| Happy:) | Дата: Среда, 29.02.2012, 17:38 | Сообщение # 567 |
 High Society
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HOW DO YOU KILL A FEELING: AN EARNEST CHAIR V. DAIR EXAMINATION
I’ve never done this before; when I love a love-story, it’s usually down to gut-feelings and I never look back, giving instead a reactionary cold-shoulder to any second efforts in the same arena. Sometimes I commit to first encounters too much. With the recent turns in Season 5, the mantra ‘chair is endgame’ has seemed less and less unshakably true, and besides, ‘end game’: what does that mean? In terms of OTP’s, I think it means that every movement in the story has contributed to the finality of their romance. A checkmate. A chair-mate, here. That’s rarely true in television, at least, in terms of conscientious intentionality on the part of writers – seems more often to be a process of stitching it together. So I did what any rational girl who wails watching the latest episode every Monday would do: I put my love on the line, because if Chuck and Blair really are Chuck-and-Blair, Blair-and-Chuck, it wouldn’t change a damn thing. I want to compare the love stories being told, Chair versus Dair, by being as charitable as possible in my reading of the narrative and the spin it puts on the characters involved, and answering a few possible criticisms of the respective stories in the interests of fairness. It’s going to be a doozy in length, so my apologies for that.
Cards on the table? Chair is endgame, sugar. (But maybe not in the sense of being foretold through narrative bread crumbs, maybe not in the sense that it will happen, as a prediction of the twists and turns of Gossip Girl. Only that it ought to, I think.) Which is why I won’t be sticking this into the #dair tag, but if some ‘shipper from the other side does find it, and would like to respond, I’d welcome it! Because frankly, that’s what makes it fun, yeah? We’ve all begun to treat a television program as if it had something to say about the world, as if it bears a harpoon in hand, and must be dealt with – ‘shippers don’t consume, they invest, they put their hearts into it, and that means we’ve got common (masochistic) ground. So if I’ve been unfair to the unfolding Humpdorf tale, do let me know, because my hope here is to give both sides their best shot. Same goes to my strong sisters in the chairleader section.
· BLAIR AND DAN
Before I begin, I ought to credit my refreshment with their story to this youtuber’s videos. Initial thoughts: damnit, they are cute. Part of their story has roots in the moment that Dan whisks off Blair’s headband in that 3x02 scene: “No headbands in college, kay?” I think this gets cited as representative of the unique ability that Dan has to strip off the Waldorf mythos from a position of sympathetic honesty – kinder to tell her straight-off that the standby accessory is childish rather than regal. He digs his heels in. He demanded an admission of equality before assisting her in 4x16; in 5x16, he tells her that he wants her romantically, nothing less, rather than settling for the scraps she’d been willing to give him, French cinema and the like. Butting heads with Blair isn’t a small thing, but he does it casually, comfortably, unharmed by her singeing commentary on his hair and the various food products he smells like. They spar! And yet he’s also there with the easy shoulder, ready for her vulnerability. I think this is the bit of Blair he likes the best, honestly: that she “weeps at Nights of Cabiria,” is wearing mismatched shoes, that it’s her, it couldn’t be awful. This drives him to her sullen side in the stairwell in 1x04, encouraging her to be honest about her feelings even when it changes nothing. This is Dan pulling apart the puzzling carapace of façade and taloned intelligence and finicky emotionality, this is him telling her, perhaps as she’s never really heard before, that it’s alright to be weak. Serena might have said so, but then Serena has never needed brutal means – look at that gleam, the blonde hair and the sheen of her easy glamour. It’s hard to believe a competitor when they tell you to lay down arms, and if Blair has never confided her whole vulnerability to Serena, I’d blame it on that. Humphrey’s advantage is that flannely sense that he’s really innocuous, that he can’t elbow her out of the way (at least partially because he doesn’t want any of the things that she does), plus a special lack of history that the nonjudging breakfast club just can’t claim. New enough to lack alarm bells, old enough that there’s a sense of his character, and so he can’t be rejected from innate distrust.
