This week on Girls, felt reminiscent of “One Man’s Trash” from season two of the show. Where the episode focused solely on Hannah meeting up with an author she had admiration towards, but a recent event changes things. Also we get an oh my god moment towards the end.
Hannah (Lena Dunham) has a meeting with author Chuck Palmer (guest star Matthew Rhys) at his place and as soon as she walks in, Hannah tells him that she is not planning on staying long. The reason for this visit? Hannah wrote an article about Chuck where he used his power and influence to involve himself sexually with a college student on his book tour, Chuck wants to tell her his part of the story.
During their conversation, Chuck gets a phone call and it goes on for a long time while Hannah just waits. When Chuck gets off the phone, both continue where they left off. He asks Hannah why he’s being punished with this article about what happened with college student. She tells him, because it important to the voices of women and how it is a power imbalance, where he’s a famous writer and how this college student is trying to work hard to get a bit of what he has. Hannah then tells Chuck a story about when she was in 5th grade her teacher used to massage her shoulders and how years later she met up with a classmate and told him about the what had happened to her with their teacher and his response? “That’s a serious accusation” Hannah tells Chuck how something like that never goes away and Chuck apologizes to her and Hannah tells him how now she has a story.
Chuck wants to read something to Hannah, it’s something he wrote about his encounter with the college student and Hannah finds out that Denise (published her story on Tumblr) was the one who had initiated things with Chuck. He tells Hannah the reason he was more upset with this whole article about him is because he was like every guy that he didn’t push hard enough to get to know a woman and just another reason he invited Hannah. Chuck mentions that she only listened to one side of the story and not the whole story.
As they are walking around his apartment, Hannah sees a copy of the book “When She Was Good” by Phillip Roth and tells Chuck how she loves this book and how she always heard how this book had an alternate title called “American Bitch”, but it could never be proved anywhere. Chuck tells her to keep the book, because he can see how happy it makes her and then tells her if she can lay down in bed with him. She does and apologizes for writing about something that upset him and Chuck unzips his jeans and pulls out his penis and puts it on her leg (I was like OMG) and Hannah grabs it and then lets it go as she gets up shocked. Hannah is in disbelief of what happened when Chuck’s daughter calls out to him. As Hannah is about to leave, Chuck’s daughter is telling him how she has a new piece of music she would like to show him and asks Hannah if she would like to hear it and she says yes. Hannah watches how in awe Chuck is of his daughter playing the flute and it is for the first time she sees the real Chuck Palmer. As Hannah walks out and leaves the building a bunch of women are heading the opposite way heading into the building Chuck lives, the symbolism of that last scene was great.