The advert is catchy, maybe too catchy. According to the Darwin Marketing blog, the animated donkey made such an impression that people who wanted to visit the site couldn’t remember the name and instead of typing Ganji (赶集), which means “hurry to the market,” they typed Ganlv (赶驴) which translates to “hurry a donkey.”

One company’s loss is another’s gain however, and one of Ganji’s competitors, Baixing, also a classifieds website, quickly snatched up ganlvwang.com and diverted traffic to their main site at baixing.com. Baixing wasn’t exactly shy about riding another company’s coattails. A comparison of their logos says it all.

Ganji’s slogan is: “Ganji, we have everything,” while Ganlv opted for the more Socratic, “Ganlv, what don’t we have?” Aside from the semantic differences, Ganlv has shamelessly imitated Ganji’s logo design, color scheme, and typesetting. Though ganlvwang.com now redirects to baixing.com, another website, ganlva.com, is using ganlvwang.com’s logo on their homepage, which appears to be an Internet portal. It is unclear whether or not this new website is connected with Baixing.

But this isn’t the end of the story. Now on the subways one can hear another shout-based commercial for 58.com, yet another classifieds website. Instead of shouting “Ganji la!” at the camera, TV actress Yang Mi shouts “Wu ba tong cheng!” (58同城) into a magical laptop; and instead of shouting once during the commercial, she shouts twice.

Aside from the amateurish CG and inane sound effects, the worst part about these commercials is that they play on what seems like a continuous loop on buses and subways around town. I feel crappy enough squeezing onto the subway in the morning without people constantly yelling at me.

Though Ganji’s advertising campaign is not representative of Chinese advertising in general, the story behind their advert does reinforce the oft-repeated maxim about why it doesn’t pay to innovate in China. Ganji’s entire advertising campaign cost a reported RMB 200 million but why should Baixing spend millions on an ad themselves when they can just siphon off inattentive customers from a competing website? As for 58.com, why come up with an original tv spot when you can just imitate another that has proven to be successful?

As annoying as their commercial is, Ganji deserves credit for creating a successful ad. Hopefully, for my sake and the sake of everyone who takes public transportation in Beijing, 58.com’s imitation will be the end of it and this won’t start an ad war that devolves, literally, into a yelling match.

UPDATE: A better, more creative advertising campaign from Semir.

The latest episode of NBC’s The Office (Thursdays, 9 PM) entitled “China” uses Michael (Steve Carell) and his newfound fear of China’s economic power as the launching point for its storyline. It’s interesting how this ambivalence towards corporate internationalism seems to be of a piece with another NBC Thursday sitcom, Outsourced. And while that other show appears to be the most egregious example of racial minstrelsy on network television since The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer or perhaps Homeboys in Outer Space, The Office manages to poke fun at American naivety about China while exploring the political and cultural fears permeating the China discussion.

“China” frames its A-story as a debate between Michael and Oscar (Oscar Núñez) the accountant, who is pegged as the office’s know-it-all. After Michael reads an alarmist Newsweek article about the Chinese economy, he tries to get the whole office fired up about the threat to America. Michael focuses on China’s massive population base and its large holdings of American debt, while Oscar points out how much of China remains overwhelmingly agrarian and America’s comparative advantage in the higher-potential information sector. But the substance of the arguments are largely irrelevant, because it’s a sitcom and not The Situation Room, so the debate is more of a pretext for the denizens of Dunder-Mifflin Scranton to score a point against the haughty Oscar. However, there are interesting analogues in Ellie Kemper’s portrayal of Erin the receptionist as the dumb naïf who passively accepts whatever Michael says about China, and how Michael loses the debate on substance but triumphs by papering over the argument with meaningless platitudes and an unswerving faith in American exceptionalism.

This is the same debate that’s played out for years, with Michael taking on the role of the “blue team,” a faction of American foreign policy analysts who believe that China is America’s preëminent potential threat on a number of levels. They reached their peak in the 1990s when the triple whammy of China’s economic boom, its spotty human rights record, and political friction with Taiwan put a spotlight on the region. After being cast into the wilderness when the War on Terror took precedence, the blue team and their ideas have had a resurgence since the economic crisis brought China’s complicated relationship with America and American corporations into stark relief.

But for a sitcom episode using the situation as a pretext for character comedy, there are quite a few incisive points to find here, especially in the show’s seemingly-unrelated B-story. Dwight (Rainn Wilson), an employee at Dunder-Mifflin that also happens to be the office building’s landlord, begins instituting annoying cost-cutting measures such as installing motion sensors for the lights and reducing the toilet paper in the restrooms to half-ply. Pam (Jenna Fischer), in her new role as office administrator, engages in a battle of wits with Dwight to thwart his plans.

The battle for creature comforts placed against the A-story’s China debate generates an entirely different context, bringing it home to Pam’s role as a worker. As consumers, our standards of living are dependent on cheap goods provided by a cheap workforce; but as workers, we’re disturbed by that same workforce who, if not “taking” jobs outright through overseas capital flight, pose a bogeyman threat to worker rights by encouraging a race to the bottom. This is internalized in Pam, a character who has repeatedly changed career paths and is crippled by the fear that she’s not good at any of them, and thus has no economic power of her own. With the ending that this episode gives her (in which Dwight “lets Pam win” to boost her confidence), the message seems to be that the only security we can find in this situation is an illusion.

It’s all about illusions. As Michael displays in this episode, the average American’s engagement with China is through its products and through heavily filtered and spotty reportage. China exists not as a people but as a collection of objects and financial obligations, a vague entity from which it’s easy to construct a looming threat. Even Oscar’s sober rationalism rests on some degree of belief in American long-term triumphalism from the limited information he has access to. A Beijinger columnist once argued that there is no such thing as a “China expert.” There are only people who have lived and breathed China for years and yet only have a narrow specialized base of information that is dangerous to generalize from. The real gap isn’t economics; it’s information, and that’s why much of the political discourse on China approaches the level of a series of sitcom gags.

When I was living in China this past summer, a frequent topic of conversation would be television. And when speaking to a native Chinese person about it, their response would be, without fail, something along the lines of: “Oh, I love American television! Do you like The Big Bang Theory? I love The Big Bang Theory! My favorite character is Sheldon. Who’s your favorite character?”

Within my small sample size of Chinese television viewers, there were several near-unanimous favorites. Gossip Girl was one of them; the appeal of a show about the dramatic escapades of hip and sexy American rich kids seems obvious, but my other work for the Hypermodern examines the levels of political and social critique embedded in that CW soap. Prison Break was another, and while there is a certain interest in speculating about how the Chinese live vicariously through a show about the wrongfully-imprisoned fighting against a shadowy government cabal, my curiosity ended there.

