December 13, 2007
gossip girl (new york stories?)
Hello. Perhaps you are visiting via the perspicacious linking taste of Time Out New York — which would seem to make this a fine occasion to take up a matter concerning New York. It is also a matter — a very small matter — concerning a New Yorker story, a review of Gossip Girl, by Nancy Franklin. It is a matter of such irrelevance we can't help wasting a New York minute on it.
The show has problems. They include the plot, dialog, and acting, which may seem like a lot. Serena, as close to a lead as the show has, is played by an actor who could generously be described as a lesser version of Piper Perabo. Ponder that. It is, one should note, not a lot of charisma on which to base an almost-major network show. The article concludes — at considerable length — that what makes the show appealing must be its scenario, the megaprivileged life of the Upper East: "Because this is a world open only to the few, it’s of great interest to the many. (And, it goes without saying, of ginormous interest to the few.) It’s not hard to imagine that girls all over the country would want to get a glimpse of this tantalizing spectacle, because they’re never going to experience anything like it in real life." From this springboard, the article — and this will aggravate a person — takes the opportunity to linger almost exclusively over the show's newyorkness, with kneejerk references to Sex and the City, correctives about the true nature of Brooklyn, and an apparently sincere taking-to-task for the show playing fast'n'loose with location shooting. Say it ain't so!
Franklin does seem intimately familiar with the zip code in which the show purports to reside, reeling off actual preparatory academy names which are much funnier than the essay seems to think, and waxing specific about what sort of dresses girls there wore in 1988 as opposed to now. At the same time, she seems surpassingly oblivious to the culture-consuming world beyond 10028, and what's happening out there. She mentions the show's "primary purpose of marketing pop songs, which are heard throughout." Actually, we're pretty sure that an untested show on the CW isn't marketing "What Goes Around" by a non-New Yorker named Justin Timberlake, and the like. Mr. Timberlake, who comes from a land down under 72nd Street (it's called "Tennessee") may in fact, along with his staff and servants and holding company, be receiving a certain fee for his participation. We are just guessing.
One can't but suspect that the article's indifference to the facts on the ground of culture leads to the review's disastrous point-missing. Franklin passes entirely cursorily over the show's structure, significantly modified from the original series of books, in which we are led through the tangled webs of the social scene by "Gossip Girl, who isn’t a character, exactly; she’s a presence, an omniscient stand-in for our voyeuristic selves. In the books, Gossip Girl chronicles online the activities of the half-dozen or so main characters, and her postings are interspersed with traditional narrative; on the TV show, Gossip Girl’s reports are presented as voice-overs." And that's it for the conceit. Back to quips about the Abercrombie catalog, and Williamsburg.
The conceit, sugarhigh! is here to tell you, makes the show (though we admit they aren't doing enough with it). Gossip Girl is not, in fact, a character within the narrative's world (though there is a voice we hear); it's certainly not, in Franklin's one stab at "analysis," a substitute for our watching. It's a blog with Kristin Bell's voice, which posts news, salacious stories, gotcha pix and so forth about the popular students. It is, in short, a gossip site. The show's imagination is that celebrity journalism has made its way to high school.
Which is not to say that Gossip Girl merely proposes that the scions of the superwealthy are the not-yet-acknowledged legislators of the world and the rightful subjects of TMZ and Perez, which wouldn't be much of a breakthrough. The show's idea is that the form of celeb gossip is now the significant way of knowing about one's own life. What's interesting — and really, it's compelling — about Gossip Girl is not the conceit itself, but the life it proposes: one in which, when someone makes eyes at you across the party, you can check out their cachet and date-rape record on your mobile before they meet you at the bar.
So it is that the show sets up a logic where all relevant knowledge is routed through said device, with its always to-hand camera, its browser set to the Gossip Girl site, its text messages which come particularly in handy when you need the 411 on a boy but are in the middle of a conversation with him. For all the biz talk about designing shows that can be watched on a phone, this is the first show that takes the phone entirely seriously as something more than a new distribution platform — as the technological kernel of a form of life. It's no wonder that one episode ends with Sum 41 on the sndtrk singing "I'm nothing without you" while Serena chucks her mobile in a trashbin. She has it back by the next episode: once again, she's something.
Of course, the show's grownups don't quite get it, which is a way of saying that the cellphone is the new rock'n'roll, a way of understanding the world that separates generations. It allows a negotiation of the threatening information cloud that seems at once ultra-contemporary and a perfect figure for the ambient anxiety of adolescence. The irony is that the adults exist to demonstrate something that the kids already know, which is that their social and romantic decisions are actually business calculations, requiring the most current information to be figured correctly, a real-timing in which feelings appear as facts, and the slightest differentials in the grand and weightless flux of data can make your fortune, or break it. Thus, in addition to the show's insight about life after landlines, it manages to figure teen romance as a kind of arbitrage.
Which is to say: if Gossip Girl is about New York in any meaningful way, it's about Wall Street. The remainder of its settings are color and alibi. Coincidentally, one can always say the same about the New Yorker.
Posted by jane at December 13, 2007 07:34 AM | TrackBack