6 — Tuesday, April 18, 2017
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
I’m not going to compare my
college graduation to the series
finale of a TV show.
It’s common knowledge that
everyone who likes TV sees their
own life as a TV show. We see
ourselves as the protagonist of
an indie movie, complete with
romantic subplots and a built-in
coming-of-age narrative. If you’re
a person who watches a lot of TV,
it’s impossible to avoid looking at
graduation — whether it’s from
high school or college or med
school or anything — as a series
finale of sorts.
That’s how it was for me
during my senior year of high
school, anyway. I knew relatively
early on where I’d be going to
college the following year, and
that allowed me to experience
most of the year as sentimentally
as possible. I hung out with my
friends all the time, savoring the
time I had left with them. I wrote
heartfelt notes on the back of
wallet-size senior pictures and
told people what they meant to
me, even wrote full letters to some
as they left to move into their
new dorms. I’m embarrassed to
admit it, but I actually tabulated
a list of my friends, complete with
schedules of how often to keep
in contact with them based on
what ‘friendship tier’ they fit in.
My very closest friends belonged
in the ‘talk to every
week’ category, while
my good friends were
‘text every two to
four weeks,’ and my
vague tertiary friends
were ‘text every now
and then.’ I thought
I could keep a strict
schedule in order to maintain my
various high school friendships.
Of course, that didn’t happen.
I think I failed the first week I
moved away. As I would learn
over the course of college, and as
I’m still learning now, endings
can never be perfect. Closure isn’t
always possible, and sometimes
things must come to an end
without a tidy resolution. The end
of college is, of course, also the
beginning of something new and
exciting, but it’s wrong to pretend
it isn’t the end of something
important and irreplaceable.
My senior year of college has
been imperfect in a way that
high school never was. The
pressure of post-grad plans has
hung over everyday life like an
ominous cloud, preventing me
from fully feeling the weight of
everything, from processing the
fact that it’s all actually ending.
Besides, college endings are
weird and anticlimactic — back
in middle school, on the last
day of school, we’d all sign each
other’s yearbooks, and at least
in high school we all had the
same last day of school, the same
prom, the same graduation date.
In college, people all move out
at different times depending on
their final exam schedules and
their summer plans. There’s
no climactic day when you can
deliver your perfect goodbye to
everyone you care about.
Last night, I watched the
series finale of “Girls.” “Girls”
has never precisely been about
college, but the journey Hannah
Horvath (Lena Dunham, “Tiny
Furniture”) goes on seems to
parallel my own, in some ways.
It’s a coming-of-age story about a
young woman whose perspective
of the world and herself shifts
over the years. I started watching
“Girls” the summer before its
third season aired, which also
meant the summer before college
began for me. It feels fitting that
the show is coming to an end just
as my college experience comes to
an end.
The series finale of “Girls”
was
an
anticlimactic
affair,
filled with low-key moments
of connection and growth. If
“Girls” had a bombastic ending
with massive leaps of character
development, it’d be disingenuous
to the spirit of the show, which
has always been concerned with
emotional realism. The closest
“Girls” got to a traditional sitcom
ending, complete with satisfying
emotional catharsis, was actually
the penultimate episode. And
even that was hardly conventional
— sure, all four of the main
characters appeared onscreen for
the first time in more than a year,
but the scene ended with them
decisively ending their friendship.
These women have outgrown
each other, and the show is bold
enough to suggest that they were
never there for each other in the
first place.
Many times this past year, I’ve
craved big moments of finality,
sappy
reminiscing
sessions
with friends and huge personal
revelations,
like
the
crowd-
pleasing series finales of shows
like “Friends,” “The Office” and
“Parks and Recreation.”
I’ve managed to have a couple.
One night at a party I bonded
with my friend Sam, talking
honestly about heartbreak when
the only things we’d really talked
about before that were TV and
movies. A week ago, I spent a full
day with my close friend Shev,
hammocking in the breezy spring
weather and just talking for
hours. My fantasy this year was
to have a day like that with each
of my friends, a day after which
I could safely feel like we’d given
our friendships the attention they
deserved.
But I’m sensing the end of
college, in reality, will be more like
the finale of “Girls.”
In “Girls,” Hannah
didn’t reach perfect
moments of closure
with most of the
characters. She made
peace, to a degree,
with her ex-boyfriend
Adam and her ex-best
friend Jessa, but it’s unlikely
they’ll ever be close again. She
almost completely forgot about
her old friend Shoshanna, and
her friendship with Elijah will
remain long-distance as long as
he’s pursuing showbiz fame in
New York City. She hasn’t talked
to her ex-coworker Ray since she
awkwardly tried to give him road
head and he crashed the truck.
Even her best friend Marnie
is still self-centered, helping
Hannah raise her baby just to give
her own life meaning.
Some people will criticize
this ending as incomplete and
unsatisfying. But “Girls” is a
purposely untidy show, based
on incremental growth and a
realistic lack of easy closure. It
reflects my life better than those
closure-heavy
sitcoms.
The
ending of “Girls” is imperfect,
just like my own senior year. I
haven’t connected with all the
people I’ve wanted to this year.
I’ve failed to stay in touch with
some of my favorite friends. On
the positive side, I’ve continued
to form connections with new
people, even in the last month of
my senior year — but that’s untidy
in its own way, because I’m sad
I won’t be able to build on those
new friendships when I leave Ann
Arbor. These are some of the same
imperfections that riddle the last
season of “Girls.”
And here I am now, comparing
my senior year to a final season
even though I said I wouldn’t do
that. Old habits.
Here’s what I know: If my
college experience was a TV
show, the series finale wouldn’t
show the moment I throw my
cap into the air or hug my best
friends goodbye. It wouldn’t
show a flashforward to the
moment I step out of a plane
and see Manhattan in the flesh
(and hell, I don’t know when that
flashforward would even be set
— maybe a month from now, or
maybe a year, or maybe never).
It would show something
more subtle, like the shot that
closes “Girls,” with Hannah’s
subtle expression of confidence
and accomplishment. My series
finale would end on something
quiet and intimate, like closing
my laptop at the arts desk,
or biting into a slice of South
U pizza, or laughing at some
stupid meme. Or maybe I’d
just be sitting alone in bed,
watching the end of one of my
favorite TV shows, smiling a bit
as the credits started to roll.
College, TV &
the imperfect
closing scene
DAILY TV COLUMN
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