The death of Sex and the City
Ubiquitous
I'm not asking for much. I just don't want to be sick in my mouth. I
don't want to leave the cinema feeling like I've paid �7.50 to be
mocked, patronised and kicked in the face. I don't want to be filled
with despair at Hollywood's increasing inability to conceive of women in
comedic films as anything other than self-obsessed babies with breasts.
And I don't, most of all, want to spend two hours watching dreams and
memories from my youth being trampled into humiliating self-parody. Is
that too much to ask?
Judging from the hideous trailer and even more hideous scenes that have
been leaked on the web, yes, all this is just beyond the capabilities of
the pink-fringed, cliche-ridden, materialistic, misogynistic, borderline
racist Sex and the City 2.
And depressingly, it's no surprise. After all, my God, did you see the
first film? As Carrie herself would have once said � before she became
the demented harpy she was init, one whose response to having been
jilted at the altar was: "How am I going to get my clothes?" � could a
cinematic experience be any worse than that SATC film (part 1) was? The
answer from this Friday, when SATC 2 opens, looks set to being in the
affirmative (and I warn you now, this article will be full of spoilers,
spoilers of both the film and your memories of the show).
There's been a lot of nonsense written about SATC the TV series in
recent weeks, often by journalists who never watched it (in fact, one
writer of a recent piece cited that achievement as a point of pride
before then listing his reasons for hating the show, reasons he
presumably pulled out of his ass).
But the truth is, the show was fantastic: smart, funny, warm and wise, a
far cry from the "middle-aged women having embarrassing sex with various
unsuitable partners" cliche that the above writer used. It was about
four smart women, three of whom had no interest in getting married.
Candace Bushnell's original book on which the show was based was good,
but the show was great. Yes, there were stupid puns (although I maintain
that Carrie's response to Big when he said he was moving to California
because he was tired � "If you're tired you take a napa, you don't move
to Napa" � is pretty funny). And, yes, there was sex and shopping. But
unlike in the films, that's not all there was, and that wasn't all the
characters cared about. What elevated the show way above the normal
chickflick tat, and way above the films, was that it had genuine
emotional truth. It sang with lines that you knew had come from real
life ("How can I have this baby? I barely had time to schedule this
abortion" being quite possibly my all-time favourite) and plots that
went beyond the limiting convention of cliche. Samantha's breast cancer,
for example, showed not only how scary and sad cancer (obviously) is,
but also how boring, sweaty and plain inconvenient it is, too.
But now, treacherously, the films confirm all the worst (and wrong)
assumptions (men, mainly) made about the show and its (largely female)
audience. The most humiliating example of this was the review of the
first film in the New Yorker by Anthony Lane, one of my most revered
journalists. Lane wrote: "I walked into the theatre hoping for a nice
evening and came out as a hardline Marxist, my head a whirl of closets,
delusions, and blunt-clawed cattiness . . . There is a deep sadness in
the sight of Carrie and her friends defining themselves by . . . their
ability to snare and keep a man." Oh, Anthony! You're right, but it
wasn't always thus!
After I saw the first film and emerged from the cinema making a
Munch-esque scream, I thought maybe Sarah Jessica Parker and Michael
Patrick King (the show and film's writer and director) had been
paralysed with fear by their foray into the cinema. But from recent
interviews they have given, and how bad the second film looks, I'm
really beginning to wonder. Did they just never get it? Was the show's
genius a fluke that somehow slipped through their conventional,
patronising net? Or have both been so blinded by the success of the show
that they have lost sight of its original appeal? Simple comparisons
between the films and the show give a hint of the answer.
In the TV show, the women (I refuse to refer to them as girls as they
did a little in the TV series and a lot in the films) reprimanded
Samantha for her occasional crackpot attempts to maintain her youth, and
she always came round and loudly loved her looks. In the second film,
she knocks back 44 pills every morning to "trick my body into thinking
it's younger", she says triumphantly, and Carrie and Miranda look
impressed. Miranda! Surely the woman who once said while buying her
wedding dress on the TV show, "No white, no ivory, no nothing that says
virgin. I have a child. The jig is up," will inject a little
reality-establishing sarcasm here? No. She says, "I've tricked my body
into thinking it's thinner � Spanx!" Again, Carrie nods approvingly.
It's like being lobotomised with a pink teaspoon. (If this point about
youth obsession now being de rigueur is not made clearly enough, behold
the film poster, on which the four leads are so airbrushed not only do
they not look like themselves, they don't even look human.)
Then there's the issue of race. The TV series was, quite rightly,
criticised for rarely featuring non-Caucasian characters. The first
film's nervy response to this was to include a black character, but as
Carrie's assistant, played by Jennifer Hudson, who is cravenly grateful
for Carrie's designer cast-offs, and then returns in the end to the
south, where black people belong. The second film goes even further,
because King sends the characters to Abu Dhabi. Not since 1942's Arabian
Nights has orientalism been portrayed so unironically. All Middle
Eastern men are shot in a sparkly light with jingly jangly music just in
case you didn't get that these dusky people are exotic and different.
Even leaving aside the question of why anyone would go on holiday to Abu
Dhabi, everyone who has ever watched a TV show knows that the first rule
is: don't take characters out of their usual environment. The term "jump
the shark" was even coined about the series-destroying episode of Happy
Days in which the characters go on holiday and Fonzie water-skis over a
shark. This rule was repeatedly proven in the TV series of Sex and the
City as the weakest episodes always involved the women leaving New York
(two forays to California, one to Atlantic City) and it is roundly
proven here because the film-makers' knowledge of the Middle East begins
and ends with Lawrence of Arabia, whereas part of the fun of the show
was the in-the-know details about Manhattan. And speaking of Manhattan,
the only ethnic minorities you see there are waiting behind counters to
sell the women expensive handbags.