The Big Bang Theory, on the other hand, was a conundrum. The CBS sitcom about nerds (Thursdays, 8 PM) is in the middle of its fourth season and is a hit in the States as well. The show comes from television sitcom super-producer Chuck Lorre, whose legacy stretches back to working on Roseanne but more recently includes Two and a Half Men (the title greatly overstates the maturity level of the show) and Dharma & Greg (the television equivalent of punching a small child in the face). The show was co-created by former computer programmer Bill Prady, who previously worked with Lorre on Dharma & Greg; together with physicist and technical consultant David Saltzberg, he’s responsible for the show’s “nerd accuracy.” However, as any nerd can tell you, there is a difference between accuracy and precision.

BBT’s central characters are a group of young scientists and engineers who work at Caltech. Sheldon (Jim Parsons) is the quasi-Asperger’s genius of the group, an eccentric who finds it difficult to understand social situations except scientifically. His roommate Leonard (Johnny Galecki) is the well-adjusted one; his pining for—and eventually, relationship with—attractive girl next door and aspiring actress Penny (Kaley Cuoco) was a main focus of earlier seasons but was eventually downplayed for more of Sheldon’s antics. The cast is rounded out by Raj (Kunal Nayyar), an Indian physicist who can’t speak to women unless he’s drinking, and Howard (Simon Helberg), a self-proclaimed ladies’ man who lives with his perpetually-offscreen mother.

The comedic template of BBT is usually “The nerds try to do something that normal people do but things get wacky Because They Are Nerds.” It’s also often more specifically “The nerds try to interact with women but things get wacky Because They Are Nerds.” This is not an entirely awful premise for a show, and in fact is the basic template for many sitcoms; for example, if you crossed out “nerd” and replaced it with “snobbish cultural elitist”, you’d have the logline to Frasier. The difference is that Frasier was funny.

The problem here isn’t in the performances; they’re mostly serviceable, and the cast does have some level of natural charisma that threatens to cut through the material. It’s admirable in a way, like soldiers sent to the battlefield without adequate supplies and equipment and yet they fight anyway because it’s their duty. If the live studio audience howls at “[Social situation] is like [scientific concept]” or “[Sci-fi, video game, or comic book reference awkwardly shoehorned into conversation]”, the two things that make up the majority of the show’s “jokes”, it must be from these actors’ sheer physicality, from their goofy mannerisms and their wide-open body language. It’s certainly not from anything like plot or dialogue.

Earlier this year, porn distributor New Sensations released Big Bang Theory: A XXX Parody, whose title is self-explanatory. Pop quiz: try to identify whether the following quotes are from A) The Big Bang Theory or B) Big Bang Theory: A XXX Parody.

1. “Cultural perceptions are subjective. Penny, to your mind, are you a slut?”
2. “You let her drive around in the NASA Mars rover?” “Yeah, and everything went great until she ran that bus full of nuns off the road!”
3. “Oh God, that feels so good…oh, oh, oh, that’s the spot. Oh baby.”
4. “I don’t want to speak to the FBI!” “Why not?” “I’m brown and I talk funny!”

At times, the parody seems funnier than the show, although part of that is from the contemplation that a porno might be better written than, you know, an actual television show. And it’s difficult to say which is more misogynistic; although Two and a Half Men is your Lorre go-to for a vile parade of women-as-sex-objects, BBT has its troubling moments, not only in the clichéd characterization of Penny but in the way Sara Gilbert’s “girl nerd” character, Leslie, was demoted in the third season and then written off because the writers couldn’t find “quality material” for her. (By the way, quote number 2 is from the parody. The rest are from the show.)

In conversations with and about Chinese viewers of BBT, we considered the possibility they watch the show differently than American audiences do. The character traits on display (working in scientific and technical fields, social awkwardness, an adult professional living with his mother) are perhaps more relatable to Chinese young adults than the vast majority of other American shows. And maybe because of the language gap, the dialogue recedes into the background in favor of the broader and more physical aspects of the comedy. Another element is that it’s a rather inviting caricature of American culture; one English teacher in China I spoke to called it “to them what Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is to us”. But Chinese viewers perceive that they are laughing with these characters, as opposed to American audiences, whom Chinese viewers picture as laughing at the characters instead. It’s not really fair to paint either the Chinese or American audiences with one brush; a show with an enormous audience like BBT has many different groups of viewers with their own reasons for liking the show, scavenging what humor and quality they can. But the show’s template, the pattern on which its episodes are constructed, will guide those audiences one way or another.

The more episodic a show is—that is, the more it tries to have each unit of story be self-contained—the more the show’s template takes on the aspect of law. The draw of the episodic show is the way that its template creates a comfortable rhythm and imposes order; it makes assumptions and places constraints on the world. For example, the specific details of the weekly medical mystery on House are irrelevant; they’re an excuse to watch the characters on that show play some slight Goldberg-like variation on the show’s core themes: that physical frailty is the expression of moral frailty, and that we create illusory realities to hide from the pain of the world.

So if there is something fundamentally wrong with an episodic show, it’s because there’s something fundamentally wrong with the show’s template. In BBT’s case, it’s because the show operates from a foundation of broken caricature. It’s never overtly or actively malicious, and critical accusations of the series being a “nerd minstrel show” are a bit overblown, but the series is less a story about nerd characters than it is a story that uses its characters as vehicles for nerd jokes. When caricature is wielded properly, it achieves through its distortion and abstraction an acknowledgement of our common humanity by pulling performers and audience towards the same comic level. It’s possible to laugh both at and with someone at the same time. It’s the way the animated sci-fi comedy Futurama can take nerdy topics and make them the foundation of great comedy; that writing staff is able to take something as potentially dry as mathematical pairing theory and use it as the premise for brisk, madcap farce. Futurama works because no matter how outlandish or wonky their plots get, their characters feel like people (even if they’re aliens or robots).

BBT pretends to live in that space; the fact that there is any humanism embedded in the writing at all must be attributed to co-creator Bill Prady, who also worked on shows such as Gilmore Girls that tried to tell stories about actual thinking, feeling people. Lorre sitcoms are aggressively unfunny because they operate from a narrow vision of humanity where the pettiness and brokenness of people are on display; but rather than locate some semblance of story or humor there, they cruelly use them as vehicles for a disconnected series of stale jokes. These shows try to sugarcoat their misanthropy with the slick, colorful stylings of the traditional sitcom setup and try to wipe your memory with rapid sound-and-color transitions between their short scenes, but these things can’t mask the utter detachment the stories have from the characters in them.

It’s telling that there is a clearer voice and real humor to be found on Lorre’s “vanity cards” at the end of each episode which have various thoughts, stories and rants written on them. When Lorre personally writes about himself or his actors or real people he knows, as opposed to pushing bundles of cliché through the sausage grinder of his writers’ rooms, there are some actual sparks. One card this season was a list of “new rules” for his actors following Kaley Cuoco’s horseback riding accident:

1. No friggin’ horses. This includes those found on merry-go-rounds and in front of supermarkets.

2. The only motorcycle you can get on is the one you’re accidentally crushing in your big-ass, air-bagged SUV.

3. All cast member motor vehicles must adhere to U.S. Army guidelines for attacking Kandahar. (Galecki’s Tesla is a terrifically fuel efficient vehicle but is essentially a hundred thousand dollar go-cart. From now on it is only to be used for backing down his driveway and retrieving mail.)

