Wow, so, OK, my weekly post on Gossip Girl is almost a week late. Since Belinkie and I are watching tonight’s episode together, which will probably provide fodder for any number of posts (especially considering the day’s financial meltdown), I should probably push this out, huh? For those just now catching up on this series, last week I saw a problem with Gossip Girl. To recap and summarize:
Gossip Girl’s unique claim on our attention — allowing us vicariously to enjoy stratospheric displays of wealth (leaving aside the scantily clad nubile young things, which are on offer elsewhere) — is inherently at odds with its status as a teen soap opera.
The attraction of great wealth is that, at least in theory, it elevates one above the striving, disappointments, and compromises which the non-wealthy must endure. This is why, as F. Scott Fitzgerald points out, wealth changes the wealthy, replacing one kind of toughness, born of character-building deprivation, with another, a contempt for those who have not enjoyed similar advantages.
But this substitute toughness is at odds with the dramatic necessities of soap opera, which demands that everyone act like an adolescent. (With all the musical beds, copious drinking, and absent parents, we can be forgiven for forgetting that the characters are, in fact, nominally adolescents.) You can’t be hardened by life in the upper crust and still pout and sigh like a petulant child when your boyfriend doesn’t call you.
This is all complicated by our relationship to television, over which we exert a kind of sadomasochistic intimate mastery. The point of the wealth represented on Gossip Girl is that you don’t have it. But the point of television is that you do have it, and with TiVo you have it whenever you want it.
This week, I am taking up that other influence, besides riches beyond the dreams of avarice, on our poor little rich girls and boys: their parents. Needless to say, the outlook is bleak. Spoilers after the jump.