Like all the characters running around the Upper East Side, Blair and Dan have a complicated relationship with ideals. I think Blair ate up cinema and storybooks and then looked around. An estranged father? A social set that without every eye on her? A body with insufficient appeal? Cue rolling up sleeves. Cue dirty work. I’ve said before that her superpower is the ability to reject – to say ‘no’ to circumstances as they are, and ply them towards her perfect internal picture. I think her bulimia was part of this, but I think the delay in exploring her sexuality was part of it, too, a wish to make it meaningful, ideal. The show does an excellent job of making us feel how formidable her willpower is even as it demonstrates its repeated failures – see Yale, and the NYU social scene, and her internship. Nobody has gone down quite like Blair Waldorf has, and yet, to quote Leighton Meester, she’s ‘pure, naked striving’ even so, even as her dreams turn into a house on fire. Where Blair sees discrepancies between internalized ought-to-be and how-it-is, Dan seems to mistake the latter as the former. In their 2x03 breakup, Serena notes that yet again she’s not who he thought she was, and that’s at the heart of why they’re breaking up. Blair’s disappointment lies in her inability to spin straw into gold; Dan’s, in realizing that it was straw all along. I think Dan put this to paper in Inside, which is why his friends and family might have found it so scathing – and all the more interesting that Blair emerges as its heroine. Whereas others, perhaps Serena most of all, decayed from ideal to dun factuality, Blair blossomed from package of girly evil into an intern who sent her resume to three-hundred and thirty-two fax machines in the hopes of a mere glimpse.
I think that’s the primary appeal of Dair: Blair and Dan’s love story is based on an unraveling of projected identities. From ‘Humphrey’ to ‘Dan.’ From mean girl extraordinaire to intelligent, industrious equal. Their stand-offs and couch-cuddling are permutations of the same imperative: take off the mask.
· BLAIR AND CHUCK
A confession: most of my thoughts on Chuck and Blair are colored by zoroetarrive’s essays on the subject. I heartily recommend them.
As once described by Ed Westwick, Chuck and Blair are a bit like fighting fire with fire. The similarities pile up at the get-go. Both have an absent parent, while one with weighty expectations remains to remind them precisely where they fail to measure up. Both can only truly claim a single friendship, one that might be more habit than anything else. Scheming. Machiavellian means. A maid: a limo. Bowties: headbands. Chuck is a study in excess; Blair, control. He’s the boy billionaire with nothing to lose, and she’s the girl aristocrat that wants it all. Twin high-maintenance machines. They understand one another, right down to their matching crooked hearts, and the resulting compliments and insults are stunning. The limoscene in 1x07 is incredible, indelible, unforgettable. It’s interesting to me that when he begins to ask how she feels about her recent break up, she says, giddily, “Relief, I feel relief,” her eyes locked on the stage, because Nate was the very first substantiation of Blair’s princes, the pretty-eyed good-hearted boy next-door, and had already been deeply spun into her story of how-things-should-go, the peacock prom dress and the wedding ring. Funny, that the first time we see her plan crumble, it makes her happy. Cue mental shoving match, a push-you push-me – he dares her, she accepts. Later: “You were amazing up there,” and the slow move across the leather seats, a first kiss, “You sure?”, and the inexorable embrace. The best Chair scenes are like this: it’s not what’s being said but what isn’t, and the physicality of their emotions, motives, the kinds of unguessable gestures that manage to be meaningful without being articulate. I can never say quite what it was, what that glance signified or this narrowing of the eyes, because they’ve arrived at a codified privacy. They know.
