On Serena van der Woodsen and self-surveillance
(if you're wondering why you hate everybody's favourite it girl)
Main characters are the worst, and I mean this in every sense. There’s always somebody in your life who’s a little too frustratingly sure that the world revolves around them, that their story is more important, that their joke is funnier, that their voice is better. There’s nobody we love to hate more on a TV show than the protagonist, and nobody who makes us cringe like a celebrity or influencer. There is something so grotesquely self-indulgent about living your life like you know somebody is watching. We like our protagonists to be unaware, unshielded, but not necessarily unmanicured. The protagonist of HBO’s Gossip Girl, Serena van der Woodsen, is presumably the perfect combination of these traits: she’s cool without ever trying too hard, she’s polished, she’s vulnerable, and yet she is by far the most unanimously disliked character on the show (you might be wanting to bring up the anti Dan Humphrey cult in response to this statement- we’ll get there).
What I’ve noticed about Serena that makes her so easy to hate is that in moments of crisis, she seems to just run away (see: the plethora of ‘I gotta go!’ tiktoks). She is painfully avoidant in her interpersonal relationships, and yet expects everyone else to be there waiting for her when she gets back. Her inaction, or rather, ineffective action, seems to push on a collective sore spot in the Gen Z zeitgeist. We are infuriated by her emotional paralysis, it is scream-at-the-screen difficult to watch. Serena even manages to up Dan’s popularity, a character disliked for the chip on his shoulder more than anything else, because of how unreasonably slippery we find her to be. We hate Serena because she reminds us of us.
At least for me, I find her infuriating urge to flee deeply familiar, in fact, I flee here, to write. We flee to our phones, to our text messages, to tiktok, to netflix, to twitter. To overshare, to under-think, or worse, overthink, to be overstimulated. If this generation-wide common flaw with Serena didn’t already make us hate her enough, it is even more annoying knowing that her hiding place was quite often mainland Europe. Or whichever continent she wanted to be in that week. Her privilege, overlapping with her relatable foot-tapping impatience, means she is always catching strays.
Another thing that sets Serena apart from her equally privileged company, like Blair for example, is the show’s exploration of surveillance. Gossip Girl toys with the idea of the panopticon, a common theme in the 2000s and 2010s, particularly in reality TV. What separated Gossip Girl from reality TV, apart from the obvious fact that it is scripted, is the distinct lack of self regulation from some of the characters, namely Serena.
Serena knows she is being watched and reported upon, yet she still participates in the messy drama of her love life, taking flight at anytime, anywhere, to seemingly 'escape' herself and the image of herself she has caused, yet ironically never achieving it because Gossip Girl (the purveyor of power in this sociological surveillance scenario) is interested in her, wherever she may be. In this way, Serena is the embodiment of 2000s celebrity, the Paris Hiltons and Lindsay Lohans of the world, who continued to live in their debauchery despite disdainful comments from the press or a cruel blast on Gossip Girl. Paris, who gained most of her fame from her reality TV show alongside Nicole Richie, The Simple Life, has been hailed a pop-culture icon for her party girl antics, and fabulously enigmatic public persona; Serena’s character, however, was received as being too on-the-nose, too girl-next-door for her circumstances, only as iconic as we’ll let her be. The unabashed flamboyance of the Hilton and Lohan era isn’t quite as central in the portrayal of Serena’s life, and maybe that is the point. Perhaps we, as a society, are just not ready to humanise girls of this trope. Blair’s character, while flawed, does not struggle to be humanised in the eyes of modern audiences, maybe because we already respect her traits outside of her notoriety.
Blair represents a different kind of individual to Serena: she is clever, sharp and manipulative in a way that allows her to have more of a back and forth relationship with Gossip Girl. As the purveyor of power (Gossip Girl) changes her tactics, so does she. When she knows she can't be seen at a certain event because it would raise suspicion, she manipulates Jenny into being her vehicle for chaos. When she is particularly heartbroken about being rejected from her dream university, she knows she will be Gossip Girl's biggest target, and so decides to lay low. When she thinks she could benefit from Gossip Girl's exposure, she plays into the conniving villain role assigned to her, in order to reassert her dominance in her social sphere by humiliating one of her subjects or causing a scene.
Blair is aware of how she can feed into Gossip Girl's games, using the panopticon as a stage in order to achieve a certain public image. While there are some uncomfortable moments in this show, watching blair be tortured and endlessly manipulated by Gossip Girl at every life turn and memorable moment, the show largely presents blair and Gossip Girl as having this mutual marionette relationship, wherein one party lifts a string, causing the other to follow behind, and vice versa, in this messy, yet almost friendly machiavellian tango of a parasocial relationship. Blair humanises Gossip Girl, and Gossip Girl humanises Blair.
To return to the issue of humanising Serena, though, I am optimistic that we are getting better at sympathetically viewing women with similar journeys as Serena. I do question how much of the hate towards Serena can be chalked up to internalised misogyny towards a woman who seemingly gets all the guys she wants, lives a privileged life on the Upper East Side and does it all effortlessly. Are we ready to receive and respect this perfect ‘party girl’ trope with open arms instead of pronged claws? The answer to this question is Alix Earle. Her rapid and recent rise to fame has proven to me that we are capable of no longer tearing down the ‘party girl’; the support she received for the recent launch of her podcast, Hot Mess, proves we want to be let into the party girl’s world, we want to understand her, we want to give her a voice and a beating heart. Had Serena van der Woodsen been introduced to us in the 2020s, would we have hated her more for her shameless wealth and world of privilege? Or would we have welcomed a human depiction of the 'party girl', to right all the wrongs of the media in the early 2000s? I shall leave that with you.
Either way, the reason so many viewers have taken a dislike to Serena is because she uncomfortably foreshadows the current state of our relationship with social media and surveillance. She is aware of what she is victim to, but not self aware enough of her own actions to change them. She would rather sacrifice her privacy and comfort in order to live a life she enjoys, rather than dealing with the issue of Gossip Girl head on. After all, the series is six seasons long, and Serena, who you could argue is most incentivised to crush Gossip Girl, does basically nothing to stop her. She is frustrating because she is ridden with the same flaws that plague our generation, and yet she cruises through life untouched by them, and while she jets off to a Greek island, we feel there is nowhere else to run.
xoxo