In case you missed it—and I bet you did—the TV show “Gossip Girl” ended this week. Based on the young-adult novel series of the same name, by Cecily von Ziegesar, “Gossip Girl” was borne of “The O.C.” which was borne, at least spiritually, of “Dawson’s Creek,” which débuted in the year of my bat mitzvah. On Monday, the CW aired the final episode of the show’s six-season run, and with it, a totem of my youth has been knocked to the dusty floor. Most of the three-and-a-half million people who tuned in to the first “Gossip Girl,” on September 19, 2007, did not tune in this week. Pity for them: the series, the first smash of the Web-zeitgeist generation, actually wrapped up with something relevant to say about the way we live now.
The gang was all there. They looked preposterously fit, fickle as a tween-chameleon, and narcissistic almost to the point of self-enshrinement: my old friends. Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester) donned fancy headbands, and Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively), still her B.F.F. (sort of), bore her trademark cleavage rhombus with the pert aplomb of an actress who knows she can finally kick it with her superhero hubby and take on more “serious” roles. The episode also featured a cameo from Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is making a good show of it these days. Lisa Loeb peeked in, as the wife of Rufus Humphrey (Matthew Settle), since his burnout with long-flame Lily Bass (Kelly Rutherford), who at some point was step-mother, aunt, or wife to probably every character on the show. William Baldwin, having fathered daughters by both Lily and her sister—and having duped his daughter’s impostor into thinking they were in love only to get accepted back in to the glistening clan—was there, too.
But the Fabergé cherry on top was Wallace Shawn, on hand to officiate his step-daughter Blair’s wedding to Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick), her crazy-womanizing one true love. (I hope one day Shawn will officiate my nuptials, but that I won’t be marrying a man who’s just let his father fall from a rooftop to his death, in order not to testify against him.) Finally, in a hat-tip to fans, we saw “The O.C.” star Rachel Bilson trying out for the film version of “Inside,” the novel by the token-boho character, Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley). Bilson nervously runs lines alongside Kristen Bell, the actress who provided the voice of Gossip Girl throughout the show. (Bell tells Bilson she may just be too old to play a high-school character. Get it?)
This little “meta” moment was another wink and nudge revealing how startlingly in touch the show was with its writers and fans. Through its run, “Gossip Girl” made reference to current events in and beyond pop culture (every episode title was taken from the movies) and arranged a cameo for its most heroic recappers (New York magazine’s Jessica Pressler and Chris Rovzar), but it never revealed the identity of the anonymous and all-knowing Gossip Girl who narrates the show. Gossip Girl was unveiled in the finale, at last, and it turns out that she’s actually a gossip boy: Dan—the sad outcast, the unfortunate Brooklynite (you can tell because of his cross-chest messenger bags)—has been culling and dishing the dirt all along.
In the first season of the show, Dan, a high schooler, had a story published in The New Yorker. He also had a poem, titled “Sluts,” published in the magazine. (In von Ziegesar’s active imagination, on page forty-two of a Valentine’s Day issue, somewhere in a story about cat love.) While legitimate writerly figures—including Jay McInerney, Hamish Bowles, Jonathan Karp, and Katrina vanden Heuvel—have appeared on the show, this is a program that once paired Keith Gessen with Elizabeth Hurley as “NYC’s Newest Power Couple!,” which is to say, it’s a representation of the literary world bothered neither with integrity nor realism. (I won’t get into the Hilary Duff three-way, or Lady Gaga’s appearance, which she called, in a unique adjectival styling, “very performance art.”)
So I took a strange pleasure in a literary parallel that emerged in this last episode. When Dan finally reveals himself as Gossip Girl—through an article in the pretty boy Nate Archibald’s Observer stand-in—the coterie collect and are aghast as they debate how Dan could possibly have done this. How could he have slandered his sister? How could he have wounded his friends with never-ending nasty rumors? How could he have abolished their privacy like this? Most potently: How could Dan have represented him_self_ this way? The scene contemplated the tension between Dan according to his actions, and Dan according to Gossip Girl—himself. Strangely enough, it resembled debates I had in college colloquia on the extent to which “Chaucer the pilgrim” reflected, even ironically or in opposition, “Chaucer the poet.”
“Gossip Girl”: finally a study in intertextuality.
In the finale, Dan explains that he began Gossip Girl to become known, to be one of those talked about, even as he gave himself the woeful moniker “Lonely Boy.” Serena sees his point, realizing that Gossip Girl was a “love letter” to people like her; those it ragged and vilified were undeniably its heroes. In the end, she forgives Dan—so much so that she marries him, in a happily-ever-after flash-forward. (Chuck and Blair by this point are the parents of a perfect besuited son, who may as well be named Patek Philippe.) These characters are and have been, after all, like Pirandello’s, in search of an author. What would they have been, without someone to observe and record their stories? Would any of us even know their names?
“Gossip Girl” doesn’t give everyone fifteen minutes of fame. Rather, it shows them having the power to make themselves famous to fifteen (or a hundred and fifteen) people. There is still no good explanation of how Dan, as Gossip Girl, managed to send text-message blasts to cell-phones years before Apple launched its push notifications. But “Gossip Girl” astutely portrayed how, today, everyone who’s anyone is a tipster, fixer, and author. Dan, the writer, turned to a more modern genre of exposition—ostensibly micro-blogging—and joined the inside through his propaganda channel, and because of how much he knew. Gossip Girl was a Wizard of Oz for millennials. In the end, the series presciently showed that social media is just a man, or a few, cowering behind a curtain, or a monitor, or a phone screen. XOXO, you know you loved it.
Photograph: CW Network.