The whole list flashes by so fast you need to pause the video to read them, which means the funniest parts of a Lorre show last for literally half a second.

It’s almost tragic how you can see the cast of BBT try to fight against the hegemony of the Lorre sitcom mold. When you have a strong actor that can rise above the material (like Cybill Shepherd in her eponymous sitcom, also created by Lorre), the tension generates something that’s at least watchable. On Two and a Half Men, you can see the leads being complicit in their own dehumanization. And when you have weak actors utterly dominated by the material, the purest form of Lorre’s vision is realized in a grotesque stillbirth like Dharma & Greg. The actors on BBT are somewhere in the middle, and you can see in the show’s few moments of actual warmth and humor their active resistance against being treated like soulless joke-delivering automatons. Perhaps it’s a bit Brechtian after all.

An article in the Wall Street Journal profiled the women writers behind the hit AMC drama Mad Men, where they make up the majority of the staff. Such a writers’ room is a rarity; more often seen is a writers’ room composed entirely of men. But the world of television is a utopia of diversity in comparison to the feature world. Try this little test: think of all the contemporary Hollywood directors you can name. Now think of all the women on that list. I like to think I’m well versed in these things, and I barely need more than one hand to count the number in the second category.

There are two questions that revolve around this issue: Why is there such a lack of representation of women in Hollywood, and why is television slightly more diverse than features? It’s especially interesting in this historical moment where the Sotomayor nomination revealed quite a bit of rhetoric with the unspoken assumption that the white male was the standard of unbiased neutrality. There has been a mountain of writing on this very topic, but let’s try to sketch some points out.

It goes without question that the majority of what comes out of Hollywood is saddled with some sort of inequality of representation. My favorite of these tests: think of the last dozen films you’ve seen, and think of the most prominent woman in each one. Now how many of those women are more than a wife/girlfriend/sex object/love interest? (The only genre in which women are strongly represented is romance, for obvious reasons. Pursue that line of inquiry and you just get into wheels within wheels, so I’m just going to recommend that you watch The Celluloid Closet for that.)

Some of this lack of representation in front of the camera stems from a lack of representation behind the camera, and both shortcomings come from an inherent bias somewhere in the chain of production. This bias is largely inadvertent, because most filmmakers aren’t going around saying, “We can’t put a black/Latino/Asian/female person in this role.” But I have to say “largely” because in some cases, that’s exactly what they’re saying:

“There’s sort of an accepted myth that if you have two black actors, a male and a female, in the lead of a romantic comedy, that people around the world don’t want to see it,” [Will] Smith told the British paper, the Birmingham Postwhile promoting the flick [Hitch] overseas. “We spend $50-something million making this movie and the studio would think that was tough on their investment. So the idea of a black actor and a white actress comes up—that’ll work around the world, but it’s a problem in the U.S.”

So in Hollywood logic, a black woman won’t do well overseas and a white woman won’t do well in America. So let’s split the difference and cast a Latina! Not exactly cinema’s finest hour, but it shows that most of the skewed representation isn’t because of some malicious atmosphere but because of a drive to chase the bottom line—movies are a business after all, and so the studios pander to the biases of their audiences. Another way this is seen is in the conventional wisdom that women will watch films centered around men and male themes but it doesn’t work the other way around.  So in Hollywood’s Barnumesque logic, catering to the shallowest and most narrow-minded among us will lead to maximum profit.

That explains part of it. But shouldn’t women be able to direct all kinds of films? Kathryn Bigelow tells us yes, but look at the rest of the films out there and the evidence is scant.  Just as how a number of U.S. Senators thought that white males are free of the racial and gender bias that Latina women apparently carry with them, the Hollywood assumption is that men can do your standard chick flick rom com as well as women can, plus everything else to boot.

Again, this is (largely) absent of any active malice. Few people would say that men are inherently better scientists than women (except for Lawrence Summers and look where that got him) and few people would say that men are inherently better musicians than women (except for the Vienna Philharmonic). And yet when orchestras started hiring via blind audition in which the performer was hidden behind a screen, there was a corresponding increase in the number of women hired.  Some biases are just too subtle, too ingrained, and too subconscious; and the smallest things can tip the balance in hiring.

Few people would say that men are inherently better writers and directors than women. But you can’t hire directors and writers behind a blind screen. There are no objective criteria in this industry; it’s all about personality and reputation. Once again, the focus is the bottom line: on a feature, one director and one script hold everything together. The studios want proven performers to fill those roles, known quantities from a select list that can turn out a good product.  Right now, most of the names on that very short list are men; those demographics may shift in the future, but it looks to be a long and slow process.

What about television? The Journal article notes that 23% of television writers last year were women, a clear minority. However it’s far better than the 12% of feature writers that were women. What makes the difference?

A theory I heard once was that feature directing and scriptwriting was about self-aggrandizement, competition, and dominance. Television directing and writing, on the other hand, was about consensus-building, collaboration, and long-term planning. Features were full of “daddies” and television shows were full of “mommies.” While this was quite possibly one of the stupidest things I had ever heard, it sounds like the type of conventional wisdom that some executive somewhere would believe.

A more plausible take on the situation is that features are generally larger in scope, more visual, and more action-oriented. Television on the other hand tends to be more intimate, more dialogue-driven, and more focused on character and relationships. Along with this, feature audiences are male-driven and television audiences are female-driven. Combine those two bits of wisdom and view them through the lens of subtle gender bias, and it seems like those in charge might think that women are better-equipped to handle television (but not enough to bring them toward any sort of equality).

But to me the strongest element seems to be one of risk. Hollywood is a business, and everyone wants to maximize profit while minimizing risk. The sad fact is that the conventional wisdom says that hiring a woman anytime and anywhere is a risk compared to hiring a man. The difference is that in a feature, hiring that woman as the sole director or the sole writer puts everything at risk. The episodic nature of television means that you only put a small part of the larger whole at risk when you hire a woman. And that makes the risk acceptable enough to do it.

Of course, the fact that one of the best shows on television is written mostly by women means that all your conventional wisdom is bullshit.

The central plotline of the episode is dominated by Serena: the stresses placed upon her love affair with Trip, its dissolution, and her car accident. Apparently Gossip Girl was not content with the Kennedy parallels by the fake Chappaquiddick earlier in the season that they had to have a real one: Trip crashes his car after being accosted by three wolves (really?) in the middle of the road, and he and his wife try to cover up the incident by making it look like Serena was driving the car or something similar. Ignoring the fact that this was a plotline used in the comedy Arrested Development, and that there is a huge bloody indentation in the passenger-side windshield, the problem is that this is putting Serena into the utterly cliche “girl in peril” role. The answer to all the dramatic conflicts in this episode is “Serena is hurt, let’s all rush to the hospital!” The Jenny-Eric conflict fizzles out with a rather weak justification about family, considering all the horrible things they’ve done to each other this season — they seem to be setting Jenny up for the even-more-insipid plotline of “Jenny is a drug dealer!”