In the films the message is women want a ring at all self-abasing costs;
in the show, Carrie rejected Aidan, who was perfect on so many levels,
because she couldn't, no matter how hard she tried, bring herself to
marry him. The show didn't judge her or him for that, nor did it get at
her for being "old", the way the film does � it just showed how sad it
was for both of them and how marriage takes more than just the seemingly
perfect ingredients. This was a plotline that seemed so true and
heartfelt, two words that one would be hard pressed to employ about the
big romantic twist to the second film. You may have heard there's a
wedding. There is. And it's for . . . Stanford and Antony. That's right,
two gay characters who always hated each other in the show but now get
married because, well, they're both gay. What else do you need to be
married?
The difference between how the women's jobs are portrayed in the TV show
and the films is perhaps the best example of how low the latter have
sunk. In the show, we repeatedly see Miranda working in her office as a
partner in a law firm and, yes, the job is hard and time-consuming but
she loves it and her success is a badge of pride. Ditto Samantha as a
PR. Even Carrie, who works as a newspaper columnist, a job I can
personally assure you is not physically taxing, derives real
satisfaction from her work, to the point that her willingness to quit it
for her Russian boyfriend in the last series is an ominous sign. There
is a whole episode about the women's difficulty in accepting Charlotte's
decision to quit her job when she marries, and boyfriends who don't take
work seriously are seen as immature freeloaders.
Cut to the films. In the first one, not only do we never see Miranda
working (because that's obviously less relevant to women's lives than
watching Carrie have an orgasm over her new walk-in closet), but her job
is the reason for Steve's infidelity, because he wasn't getting enough
attention from his wife, who was working to support him. In the second
film, guess what? She leaves the law firm! How could she resist after
Steve suggested she could "be at home [more] and help out around the
house"? Sorry, I think I just burned my fingers while retrieving my bra
from the fire.
Then there's the fashion. The women always wore designer clothes in the
series, but the movies are little more than two-hour adverts, a point
underlined by the fact that Parker is now the chief creative officer of
Halston Heritage, a label that features heavily in the second film.
A woman can love fashion without looking and behaving like an
international call girl. In fact, the show made this very point in an
episode involving an international call girl. Both movies have forgotten
this and instead, we are left with Carrie squealing about Dior and
Samantha wearing clothes that she seems to have stolen from Joan Collins
and the whole thing adds up to Absolutely Fabulous without the fun.
If the movies have killed the Sex and the City dream, then, in
retrospect, its death throes could be seen in the last series with its
insistence that Carrie had to get together with Mr Big in the end, never
mind if it was totally out of character for both of them, never mind if
it went against everything the show once said about women not needing to
put up with men who make them feel like crap. Weirdly, as the show
became more successful, it became more conventional, thereby losing its
USP. Bridget Jones � arguably the UK equivalent of SATC � suffered from
this problem. The moment in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason when
Bridget is in jail having a singalong is like the moment in the first
SATC film when Carrie agrees to marry Big if he'll build her "a really
big closet". Ultimately, both Helen Fielding and Sarah Jessica Parker
killed their own franchises, and what's really depressing about this is
that it suggests the default position for movies and books about women,
for women, is to show them as marriage-obsessed morons.
There are still hours of re-runs of the TV series every night on the
Comedy Central channel, and I used to watch them. But the films have
ruined them for me. I can hardly make out the smarts and emotions that I
used to love because all I can see is the impending conventionalism.
Apparently, that's all Parker and King could see, too.
The death of Sex and the City is not just a shame for fans, but for all
women with higher expectations of movies about women than a compendium
of cliches from the Daily Mail. Carrie, you may have bought a lot of
shoes in these movies, but ultimately, you sold out.
--
It is simply breathtaking to watch the glee and abandon with which
the liberal media and the Angry Left have been attempting to turn
our military victory in Iraq into a second Vietnam quagmire. Too bad
for them, it's failing.
RichA
Flasherly
> mocked, patronised and kicked in the face. I don't want to be filled
> with despair at Hollywood's increasing inability to conceive of women in
> comedic films as anything other than self-obsessed babies with breasts.
> And I don't, most of all, want to spend two hours watching dreams and
> memories from my youth being trampled into humiliating self-parody. Is
> that too much to ask?
That the same blond, a dyed Jewess from NYC television? I don't know,
for sure, that maybe she's really not a Jewess. Never bothering much
to turn on sound, these days, to television, may factor upon a
limitation of insight, such as Sex and the City purveys. An offset to
having said so much the same thing, in so many exponentially
increasing fewer seconds, that I'm blurring this together into one
long inanity called commercial reality -- waiting, just there, in
line, to be surely stayed, and in tune, to attempt another
depreciating parody only of our mindless collective addiction to a
status quo falsely depicted as security.
Then again, early on, a woman is impelled, psychologically speaking,
to baby-making;- within such a framework generally occurs, such that
character postures reveal themselves indicative, as if a sun were
totally to revolve around only her, no doubt, most succulent ass. A
minor footnote to conception, which appears to mitigate a weight of
assessment for heavy loads and deep thought. Although, I'm sure a
male counterpart, to be fair, has suitably analogies to draw.
--
39 nine bottles of beer on the wall;- <reaches over for a butt to slap
upside into a jiggle> take one down and pass it around, or go and find
another country to live in.
Red Cloud
How do Jews, Christian, West all fit into here? I don't think this
garbage is more than about Liberalism. It has to be Jewess and
Christian thing...
Flasherly
>
> How do Jews, Christian, West all fit into here? I don't think this
> garbage is more than about Liberalism. It has to be Jewess and
> Christian thing...
Liberalism will work, or so far as alloted in the Judeo-Christian
order of things.