More to be Desired: Jessa Johansson
True to HBO form, Girls is packed with complicated characters that require a bit of audience negotiation. They constantly teeter between redeemable and deplorable, and hold up a mirror to those qualities in each one of us watching.
But it's difficult to unpack the complexities of four distinct characters, each equally worthy of our consideration, in a mere 10 half hour segments. And it's particularly difficult to do so when those characters (despite their players' top billing) fade from narrative focus, or even occasionally disappear from the narrative altogether. That tends to happen in world of Girls, where Dunham makes a habit of sprinkling stand-alone vignettes throughout the serialized dramedy.
Consider this: in the seventh episode of season two, Jessa and Hannah visit Jessa's father and stepmother in upstate New York, where Jessa ultimately abandons Hannah. (Note: the other two leading ladies, Marnie and Shoshanna are nowhere to be found in that episode). Viewers didn't know it at the time, but that would be the last time they'd see or hear of Jessa until the season three premiere — nearly 11 months later.
Ironically enough, that episode ("Video Games") was written, according to Dunham, with the intention of stirring sympathy for Jessa. After all of her whimsical yet troubled high jinks (a move from France to New York, a possible pregnancy, an affair with her employer, and a failed marriage), this foray into her family life was meant to be a real moment of development for this character.
In a behind-the-scenes video, Dunham explains, "Jessa is perhaps the character we needed to see at home the most. She puts on this performance of being the most liberal, free-spirited, open girl. But she's actually so guarded and so performative." But while that episode did do some crucial work in building out a more nuanced character, all of that effort seemed to be for naught when she subsequently disappeared for the next 11 months.
A lot can happen in 11 months, both in the real world and in the scheme of the narrative, even if time is truncated between seasons. Most pertinently, viewers can become estranged from this character, someone they'd become attached to and invested in. Where was Jessa for all that time? The only information we can glean upon her return is that whatever she was doing landed her in a rehab facility, where she feels angry, repressed and starved for friendship.
There are two missed opportunities to be noted here: for one, the chance to keep audiences connected to Jessa through transmedia extensions, even while her story isn't playing out on screen. Even in absentia, Jessa is still very much a part of the Girls ecosystem, and part of it crumbles without her presence.
Moreover, both running away and a stint in rehab are narrative bends ripe for character development. If Girls was dealing in narrative immersion even half as much as they deal in social immersion, they could have taken Jessa's absence as an opportunity to further flesh out her inner demons through diary entries, visual art, or even stream of conscious tweeting, just as Dunham had intended with "Video Games." And all of this could have been distributed as transmedia extensions, without ever compromising the vignettes that Dunham and her cohort of creators had in mind.
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