It’s hard enough being a teenager — raging hormones, peer pressure, trying to get into a good college — without your ambitious relatives using you to advance the family’s interests. If you thought your adolescence was difficult, consider The Other Boleyn Girl, the film adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s best-selling historical novel.
According to the movie directed by Justin Chadwick, the beautiful Boleyn sisters were pawns in their father’s campaign to get ahead in the court of Henry VIII. One minute the girls are wondering what their first sexual experience would be like; the next minute, Anne (Natalie Portman) is assigned to beguile King Henry (Eric Bana, doing a good impression of the famous portrait by Hans Holbein). Henry is vulnerable: his marriage to Catherine of Aragon is troubled by the lack of a male heir. Anne eagerly sets out to seduce him with come-hither looks and remarks about her thighs, but her enthusiasm backfires. The king ends up being besotted with Mary (Scarlett Johansson), the nice sister, who inconveniently is already married. The Boleyn sisters are summoned to court posthaste, and the catfight begins.
But for the involvement of historical personages and a certain schism, The Other Boleyn Girl is a cliché-ridden soap opera about overachieving teenagers. Well, they did get very close to the throne, and given that there wasn’t a wide range of careers for women at the time, that was sort of an achievement. Talk about a black and white view of the world: blonde, boring Mary, who genuinely loves the king, suffers in the name of duty; dark-haired, vicious Anne has so much more fun bending people to her will. All right, she loses her head in the end, but not before she causes a whole lot of trouble that continues to this day. (If that’s a spoiler to you, then you really aren’t going to get into your first-choice university.)
The teenagers of 16th-century England would be chewed up by the perfect orthodontia of Gossip Girl’s 21st-century vixens. The best-selling series of novels by Cecily von Ziegesar chronicles the lives of a group of students at the exclusive Constance Billard School in Manhattan.
“Spoiled” does not begin to describe these Upper East Side girls and their monstrous sense of entitlement. “We all live in huge apartments with our own bedrooms and bathrooms and phone lines,” begins the unidentified Gossip Girl, who reports on their comings and goings on her website. “We have unlimited access to money and booze and whatever else we want, and our parents are rarely home, so we have tons of privacy… Our shit still stinks, but you can’t smell it because the bathroom is sprayed hourly by the maid with a refreshing scent made exclusively for us by French perfumers.”
The notion of filial duty is nonexistent; as for their family’s fortunes, they survive their profligate spending (one mother buys islands for all her children). There are at least three high-end brand names on every page: Gossip Girl often seems like a shopping catalogue with a plot, or a crash course in consumerism (Now I can shop in Barney’s even with a blindfold!). Sex is still a tool for personal advancement, but since they already have everything they could possibly want, they do it in order for the fame. I mean infamy. And the pleasure, of course, because these characters are walking ids clothed by Marc Jacobs. They’re not illiterate clods — there are references to The Great Gatsby, War and Peace, and The Red and The Black, among others.
The main characters are Blair Waldorf, the malevolent leader of the senior class, and Serena van der Woodsen, the heartbreakingly beautiful nice girl. Serena is the one very boy wants and every girl wants to be; Blair, I suspect, is the stand-in for the reader. She’s the bitch you love to hate, the avatar of all your worst impulses. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the bad girl is more interesting than the good girl, whose unfair advantages are mostly genetic.
As bad girls go, Blair is intelligent, responsible, and chaste: the only person she really hurts is herself. Nor are her ambitions worthy of a supervillain. All she wants is to get into Yale — to this end she does a lot of extracurricular social awareness and charity work — and to lose her virginity to her boyfriend, Nate Archibald. Nate is so stoned that en route to The Plaza, where she’s booked a suite, he forgets their assignation and ends up taking his father’s sailboat to Bermuda.
Unlike the Boleyn girls, Blair knows exactly how she wants her first time to be — she’s done the production design, with La Perla underwear, champagne and caviar on toast points, and burned a mix CD to play in the background.
The Gossip Girl novels are compelling and horrible, and I mean that in the best possibly way. Like Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Gossip Girl sends up the culture it seems to be extolling. This is what civilization has come to: shopping, shopping, more shopping. Beneath the brand names and designer labels of its fabulous denizens looms the void.
So the clear winner in this inter-century teen smackdown is Gossip Girl. (I must emphasize that I am referring to the novels; I hear the TV series is not worthy of the name.) Of the two, The Other Boleyn Girl is the “prestige project”: it has the costumes, castles, and British accents. However, in its pretense at historical importance, it strangles on its own corsets. Gossip Girl is wicked and shallow, but it revels in its own wickedness and shallowness, and is therefore the more honest work. Granted, it is possible that some gullible child may crack open
Von Ziegesar’s books and see them as manuals for modern living. But real life will deal with her in time.