Gossip Girl 3.12 “The Debarted” (aka Patrimony)
The time of Gossip Girl‘s pilot may seem like so long ago that it is easy to forget that it actually had a relatively sophisticated narrative structure, the highlight being the use of a fourth-wall breaking flashback to link two interconnected scenes that were separated by space but not by theme. This episode, written by Executive Producer Stephanie Savage, recalls some of that style — it features less naturalistic tricks such as starting... Read More
Gossip Girl 3.11 “The Treasure of Serena Madre” (aka Detournement)
Those that scaped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune throw with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatchte, and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyer, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and sente there of, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave the prayers... Read More
Gossip Girl 3.10 “The Last Days of Disco Stick” (aka The Gagaesque Modality)
Two of my recent focuses in media analysis have been Gossip Girl and Lady Gaga; the show played a large number of her tracks last season, so perhaps it was inevitable they would eventually collide. Nevertheless, it’s kind of like the Beagle landing at the Galapagos for me. While my 7200-word feature article on Lady Gaga’s videography awaits editorial approval, consider this a preface to that piece. Oh yeah, I guess other stuff happened... Read More
Gossip Girl 3.09 “They Shoot Humphreys, Don’t They?” (aka Power Transition Theory)
It came as a shock to me — though it really shouldn’t have been — when I found out that the main demographic for Gossip Girl was not teenaged girls (which only make 16% of the viewership) but “18- to 34-year-old women, with a median viewer age of 27 years old.” It doesn’t change my primary analysis, and it makes sense: the kids from the Upper East Side and their hyper-literate self-awareness seem like it would skew... Read More
Gossip Girl 3.08 “The Grandfather: Part II” (aka Categorical Imperative)
One of the reasons that it is so easy to see echoes of real philosophy and political theory in Gossip Girl is that we can see the machinations of these teenagers as reflections of the real world; their sometimes-clumsy, sometimes-petty schemes recreate adult social structures. But what about when the show attempts to actually portray those adult social structures directly and with an attempt to actually say something, as they do with William “Trip”... Read More
Gossip Girl 3.07 “How to Succeed in Bassness” (aka Mask of Command)
In contemplating which tyrant Jenny Humphrey (Taylor Momsen) most closely resembles, there are several choices. Robespierre, who initially spouted platitudes about liberty and equality and liberty yet became as bloody-handed as the monarchs he replaced? Or Stalin, who was born of peasant stock but rose through the ranks via connections, cruelty, and subterfuge? No, if you want to find the most intriguing parallels, you have to turn elsewhere; Jenny... Read More
Gossip Girl 3.06 “Enough About Eve” (aka Social Identity Theory)
This week’s episode of Gossip Girl is a very combative one: Vanessa versus Blair, the Van Der Bilts versus the Buckleys, aristocrats versus egalitarians — it’s all about pitting faction against faction. In an earlier review, I addressed how the American worker was pacified by getting the working class to look up and identify with their exploiters. Part of that was accomplished by associating the ruling class and the workers together... Read More
Gossip Girl 3.05 “Rufus Getting Married” (aka Screwballs)
This episode of Gossip Girl centers around the marriage of Rufus (Matthew Settle) and Lily (Kelly Rutherford), but also uses that lens of marriage to focus on the myriad other couplings and re-couplings in the world of the show; they even start with a montage of them all. The film theorist Stanley Cavell identified the “comedy of remarriage,” a subset of the screwball genre. The comedy of remarriage cements the contemporary image of marriage... Read More
Gossip Girl 3.04 “Dan de Fleurette” (aka Perestroika)
One well that the storylines of Gossip Girl keep coming back to is the nature of identity; the show likes riffing on its various permutations and showing how it’s constructed. Most importantly, it’s formed from the intersection of other people’s perceptions, and this drives most of the social gamesmanship that takes place — it’s all about perception control. But the most important thing is that a gulf exists between how... Read More
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 term 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... Read More
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