The events turn the rather bland character of Trip into a scumbag rather quickly, but he seems schizophrenic (as a politician usually ends up seeing, true), another hodge-podge of plot necessities that only exists to create artificial conflicts. It also places Nate conveniently in the role of protector, voice of reason, and hero, finally punching out his own cousin. (The quality of a season of a Josh Schwartz show can be judged by how frequently someone gets punched out. Season One: a punch in the pilot and in almost every other episode. This season: it took twelve episodes for the first K.O.)

The problem revealed by this storyline is that it shows that at this point, in order for Serena to be a sympathetic figure, she has to be a pitiable one. She has to be wronged; she has to be weak; she has to be placed in grave danger. In other words, she has to be Marissa Cooper. The Marissa Cooper Problem was seen in The O.C., where Mischa Barton’s character was a loathsome, vile creature: self-centered, over-dramatic, codependent. She always made incredibly stupid decisions, tried to make herself the center of attention with transparent cries for help, and generally ruined every plotline she was remotely involved in. Contrast this to the Serena of Gossip Girl’s first season, who was intelligent and reasonable; even though she wrestled with her past and with inner demons, she was possessed with a self-awareness and confidence that Marissa Cooper lacked. Unfortunately, it seems as the seasons wore on, Serena trended downwards toward that broken characterization like it was some kind of baseline equilibrium. I’ve mentioned similar problems with the character of Jenny Humphrey; it’s interesting that the most well-adjusted and sympathetic female main character on the show is Blair Waldorf, who also happens to be the character who hews the closest to traditional gender roles.

In fact, the only character really served by the episode and treated with a measure of dignity and thoughtfulness is Chuck Bass; it’s the anniversary of his father’s death, and the weight of that lays heavily upon him. His internal monologue is externalized as a dialogue with a ghostly vision of Bart Bass, and in those scenes the show actually takes time away from the relentless pushing of plot points to breathe in and realize one of their characters as something more than the conjunction of conflicts. Chuck continually compares himself to his father, and part of what drives his character is the indelible fact that his father died knowing him only as a wastrel and a dissipated lush. Bart Bass will never see his son be a man, and this invests Chuck with a measure of guilt, compounded by the fact he couldn’t even muster up the courage to see his father on his deathbed. It’s a powerful internal struggle, as we see Chuck deciding between whether to wall himself away from others and retreat into the exacting security of work — in other words, to honor his father by being the same man as he was — or to connect to others, to reach out and admit his own inner humanity — to honor his father by being a better man than he was.

Friday Night Lights also recently dealt with a plot arc about one of its main protagonists, Matt Saracen, dealing with the death of his father. Although the shows are diametric opposites — rural Texas versus Upper East Side Manhattan, raw and subtle versus stylized and soapy — it’s interesting to see the commonalities between the two arcs. Both seem to manifest the loss of the father as a spiritual wound; for Matt it is fresh and deep, while for Chuck, it is a dull ache, scarred over and yet impossible to ignore. Both are confronted with images of their fathers, unsure of how to reconcile the man they see with the man they knew and will never see again. Both shows meditate on how grief is a personal and supremely unique torment, impossible to share with others; and yet we do it anyway because we don’t know anything else. Without indulging in normative claims about what a family should be, both shows dramatize that we live in a society that is bereft of fathers and yet that same society will always live in their shadow. And finally, both Friday Night Lights and Gossip Girl tell us in order to heal the wounds and pain caused by the loss of their fathers, the characters must confront their own fears and misgivings about who they are as individuals. Chuck and Matt are men, not their father’s sons.

Of course, Gossip Girl is a soap opera, and it can’t escape that; it has to plant and pay off another over-the-top storyline about “Chuck’s mother didn’t die in childbirth and has been living in secret for decades, isn’t that crazy?” But let’s ignore that for now. Of all the characters’ obsessions and conflicts with their parents, Chuck’s is the most potent and the most thoughtful. And of all of Gossip Girl‘s reversals and inversions over the years, the supreme one is that the most villainous and corrupt character has matured into the most nuanced and truly understandable one.

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 thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to inclose their enemise in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enimie.

– William Bradford, History of the Plymouth Plantation

Gossip Girl graces its fans with a belated Thanksgiving episode this year; these episodes tend to be the bulwarks of the season, playing directly to the show’s core strengths: filial and political intrigue, incredible awkward moments, and reversal upon reversal upon reversal. This year’s episode is no exception.

The “Jenny-as-neoconservative US interests” allegory continues in full force, as somehow Jenny cannot comprehend why after exercising heavy-handed domination and humiliation over Eric and his boyfriend Jonathan why they would somehow hate her and why Eric would not want to be best buddies at Thanksgiving. Of course, once the cards come out and Eric reveals that he was behind the attempted sabotage of cotillion, Jenny promises retaliation while Eric promises never-ending war. This is part and parcel with the disparity of force brought to bear by the hegemon and the challenger. The hegemon is on the defense; the challenger is on the offense. The hegemon has everything to lose; the challenger has nothing to lose. The hegemon has to win every time; the challenger only has to win once. Most likely something (perhaps not Eric, but something) will bring Jenny crashing back down to earth, if only because turning Jenny into a permanent Blair clone holds little long-term narrative potential.

Meanwhile, the fallout from the Dan-Vanessa-Olivia threesome continues to reverberate; Olivia is out of the picture and shooting a new film (and possibly off the show for good?) leaving Dan to stew with the seemingly newfound feelings for his best friend. This plays off as awkward banter during the Thanksgiving dinner proper and Vanessa’s mother Gabriela bringing her perception and wisdom to the situation. It’s actually quite difficult to summon interest for this plot, because as mentioned before, Dan Humphrey is no longer our point of entry into this world. Back in the salad days of Season One, we were traversing into unknown territory, and Dan — good old cynical outsider Dan — provided our viewpoint into the world of the Upper East Side. However, his transition over the seasons has made him into as much of an insider as anyone else on the show; he’s become one of the soapy characters without any of the interesting soapy plots. Again, this is the same transition that The O.C. went through somewhat unsuccessfully, and calls into question whether there isn’t something inherently self-limiting to this narrative cycle — it’s got enough life for a couple of seasons, but trying to sustain it is like keeping a corpse on life support.

What ends up happening in this kind of narrative cycle is that we become inured to your standard soap plots; either the plotlines have to be thinly-veiled retreads of things we’ve already seen, or things have to be pushed to newer and more extreme levels, eventually creating an atmosphere and mood that is unsustainable. For example, now that we’re fully ensconced in this world, it seems that the only things that can hold our attention and have some narrative oomph are indeed the crazy soap-bubble plotlines — aka the Serena-Nate-Tripp clusterfuck. This is a plotline that was mind-numbingly boring when it was merely about Serena wondering whether or not she should sleep with a married congressman, but with the introduction of Tripp’s wife as an active antagonistic force, there is an actual sense of intrigue when played out over the course of the Thanksgiving meal. This is also complicated by Nate’s revelation of his own feelings for Serena, which seems to pose a parallel to Dan: note how Nate’s active reaching out towards Serena ends up in heartbreak, while Dan’s denial of his own feelings results in a pleasant status quo, regardless of how false it may actually be.

