Every Other Day LENA DUNHAM’S GIRLS
The pre-credit prologue to the first episode of the final season of HBO TV series Girls in 2017 achieves many things in less than two minutes. In a montage comprising twenty rapid shots, it sums up plot elements (especially from the previous, fifth season); reminds us of all the key, familiar characters in the series; and sets out a new milestone in the life of young adult Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham): she has a candid, autobiographical story published prominently in The New York Times.
But there is so much more than mere plot information embedded here. As directed by Dunham, the short sequence is complete ecstasy for any Girls fan. Carefully set to the musical rises and falls, swells and lulls, in a performance of ‘Amsterdam’ by Gregory Alan Isakov (backed by the Colorado Symphony), the montage begins with fragments of Hannah: her hands typing at her laptop, her anxious eyes and mouth in separate extreme close-ups, a view of her email inbox, and then another super close-up of the words of acceptance from a Times editor. Then a leap in time: that edition of the newspaper now exists, and simply sits on a table somewhere, where we can read the headline (‘Losing My Best Friend to My Ex-boyfriend’) and see the accompanying drawn illustration.
Cue a series of dissolves between tightly framed images of people reading and reacting to the article (interspersed with a few other angles), all scaled to the same size and position in the frame, evoking a morphing effect. In this order: Hannah’s proud dad, Tad (Peter Scolari); Adam (Adam Driver), the ex-boyfriend
