Gossip Girl - The Cinema Style

Have you ever watched The Bachelorette or RuPaul’s drag race? Or any other reality TV that gets you invested in the story? They may be ‘reality’ but they still rely on characters; Villains, Heroes, Miss Congenialities, The hot one, The nerd, The quirky girl, The jock. Reality TV is populated by the same tropes and stereotypes as its non-reality cousins. I find it funny how much editing goes into ‘reality’. What I still find surprising however, is that I always end up loving those characters that in the beginning I hated. Contrary to the first impressions thing, the ones you instantly love turn out to be cunts and the ones you instantly hate turn out to be misunderstood dark horses. One simple edit, one piece of misinterpreted gossip can make or break someone’s reality career, or their life. The old trope, there’s your truth, my truth and the actual truth is very much a thing. Much like a reality TV show, with this book you only get to see one side of the story. In this book you are seeing only snippets of my life, told from only my perspective, (with regular narratorial interjections by my editor) long after the events themselves occurred. You don’t know the backgrounds or the histories of the characters involved, just a brief story about how they entered and exited my life from my perspective. They are people, with pasts, perspectives and stories of their own. But due to structural and contextual limitations inherent to storytelling, on paper they are little more than side characters to my tale.

Gossip spreads like a rapidly mutating virus and before you know it a skewed narrative about a person starts to emerge. The story mutates and distorts so quickly with each re-telling that the initial intentions of the story are lost, and the meaning behind it all becomes unrecognisable. The person being gossiped about then believes the source of the gossip spoke badly of them, and relationships are poisoned when they should not always have been destroyed. Now, anyone with any taste has seen the show Gossip girl, but for those of you with dubious aesthetics and poor taste in TV viewing I will give you a quick run-down. Gossip girl is the story of a country bumpkin who moves to NYC to live with his dad and is enrolled in a high school for the kids of the rich and famous. During his first days there someone starts a twitter account and adds everyone from the school, and then the gossip begins.

The anonymous person posts about all the people within the school, their fakeness etc. It causes a lot of drama, and quite frankly it’s an excellent premise for a show and I wish I had thought of it. The plot twist that isn’t really a plot twist is that at the end of the show we discover our gossip girl was our country bumpkin all along. For those of you who need subtitles for your life lessons, the moral of the tale was the simple country boy was better than the rich kids all along. Yeah, he wasn’t fake like the rest of them, but our simple country boy was also the most savage of them all, anonymously stirring shit and mind gaming like a pro. Just goes to show that the author of a story gets to decide who the heroes and the villains are, objective truth be damned.

The cinema days were a rough time for me. I had supportive friends that I still keep in contact with today, but it was a bumpy time in my life. We were all a little lost, and with the suicide of our friend Ella, we all became a bit self-destructive. We were all still just kids, just out of high school, exploring our independence and trying to find our way in the world. Ella’s life was just beginning when it ended, it should have been the best time of her life, but when she ended her life it became the worst time of ours. If this beautiful, young, smart person, with the world at her feet, wasn't happy with life, what hope was there for the rest of us?

Ella’s death put a lot of things into perspective for us, and our emotions became rawer and more heightened. We took everything personally. We became angry and defensive, ready to hurt anyone who dared try take our confidence, or hurt us. Her death, rather than tearing us all apart, bonded us together. We were the ones she left behind. Change became a very hard thing for us; we started out as co-workers but had become friends. After her death, we were deeply resistant to any changes within our world, so when new management arrived, we didn’t cope and pushed back against them. It was almost like we started to revolt internally, and destruction at all costs was our response to anything that threatened our status quo. We started to get drunk at work, called the mascots cunts, and generally angrily thumbed our noses at the world. During this time Gossip girl started. To a group of angry, hurting young adults, the idea of creating drama and revolution without any consequences or fallback for the instigator was a deeply seductive idea. An outlet for our anger at the world, without any real risk to ourselves, who wouldn’t feel somewhat empowered by the idea? The truth could become known in a safe way, without repercussion for the source. In the naivety of young adults everywhere, we were fixated on truth and fairness, without stopping to think that our truth was not always the whole truth, and our beliefs about fairness were not always about the bigger picture of fairness. Now, I know that what is shared and what is withheld when sharing ‘truth’ is always biased, and we are all pretty shit at differentiating fact from opinion. ‘He hit me’ is indeed a fact, but there is always a context. There is a big difference between ‘A man I have never seen before in my life coward punched me when I was walking down the street’ and ‘My friend punched me after I called his girlfriend a whore as I was angry at the world because I didn’t have a girlfriend’. Life is not a science experiment where variables can be objectively examined in isolation, in life context matters, and bias colours our every move. If you have ever been so drunk you start randomly swinging punches, you are more likely to look for excuses for a coward punchers behaviour. Sure, there are facts ‘I got hit’ but the mitigating factors and context are WIDE open to interpretation and the role of context makes it anyone’s game in the ‘I was victimised’ story.

