Lena Explains 'Girls' Romance With Patrick Wilson

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HBO

Lena Dunham is getting a lot of backlash after Sunday night's episode of Girls, titled Another Man's Trash, featured her character Hannah Horvath in the throes of passion with big-screen heartthrob Patrick Wilson, a.k.a. Dr. Joshua. Many critics are calling the episode a "fantastical, implausible story," but these writers may be surprised that Dunham sort of agrees with them.

The episode begins with Hannah dressed in a skimpy jumper showing up at the handsome, 40-something Joshua's (not Josh) brownstone in Brooklyn where the two begin a whirlwind, highly sexual romance that ends after two nights and involves a nude Ping-Pong scene. "I kind of wrote episode five in a fever dream," Dunham, 26, says of the now-controversial scenario in a HBO Inside the Episode piece. "Hannah got lost in a version of what could be her life."

The Golden Globe winner continues, "I like the idea that in her fantasy life she might be loved by sort of a stable, attractive older man with a great Brooklyn house."


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Critics from Esquire, Slate and Entertainment Weekly tore this episode apart, with even the feminist blog Jezebel writing: "Basically, nobody thought that it was remotely plausible that a successful doctor who looked like Patrick Wilson would be into a girl who looked like Lena Dunham."

Meanwhile, Slate's Daniel Engber said of the episode: "Narcissistic, childish men sleep with beautiful women all the time in movies and on TV, so why should this coupling be so difficult to fathom? I think it's because Hannah is especially and assertively ugly in this episode."


What do you think? Is this Girls romance between Dunham and Wilson so "implausible"?