18 Reasons Why Marnie from GIRLS Is The Most Cringeworthy Character Ever
1. She’s too typical.
Especially in her vapid commentary on the social media device Instagram. At Hannah’s birthday she told Hannah she loved planning the party, adding, “And I’ll have a bunch of party pics to post to Instagram, because I know he checks it”—”he” being her ex-boyfriend Charlie. And in the episode this past Sunday she admitted to Hannah, Shoshanna and Jessa the real reason she wanted them to have a weekend getaway at her beach house, “I thought that this would be a good opportunity to have fun together and prove to everyone via Instagram that we can still have fun as a group.”
Marnie really just has to go there, doesn’t she? She just HAS to go and become a living and breathing manifestation of everything that’s wrong with our self-obsessed society. It’s nothing we all haven’t thought before, but at least do us the decency of not announcing it out loud.
2. She made Hannah’s birthday party all about herself.
First she makes the comment about being excited to take pictures and upload them to Instagram, which she hopes will make Charlie jealous. Charlie—seemingly her only priority and reason for throwing the party. And then she makes the mistake of thinking the stage is worthy of her presence. It’s not her birthday, and yet for some reason she hogs the mic and the center of attention the entire night. Which brings us to the next point…
3. She can’t resist a good stage.
Granted she first gets on stage at Hannah’s party to wish her a happy birthday, but then that fake-seeming gesture is rendered entirely obsolete when she calls Hannah up to the stage to sing a song from Rent—something Hannah expressly stated she didn’t want to do. We see Marnie at her most pitiable self as Hannah trails off and exits the stage, leaving her to sing in front of an empty crowd.
4. Her outfits.
In particular, the dress she wore to Hannah’s party. What was that? Did she have a derby to attend to after the party?
5. Her “music video.”
You know, the one Charlie “made” her do? And the one that Hannah so dutifully noted Marnie was clearly very complicit in? The video is actually hard to watch—probably because we’re not even sure if Allison Williams is being serious or is even capable of making fun of herself. And of course there’s her unforgivable hair-do when the video cuts to her in the stairwell. It seems she was channeling Mary-Kate and Ashley à la So Little Time (pictured below), and it hurt to watch.
6. She claimed to be above the commenters.
Her claim “I don’t read the comments” as Shosh was reading aloud some scathing commentary on Marnie’s Youtube video seemed to encapsulate her fundamental problem. If any one character cares about what people think of her it’s Marnie—we all know this, her friends all know this. And yet, she’s still trying to put up a front, and in front of her supposed “best friends” too. She’s so irreversibly, depressingly insecure that she can’t even be honest with her closest friends. You almost feel bad for her, until you realize that she’s bringing it all on herself.
7. The way she does pull-ups.
Why does it look like she’s having an orgasm when she does a goddamn pull-up, huh? What about pull-ups does she find so shit-eating-grin satisfying? Very curious behavior if you ask me…
8. She’s insincere.
Evidence of this is rampant, but her disingenuousness sort of culminated in the scene when she’s alone in her apartment listening to a self-help, namaste tape. If she wants to commit herself to this type of therapy, fine—then do it. But instead she plays the tape and then drowns it out with her blender. ‘Sup with that, Marns? You know you’re only cheating yourself, right?
9. She’s painfully self-obsessed and pathetically fixated on status.
She gives women everywhere a bad name. She’s obviously smart and qualified and yet it’s not these traits she harps on but the crass fact that “fancy people want to work with me.”
10. She’s disastrously oblivious.
She reaches new heights of unconsciousness that we didn’t even know was possible. Going to Ray’s to merely ask him “What’s wrong with me?” only epitomizes her general and pervasive ignorance.
11. She’s exceedingly snobby and for no good reason at all.
When she first shows up, unbidden, to Ray’s place in Brooklyn she says, ” I could never live all the way out here. Once you move to Manhattan, it’s kinda hard to move back to Brooklyn,” voicing an opinion that’s actually quite rare among 20-somethings living in NYC these days. Brooklyn has morphed into a 20-something haven, and it’s obvious from Marnie’s priorities that her living preference depends only on how it will affect her perceived status.
12. She has sex with Ray.
It must be said: Marnie is a babe, and she could do so much better than Ray. It also felt like a slap in the face to feminism when Marnie’s lust for Ray grew after he called her a “huge fat fucking phony.”
13. She might be dating Ray.
Have we forgotten that Ray and Shoshanna used to date? Shoshanna—one of Marnie’s 3 supposed “best friends”?? No decent girl would ever hook up with her best friend’s ex-boyfriend, let alone date him. And if the way Marnie spoke about Ray at her beach house is any indication, there is nary a bone in her body that sees anything wrong with this.
14. She tries too hard.
A fact that was ever more conspicuous in this past episode. From the name tags to the rigorously detailed schedule, to just being an overall lame-ass, if Marnie has one fatal flaw it would be this: she tries too hard. We know she wants to rekindle her friendship with Hannah, but it’s as if she’s on her knees, grasping at hannah’s ankles, refusing to let go. She’s forcibly trying to make Hannah closer to her by continuously pulling Hannah away from the group to “talk.” In light of this, Hannah’s parents don’t seem all that bad.
15. She might be 4 years old.
The evidence: on their “weekend getaway,” she tells the 3 other girls, “I was actually thinking the healing would take place during dinner, but after that we would do face masks and watch The Queens of Comedy, and then we could maybe write our wishes down on pieces of paper and throw them into a bonfire so they would come true. But for now, we have to go grocery shopping.”
16. She’s too proud a wasp.
We get that she’s a wasp, but would it hurt to tone down the comments like this: “The North Fork is where people go who think the Hamptons are tacky and don’t want to be on a beach that’s near J. Crew.”
17. She admits to knowing every line in Rent.
How about putting a crumb of effort into not offending others Marnie? How ’bout it? I thought it was an unspoken agreement amongst all white girls that we shall never admit to knowing the lines in Rent. Why you gotta expose us like this?
18. She’s a perfectionist.
And the really destructive kind too—the type who imposes and inflicts his or her own perfectionist habits and compulsions onto others. She turned a fun (was it even fun though?) dance routine into a boot camp drill. The girls were finally able to let loose, only to then have the fun sucked right out of them when Marnie asks to do the dance again because Hannah was one count off and it needs to be “perfect.” 