If I’m right, and Dan is always urging Blair to curl into the afghan, come home, take off the mask, then Chuck is ever doing the opposite. They chant their names: “You’re Chuck Bass.” “You’re Blair Waldorf.” Dan once commented that Blair was intuitive and intelligent, not merely scheming, and I’d like to hold the way that Chuck talks about Blair in counterpoint to this. Maybe the strength of the Dair story is words – they banter, and they say what’s on their respective minds, a province where Chuck and Blair sometimes truly suffer. Perhaps what makes Chuck’s love for Blair so beautiful to behold is how wordless it really is. He says her name, not adjectives, not qualities, when he needs to remind her who she is; it is up to Blair Waldorf to assign content to what ‘Blair Waldorf’ really means. Remember in 5x06, how he smiled as her minion tripped into a caterer’s arms and then scolded said minion for her indiscretion? In 4x14, when he smirks as she cuts him off to say that there’ll certainly be a stage in the Palace by that evening? When it comes to full-fledged Blair Waldorf – and by that I mean every bit of her, not just academic aspirations, not just protective instincts, but the complicated bits, the helpless schemer, the vengeful socialite, the fashionista, duck feeder, sex-gamer, princess-in-a-tower, aristocrat, mean girl mastermind – I think nobody loves her like Chuck Bass. And part of why this is so is because he’ll never say, come undone, darling – because there is no part that isn’t really her, no facsimile in her façade, there is nothing that needs to come off, there is no mask.
The Dair fandom has room to reply to this. After all, Blair states in 5x16 that Dan does love her for her, and Dan cements this with his later comment, taking her hand, saying, “It’s you, it couldn’t be awful.” Doesn’t that illustrate that Dan is enamored of the whole Blair Waldorf, too? I don’t think so, but we’ll begin to run into an undetermination of evidence, because I’m going to point to that last line as evidence exactly to the contrary. As I’ve said earlier, I think Dan has a complicated relationship with ideals, a tendency to launder out whole pieces of a person in favor of seeing some flax archetype, or beautiful possibility – something like Serena van der Woodsen smiling at him from the top of the stairs in 1x01, and not like Serena’s casual conceit when she tells him that perhaps he ought to let the operator know who she is for faster service in 2x03. ‘It’s you, it couldn’t be awful.’ Love doesn’t scrub off the rust that twenty-one years of being bona fide HBIC material will leave behind. It’s an epiphany of individuality: if you love Blair Waldorf, you behold her as no more and no less then what that is, and that means that there will be bad parts, and you will love them, but they won’t cease being bad for that love. Love is a transformative process, but you’re what is transformed – not your beloved.
Plus, I’ve always been a bit mystified about what Blair gives to Dan. For Blair, Dan represents a cottony kind of safety, a new and unknown quantity of comfort. Part of that safety comes from his white knight appeal. Part of it from the fundamental difference in their ambitions, their worlds – he can’t overtake her because he’s facing an entirely direction. Part of it is that he thinks she is a piece of herself that she’s been denying for the past twenty years – the little girl inside the magnificent monster. But what does Waldorf offer him that can’t be provided from another source? True, she’s been in desperate need of rescue for the better part of a season – well, not need. How does the Josh Ritter line go? ‘The keys to the kingdom got locked inside the king.’ Our girl seems to have forgotten her primordial cunning in the midst of playing princess — or, if not cunning, then at least that the means to her salvation lie right there, right inside her. I digress. Being needed is something that any number of damsels-in-distress might offer him. There is something lovely about her insults towards him, bordering both cross and casual, but they’re not … perceptive, in the same way that some of Dan’s are. For the majority of season five, she’s told him his hair sucks. True: not game-changing. Is it intellectual sparring that she gives him? Perhaps, but that was a hat Vanessa tried on many times; it’s nothing new. (I do hate when I see posts saying that Blair’s desire for Dan is all brain, and for Chuck … mostly just blagina. Please rewatch season 3.) If we think that a love story in part reveals what each partner is capable of offering, then I think Dair falls short due to Blair, not Dan. Chuck and Blair, in contrast, have a way of drawing out the best in each other for each other. Moments of such support and confidence in the other’s capability, weaknesses whiled away together. 3x02, crawling into bed together, rubbing arms, sleeping away a bad afternoon – it’s probably the most iconic demonstration, but early season three is littered with these sorts of scenes. Later, the brief exchange in 4x13 (probably my truly favorite scene between them) right after Chuck says, “Your plan is working.” Warm, unthinking smiles. Bone-melting admiration. And, of course, 4x08: “What do you think our count is?” “For us? A million. The world, zero.” They are genuine equals. The Chair love story presents two people whose comparable levels of damage are frequently alluded to – and it shows them bandaging one another, carrying one another, taking down the world à la Bonnie and Clyde.
