I can only handle obsessing over one TV show at a time. This summer it was Toddlers and Tiaras (until my workload got too demanding), but Gossip Girl was my unhealthy addiction throughout the past school year. It's full of fashion, immature drama, and implausible plots, aka awesome. Season Three, as poorly written as it was, got me thinking, however, and I thought I'd type up my musings just in time for Season Four's premiere tonight.
So, yes, Season Three was completely rancid, including but not limited to these reasons: Vanessa, the really lame plot involving Chuck's mysterious mother (Why do they insist on giving Chuck these stupid plotlines? I can't decide which is worse, this one or the Eyes Wide Shut-esque one from Season Two), Hilary Duff, Serena and her mother being complete idiots, Serena's inability to dress modestly for any occasion, and Hilary Duff.
But what I found most striking about this season was the ugly brand of classism it promoted. Remember Season One and how it depicted the Humphreys and Vanessa as being virtuous in their lower middle class Brooklyn lives? And how Serena becomes "good" primarily through dating a guy who doesn't have a trust fund? This pro-proletariat theme was completely reversed in Season Three.
The basic premise is that it's not enough to come into money, you're only acceptable if you were born into it. Take Serena. This past season, she, to paraphrase Gawker, did everything wrong.
So, yes, Season Three was completely rancid, including but not limited to these reasons: Vanessa, the really lame plot involving Chuck's mysterious mother (Why do they insist on giving Chuck these stupid plotlines? I can't decide which is worse, this one or the Eyes Wide Shut-esque one from Season Two), Hilary Duff, Serena and her mother being complete idiots, Serena's inability to dress modestly for any occasion, and Hilary Duff.
But what I found most striking about this season was the ugly brand of classism it promoted. Remember Season One and how it depicted the Humphreys and Vanessa as being virtuous in their lower middle class Brooklyn lives? And how Serena becomes "good" primarily through dating a guy who doesn't have a trust fund? This pro-proletariat theme was completely reversed in Season Three.
The basic premise is that it's not enough to come into money, you're only acceptable if you were born into it. Take Serena. This past season, she, to paraphrase Gawker, did everything wrong.
Is that a onesie?
Besides dressing like a tramp, she deliberately embarassed herself and others at public events in her hopes that the tabloid write ups would reach her missing father, had an affair with a married politician, and decided not to go to an Ivy League school in favor of taking on a job for about 3 weeks and then doing absolutely nothing productive for the rest of the year. And oh yeah, she tried to break up her mother's marriage because her sleazy father reappeared after about 10 years and told her the divorce was her mom's fault but he wanted to rebuild their family sooo much. But all of that is ok. Nobody holds any lasting grudge against her. Why? Because she's Serena van der Woodsen. Trust fund babies are never at fault!
Besides dressing like a tramp, she deliberately embarassed herself and others at public events in her hopes that the tabloid write ups would reach her missing father, had an affair with a married politician, and decided not to go to an Ivy League school in favor of taking on a job for about 3 weeks and then doing absolutely nothing productive for the rest of the year. And oh yeah, she tried to break up her mother's marriage because her sleazy father reappeared after about 10 years and told her the divorce was her mom's fault but he wanted to rebuild their family sooo much. But all of that is ok. Nobody holds any lasting grudge against her. Why? Because she's Serena van der Woodsen. Trust fund babies are never at fault!
Blair also does immoral things all the time, but the consequences for her are rarely bad. For example, in Season One, she sabotaged another girl's SAT preparation and stole her calculator batteries the day of the test, but was never punished for it. The only retribution she's faced is when her acceptance to Yale was rescinded because she harrassed a teacher after getting a B. But did she learn any lesson about this? No, she whined the entire time in Season Three about being at NYU, continued to be rude and hateful (telling a bi-racial girl that she was inferior to her upper class breeding), but got accepted into Columbia for sophomore year, where she can be around other rich people (Newsflash, Blair, the Ivy League is notorious for wearing sweatshirts and ratty jeans all the time). While the show used to portray her as an anti-heroine, the show now backs up her classist insults, primarily with its depiction of Jenny Humphrey.
In Season One, Jenny was this cute little freshman from Brooklyn who wanted desparately to enjoy the pleasures of the upper class- elegant gowns, cocktail parties, and debutante balls, etc.
