The Deepness in the Shallow Pleasure of Gossip Girl.

We as an audience tune in every Monday at 9 PM, eager to watch what devilish drama may occur. Yet, what once seemed to be a measly pastime, seems almost like an observational look into the boxed life of these gossip girls. As the voice of the narrator is addressed less and less, her narrations become more personal and more like surveillance. She knows things that no one from the outside realm of these families and friends would know. She knows exactly what is going on at what particular moment to which particular girl. Her message isn’t delivered via text messages anymore, it is delivered through the TV and into our living rooms. We are the ones receiving the imaginary text messages through our television sets, and gasping in horror about what happened to Blair and Chuck at the such and such restaurant. Once just an audience, we seemed to have penetrated that invisible wall and become a direct third party into the world that is Gossip Girl. Watching the TV, it seems we are observing the lives of the girls and boys as if we read our National Enquirers– they are eternally trapped inside this domain where we will be hungrily watching them as the media continuously penetrates their personal lives and lets us know for our own entertainment.

Watching Gossip Girl brings up another question of, is this show presenting a false reality or is it a satirical and almost parody of the fake lives of the people in the city? These kids are supposed to be 18 years old. Fresh out of high school, they all conveniently enter prestigious schools in the city and continue on in their efforts to reign supreme over other inadequate beings. Not only does this apply to the rich upper eastsiders, even Vanessa, who is the bohemian artistic chick suddenly fits right in with the crowd and gets to do everything that the rich girls can do and more. People who watch scoff and laugh at the thought that these teenagers have it all so easy, and the most they worry about seem to be how to open an exclusive club in a hotel that they so easily bought. But is this in fact so far twisted from reality? Not to sound ignorant, but from a one cow town in the Midwest, it might seem impossible, however, for the New York crowd who observe and constantly see these spoiled socialites in the public, it doesn’t seem to be such a far cry from actuality. We relentlessly see and report about the likes of Paris Hilton, Tinsley Mortimer, and Lydia Hearst and can’t help but guffaw or in some cases feel intense jealously about the blessed lives that they have. Sure, Gossip Girl may not reflect the norm, but can it be said that it is more than just a fake drama, and maybe a caricature of reality? After all there is a blonde, a brunette, a down-towner, a gay, a rocker chick, an uptight parent, a down-to-earth parent, and too many other one-noted characters that we can easily view all over New York City.

So is Gossip Girl a reflection of our own fake lives, or is it just merely a TV show that I spent way too much time dissecting? And is the narrator a more broad distortion of the media, or is she a random character who will be introduced when ratings are dropping? The truth lies only within the writers, but it seems as though Gossip Girl is taking a route that probably is not visible to the younger audience, by setting up a parallel realm that not only keeps us up-to-date and entertained like the likes of a tabloid magazine, but also calls us out on our own infatuation with peeping into the lives of these socialites and raises the question within ourselves, are we also like that in some way, shape, or form?