And it’s that very same level of equality that makes their romance so impossibly dangerous to accept in the same supine way that Blair might accept Dan Humphrey’s. 4x01: “It takes more than even you to destroy Blair Waldorf.” No, but Blair Waldorf could – hence her rebuttals in 3x18, that she didn’t like who she’d become with him, not because he made her walk into Jack’s bargains, but because she’d undertaken it on her own, because she’d become the kind of girl capable of anything for lover – and capable of being manipulated by said lover. I think this is also why she’s dodged a reunion with him the second half of the present season, because 5x10 found her once again willing to undertake anything for him, even something as preposterous as a bargain with God. (3x22: “Signs are for the religious, the superstitious, and the lower class.”) If we think actions define us, then who are you, when you will do anything for that one other person? Your self empties out; you become an adjunct. How do you love the key to your own destruction?
The catch is, of course, that Blair is Chuck’s own demise. 5x02: “I feel nothing, when I see her and Louis, or when I jump off a building, or when I crash a motorcycle, even you don’t irritate me. Is being dead that much worse than being nothing?” 5x14: “I’d do anything for you.” Consider the following:
“If , then, one yields one’s person, body and soul, for good and ill in every respect, so that the other has complete rights over it, and if the other does not similarly yield himself in return and does not extend in return the same rights and privileges, the arrangement is one sided. But if I yield myself completely to another and obtain the person of the other in return, I win myself back; I have given myself up as the property of another, but in turn I take that other as my property, and so win myself back again in winning the person whose property I have become. In this way the two persons become a unity of will.”
– Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics.
I debated whether or not to include the quote above, because A. hello pretension and B. I don’t stand one-hundred-percent behind it as a characterization of Blair and Chuck, but I do think it points to something that they are capable of, which is to say… anything, in one another’s arms. To come full circle. Be full circle, in a special sense. And this is why I think Chair is endgame, in the sense that the other movements of story – including the Dair love story – contribute to it. Because I think Chuck and Blair, as they are, are so helplessly tangled in one another that it’s impossible to make a decision to be together, because that’s the default – they are together, even when they’re not. They have become hyphenated! And I think Louis and, to a greater degree, Dan, offer Blair the possibility of being some other Blair, some other girl than the one that gave her whole heart to Chuck Bass and has yet to get it back. I think the reason she has been so torn, so frustratingly a-skitter this season, is because she isn’t torn between partners. That part is easy – it’s which Blair to be that is the trick. Blair the princess, a photographed monarch in the final step of the story that Blair’s been telling herself since kindergarten. Blair the vulnerable, the brilliant girl and French cinema aficionado. Or, perhaps, Blair Waldorf, who Chuck Bass loves, and all that implies. But what does that imply? Nothing. Anything. Everything, from the ugliest animal part of her to her domineering will to her hidden, curled-in heart. If she hasn’t been acting quite like herself, it’s because she’s no longer really sure what that might mean, how that girl should act. This is the first time she could really leave Chuck, and as such it’s the first time they can really be together. The reason I find Chair to be the stronger love story is because I think it has demanded so much from both parties, and because of it, we have seen the very best and worst of Chuck and Blair, the most of their respective hearts. It is a great love. It is a love that doesn’t suffer from the introduction of other possibilities. They are endgame not because there is no other way for the story to go, but because even so, it is an incredible account of how two people loved, and the exacting transformations that love asked of each of them.
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И уж тем более там не возникало внезапной любви между Милли и невзрачным, немного дебильным пареньком Чамуко, бойфрэндом ее подруги.... 
