I watch Gossip Girl because nobody can stop me, plain and simple. It’s truly a wonderful show because if you just need glittery escapism, you can drain your mind of pesky things like dignity or irony, and suddenly you’re wearing a headband and drinking a saketini on a New York rooftop. Or if you’d rather keep your cynical third-eye wide open, then you’re presented with a show so hysterically, unapologetically bad that you won’t run out of blog fodder for months. I mean, seriously. It just gets worse and worse (i.e., better and better). It knows it’s unstoppable because it appeals to 11-year-old girls, and therefore will always have a captive and uncomplaining audience. I think they toss the bloopers and inconsistencies and adolescent-Diablo-Cody-on-designer-drugs dialogue in there just to annoy the high-horse hipsters who tune in to boil with rage at the state of US entertainment. So, in sum, it’s like my favorite show ever.

A few weeks ago (sometimes panic about study permits and plane tickets intervenes with my ability to blog quickly and effectively) two of my favorite television friendships collided dramatically. And if that metaphor reminds you of a car accident, you are correct. It does remind one of a car accident, where one has plenty of time to pull over onto the shoulder of the road and just gawk to one’s content and pull out one’s camera phone. One is a jerk. Anyhow, what happened is, Tyra Banks, I guess hired because of her work in Life-Size or as Super Smize or whatever, managed to land a guest role on Gossip Girl. Trying to figure out who approached who about this is like trying to figure out which preschooler hit the other one first. But there Tyra was, with a cameo, the same week as Hilary Duff, because God was reading too much fanfiction and decided to intervene. And Tyra’s cameo was about what you’d expect, which is to say, awkward and saddening. If you were like me and sort of hoping that maybe this Gossip Girlcameo would miraculously reveal the clever, self-aware business-mogul that I suspect lurks behind every media bimbo (see Paris Hilton for starters), by the end of Episode 3.4, “Dan de Fleurette,” you’d be like me: crying plump tears of disappointment through your compulsive painful laughter.


Tyra is playing the role of Ursula, a bossy sea witch who preys on the dreams of young girls glamorous star of the silver screen. Our plucky heroine Blake Lively, who is way too special to go to Brown and prefers to run around New York disrobing for paparazzi and finding herself, is getting a job! And the very adult and responsible job she finds is being Tyra’s keeper! (You guys … if you’d read this far without rushing to watch Gossip Girl, I don’t think we could be friends in real life. You’d want to strangle me with my Forever21 plastic pearls before we even made it through our coffee date.) So in sum, Tyra is playing a fragile, paranoid diva who feels the need to surround herself with nubile yes-women: her “talents” are “under-appreciated,” and she is a bully and a shrinking violet all at once, like a mean first-grader, or someone’s hackneyed interpretation of Bette Davis. TYRA BANKS IS PLAYING HERSELF ON GOSSIP GIRL.

Tyra obviously agreed to this role before she stepped in front of the cameras. Or else, OK, maybe someone close to her (and paid by her!) agreed to it for Tyra. Same thing. I refuse to believe that any human being alive is oblivious enough to ignore the parallels between “Tyra” and “Ursula,” and that includes Tyra Banks. She’s a megalomaniac, sure, but she’s also one media-savvy lady! She has her artificial fingernails dug into all the trashiest pies, and Gossip Girl is certainly as trashy as they come. (It’s filled with beluga caviar and Bubble Yum, just FYI.) So this was a perfect opportunity for Tyra to stop being so clownishly and obsessively self-aware that she tearfully slaps her own size-large bikini-bottom on television, and to start being, you know, functionally self-aware, poking gentle self-effacing fun at her own image while still appealing to the same smug demographic who probably send each other YouTube clips of her talk-show on Facebook with ironic quips like, “Look at what your bff is doing now!!!!” (I do that. That’s me I’m talking about.)


Tyra speaks basically the same way in every incarnation of her that I’ve ever viewed (talk show, reality show, acting gigs, interviews) : as if she’s trying to get through to a very small disobedient child. I’ve read that analogy in a ton of novels, always connected to villains, but it never really clicked until I first heard Tyra. There’s a stagy, wide-eyed condescension in her voice nearly all the time, as if she’s playing along with something embarrassing for your sake, but she’s not feeling kind or playful about it, and she’ll have to stop very soon and go back to her actual real-life adult responsibilities, which you can never understand. All the creepy stunts she pulls on her show are performed with a disdainful aplomb, with the impression that Tyraherself would never think to do these things, and is crying inside, but she knows her duty is to give the poor good-hearted populace what they want. Tyra’s whole life, apparently, is making sacrifices nobody wants her to make but feeling generous and put-upon anyway. Her enormous staring eyes and prim mouth afforded her a modeling career, but they also go very well with her life’s calling, which is to interview 13-year-old mothers and Klu Klux Klan members and reprimand them for their foul ways while also getting them to perform like Victorian freak shows.


So, in sum, the Gossip Girl cameo played out the same way: Tyra spent the whole time talking in a disingenuous “actress” voice that stood out as false even in comparison to Penn Badgley and Taylor Momsen. To my disappointment (but not surprise!), Tyra played Ursula as if she felt very sorry for this poor fragile loony who had her one great acting moment torn completely from the Josephine Baker epic also starring Hilary Duff-as-Hilary Duff (keep up, kids, keep up!). I mean, it’s not hard to imagine Tyra Banks throwing a similar waterworks-and-violin scene if her own work was ever belittled, although in Tyra’s case she’d make sure her temper tantrum went out to all the major networks. Fortunately Ursula has Blake Lively to counsel her on public relations. During this final scene, Ursula stares up at golden Blake like a lost child, while somewhere behind that flimsy mask lurks the actual Tyra, just itching to rise up and send both Blake and Ursula packing. “Two lovely ladies stand before me: one who has all the potential in the world, but just can’t seem to find herself, and one who has such a beautiful face and perfect body and flawless speaking voice, but who may be too sensitive for this harsh industry.” I just want to get back to America’s Next Top Model. Of course Tyra’s natural element is one in which she can rule her glittery little microcosm with an iron fist. Displace her into a world where cartoonish plots and pretexts are fair game for everyone, and Tyra can only manage to churn out a few painfully self-conscious school-play sobs from inside a restroom stall, all the while wondering why Ursula can’t just get her act together and be more like Tyra.


(P.S. I titled this ‘The Witch and the Wardrobe’ because I thought I’d have time to also talk about my Halloween costume. But now I’ve run out of room, so, in keeping with the Lewis theme and acknowledging my preachiness, maybe a more accurate title would be ‘A High Horse and Her Girl.’ Or something.)