Over the past four years, viewers have been able to grow up with the characters on Girls. Whether you identified with a romance like Hannah and Adam's, a break-up like Marnie's and Charlie's, or Shoshanna's huge career move at the end of Girls Season 4, the lives of the characters are hugely relatable. While promoting the Girls: The Complete Fourth Season Blu-ray and DVD, Bustle spoke with Zosia Mamet about Shoshanna's move to Japan and what it means for her future.
"I feel like there was a moment in Season 4 where Shoshanna hits rock bottom when trying to find a job... It was a real come-to-Jesus moment where she was like, 'Oh, this is just the world, this is my reality...'" Mamet says when discussing the major evolution Shoshanna went through in Season 4. "I think that's a wake-up moment that kids in our generation have when they graduate and try to find a job," she says, suggesting that there's a optimistic time where young adults assume everything will magically work out, and then the switch of, "Maybe it won't... Maybe I'll wake up tomorrow and have to figure out how to pay my rent."
Uh, yeah. That's a question that a lot of twenty-somethings are trying to figure out each day. Luckily for Shoshanna, she found a job. The only catch was the fact that it was in Japan.
On the show, Shoshanna's soup boyfriend Scott tells her to not take the amazing career opportunity so she can stay with him. In an complete "Hell Yeah!" moment for the once boy-crazed "girl," she decided to move to Japan while still trying to make her relationship work.
Mamet says that she doesn't think that Shoshanna would make the same decision in earlier seasons as she did in Season 4. In fact, she says, "Definitely not. I think she wanted a boyfriend, and she wanted to be in love, and she wanted to lose her virginity." In defense of that, Mamet says that at the time she doesn't think Shoshanna would have been able to handle going to Japan at that time in her life.
But was Japan just a means to escape what was happening in New York? Mamet doesn't think so. "I think that [moving to Japan] was an amazing opportunity and she is genuinely happy there. I also think that there are things that her Japan-high keeps her from figuring out," she says, noting that there are things Shoshanna needs to "fix," like her current relationship that she "doesn't actually want to be in."
Hopefully, in the Season 5 premiere on Feb. 21, Shoshanna doesn't fall into the trap where she chooses to ignore her problems rather than address them. She's made leaps and bounds from where she was in Season 1, but there's something to the saying, "Ignorance is bliss." Maybe her relationship with her soup boyfriend Scott will just disappear if she pretends like it doesn't exist?
Images: Geoff Johnson/HBO; giphy
