Jersey Shore Season Four

Since its primitive beginnings, the Jersey Shore civilization has flourished as a culture—The Situation exploring the terpsichorean arts, Snooki becoming a woman of letters, etc.—so it’s thematically fitting that the fourth stanza of their ongoing epic poem finds them relocating to Florence, Italy, birthplace of the Renaissance. As this trailer reveals, it is truly a time of growth and upheaval in the world of Jersey Shore, in ways that have nothing to do with JWOWW’s breasts. (Although, as she proudly declares, they’re definitely along for the ride.)

The intellectual curiosity that marks the Shoreites’ emergence from the Middle Ages is seen in the endeavors of would-be polymaths like Vinny, who embarks on an autodidactic quest to “master Italian” during their few itinerant weeks. Of course, that kind of swift and sudden change can often have unexpected consequences: Old patterns, like the eternal existential crisis of Ronnie and Sammi’s “done”-or-not-“done” relationship, are broken finally, only to have their energy manifested in other, even more violent confrontations, as seen here in all the shouting matches, breaking glass, and surprising number of stretchers. But these are just the necessary by-products of revolution, the cleansing by fire so that we can emerge like a phoenix from the ashes into the Modern Age of enlightenment. Or, as epitomized here in one symbolic sequence, it’s like the “doucher” for Snooki’s vagina—the vagina that contains us all.