Gossip Girl in the Metaverse
& next-level mimetic desire
Given that The Portrait of a Mirror has received comparisons to Gossip Girl everywhere from Publisher’s Weekly to New York Magazine, I was pretty hotly anticipating the show’s renaissance on HBO Max:
My eagerness only grew after my recent introduction to Luke Burgis and reading his extraordinary book Wanting, which came out the same day as Portrait. Luke’s work builds on that of French polymath René Girard, and the concept of “mimetic desire” they both explore is at the heart of Gossip Girl (let alone Portrait, which I talked to Luke about here).
Luke’s website has a whole primer on mimetic desire that I won’t attempt to imitate (ha ha), but briefly, he defines it in Wanting as “Desire generated or formed through the imitation of what someone else has already desired or is perceived to desire. Mimetic desire means that we choose objects due to the influence of a third party, a model or mediator of desire.” Does this not sound like the crux of any given episode of the original Gossip Girl? Serena wants Nate because Blair wants Nate because Serena wants Nate etc. etc., periodically replacing “Nate” with almost anything the two of them happen to be vying for that week. The shifting object of desire isn’t really that important—you might even say it’s a MacGuffin. Blair and Serena’s mimetic rivalry is what drives the drama and ultimately powers the show. And its cycling intransigence rings true for a few Girardian reasons:
As best friends who go to the same school and travel in the same social circles, Blair and Serena have zero barriers to competing with each other directly. Luke calls this realm “Freshmanistan” precisely after the high school vibe of its competition.
Blair and Serena’s extreme similarity as beautiful, rich Upper East Siders exacerbates their eagerness to differentiate themselves, leading to conflict (this is an idea I coincidentally note in Portrait, too: “nothing highlights difference quite like homogeneity”).
Whether or not we as viewers can relate to their rarified world, Blair and Serena want how we want, mediating each other’s desires. Their friendship and feud feels realistic even as their lifestyle is aspirational.
And because we viewers exist on a different plane from these fictional characters and the celebrities who play them, we’re free to imitate them shamelessly. We can go out and buy the exact same dress as Blair—even though Serena wouldn’t be caught dead in it—because she’s up in “Celebristan” (again Luke’s apt term).
If you haven’t seen the first episode of the reboot yet, consider this your spoiler alert. Like its predecessor, the new Gossip Girl is self-consciously setting up a nearly identical mimetic rivalry. Perhaps it’s even more intensely mimetic, given Julien and Zoya are half-sisters. While the characters don’t use Girardian terms, we literally follow the long-suffering teachers at Constance Billard as they set a mousetrap for mimetic crisis, analyzing Blair and Serena’s rivalry like a playbook for how to manipulate their new students. It takes less than one episode for Julian and Zoya to go from co-conspiritors to “this town ain’t big enough for the big of the both of us,” with Obie’s affections hanging in the balance. Meanwhile, the subplot basically consists of Audrey’s inability to orgasm with her boyfriend, Aki, unless she’s thinking about (or in one scene, literally looking at) Max the naughty libertine. Aki’s devotion is boring to her because no one else is modeling desire for him.
So, despite the many recent articles and tweets about how HBO Max’s Gossip Girl is different from its predecessor because the new kids are woke, I’m going to have to disagree.
In the time between the original (2007-2012) and the reboot, apologizing for one’s privilege has itself become a status symbol. As I recently argued in Electric Literature, “the linchpin of elite decorum rests on decrying the very class structure that elite decorum traditionally exists to signify and protect.” That Obie in particular is a nice rich guy who “wrestles with” his privilege isn’t a departure from the original, but rather a necessary adaptation to preserve the same (lucrative eyeball grabbing!) mimetic relationships in different sociopolitical times. Obie’s primary function is still as an object of mimetic rivalry—no different from "Nate.” On television, the new Gossip Girl is . . . still Gossip Girl.
The show’s marketing is a totally different story though, which brings us, finally, to the Metaverse. It’s still up for debate what exactly the Metaverse is, so I’m going to attempt to define it myself as an immersive, interconnected virtual landscape that blurs the lines between life and simulation. It’s the place where we might all buy virtual houses someday in which to hang our NFTs. But the Times piece I linked to also ends with the observation that “the internet of today . . . is perhaps more metaversal than it gets credit for,” and I thought the same thing last week when Instagram suggested I follow @juliencalloway—the real account of a fictional character. Now this was a departure from the original Gossip Girl; this was new.
Back in March 2020, around the time my book deal for Portrait was announced, I thought it would be a cute little on-theme idea to create a real-world Instagram account for @imetovidsheirs (I Met Ovid’s Heirs) to mirror Vivien’s account in the novel, featuring Bookstagram posts in the same way I imagined Vivien reposting visitors’ selfies in the exhibition. Of course I was hardly the first person to create a dedicated social media account for a novel, let alone a TV show, but I was tickled by its recursive/mimetic quality in the sense I’ve historically associated with the word, with life mirroring art mirroring life. The Gossip Girl reboot takes this conceit a step further—a step I have not previously seen—by creating immersively mimetic accounts for many of its key fictional characters, each fully realized from the character’s perspective. This network of fake accounts interact not only with one another but with actual users—Julien follows Audrey and Max alongside Ferragamo and Michelle Obama. “She” also follows The Cut—after Lindsay Peoples Wagner, its actual Editor-In-Chief, guest-starred as herself in Episode One.
This isn’t life mirroring art—it’s collapsing the space between them; it’s creating an immersive, interconnected virtual landscape that blurs the lines between life and simulation. There are some interesting mimetic implications here in the Girardian sense of the word, too. As Luke writes in Wanting, “Social media is social mediation—and it now brings nearly all of our models inside our personal world.” When I go from watching Julien on television to following “her” on Instagram, does she relocate from “Celebristan” to “Freshmanistan”—should I be embarrassed to copy her too closely? To wear the same dress?
I have a lot of questions about what comes next. Will Ferragamo follow Julien back? Will they want to partner with her? Will her account get verified, as HBO Max’s “official” fictitious account for Julien Calloway? If it doesn’t, will copycat accounts proliferate? Will there be confusion as to which fake Julian is the “real” one? And how might Jordan Alexander—the actor who plays Julian—feel about all this? What if Ferragamo wants to partner with Julien over her? “I’m influential,” Julien says on the show. But do the spoils of her actual influence—of @juliencalloway—go to Alexander or HBO?
I can’t help thinking back to the scene in Portrait where Diana describes encountering her own wedding announcement in the Style section: “but I’m telling you,” she says, “this went beyond a filter. It didn’t even seem like me in there. Like, I was actively jealous of the girl in the article—jealous of myself! The girl in the article seemed like the luckiest fucking human being in the entire fucking world. Now she had that thing. I’m telling you, aspiring to my fictional self and empirically knowing that she wasn't and could never be real—it was mind bending and ego shattering and dehumanizing and bleak. You don’t realize how important that sliver of hope is until you’ve lost it, I think.”
Welcome to the Metaverse.
XOXO,
https://natashajoukovsky.com