struggle of all generations at this age, are not carbon copies because society has progressed, and the economy has digressed. I have a feeling that Dunham isn’t trying to portray feminism as much as she’s sharing our unique struggles as a generation — the average viewer may understand them or not. But they are unique. Every generation is unique.

But who knows. People aren’t always right.

For Susan Beth Lehman's original piece on Girls, click here.

For Madeline Schaefer's response to that piece, click here.