Rogueish

Characters on stage should be flat, like clothes in a fashion show: what you get should be no more than what you see. Psychological realism is repulsive, because it allows us to escape unpalatable reality by taking shelter in the “luxuriousness” of personality, losing ourselves in the depth of individual character. The writer’s task is to block this manoeuvre, to chase us off to a point from which we can view the horror with a dispassionate eye.

— Elfriede Jelinek, quoted in Žižek, Living in the End Times

I almost stopped watching Girls after the pilot, because all the characters, with the possible exception of Hannah, seemed like such flat clichés. Later episodes alter this, but in an interesting way: the characters become more complex without negating the way in which they are clichés. Jessa, for instance, really is a rather unoriginal and pretentious faux-bohemian cliché, but we discover that she’s rather (tragically?) aware of this, but sees no better option to express her own self-awareness than channeling it through this clichéd role. This isn’t quite the same as the flatness Jelinek is talking about, but there is a similarity in that it avoids the idea of psychological depth as redemptive, the idea that real people are “more complex” than clichés. In Girls, people are exactly as complex as these clichés turn out to be.