I’ve been following Enlightened for more than a year now so I know where all this transformation comes from: it’s Amy talking. All of us fans of the show who have defended Enlightened on social media over the past month have been so absorbed within its world that we have begun channelling the lead character’s earnestness and indignation. Like Laura Dern’s Amy Jellicoe, we can’t believe how fucked up the world is. Her shock at seeing people freaked out by her intensity has inspired our own disbelief over how very few people watch the show.
And like Amy, we were a part of this bullshit world before; but instead of going to Hawaii for treatment, we watched Enlightened. So now twitter has become the venue for our own chillingly voiced-over epiphanies, filtered down to 140 characters.
Even if Enlightened doesn’t get renewed (and honestly, after that outpour of humanism all across the deconstructive universe of social media, I think it will) there is still no bigger casualty in all this than Lena Dunham and Girls. Everyone who developed a hyperbolic passion for Enlightened rode a momentum that inevitably carried them to an anti-Girls sinkhole. It’s an easy enough target: it’s weary cynicism, hip detachment, and relative popularity is the perfect antithesis to Mike White’s meticulously unhip, unironic, deeply sentimental, and largely ignored TV series. Many of these crusaders have hated Girls way before they even knew Enlightened existed, but its opposition provided them with a new prism through which they can point out its flaws. Enlightened is the sun, and as it started to set, Girls cast a shadow large enough to make its true shape more apparent.
So here’s what we’ve learned over the past week: Enlightened is good, Girls is evil. Enlightened should be praised for its cleanly-structured writing and narrative, Girls should be condemned for its increasingly aimless pseudo-storytelling. Enlightened should have Girls’ audience and more because it’s redemptive whereas the latter is apathetic and generally whiny.
I’m not gonna go there. I love Enlightened with all my heart and soul but it's a love that doesn't contradict any good thing I’ve ever said about Girls. I have some incredible news for all of you: you can actually like both of them at the same time. They’re not really the opposite of each other, even if it certainly feels that way. They are, however, different stages of the same pursuit.
Enlightened is basically a redemption story that revolves around middle-aged characters. Girls isn’t actually more inconsequential, it just seems that way in comparison because it’s about a bunch of people who haven’t been hurt thoroughly yet, so they have no choice but to wallow in a limbo where “angst” has actual currency, adapted from fiction and post-modernism, because they have to identify the blahness of their existence with something. This is what it’s actually like being in your 20s. And Girls does a great job of capturing that.
Enlightened feels more powerful because it’s about characters who have accumulated too many mistakes to even remember what “angst” is. It portrays a point in one’s life when angst starts to look like a mere cute thing you find in movies and indie rock songs. You have to reach a certain age (it starts around the mid-to-late 30s mark) before you get hurt enough to realize what’s really at stake; and you find out it’s not about book deals or career choices or feeling merely “alone” – it’s about life and death, it’s about being too late for everything, for love, for justice, for hope. Any redemption story that can happen in Girls could only be provisional. For you to redeem anything of real value, you first must lose everything.
What endears me most towards Amy – more than her crusade against corporate greed – is her quest to reclaim who she is, whoever that person even was. Her scenes with her husband Levi are so incredibly touching because you hear in their voices, you see in their eyes, you feel in Levi’s defeatism and in the way he seems to weigh down Amy’s newfound optimism, that accrued mass of your whole life being torn down and the ambiguous necessity of carrying on. In those scenes of them just being together, Mike White is able to convey the entire gravity of their history.
Sitting in front of the TV to watch Enlightened is like sharing horror stories with a long lost friend who’s been through a lot, probably more than you have, and suddenly sifting through the debris feels a lot less lonely, even if it doesn’t get any less difficult. HBO can choose to let it go if it wants to and I’m not sure I’ll miss it. I can watch any of its 18 brilliant episodes and revisit all of those moments any day. A third season would be nice but it wouldn't be necessary.
Amy’s story actually feels so complete now that I suspect many of its fans aren’t really mad that there won’t be a third season; I think they’re mostly indignant that it was endangered at all. The main frustration, it seems, is that Girls is the one that captures the zeitgeist and not Enlightened. That Girls’ world is more our actual world – a world of status anxieties and cynicism. That our world has become so numbed that hope is now considered a novel concept for a TV series. And it took two seasons of that series for us to finally realize this.
I’m not going to boycott Girls in an act of protest against HBO for choosing it over Enlightened (as Mike White himself suggested might happen). There’s a sincerity to Girls that people ignore in favor of the usual tired complaints about the show that we could’ve easily said about Seinfeld but never did because the world is really still sexist but we keep forgetting. But Lena Dunham’s sincerity can only be limited to the things she feels right now, which are, in themselves, limited.
What’s great about Louie – a show that Girls was compared to early on – is that it’s Louis CK’s own redemption story. He’s seen his film career, his marriage, and his early attempts at TV fail miserably. The comedy and anti-comedy in Louie are informed by his frustrations, his pessimism, and as funny and as corny as this sounds – his wisdom. By dealing with his pain in the weirdest, most unconventional way possible, he is able to rise above the ashes. Yet, I do not find Louie postmodernist at all. It doesn’t put itself out there the way Enlightened does, Amy-style, but it reveals its hopefulness once in a while in every scene with his daughters or with some random duckling.
If Enlightened doesn’t get the renewal it “deserves”, then it will only join the pantheon of great TV series that have died prematurely. And if, like the rest of that pantheon, it does become influential, then post-modernism may soon become obsolete and a sort of neo-romanticism, something more grounded in reality, may emerge. One can only hope. Or maybe this is just Amy talking.
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