I get to movies late.
One of the movies I have recently gotten around to is the Sex and the City movie. See, I make no apologies about my love for the HBO series. At its core, the series had a biting humor and a dark reality about modern love, city life, and 3rd wave feminism. What DO women do when we have the autonomy and power of men? Is that power merely a mirage? What about our desire for beauty and love? How does a modern woman express that desire while balancing their new-found clout?
The show also had a humor about female sexuality that was unparalleled. Female sexuality wasn’t mysterious or dangerous…it just WAS and with hilarious and sometimes devastating result.
Unfortunately, I feel, that a lot of this was lost on the Manholo-Cosmo set who claimed to be ” Soooo Carrie” or ” SOOOO Samantha”. A startling look at the woman behind the curtain had become co-opted by the consumption of luxury items, and an entire culture grew up around misunderstanding.
The first season of Sex and the City was downright UGLY. New York looked like a major city, not gotham via Nordstrom decorator. The women were complex, often acted like fools, and the shoes? The shoes were a way to show how Carrie was filling the empty promise of her life. It was literally like dropping Manholo’s into a cavern of suck.
Unfortunately, the show kind of went tripping down the whole ” fairy tale for single gals” path and absorbed the consumer fantasy. While the characters were still there, they became more like caricatures, and the show lost its edge while it gained popularity. It seems when the public latches in, it sucks the life right out of any type of cultural criticism.
ANyway, the movie.
The movie ,literally, took every piece of criticism about the show and amped it up to 20. If you took out the dialogue, it became an almost 2 hr infomercial about the cult of mass consumption. If one was to drink every time a designer was mentioned, there would be a mass shortage of the ingredients of a Cosmo.
What was most painful to me was the rampant character assassination. Most of the movie entailed the painful, prolonged de-balling of Chris Noth’s character via rhinestone encrusted spoon. Mr. Big, once full of New York and swagger (possibly the human incarnation OF the New York attitude) became a sullen frat boy who JUST.DIDN’T.KNOW.HOW.TO.LOVE. Then we have Steve, the harbinger of ” It is OK to marry a working class man” cheat on Miranda. Yeah…sure…the writer just didn’t know what to do with him. See, I remember when Steve had cancer, you know because I PAY ATTENTION to source material. Sam Jones? I am so over it. You like to fuck WE GET IT. They managed to take a sexually empowered woman and eventually turn her into a boar who sniffs for penis instead of truffles.
Although, maybe the reason that I didn’t like the movie has LESS to do with the movie and more to do with the times. We, as a nation, are in a luxury hang over. For so long the appearance of wealth and the ease of consumption dominated our national consciousness. I frequent a beauty board, slowly but surely the threads fled away from ” Look! Gucci boots! to ” Walmart has some pretty nice jeans.”
We watched a nation become capitvated by a man who was a community organizer. People of my generation learned that the most powerful suit wasn’t by Tahari, it was the sneakers you wore to go block walking. With so many of our friends and loved ones missing out on the ” trickle down” that was supposed to save us all, flashy displays of wealth seem vulgar. Sex and the City seems like THAT person now. You know who that person is:
You: Hey! That Person how are you?
That Person: How are you?
You: Oh I have to get a spleen transplant and my parents house burned down
That Person: REALLY?! My life is AWESOME!! I get to go places and do things you can’t and I can afford a lot of cool shit.
Nowadays you just can’t deal with THAT PERSON, and maybe why THAT movie fell as flat as a pancake for me.
