“Sometimes a critic’s aesthetic judgment is impossible to extricate from what you might call her cinematic libido. There are movies that bring us a pleasure that’s neither definable nor defensible. These used to be called “guilty pleasures,” but that phrase seems too judgmental, too pre-Vatican II, for our postmodern era of omnivorous cultural consumption. The distinction between high and low culture, between what we’re allowed to enjoy publicly and what we must sneak off to savor in private, has effaced itself to the degree that “guilty pleasures” needs to be replaced by a more morally neutral term. For our purposes here, I’ll go with a term that a friend and I coined in college and that I still deploy on occasion: movies we couldn’t intellectually defend but still unapologetically loved we called “juicebombs.”"
In her recent review of The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Slate’s film reviewer Dana Stevens faces a conundrum which I found myself confronted with while I read, and wanted to read, the first book in the Gossip Girl series by Cecily von Ziegesar. “I don’t believe in guilty pleasures” I always asserted, I believed in unashamed, unabashed pleasure in anything I enjoyed. Whether it be an apparently crappy movie – Showgirls was a favourite for a very, very long time – or television show, or music, if I liked it and was entertained by it, then it was worthy of my attention. I never looked at things in terms of “taste” or kitsch value, value was determined by my personal relationship with it. So, why was I so embarrassed to buy (yes, really) and read these novels? Why did I seek reassurance that I wasn’t committing some booknerd crime? Why did I consider excuses and alternate reasons for my purchase choice?
Because, Gossip Girl is, as Stevens would call it, a juicebomb of a novel. I cannot defend it. I cannot claim any intellectual or moral value of the novel; the writing isn’t great, the characters are ridiculous and their trials and tribulations are completely alien to me. The novel is populated with rich, spoiled brat 17 year old characters who act like middle aged women, are preoccupied with labels and social standing and who speak in the flattest dialogue I have ever read.
Serena van der Woodsen returns to her privileged Upper East Side social set after a stint in boarding school, only to find herself shunned and plagued by rumours from her form circle of friends. With their social movements charted by the anonymous blogger known only as Gossip Girl – a narrative choice that functions only as a gimmick, it offers no real perspective or comment on the happenings, maybe I expect too much – the group of teenagers tread the ground of adolescence with the hyper-awareness of public scrutiny. Blair Waldorf, Serena’s former best friend, is horrified by her return because she believes she will be relegated to second best in favour of the “perfect” Serena. Blair’s boyfriend, Nate Archibald, has a long standing attraction to Serena, a relationship consummated without Blair’s knowledge. The plot is substandard fare, the usual soap operatic tropes. Yet, for some reason I am still unable to define, it is compulsively readable and I am determined not to feel guilty about it.
