Reply to PostChuck, Blair and narrative power.
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I found this in Tumblr and I was really amazed, I thought I will share this with you.
This girl made a brilliant analysis:
http://zoroetarrive.tumblr.com/post/2501437709/chuck-blair-and-narrative-power
One of the more fascinating aspects of Chuck and Blair’s incendiary relationship, for me, is their constant fight for ascendancy and dominance. These two are perpetually exchanging power, an issue which is at the centre of Gossip Girl’s rarified world. Like their most obvious literary predecessors, Valmont and Merteuil, they are skilled players of the game, something they are deeply invested in (or so they tell themselves). For me, and, I suspect, for them, the chief amusements to be derived from their interactions lie in the revelation of self, or the permutations of self which are unveiled each time they toy with one another. These are two peacocks - preening narcissists with absolute control over their respective environments. This is achieved through the construction (and destruction, plus a little inventive revisionism) of personal narrative.
So determined are they to exert control over the world around them that they will hurt themselves to do it. After all, when they hurt themselves, they are hurting each other, and what better mastery is there than that of the person who loves you most in the world; who is in your very blood and bones. Why did they go to ‘war’ in the first place? Because Chuck was punishing her for attempting to remove herself from his life, just as he formerly managed to simultaneously punish her/punish himself for being in love with her in seasons past. “Who knows my limits since you took away my future.”, “…the person I care most about”. Even if Chuck is not conscious of whom he is actually referring to, the audience should be clever enough to infer it.
While re-watching Mad Men I was struck by the similarities between Chuck Bass and Don Draper. Both men are obsessed with creating a narrative for themselves that eliminates the past, or re-imagines it. They allow certain people into their lives that facilitate that narrative (this is particularly relevant for Don at the end of season four with regard to Megan and for Chuck at the beginning of season four with regard to Eva – both women are necessary at those points to tell the story their respective men want to tell about who they are now, or who they are playing at being, to the exclusion of what is fact, and what is empirically real). Both women are mirrors that reflect back the positive self-image Don and Chuck desperately crave in order to live with themselves. The people who know better (Dr Fay and Blair); the people who have seen them unmasked, have to be removed from the story. This completely ignores the fact that “there are no fresh starts. Lives carry on”, to quote Henry Francis. This obsession is what drives them. Don is fixated with wiping out the past, while Chuck is consumed by ideas about legacy, and forging a future that can negate the untenable parts of his personal history. Essentially “Chuck Bass” and “Don Draper” are brands that require constant modification. As Jacob at TWOP says so eloquently:
“It’s all about willpower; it’s all about defining exactly what the story’s about, no matter what anybody else has to say about it. No matter how much it breaks your heart.”
By the same token, this is why Chuck was the first person who had to be plucked out of Blair’s old life when she wanted to throw the whole book away towards the end of the second season. Equally (and in opposition to this) when she couldn’t bear to be apart from him even after the events of 3.17, she went back to her old bag of ‘movie of my life’ tricks by looking for signs (which she willed to mean what she wanted them to mean) and plucking out ‘love makes everything simple’. This was the same bag of tricks that housed that old stalwart for avoiding personal responsibility: fate (which cropped up in 4.06 as a way of allowing them both to live with themselves).
They have to keep contorting themselves into new permutations of BlairandChuck,ChuckandBlair, in order to have a legitimate reason for remaining in each others’ orbits. “We’re not a couple, we’re not at war. We have no reason to interact beyond social niceties.” What to do when you can’t wage war on your beloved? After all, “you know its love when you start talking like an assassin.” Cue, piano!hate!sex! They are just doing what they have always done; “finding excuses”. In this case, to be together, as opposed to finding more and more tenuous reasons not to be, or to find new and imaginative ways of drawing out the inevitable, or to determinedly ignore the elephant in the room. For many, the dialogue in the scene before all the ‘hate’ sex represented the worst kind of turgid ‘romanticism’ the GG writers sometimes approximate. For me, their exchange represented the tone Chuck and Blair themselves felt they needed to strike in order to enable the story they both wanted to tell. Of course it was ridiculous and hyperbolic. They are ridiculous, hyperbolic people with a flair for the theatrical, and in order to justify getting anywhere near each other after all they had inflicted, they had to launch themselves into their version of an overwrought romantic fit of mutual pique. It was even comical if you read it without the inflection and emotion Ed and Leighton imbued it with. Chuck and Blair are nothing if not a tragi-comedy of at times near-hysterical proportions, always walking the fine line between absurdity and pathos (as do the actors that play them).
Their so-called ‘hate sex’ was another in a long line of narrative conveniences (utilised by Chuck and Blair, I’m not referring to the writers) that was totally disproved by the subsequent episodes. This was merely used as a novel way of constructing a new narrative around a new conceit. It was a new mask to wear. They had to have sex because that is what former flames do when there is mutual loathing to work out; to prove they were nothing more than animal impulse; because they had to get it out of their systems in order to move on, because it was convenient and easy to be “enemies with benefits”. When Chuck accidentally deviated from this by letting the mask slip, it forced them to re-negotiate with their sense of story. Now it is not so much exterior forces which make them star-crossed lovers (although societal convention is obviously an impediment to a union between the original brash, vulgar, nouveau-riche dandy and an old money UES princess with a penchant for prohibition), it is their own internal resistance to the symbiotic nature of their relationship, from Blair then from Chuck, and now back to Blair again. This is the essential conflict which lies at the heart of their combative pairing. What happens now they have forcibly separated from each other remains to be seen.
Posted 12/29/2010 7:43:48 AM # -
someone had way too much time on their hands...
Posted 12/29/2010 7:55:04 AM # -
Very interesting!!! Thanks MarieChic!
Posted 12/29/2010 8:07:42 AM # -
i would read it but it was way too long and about Chuck and Blair so i really don't care
Posted 12/29/2010 11:53:14 AM # -
that was really interesting!
Posted 12/29/2010 12:03:12 PM # -
interesting post!
Posted 12/29/2010 12:05:39 PM # -
Very interesting! Nice insight... but I had no idea what she was talking about! haha, I did enjoy reading it though! Thanks for sharing!
Posted 12/29/2010 12:12:13 PM # -
I can't read through all of this. Summary please.
Posted 12/29/2010 12:28:37 PM # -
this was great! it's what i've been saying all along :) they're indestrible
Posted 12/29/2010 12:30:14 PM # -
Very, very interesting insight indeed. It cuts right to the heart of the problem, just with really big words and (unneededly)long psychobabble. Basically it says that Chuck and Blair are both destructive individuals who feel the most in control when they hand out destruction, so to let themselves be in love with eachother for real and try for a healthy relationship would mean for both Chuck and Blair to not feel in control, so they constantly are trying to find ways and reasons to create a reality within their relationship where destruction(and that whole push/pull thing) of one another feels like a viable option to enact, so they can feel in control because otherwise, their own visions for themselves cannot be realized(this is incredibly true for Chuck) because they need full control of themselves to do this.
Being in a loving relationship with someone else means giving up a large portion of said control, so they cannot bear long enough to be in one before reverting back to old tricks.
Posted 12/30/2010 10:07:38 PM #
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Blair: You say I always bet against you. Not this time. I'm all in.
