We love to see a pretty girl losing

Marnie Michaels has an uncanny ability to bring a commercialized soulless sheen into everything she does. And that can be a gift...sort of.

On my rewatch of Girls, i am thinking about “pretty privilege” and specifically when Marnie loses her job as a gallery assistant and it is suggested she get a “pretty person job.” Not as a model, obviously (as Shoshanna and Ray are quick to point out)—but as a hostess or something else where she’d benefit from her looks. Marnie is humbled a few different times in her career endeavors. When she and Desi write their song, her friends point out that it’s a “perfect” song, meaning It’s the kind of song you have to listen to a million times before you realize you have no choice but to embrace the earworm.

She is a girl who is obviously beautiful, but it doesn’t take her anywhere particularly good or interesting. And I suspect that she has also suffered from the plight of wishing she were a slightly different type of beautiful woman, much like a one percenter complaining about being broke. So she’s pretty—and what does that get her? Bad sex with a gay guy, feeling stuck in a 4 year relationship with a man whose love is “smothering” and disgusts her, a marriage to a self-involved delusional manchild, and the only good man she dates resented her for years before deciding he wanted her as a representational trophy of a “type of girl” he could never get.

marnie’s beauty is mostly an asset that allows her to be condescending towards people because perhaps she assumes she will always have better options. she hasn’t worked through the task of trying to ever “use” her looks to a high ROI probably because she doesn’t believe that things will ever be handed to her.

i see her as the Miranda of the show because on a fundamental level, she is self-sufficient and never expects a man to take care of her. She wouldn’t even know how to relinquish control, in part because she never dates men she respects enough to lead her anywhere worth going. Charlotte sticks to her ideals of love and partnership, accepts that it may not come from an handsome Old Money WASP, but comes close enough and marries a homely rich Jewish lawyer who is completely devoted to her and is not without his own sturdy masculinity. And it is Shoshanna, like Charlotte, who adapts most gracefully to challenges and overcomes adversity. Perhaps in part it is because of the financial safety net of her (also divorced) parents, but Shoshanna was raised in some of modern Jewish tradition and has gone through the initiation rituals of people in her cultural milieu. She has an awareness that there are others like her, yet chooses to hang out with her older cousin’s “cool” loser friends. Shoshanna has certain expectations for herself, maintains a sense of entitlement, and ultimately delivers on realistic goals. So she slipped up in her studies her senior year, but does interview at Ann Taylor, Mckinsey, and within two years ends up working for a mid-sized but influential trendy branding agency Silver Horn. (This is the show’s nod to Red Antler, whose notable D2C clients include Casper, Allbirds, and Versed. They specialize in branding elevated products for basic aspirational class bitches.) She might be a girlboss, but she’s sticking to her prescribed path of traditional Jewish high-performing NYU grad. Marnie, like Miranda, is a pragmatist with no guiding principles beyond a redeeming loyalty to her friends, best served by a meritocratic system. She is ambitious, but towards seemingly random goals and undeserving people.

Marnie works hard, stays disciplined, maintains her hygiene and still “loses” to jessa, who is the kind of effortless beauty who can get a millionaire to marry her within a month. she can still be resentful that there is a girl, a trustafarian dropout addict at that, who doesn’t do any of the “right” things that she does and yet still manages to live life on easy mode. marnie has parental abandonment issues, too! she experienced early adultification! where’s her medal for not becoming an addict? where’s her chance to become a stay at home girlfriend? is she not more deserving of a trust fund than jessa?

Marnie is not cool enough for the kind of job she once aspired to. the cultural gatekeepers have made that very clear. (In contrast, Jessa gets a job in that world right away as an artist’s assistant, although it’s not for her curatorial eye per se.) and for the first few seasons Marnie feels like she’s invested too much in being creative-adjacent to pack it up and go to law school just yet. Her utter lack of subversive edge makes her so funny.

She is smart and talented and pretty, so why is she such a massive flop? it’s not her abrasive and uptight personality alone. She lacks the temperament of an art world socialite, and her tidy Ann Taylor sheath dresses are off-putting to the bohemian leisure class. She is pulled in by the elusive allure of cultural capital, and the fact that she is invested in a career at all is off-putting to her colleagues. At her core, she’s an EY consultant or a product manager—someone with the good handwriting and productive work habits that would be rewarded in the worlds run by second gen immigrants who went to Harvard and Berkeley.

i hope for her sake she does go through with law school. if her uptightness and pedestrian sense of creativity alienates her from her layabout friend group, she’d probably be embraced as the “token artsy friend” among the careerist law students. She’s not without merits, having retained some degree of contemporary art know-how, upper middle class professionalism, and even a record deal at one point. Desi never would have made it that far without her own vision of their terrible music, “She and Him except they’re actually in love”—which is more sellable and on top of that indistinguishable from what he believes is gritty folk americana. Marnie has an uncanny ability to bring a commercialized soulless sheen into everything she does. If she had just gotten used to having a more responsible friend group, she’d have found a way to be appreciated for it.