Girls is absolutely one of those shows whose credits song matters. The way that Mad Men's closing tune is so important that Matthew Weiner was willing to pay $250 thousand to close out "Lady Lazarus" with "Tomorrow Never Knows," the songs that close out Hannah's adventures in self-importance not only place the episode in time, but they wrap out the emotional weight of the episode with a bow. This week, for Girls Season 4's episode "Triggering," the credits song was all about tone.
The lyrics to Jesse Woods' "Gold In The Air" could probably be described as "hipster fairy music" but nothing could have better closed out the scene in which Elijah and Hannah (still painted blue from her post-midnight drunken paint fight at an Iowa frat party) stumble back to Hannah's $800 dollar a month palace. The dreamy, early morning quality of the song adds a hopeful air to the end of Hannah's first week from hell.
She was torn down by her fellow workshop writers; her bike was stolen in Iowa; she found a bat in her house and slept in the bathroom; she broke her phone; she got in a fight with the guy at the student bookstore (SNL's Brooks Wheelan in a brief guest role); and until Elijah shows up, she's isolated from everyone she knows (she can't even get Shoshanna to accept a collect call, or get her parents to stay on the phone while they play Scrabble). She's clearly having a terrible time and that part where she drunkenly told an undergrad to stop crying over her long distance boyfriend and "get your dick wet" doesn't bode well for her future with Adam.
Elijah shows up, rescues her from her wallowing (even if it was only to save himself from seeing another woman "fisting herself on [his] stoop" in New York) and makes her go out and get undergrad-level wild. So things can't be all that bad, right? The lyrics from "Gold in the Air" seem to promise as much, though this is Girls, so I'm guessing it's a more temporary kind of OK:
I see gold in the air And promises in our strings I see love in our hearts And future in our dreams It's a tunnel kind a vision Like alcohol's involved And I'll stray like a hound dog But I'll come back when she calls
Image: Craig Blankenhorn/HBO