The French theorist Guy Debord (I told you the Situationist International would show up here sooner or later) discussed two opposing forces at work in representational culture and media: detournement and recuperation. Detournement happens when marginalized, avant-garde, or oppositional forces take a piece of mainstream culture and invert it to create a new work with a subversive quality, one that often challenges core assumptions of the mainstream. One can argue that this is exactly what happens with the centerpiece of the episode, the continual series of relationship-shattering revelations that summon a feeling akin to a boxer getting pummeled in the face repeatedly. The scene is backed by the Jason Derulo track “Whatcha Say”, which samples Imogen Heap’s song “Hide and Seek” — which any follower of Josh Schwartz’s work knows is indelibly linked with the most hilarious scene from the entire run of The O.C. (In its own way, the connection between the two may be seen to be a cry for help.)

In opposition to detournement is recuperation, in which mainstream media takes oppositional forms (for example, punk music — or the decentralized multicentric communication style of today’s youth) and repackages it in such a way that it retains or generates mass appeal while being stripped of its oppositional or subversive content. Gossip Girl exists in the grey zone between the forces, playing with mitigated versions of each. At its best, by purposefully taking a different tack from the novels from which it was spawned, the series’ self-awareness plays directly into upending its own forms; the viewers can engage in negotiated readings of the material, and the show becomes open to various form of critique (such as from a Marxian perspective). At its worst, the show abandons this course and takes the path of least resistance, only playing at a hip self-awareness while it attempts to rely on its performers’ natural charms to get through tired retreads of done-to-death plotlines.

This precise position is not exactly one of recuperation, but it evokes similar responses because the question facing Gossip Girl is whether it is relevant to its audience anymore. A recent article in The New Yorker noted that

Even before the financial crash of last fall, the sales of “Gossip Girl” books had leveled off, and since then they have declined — in part because “fans are getting their ‘Gossip Girl’ in other places,” as Morgenstern puts it, but also because the books’ milieu is less beguiling, and less relevant, than it once seemed to be. At Alloy, too, a certain weariness with brat lit has set in. “We are really a little sick of mean-girl stuff”… “More serious, angsty literature is where girls are right now. Morbid, dead-girl lit.”

Twilight is the new Gossip Girl. Perhaps it’s right that a navel-gazing focus on the decaying dead space within American culture, a twisted and somewhat sadomasochistic Nietzschean power fantasy, has replaced a cynical and self-conscious quasi-celebration of excess and style as the flashpoint in young adult literature and media. So then, what is to be done with Gossip Girl? One can almost feel this awareness of being marginalized in the series itself, and this season has been one long mission to transform and transition into a form that is still viable. Will it succeed? It’s up in the air at this point, but if a country can seriously transform a singular semi-fictional event that happens to be one of the few points in Native American relations that wasn’t wholesale massacre and oppression into one of its major national holidays, then anything is possible.

(I assume it will be covered in great deal in the upcoming episode, so I’m shelving discussion of the Serena-Lily-Dr. Van der Woodsen plotline — but let’s just say that the “identical coats” plot element was so brazenly transparent that it works. More intrigue is afoot…)

First, let’s examine the sub- and filler plots. There’s Jenny and the ambassador’s son, which is fairly forgettable — especially since we’ve seen it before, and without the self-aware acknowledgment that accompanied cotillion on “They Shoot Humphreys, Don’t They?” Jenny hangs out with a slightly more mature-seeming, kind of dangerous guy, but she’s too rebellious and headstrong to the warnings given to her; this is the Jenny and the fashion photographer all over again, and with nary an inversion or nuance to it. If we acknowledge that the supreme strength of the television medium is the ability to construct longer and more complex narratives than would be possible in a shorter form, then a plotline like this is an almost-criminal misuse of the form. Gossip Girl doesn’t need to be Mad Men or The Wire, but even heavily episodic shows like CSI know that character progression is important. From a purely story-focused perspective, I preferred the fast-talking relentlessly creative J. Humphrey whose headstrong nature led her to charge into untenable endeavors that ended in beautiful failure, instead of the ennui-filled Upper East Automaton she always secretly dreamed of becoming. From a political perspective though, Jenny is a picture-perfect representation of the pernicious effect that windfall wealth has on the labor aristocracy, who choose to sacrifice creative potential and identity to wallow in expropriated riches. Of note in the plotline is Chuck Bass’s role; the Chuck -Jenny interaction is one of the sparsely-plotted pairings in the series, so it’s interesting to see the changing dynamic in that regard. Starting from his attempt to rape her in the series pilot, the two reached a detente, and Jenny held up the mirror for Chuck and showed him that he was heading down an isolating and self-destructive path. The possibility that he might do the same for Jenny is a bright spot in the arc and would be a trademark inversion.

The interposition of Nate in the Serena-Trip affair plotline surprisingly gives it a watchable dimension. It’s refreshing to get him back in world-weary guru mode, as the character who’s gone through some of the worst tribulations in the series. Unlike the credulity-straining machinations of his brother’s Congressional election, the current situation — affairs with married partners and fucked-up love triangles — are right in his wheelhouse, as he acknowledges himself. Sadly, Gossip Girl tries to give the plotline dramatic oomph in one of the few ways it seems to remember: by making Serena act as stupidly as possible. It’s unfortunate. Since the show is one that lives and dies by its triangles, Nate has to be the third point on it, the way that they bring up buried tension between him and Serena is actually intriguing. However, the plot is damned by the utter lack of chemistry between Serena and Trip; everything they do is telegraphed by obvious shorthand. For example, they finish each others’ stilted anecdotes to announce to the audience that they have a history, and they have a hackneyed “up late at the office” encounter to bludgeon “This is what sexual tension looks like!” Most of the rest of their interactions are repeated “This is wrong” – “But it feels right” waffling exchanges in Trip’s office. To be fair, it appears to be a roughly accurate anatomy of most workplace affairs, but it’s a writer’s job to make plot progression more than the rattling off of bullet points from an outline. Note the ultra-mechanical kiss scene between them at the end of the episode, where they appear to be carefully making sure they’re hitting their marks. Blake Lively has delivered good work before, so this seems to be more of an issue with the lifelessness of the plotline. It almost makes me try to look for a satirical element that’s going over my head.

