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…
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.
A Hypermodernist Critique of Gossip Girl: Entr’acte
With the recent release of the second season of Gossip Girl on DVD and its impending third season premiere on September 14, I believe it’s time to continue this little project that I’ve started. But rather than unleash a deluge of posts that risk making The Hypermodern look like a Gossip Girl fansite, here is the entire second season summed up in one list…
A Hypermodernist Critique of Gossip Girl, Part 5
But in the end, I have to give this series more credit than I did eighteen episodes ago; if for nothing else, it’s (in the words of another television character) tricking kids into thinking they’re not learning so they do. It’s Theory of the Leisure Class for teens who are allergic to books; it’s a bildungsroman for people who don’t even know what language that word is from. If The O.C. was A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Gossip Girl is Ulysses.
A Hypermodernist Critique of Gossip Girl, Part 4
In the past twelve episodes, Gossip Girl has explicitly or inadvertently touched on the following topics: the relationship between art and capital, the rise of the creative class, the persistence of neofeudalism and wealth condensation, the corrupting nature of consumerism, patriarchy and its effect on female self-image, the image-conception theory of identity, the pervasive nature of Western imperialism (Chuck Bass is basically Kermit Roosevelt), the fluid nature of the modern family unit, technological voyeurism and the permanence of information, the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Nash Equilibrium, the double standard inherent in the concept of honor, the fetishization of commodities, and the commoditization of sexuality. (In my style of analysis, I am greatly indebted to Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky’s commentary on Lord of the Rings. Seriously, if you want to read a real critique, that one will knock you on your ass.)
A Hypermodernist Critique of Gossip Girl, Part 3
Throughout this series I have referred to the work of Josh Schwartz when discussing the creative impetus of Gossip Girl. It’s a sort of shorthand, a synecdoche if you will, and I by no means want to appear as if I’m neglecting the fine work of the other writers, including co-creator Stephanie Savage and staff writers Felicia D. Henderson, Joshua Safran, Lenn K. Rosenfeld, Jessica Queller, and K.J. Steinberg. Television is an inherently collaborative medium, and when analyzing an ongoing series it’s especially intriguing to detect changes in voice and tone as the story progresses.
How these voices and tones are realized in the show depends on the dynamics of the room and the showrunner. Is a show so forcefully and uniquely bound to a showrunner that the series is defined by him or her, such as in any show run by Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, Studio 60)? Is the room looking for leadership in a way that a shakeup at the top drastically changes the show’s nature, as what happened to NBC’s Heroes? Or is the template and story larger than the writers themselves — no soloists, all chorus — like a House or a Law and Order?
A Hypermodernist Critique of Gossip Girl, Part 2
“I hope this nate plotline goes somewhere”
“because ‘My trust fund got drained, wah wah’”
“welcome to new york nate, you live in a city with a thousand homeless veterans”
A Hypermodernist Critique of Gossip Girl, Part 1
In May of 2009, Oscar Moralde embarked on a project for The Hypermodern: to watch the hit CW teen drama Gossip Girl through the lens of media and political-economic criticism. Presented via a chatlog with Hypermodern editor George Ding are Oscar’s real-time reactions to the show.
Although edits have been made for clarity and some informational links have been added, the following is mostly raw and unaltered. References to characters and events from Oscar Moralde’s feature screenplay 2400 are made; also, for our Peruvian and Cambodian readers, joking references are made to the Shining Path and the Khmer Rouge. No offense was intended, and our sincerest apologies for any it might cause.
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