Gossip Girl: It's a Trap!

Have you noticed how everyone is writing about Gossip Girl? You can't open a new browser tab during an enervating workday without running into some semi-literate sassbag coughing up sticky blobs of snark, trying to convince you of his or her ironic but actually TOTALLY GENUINE love of the "scandalous lives of Manhattan's elite." These little pieces of new-media ephemera usually purport to dissect the show on its own terms, while simultaneously broadcasting to the reader that the writer is, in fact, in the "in" crowd. After all, who among us didn't attend Yale? At some point, you must have found yourself at Beatrice with a Eurotrash stranger's tongue down your throat. What, you haven't? Well, I totally have! True story!

Reading about Gossip Girl may be a waste of time, but the show itself isn't totally unsalvageable—far from it. I watch it for toasty chestnuts like Blair's assertion that "Princeton is a trade school." OMG. So true. You know how I know? I went there! Oh, see. I'm doing that thing. And here is where we arrive at the problem: writing about Gossip Girl seems to engender the very same sort of social one-upmanship, reflected in glossy, heavy irony, that the show takes as its subject. Will Gossip Girl analysts ever move past the mirror stage?

Probably not. Gossip Girl is like the Scylla and Charybdis of pop culture scholarship: steering clear of its spackled surface (Scylla), adroitly dodging the transparent marketing gambit of links to designer clothes on cwtv.com, brings a false sense of relief. When really, the much more canny marketing gambit (Charybdis) is waiting to suck you in. While the tweens are squealing about their SideKicks, Gossip Girl is busy pitching itself to a media-savvy audience of twentysomethings who congratulate themselves in finding cultural markers that were placed there just for them! It's sort of like being on an Easter egg hunt—it's fun until you realize that your parents and not the Easter Bunny so carefully placed those pastel nuggets in the garden.

The problem with Gossip Girl is that it's self-aware. Now, there have been some teen shows in the past that feature self-aware characters, among them The OC, GG's far superior predecessor. Yes, Adam Brody's Seth was truly a revolution in teen drama characterization with his inoffensive wit and flaccid shout-outs to Death Cab for Cutie. Still, as much as The OC delighted its viewers with well-written dialogue and appealingly healthy-looking characters, it never really winked to the camera. The characters stayed in their own implausible but consistent universe. GG, however, with a hideous emergent intelligence, has beheld and assimilated its image into an imaginary whole, and now seeks to rope us into its endless cycle of self-reflection.

For the most part, self-awareness tends to ruin shows: witness Top Model after cycle 6, when the whole affair collapsed into a rococo-costumed, silver-haired hot tranny mess of scary Tyra faces and sad little girls struggling to grasp an ever-diminishing slice of fame. Once Tyra and Co. realized what the viewers were laughing at, they couldn't resist mugging to us and it got a little gross. But never before has a dumb teen show begun on the premise of self-awareness. Nobody really likes GG, they like themselves reflected in GG, and luckily the characters, as unlikeable bon-mot-dispensing ciphers, are only too happy to serve as crooked mirrors.

Obviously, the whole character-reflection thing has been built into the medium of TV, and is certainly something writers and creators have capitalized on in the past. Recall Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino in the rad movie Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion arguing, "I'm the Mary and you're the Rhoda." But Mary and Rhoda also had some redeemable qualities written into them, unlike, say, Blair Waldorf. But wait a second there; you can tell Blair's a nice person deep down. Why? Because she is just like a really pretty version of me—I mean we both love headbands and bow scarves and boys who will just screw us over in the end and mean-girl manipulation and well I fancy myself a good person, so Blair must be too, right?

Wrong. Blair Waldorf is not a real person, and ultimately GG leaves the viewer with very little of worth to take away, unless you believe (as I sort of do) that impeccable styling has inherent worth. I mean, I'll still watch it, but I am also prone to hang onto any toehold of melodrama, no matter how precarious, with all the muscle of a scrappy quahog resisting the pull of Nantucket-bound clam diggers. Yeah, part of me wants to see Blair and Chuck make it work, have lots of silver-spooned babies and settle down to a life of knitting pale wasabi green matching tea cozies for each other. So, Gossip Girl, I will continue to shake my fist at you. And you will never win! I will resist your siren call (to mix Greek metaphors). As long as Degrassi, the adorable Canadian teen melodrama, sticks by its educational motto that "whatever it takes, I know I can make it through," and continues to air Fridays at 7 on the N, I will not love you, nor will I let you know that I love you, Kristen Bell's voice!

Thinking about Gossip Girl really tempted me to crack open the ol' Ecrits and get all Lacanian, but then I realized that I'd just be contributing to the problem. And I want to be part of the solution. Gossip Girl is kinda like the mirror stage, it is pretty simple, and wasting real scholarship trying to belabor this point is tantamount to an insult.