Awww, sweet Little J
Though she managed to gain some acceptance into the "inner circle" for a while, the hateful rich kids tore her down and she learned that their lives were shallow, cruel, and not worthy of her emulation.
In Season Two, she pretty much did her own thing- designing dresses, becoming homeless voluntarily, and sporting that terrible wannabe emo punk look that was popular among the "rocker" girls in my high school from 2003 to 2005 (you know what I'm talking about, the heavy eyeliner, converses, and that nasty ubiquitous outgrown, topheavy, shredded and bleached bob hairstyle). Then her dad married Serena's mom, and she got appointed to be the next "queen" of the school's female student hierarchy because she was now the richest kid in the school. How does that turn out for her?
Well, Season Three basically argued that being the lower middle class peasant from Brooklyn (White Trash Headquarters in the eyes of her classmates and Blair) that she is, she's incapable of being polished and elegant. Instead, she's inherently unfit for the wealthy lifestyle, and she stands out for all the wrong reasons. She started dressing more and more like a cracked out Lady Gaga/Courtney Love wannabe, dealing drugs, trying to steal Serena's boyfriend, and looking like she hadn't showered in about two months.
Looks like Herpes Central to me
The part defining how unworthy she is of living in the Upper East Side is when she reacted to Serena's father trying to break up Lily and Rufus's marriage. She realized, primarily because Serena and Blair basically told her she's white trash scum and needed to go back to living with poor people, that she wasn't not comfortable with her father's new marriage and wanted things to go back to the way they used to be. And can you blame her? Her parents just got divorced within the past year or so, Lily is quite possibly the most incompetent mother and wife ever, and nobody will let her forget that she doesn't deserve her current settings because she's not from old money. So she decided to try to help break up the Rufus-Lily marriage, just like Serena. But unlike Serena, who had no reason to help her sketch-tastic father William Baldwin, Jenny actually got punished. Everyone now hates her, she got depicted as being a horrible person with horrible nasty panda makeup, and her punishment was being cut off from money and designer clothing and getting packed off to live with her lower-class mother in Hudson, where 1/4 of the population lives in poverty and the median income is about $24K. Oh, and she will have to go to public school. Serena, being 2 years older and supposedly more mature, helped her father (who gave her mom the wrong medicines so he could nurse her back to health and win her trust!) escape the authorities so he could go lie, steal, cheat, and abuse the Hippocratic Oath elsewhere. And then she gets to go to Paris with Blair! Yay! Vacation!! Because she's from an old aristocratic New York family! Of course anything she does is completely understandable and excusable!
The show has always had characters who believed their pedigrees and money made them inherently better than everyone else. But this used to be seen as a character flaw, not the show's message. There are valid arguments for aristocracy, but I don't believe that having a noble/wealthy family excuses and allows you to be immoral and rude. Instead, your background means you have a responsibility to be moral and well-behaved because society looks to the upper classes for so much. I'm pretty sure that the show's writers began Jenny's villification because they needed to work around Taylor Momsen's unavailability for the next season and wanted a way to get her character out of the picture for a while without too much protesting from viewers. I think it's a bit unfortunate that this is the way they decided to go about it-- couldn't they have just shipped her off to work at Eleanor's atelier in Paris? That's how it looked like it was heading for a couple of episodes...
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But that being said, I am interested in the course Season Four will take. I'm pretty sure, however, that it's going to be predictable. My guess is that Blair and Chuck will continue to have a rocky relationship but ~finally~ get back together at the end of the season, Chuck's new French girlfriend will turn out to be bad and have ulterior motives, Serena is going to slut it up even more, Jenny will reappear chastened (but Blair will at first try to sabotage anything she does), Vanessa will return from Haiti with some toyboy, and it will turn out that Dan is not the father of Georgina's baby and as always, Georgina is trying to get revenge on one of the gang, she'll disappear for most of the season, and return with some new schtick. And oh yeah, Nate too will acquire some sort of scheming terrible girlfriend. As always. I just want more Dorota. She's the best.
Check out the trailer, by the way. I couldn't find one on Youtube that wasn't pixilated, but isn't the French cover of "These Boots Were Made for Walking" incredible?