Now, on to Dan and Vanessa and Olivia (and Blair and Lady Gaga). This episode’s plot revolves how Dan is utterly oblivious to the emotional undercurrents following his threesome, a curious blind spot for someone who wishes to be a writer. As recounted in the flashbacks (some hilarious, as Hilary Duff admirably sells the “getting kicked out of Dan’s bed” pratfall that Blake Lively nailed in the first season), both Olivia and Vanessa have residual doubts and awkwardness from that night’s events. Couple this with Blair’s attempts to impress the NYU Tischies (or Tischites, whatever) and somehow Dan is tasked with writing “A Snow White – Lady Gaga musical to be directed by Blair Waldorf” in which Olivia stars. Vanessa ends up the director, making the whole thing a minefield. The resulting amateur theater is hilariously awful on all counts, but excising it from the Lady Gaga context, it’s all about how Olivia orchestrates events to get Vanessa and Dan to kiss during the skit to generate a moment of Hamlet-like realization in Dan. You see, in the previously-discussed Joffe-Undressed threesome taxonomy, Dan-Olivia-Vanessa was a catalyst threesome: Olivia detected a strong connection between Dan and Vanessa, and ended up being the unwitting conduit between the two. Of course, a catalyst is prone to generating an unstable reaction; both Blair and Nate warn that “the third person is always supposed to be a stranger.” Dan has the moment of realization, but Vanessa doesn’t. This is interesting, if only because it’s an inversion and resurrection of long-forgotten plot elements that were buried in the first season.

But this episode was should have been all about Lady Gaga. When you have a musical performance artist that’s the psychic fusion of Warhol, Hitchcock, Bowie, and Madonna, you let her take the reins, damn it! I know I give the coma/alternate universe episode of The O.C. so much grief, but if there were any time to go entirely off the rails and into crazy uncharted narrative territory, it’s when you’re collaborating with LADY FUCKING GAGA. She has one of the strongest visual sensibilities and authorial signatures of any popular artist today; she even had interesting things to say about the nature of television guesting:

“I really sat down with the writers,” she said. “I was like, ‘Look, I want to do this, and the reason I want to do this is because I am trying to say something that is not mainstream in a mainstream capacity. So, if I can say it on your show, that would be, like, a real coup d’état for me as a performance artist.’ “

The result sounds like an elaborate music video. “I am the narrator behind what is going on with the characters and make the song part of the moment,” she explained about the “crazy performance-art piece.” “We used these ladders, and I’m falling off ladders. Ladders are kind of a monster symbol about bad luck. And I have this 35-foot-long dress on and these X’s, very gothic-inspired. It was great. They let me do whatever the hell I wanted. It was amazing.”

Unfortunately, at this point the budget of a single one of her videos is probably more than an entire hour of Gossip Girl, and it shows. Her performance serves as a mere capstone to the episode, as a needle-drop to underscore the Serena-Trip, Jenny-Ambassador’s Kid, and Dan-Olivia couplings. Because they’re all “bad romances,” get it? I suppose my hopes of “Gossip Girl the musical, a satirical commentary on fame, glamour, and our society’s obsession with the shiny new thing, directed by Lady Gaga” were a bit too high.

At least the episode spurred someone to post this video of Gaga from her NYU days.

It isn’t even really the centerpiece of the episode, as the main plotline revolves around Jenny Humphrey and her power struggles over cotillion. There are a lot of backward-looking and cyclical references in the episode: cotillion, the Lost Weekend, Serena getting trapped in an elevator. (In that regard, it’s amazing how often Gossip Girl synopses read like they were cut and pasted from Screenwriting for Dummies and they actually manage to end up quite good — most of the time, at least.) Jenny’s fixated on her debut as the final erasure of Jenny from Brooklyn and replacement with Jenny, Queen of the Upper East Side. To that end, she’ll do whatever it takes to make cotillion go off without a hitch.

The writers haven’t fully justified Jenny’s internal psychological shift to reach this point. It wouldn’t take much; they did a fantastic job of redefining the Chuck-Jenny relationship in a few short scenes in Season 2. I mentioned before that Gossip Girl seemed to have some of the strongest female voices on television; I’m not so sure that claim holds up anymore. True, the men on the show are rather one-note, but they play their single notes well. Nate is good-natured, dopey, and charming in a leading-man sort of way. Dan is good-natured, dopey, and charming in an artsy-hipster sort of way. Chuck Bass is, as always, Chuck Bass. Blair Waldorf is at the very least a coherent character, but Jenny and Serena transparently move at the whims of the writers, making the characters so flighty and schizophrenic to the point it seems they’re playing to stereotypes. It’s sad, especially when they could be doing so much more.

What’s interesting about the Jenny plotline is the other threesome of the episode: the triple alliance against Jenny consisting of Blair, Eric, and another Constance girl, Kira Abernathy. The pattern of attack fits into the model of power transition theory, which attempts to explain the organization of states in the international system. In this model, there are three kinds of states: the hegemon is the most powerful and has the greatest capacity to shape the system in its own interests. Dominant powers are states who have bought into the hegemon’s system; to them, the disruption that would be caused by unseating the hegemon is outweighed by the benefits they enjoy under the status quo. Then there are the challengers: those who are marginalized under or are dissatisfied with the hegemon’s system. What keeps them from unseating the hegemon (or foils their attempts to do so) is their lack of power to effectively mount a challenge. Therefore, the hegemon’s continued dominance relies on keeping the powerful elements satisfied and the dissatisfied elements powerless.

Apply this template to Gossip Girl, and Jenny Humphrey is the current hegemon; she’s the United States. (Yes, I said Jenny was Hitler last time, but the transitive property doesn’t apply here.) In the status quo, Blair is content to assist Jenny as her cotillion mentor, and Kira is content to be part of the established social order, where she is somewhere in the middle or bottom. But Jenny pursues a dangerous path of unilateral action and shuns both girls; she thinks she can achieve all of her goals on her own. This turns Blair and Kira into challengers who wish to see Jenny taken down. But their combined power isn’t enough — it requires Eric to bring a credible challenge to fruition. Eric’s been a challenger for most of the season; he sees Jenny sliding into corruption and darkness, nearing a point of becoming irredeemable; after suffering several humiliating affronts at the hands of the hegemon, he has been radicalized to the point where he believes only a direct attack will have any results. (Take a guess who he’s supposed to be.)

The triple alliance’s plan to steal away Jenny’s escort succeeds, but she is saved by the deus ex machina of Nate being at cotillion and ready to go for absolutely no reason at all. With the alliance defeated, Jenny’s response and their individual counter-response varies. For Jenny and Blair, it’s an attitude of mutual respect; once Blair is beaten, she makes a negotiated disengagement from the system, content to return to the status quo ante. Kira, on the other hand, feels the full force of the hegemon’s wrath; although Kira may have her own ideas, Jenny makes it clear that any further challenges will be met with massive retaliation. Then there’s Eric — Jenny at least makes a surface gesture of a peace offer (which is easier to do when victorious) but Eric will have none of it. He’s too radicalized at this point, and nothing but Jenny’s destruction will satisfy him. His breakup with Jonathan may have been a little pat, but it makes a good parallel in that the bloody game of realpolitik and geopolitics often forces actors to pay high prices; once you’re locked in, you’re in for a long haul.