Myself and a co-worker at the cinema were talking about the “injustices” imposed upon us by the new management. In hindsight, I think the mangers were mostly worried about staff morale, but as angry young adults struggling with a recent loss, we saw their changes as an attack and wanted to fight back. Now, despite how easy it looked on the tv show, it’s actually really hard to start an anonymous line of online gossip that includes an entire workplace without the legal department quickly becoming involved. My dad worked in IT so I knew the only way for them to trace the source was through an IP address. To get the IP address would have required far more resources than the cinema had, and would have involved a police investigation. They were not going to involve the police over internal gossip in a cinema. My dad worked from home, and had a network of computers so they were never going to be able to identify the source computer. Being a popular bitch, I pretty constantly had co-workers over to my house. I set up the account, and we posted on different days from different computers in my house. If the posts were not posted at regular intervals and from the same computer, we had plausible deniability. We decided the best way to create this group was through Facebook. I created an independent email with a fake name and details so it could never be linked back to me. Once the email was created, we could create a new Facebook profile under that email name and make it whatever we wanted. The account was created and within a few days everyone had accepted our friend request. The Facebook page made people nervous, they didn’t know what was going to be posted, didn’t know who was behind the posts and there was a lot of nervous hype about what was to come. Gossip girl was out, so they suspected what was coming, but they didn’t know it was two of their co-workers not one who were behind it all.

I don’t condone what we did, and I’m sure my partner in this also regrets what we did. This is not a story that reflects well on me. At the time I was proud of fighting back against the world, of fighting back against the injustices I saw. I now see that they were not injustices that my life was coloured by, where my head was at, and some things I saw as injustices were not. I wanted to show the disconnect between the claims of the company and what was really happening. I can still definitely see the point and value in anonymous whistleblowing; it can be a good thing. It can be used to inspire uprising, and revolution, to call out bad businesses, but suburban cinemas are not really the place for revolutions. You don’t change the world by angrily protesting staff rosters at a cinema, it's not really wiki-leaks league world changing stuff.

To be honest I can't even remember what we posted, I’m pretty sure we got to three posts before we got shit scared from threats from head office “hiring” legal teams and so on and so forth. I knew most of it was bullshit but it pulled us into line pretty quickly. The cinema had messaged Facebook and reported bullying due to the content on the page. We had deviated from our original plan of facts only. At the end of the day it was still gossip, and in truth our sources were not particularly reliable. The truth is gossip is always unreliable. If someone is not prepared to own what they say, at the end of the day there is no proof. We quickly realised that it wasn’t really affecting any change in management, and was creating a dark, suspicious culture among our co-workers. No-one trusted anyone. When the area manager sat me down and implied, he knew it was me because of the content, he said if it was deleted, they would forget the situation ever occurred and not pursue legal action. He even quoted the specific email that was addressed to the account so clearly, he was on the right track. It would be an obvious admission of guilt if I deleted it that day, so I waited a week before deleting the account. I think deleting the account probably caused more drama than keeping it around to be honest. The fact it anonymously emerged from nowhere, and disappeared just as mysteriously became a source of gossip for months.

