Gossip Girl 3.03 “The Lost Boy” (aka Exchange Value)
If there’s anything that Mao Zedong, Milton Friedman, and Publilius Syrus could find common ground on, it’s that “Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.” The Marxian name for this is exchange value, in that the worth of something is determined at the point of transaction. Nowhere is this more evident than in an auction, where a madding crowd swarms over scarcities and determines what the prices of things really are. But one of the questions that art, and especially good art, wrestles with is how this economic truth clashes with the messy margin-less frontiers of human nature. Can you put a price on your lover? On the bonds of family? On vengeance?
Gossip Girl, 3.02 “The Freshman” (aka Anomie and Anarchy)
…the problem is that Blair may not be wrong. After all, Henry Kissinger has the blood of multitudes on his hands, but even now it’s hard to say he was definitively one hundred percent wrong. Similarly, Dan hooking up with Georgina is problematic, and not only because it adds to Gossip Girl’s “Let’s figure out every possible permutation of hooking-up that we can” quotient…
Californication and the Age Illusion
Riffing on a concept here: When the first wave of American film studios set up shop in Los Angeles a century ago, one of the benefits (besides evading the clutches of Thomas Edison’s patent-enforcement goons) was the area’s diverse set of looks and locales. Deserts, forests, beaches, grasslands — you could find it all within an hour of the city. And since one of the basic laws of movie magic is that with enough money you can make anything look like anything, Hollywood has recreated practically the entire world within the thirty-mile-zone.
Gossip Girl, 3.01 “Reversals of Fortune” (aka Bourgeoisification)
Gossip Girl begins its third season by spinning its wheels; whether that is a sign that is just picking up needed speed or that the show is retreading tired ground remains to be seen. Many plot threads that were set up in last season’s finale (Lily and Rufus’s son Scott, Serena’s father, Chuck and Blair) unwind as you would expect them to: Scott makes a secretive approach to the father who thinks he’s dead, while Serena acts out to try to get the attention of a father that might as well be. Meanwhile, Chuck and Blair seem happy, but are they really? The episode practically writes itself (except for the horse chase), which is never a good thing.
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