There are no grand political parallels in the Dan-Vanessa-Olivia threesome, or at least I don’t think there are. It’s not very shocking either, regardless of what the Parents’ Television Council thinks. Two interesting things about it, though, are its categorization and its display. The ménage à trois is an attempt to collapse the love triangle into a stable entity. Because it’s an order of complexity above a standard coupling, the threesome is often deployed as an element to complicate and create friction in a plotline. The threesome comes in many flavors, most of which I learned from Roland Joffe’s Undressed. (Seriously, Undressed is one of the most overlooked and bizarre gems to ever appear on television. You would never expect that the Academy Award-winning director of The Killing Fields and The Mission would work with MTV to make a series that’s basically a porno with all the sex bits cut out. And if that ever happened, it would be awful, right? Well, that’s Undressed. And it is awful — but in that low-rent “it’s bad enough to become awesome” kind of way. It’s also probably subtly influenced the past ten years of teen sex comedy.) There’s the wedge or V threesome, where the arrangement is the supposed end of competition between two people going after the same object of affection. There’s the T-shaped threesome, where it’s a couple bringing in a third party to breathe new life or expand horizons. There’s also the catalyst threesome (aka the Y tu mamá también), where one person purposefully or inadvertently bridges the gap between two people. It’s murky on what they intend do with Dan-Vanessa-Olivia.

But a thing to consider is how Gossip Girl has mapped the portrayal of same-sex romance and its different portrayals between the sexes. As great as it may be to see Hilary Duff and Jessica Szohr make out, and although the show’s characters seem to have no issue with the concept of gay couples in their midst, there’s a double standard. Eric and Jonathan, for their vaunted relationship, behave almost neutered and platonically in every scene. The show doesn’t revolve around their relationship, so perhaps that’s fair. But consider that the most specific moment of homosexuality depicted on the show was when Dan basically stumbled into a back alley to see Eric getting groped. It’s seen from a voyeuristic angle and depicted as transgressive and wrong — exactly the same way Vanessa stumbled on a scene of incest a season later. Somewhat of a double standard there.

But whatever the faults of this episode, staging a threesome backed by an acoustic cover of T.I.’s “Whatever You Like” is one of those tiny stars-aligning tremor-like strokes of genius that makes you glad the American pop cultural hegemony is good for something. Although they really should have featured the best lines of that track, with Anya Marina crooning, “Shawty you da hottest, love the way you drop it / Your brain’s so good, could’ve swore you went to college.”

Other plots in this episode are the typical Gossip Girl filler: Blair makes a new friend in a hooker, Serena’s publicity job makes her act like a hooker, and Dan wonders if he can play “hooker” on the Scrabble board for the triple word score. Dan and Olivia get the thankless “contractually obligated filler plotline” about Olivia telling an embarassing story about Dan to Jimmy Fallon on his talk show, and then trying to keep that secret from Dan. Considering that Dan’s previous girlfriends’ dark secrets have been “I KILLED A MAN,” “I HELPED COVER UP KILLING A MAN,” and “I THINK I’M COMMITTING STATUTORY RAPE RIGHT NOW,” I don’t know how this Mad Libs plotline is supposed to even register, regardless of the cutesy anniversary ending. Honestly, the ups and downs in terms of writing quality this season are especially jarring. If the characters two episodes ago were in Bringing Up Baby, in this episode they’re in Blue’s Clues.

Take the A-plot about Trip’s election campaign. Perhaps the show shouldn’t have invoked the name of Mr. Michael Mann (blessings be upon him), if only to avoid reminding us what actual political intrigue looks like. The crux of the matter is that we can accept and even enjoy the petty and unrealistic schemes of the teenagers on this show — like Jenny sending her mean girls to throw eggs at her stepbrother’s boyfriend. But it just falls a little flat to do the same with some low-rent bizarro inversion of Chappaquiddick as the turning point for Trip’s campaign, and the oh-so-telegraphed moral dilemma for Nate and Vanessa over whether to reveal that the incident was a setup. This isn’t The Insider — I don’t think anyone expects The Insider — but it’s about as subtle as that episode where the mean girls rigged the election of prom king and queen. And yes, I’ve considered that this may be an actual commentary on the politics, but it doesn’t hold water. We’ve been conditioned to believe that Blair or Chuck or Jenny will embark on some ridiculous scheme, but to place that in the context of real, non-abstract politics, “not some high school thing with Blair and the mean girls,” as Vanessa puts it — it makes the seams on the show’s premise not only show but burst wide open. It’s “Chuck Bass and the Trilateral Commission” all over again.

To examine the faulty writing of this episode further, let’s go beyond the fact that the themes of the various plot strands fail to weave together; even the premises and conclusions of the individual stories to fail to line up. For example, the election is supposed to follow Nate’s descent and redemption: he initially tries to cover up the faked Chappaquiddick, but when that fails, he sacrifices himself and falls on his sword, taking responsibility but saving the election with a stirring speech.

Bullshit. First, the element of sacrifice is overblown. Nate is just some teenaged college freshman playing at being a political fixer. What real risk did he incur in doing what he did? What kind of damage would it really cause? Second, even if Nate claims responsibility, the dirty tricks still come from inside the family and the campaign; mere protestations will not be enough to prevent tainting the candidate. Chace Crawford is supposed to sell that Nate is such a political force that he can sway the election with his words, but he’s no Jed Bartlet. He’s not even Jeff Bridges from The Contender (a movie which did the reverse Chappaquiddick too.) Crawford, for all his charisma, simply does not have the gravitas to make what’s asked of him work. Finally, to have an effective moral dilemma, you need to have the characters’ moral compasses calibrated beforehand. If Trip’s main goal was to run a clean campaign and not take advantage of dirty tricks like the ones his grandfather sets up for him, why do Nate’s actions assuage him? It’s just another layer of political cover-up and lies disguising the fact that it’s Trip’s wife, who we’ve seen for all of sixty-two seconds, channeling Lady Macbeth and orchestrating everything. It’s like the show wants to telegraph something something about “power corrupts” or “politics is dirty,” but it can’t even find the footing for that.

At the very least, the Blair and Serena story helped form an interesting riff on the nature of moral accountability and ascribing judgment to someone based on labels. Blair’s new friend Brandeis may be an escort by her own avocation, but what about Serena, who may have a different title but fulfills many of the same tasks (except for perhaps the one that truly defines the job?) It’s a question of definitions, and there are some interesting philosophical questions half-raised about what defines an action or person as good or bad; is it intent or the action itself or the results? One suspects we’re supposed to link this to the election plotline, but the two fit together like mismatched jigsaw pieces; it just grates uncomfortably, and with Serena dropping the publicity thing and apparently chatting up Trip, it looks like they’re going to go the Eliot Spitzer route. Just great.

Chuck Bass is the one to have the poignant lines of the episode (and thus the only one to act like they have a three-digit-IQ) when he tells Serena that friendships are going to take more work as they all grow older, and the petty spats aren’t going to fade away like they used to — they’re going to fester, and it’s the friendship that will fade. The sentiment touches on things that are actually within the show’s reach, and it’s emblematic of the problems that the show is having in its transition between high school and college — away from the bubble where, for all their vaunted maturity, the characters were insulated and protected from the consequences of their actions. It’s the same chasm that The O.C. tried to traverse and fell into (God forbid Gossip Girl ever does an alternate-universe coma episode.) Perhaps the writers should turn a cultural landmark that made it to the other side — of course, I’m referring to Saved by the Bell: The College Years.