Chris had started as a lackey like the rest of us, and had progressed to management when a lot of the people he started with had stagnated on the bottom rung. As is always the way, the people who started out with him and didn’t rise with him, did not trust him. The manager before him, Barry, was a shit manager, and the people who appointed him manager didn’t give a shit. He would go missing for hours at a time. We would spend hours sitting in the candy bar talking smack and doing no work and he would just sit down and join in on the conversation. He didn’t care that we did no work. He was the picture of management slobbery, he did nothing but get paid, and didn’t care that his staff did nothing, he was paid to do nothing but exist and expected nothing but presence and existing from his staff. The staff were happy to be paid for doing nothing, most of us were studying and working full time and simply didn’t give a fuck. The movies paid for themselves, when someone had a complaint, he either just gave out complimentary tickets to shut them the fuck up or literally told them to shut the fuck up. Either way he did the minimum possible to deal with stuff so he didn’t have to deal with stuff.

Barry was the polar opposite of Chris, so when Chris tried to get people to do the job they were being paid to do, all hell broke loose. Chris wanted to create a positive environment for both the staff and the clients, but this required work. Work that we had always been paid to do, but until now had never done. We should have respected Chris, but instead we saw Chris as the enemy. The spoilt entitlement of youth. We had coasted along being paid for simply existing, and when someone actually asked us to earn our keep, we were outraged and felt a great injustice had befallen us. We spent our days resentfully tiptoeing and waiting for him to walk in and ask what we had accomplished for the day. I am aware that anyone with the slightest sense will struggle to feel any sympathy for me in this situation. However, in my defence it’s the millennial/ generation Y problem. We have gown-up incredibly coddled in some ways, told we are special, positively affirmed at every step. Awarded for participation, not effort. The real world is quite a shock to many of us. Have you ever watched X factor or American Idol? Tone deaf people standing on stage truly believing they are owed fame and fortune simply because it is their dream. Genuinely confused that wanting something is not enough, that talent and effort are required. For many of them it is the first time in their lives that they have not got something they wanted, and they simply can’t process it. In the words of my beloved Brittany ‘You gotta work bitch’ but for many a millennial it’s a shock to discover work involves more than just showing up. Chris pushed us, he wanted us to strive to be better, but the old millennial curse had taught us we were good enough just as we were so there was no ‘better’ to strive for. Rather than embracing the change, and quite frankly growing up, we hid behind Ella’s death as an excuse to maintain our comfortable status quo. We didn’t want things to change, we didn’t want to earn our keep, and we used our trauma to hold back the expectations of the world. Chris tried his best. He offered us free counselling. We all refused. In time we pushed him too far. We thought Ella’s death was our trump card, we though it made us invincible, and would forever be our excuse for failing to do our jobs.

Bad stuff happens, and it can take your legs from under you, but after a while you are expected to pick yourself up and get on with it. The world won’t carry you forever, and no trauma perpetually immunises you against all criticism or the need to earn your keep. Chris fired me. I now agree with his decision; I was out of control and willing to believe I could bring the world down simply because I was hurting. I pushed Chris beyond the bounds of compassion. I now realise I had to find myself, deal with my hurt and hate, and build a more positive life. Chris had been where I was, he had been a loose cannon, he had held drunken parties at work, told customers what he thought about them, but Chris had grown-up and he was trying to help me grow up. He turned his life around, to the point where the old Chris was unrecognisable to the people who knew him in his spiralling days. The people who started at the same time as him were envious of him because they continued to wallow in inertia while he decided to make a go of life. He was trying to help me, but at the time I could not see it. Even though I only spent 18 months at the cinema, I packed a lot of living and a lot of life lessons into that 18 months.

I owe a lot to Chris. I respect him, and the shame I feel for the disrespect I showed him at the time is something I will always live with. Hopefully this story shows that you can come back from a bad place that leads you down a bad path towards being the sort of person you don’t want to be. I am a better person for having being a miserable hateful shit of a person who wanted the world to burn. There is no real justification for the hurt I caused, but having been there, I never want to be that person again. I owe a lot to the man I once saw as my enemy. At the time I saw malice, but his intention was always to help me be a better man who brought value to the world. Sometimes the hardest lessons are the most valuable lessons, and sometimes the people who change you for the better are the ones you least suspect.