Guilty pleasure
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- December
- 31
How many literary references can you spot in the CW’s “Gossip Girl” ?
There’s the whole “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” gamesmanship between the overtly venal Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick) and the seemingly virtuous Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester), the Vicomte de Valmont and Madame de Merteuil of our upper-crusty Manhattan prep-school tale. (The point is underscored in “School Lies,” the episode airing at 9 p.m. Wednesday on Channel 11 locally, and then driven home in “A Thin Line Between Chuck and Nate,” on Jan. 9. )
Chuck and Blair spend most of their respective time bedeviling reformed bad girl Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively), Blair’s BFF, who’s conducting an “Upstairs, Downstairs” affair with noble Brooklyn scholarship student Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley); and charismatic Nate Archibald (Zac Efron look-alike Chace Crawford)  Chuck’s BFF and Blair’s lover  an average student who has “future president of the United States” written all over him. (Notice how the actors names sound as WASPishly phony as the characters’. But I digress.)
Then there’s the “All About Eve” subplot, with groveling, apparently goody-goody Jenny Humphrey (Taylor Momsen), Dan’s little sis, playing the social-climbing Eve Harrington to Blair’s imperious Margo Channing.
But honestly, what “Gossip Girl” most resembles in its portrayal of the calcifying upper class and the lethal power of the written word is a low-rent Henry James or Edith Wharton novel. This is never truer than in the poignant portrait of a lady, Serena’s mom, Lily (Kelly Rutherford), who in the new year will have to choose between love and money, self-determination and self-sacrifice. Paging Lily Bart.
Indeed, the show’s titular narrator is a snarky Wharton, with her knowing insights into the manners and mores of her tribe. (I wonder who Gossip Girl really is. My money is on nosy, wide-eyed, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth Jenny.)
Of course, comparing “GG”  a limited pleasure but a pleasure nonetheless  to Wharton or James is like comparing “American Idol” to the Metropolitan Opera auditions. But then, you get the cultural symbols that fit the times.
Hey, you know you love me. XOXO.
This entry was posted
on Monday, December 31st, 2007 at 2:37 pm by Georgette Gouveia.
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