In all seriousness, the writers do grasp that they can’t extend this bubble of fakery forever — it’s just the characters and the plotting haven’t caught up with where the narrative is taking them. The characters (save for Jenny) can’t rely on the petty bullshit games of Constance — now the rest of world around them needs to behave like it.

It’s Halloween on the Upper East Side, and no holiday fits our characters better. Slipping into the cover of night, hiding behind masks and costumes, tricks and treats: the omnipresent themes of subterfuge and identity come out in full force. This episode’s lynchpin is the Halloween opening of the Gimlet nightclub; its owner, Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick), still smarting from Blair (Leighton Meester) and her manipulations in the previous episode, attempts to cut her out of his business affairs. Blair, on the other hand, tries to scheme her way back into his heart. Meanwhile, Serena (Blake Lively) solves problems in her publicity job and with her friends by bringing celebrities and paparazzi to Gimlet — and one of those celebrities happens to be Olivia (Hilary Duff). These events add another layer of awkwardness to her relationship with Dan (Penn Badgley), already complicated by Gossip Girl posts and Hollywood baggage. Then there’s the Jenny plotline, along with a runner with Rufus (Matthew Settle) and Lily (Kelly Rutherford).

That’s right: we have A, B, C, D, and E plots. That’s a lot of knives to keep in the air for forty minutes, and the writers actually manage to pull it off; even the forgettable Rufus and Lily story has a choice line about Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift costumes. (I can immediately comprehend what the Lady Gaga look is, but what the hell does a Taylor Swift costume look like? Something involving cowboy boots?)

In keeping with the holiday, one can divide the characters in each storyline into “trickers” or “treaters”. You can gloss them into any dialectic you want: idealists versus realists, negative liberty versus positive liberty, neoconservatives versus sane people. The trickers are comfortable with accepting some level of falsehood or deception into their lives if that’s what it takes to make things work smoothly. Blair is capable of all sorts of double-dealings to get what she wants, including calling in favors from a guy who’s her boyfriend’s mortal enemy and who attempted to rape her best friend’s mom. Serena, flipping around from her role in the last episode, pulls her fair share of machination as well. At this point, Jenny is practiced in casual deception, as is her stepmother. And Olivia the actress lies to Dan (and herself) about her previous onscreen/offscreen relationship and its meaning. “It’s all acting,” she says — while she and Brando might disagree with me, good acting is all about lying; great acting is all about telling the truth. The perfect deception is one you come to believe yourself.

In opposition to the trickers stand the treaters, who instinctively recoil from subterfuge and are perhaps more idealistic and less compromising; the most surprising character to fall into this category is Chuck, who previously invited comparisons to the ultimate trickers, the CIA. Unlike them, Chuck appears to have some baseline of scruples; some things aren’t games to him, and he tells Blair that when he says the reason he found it difficult to tell Blair he loved her was because “I couldn’t trust you.” His big turn in the episode, which is usually the culmination of a grand deception, is actually a grand truth — he calls the cops on himself to shut down his party because of his club’s lack of a liquor license. It’s part of a bigger scheme, of course, but the fact that there is any truth there at all is surprising.

Even Serena, in a stunning display of character consistency, finds it acceptable to manipulate strangers but draws the line in playing games with those close to her; she reveals her plans to Olivia and lets her make her own decisions. (Serena is Bukharin, and Blair is Stalin?) In this whole story, Dan once again serves the role of surrogate for the public. He is a spectator, watching Olivia’s performance in her films, watching her in Gossip Girl blasts, and watching her as she tells him her story in person. He has to take all these elements and collapse them into a cohesive narrative, which is difficult when you can’t tell what’s true and what’s false. Decisions are made for him, and he goes along with the ride Olivia and Serena have set up for him because events roll forward beyond his control.

This lack of control emanates from the publicity machine that dominates this episode. Chuck needs publicity for his club. Serena needs publicity for her job. Olivia needs publicity for her friends. There are many shades to this machine, and call it what you like: publicity, propaganda, espionage, dogma — it’s all about constructing a narrative that, when consumed, facilitates someone’s goals and agenda. In the end, publicity is nothing more than an elaborate costume or mask. This is where we get to Jenny Humphrey.

In the episode, Eric (Connor Pablo) and Jonathan (Matt Doyle) comment that Jenny is wearing a mask: she is friendly when interacting with them and her family, and cold and domineering when in her role as Queen Bee of Constance. Jonathan says that she’s been wearing the mask so long, “the mask is becoming her face.” Besides recalling a really good Twilight Zone episode, it puts deception into the context of leadership. The military historian John Keegan examined the nature of leadership in wartime, which is when it’s put to the test — after all, you’re asking for the greatest sacrifice, people’s lives. People may be easily led, but you have to prove that you are fit to be the leader. Although flawed, Keegan created an interesting framework, defining that proof of leadership as heroism; to him, leaders have to put on “the mask of command” in order to lead; in other words, they had to create the image of being a leader. It’s publicity in a different guise. Keegan classified leaders into different types: Heroics like Alexander the Great who lead from the front, lead by example, and claim authority by their own bravery. There are Anti-Heroics like Lord Nelxon, who take leadership as a mantle of privilege that few are qualified for; then there are Unheroics like Ulysses S. Grant, who view leadership as a burden and responsibility to shoulder for the sake of others.

However, Keegan has a fourth category: the False Heroics, leaders who create a grand illusion to drive and and motivate the people while the leaders themselves remain in secrecy and without accountability. His main example? None other than Mr. “Godwin’s Law” himself.

Leaving aside the surface parallels (creatives who abandoned their craft for the sake of power, and who took command after an earlier failed attempt to usurp control from sitting leadership), the closest link is that Jenny believes she can maintain her regime by projecting an aura of invincibility. If this means betraying and deceiving everyone around her, so be it. She says one thing while doing another; one can imagine “Operation Dillinger”, in which Jenny’s minions egg Jonathan, as the equivalent to the Reichstag fire. Such a regime is consolidated by visiting violence and marginalization on those who would challenge it, acts of violence which cement the bonds of those in the power structure. The critical problem with such a setup is that it is entirely built on lies and deception, and gargantuan effort must be exerted to maintain the fiction. As Jenny says herself, “As soon as those girls see me hesitate, I have a full-blown rebellion on my hands.”

Which is, of course, what will happen. At the end of the episode, Jenny destroys her creative identity by abandoning her sewing machine; remember what happened the last time she did that. She’s going to have her “cornered in the bunker” comeuppance eventually; the only question is what form it will take.

(I was hoping to be the first intersection of the keywords “Gossip Girl” and “Reichstag fire”, but alas, everything is on the Internet already)