“I am real!” said Alice, and began to cry.
– Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll
I always find it fascinating when movies do things that executives didn’t expect. Entertainment, particularly the kind with narratives and characters, is like a Rorschach test where what we have to say about the inkblot and what the inkblot has to say about us are equally as meaningful. Thus when a movie manages to find an appeal beyond what was expected it can illuminate new cultural insight.
Here is the point at which I admit I love Sex And The City. And while I can’t say I’m a “huge” fan not because I don’t feel like I am one, but because I don’t think I am one in comparison to ACTUAL “huge” SATC fans, I will say I’m pretty excited to have a reason to be writing about it.
The series premiered on HBO in 1998, when I hadn’t even graduated high school yet, and at the time the show had absolutely no way to compete for relevance in my life against My So-Called Life. But then a couple of years ago an old friend of mine (who you should know is male, and straight, and works in real estate finance in NY) got me to watch a couple of episodes cuz he loved the show, and long before I went to see the Sex and the City movie this weekend, I’d actually managed to see every single episode of the show (thanks, Netflix).
It’s not just cuz the main character is a writer, and all the episodes were filtered through the perspective of a woman whose job was about observing and writing about social behavior (though, yeah, I did really dig that aspect). It’s because she was clever enough to make even cynicism charming, hopeful enough to still be curious, difficult enough to give her gravity beyond the frenetic giddy fashionableness. It’s because there’s not too many shows where four friends hanging out is consistently some of the funniest dialogue on a screen, and where decent, relatively normal people, dealing with lives complicated by emotions and nuance and relationships–rather than intrigue or crime or the paranormal–could continue to be genuinely interesting enough to be watchable for six years.
Of course, these decent, relatively normal people happen to be four urban, sassy, sexually uninhibited women, and the show happened to be on a cable network that blazed the trail on you-can’t-do-that-on-television television. So it’s no surprise that two weeks before the movie opened, the LA Times prophesied “Sex and the City” movie may lack wide appeal,” proclaiming:
Few films have polarized audiences more than May 30’s long-awaited cinematic adaptation of the influential HBO show. It’s easier to find $2-a-gallon gas than a straight man eager to see the movie. Older women (in Hollywood’s youth-obsessed view of the world, this means older than 30) hold a dramatically different view: When they are not posting online about their love of the series — “addicted” pops up with frightening frequency — they are organizing ladies’ night viewing parties around the film’s opening….
If “Sex and the City” can start attracting more teenage girls (and appeal to audiences in smaller cities), it just might have a shot at turning into a hit.”
The polarized reactions to Sex and the City–not just the movie, or the HBO series, but really the entire franchise–is not based just on gender, or even on age. When I asked a friend of mine if she wanted to go see the movie, she replied she didn’t think she could for “moral” reasons. Another texted back, “I never took you for that type.”
You’d think digging a show about smart, quick-witted, modern women, half hopelessly jaded half hopelessly romantic, talking about love, sex, and relationships over brunch, and reaping the sexual benefits and pitfalls of having happened to be post-feminist females wouldn’t be a bad type to be taken for. Especially by anyone else that fits that exact same profile. Yet that watching Sex and the City would seem somehow “immoral” even to another educated, liberal, sophisticated girl, speaks to a dramatic dissonance in the movie’s expected demographic.
LA Times movie critic, Carina Chocano, began her review of the film by admitting:
IT’S IMPOSSIBLE to talk about the new “Sex and the City” movie without first mentioning… the rabid fan devotion [the HBO series] enjoyed; or the equally fervent antipathy (female and male) it inspired on socio-political grounds (sort of like the late-’90s equivalent of not letting your daughter play with Barbies)….
Which is too bad, because Michael Patrick King, who executive produced the show (with series creator Darren Star) and wrote and directed the movie, has done some brave, surprising things with it, mining territory that’s been all but abandoned by Hollywood….
“Sex and the City” can’t rightly be called a romantic comedy in the dismal, contemporary sense, though it is at times romantic and is consistently very funny. It’s also emotionally realistic, even brutal….
Yet despite the fact that for the majority of it’s 2 1/2 hours this is not a happy story, yesterday morning Marketing Daily proclaimed, “‘Sex/City’ Poised To Become Era’s ‘Feel-Good’ Movie.” And I, and no doubt everyone else who cheered when the usher at the Arclight who’d introduced the movie yelled, “Let’s escape reality!” as the lights went down, would agree:
Brands looking to sweep consumers off their feet to escape the recession, global warming and the war in Iraq might want to take a closer look at Carrie Bradshaw and friends.
“Sex and the City” is poised to become the new Depression Era feel-good movie that makes cash registers ring in shopping malls and along Fifth Avenue and Rodeo Drive. Such films tend to make consumers feel upbeat and not overly cautious about spending, according to marketing experts.
…Faith Popcorn, a trend spotter and founder of marketing consultancy BrainReserve, believes the “Sex and the City” movie comes at the perfect time for a nation exhausted politically, emotionally and financially. Marketers can use the good feeling gained from the movie to their advantage, she says, helping consumers temporarily escape tough times. The movie joins “My Man Godfrey,” “The Women” and other Depression Era classics that provided weary audiences with high-style fantasy relief.
Of course, as Chocano says:
The clothes, the restaurants, the apartments, the shoes — they’re all there, but then, even on the show, they were always the fantasy element, the sugar that helped the sometimes harsh emotional reality go down….
For a film that delights in indulging in frivolity at every possible turn, it examines subjects that most movies don’t dare graze for their terrifying seriousness. [How should women live their lives in a society that constantly limits them while pretending not to? What is the function of forgiveness, and why is it necessary for living?] And when it does, the movie handles them with surprising grace, wit and maturity. In other words, it’s a movie for grown-ups of all ages.
The Marketing Daily piece mentions how, “During the run of “Sex and the City” on TV, even women who couldn’t afford Jimmy Choo shoes bonded to an image that had them skipping lunch for two months so they could buy them. In one TV show episode, Sarah Jessica Parker’s character is about to lose her apartment and she recognizes that $40,000 went into buying shoes.”
These anecdotes, of both real and dramatized women, speak not so much to a childish frivolousness as to a rudderless adulthood. Cuz it’s a funny thing, this idea of a contemporary “adult”–whatever that is. We are the generation that won the fight for our right to party, after all, did we not? So that we could stay boys and girls for longer than anyone ever before. And so we have!
Then perhaps that is what it looks like now, adulthood: It doesn’t always have its priorities straight. It makes some bad choices, it has to confront compromise and make sacrifices. It fucks up and has to face the consequ–
Wait a second….
Oh, god damn it! That sounds just like OLD version of adult! What the hell?!
Beyond the frosted fashion glaze, and the wonderfully fantasy ending we can only truly appreciate after having first been taken through some nasty emotional lows, what is, in fact, quite shocking about Sex and the City, is the apparent movie-going hunger it’s revealed for characters that can reflect maturity with a right to style and joi de vivre. And there is perhaps nothing more timelessly “feel-good” than a concept like that.
After just three days, the movie that by some estimates was only expected to make $20 million its opening weekend, whose appeal to anyone but 30+ year old women seemed incomprehensible, that unflinchingly staked its flag in that grown-up territory Hollywood had pretty much abandoned, now “Ranks as the biggest R-rated comedy opening of all time,” According to the LA Times. “Among all R-rated films, it ranks at No. 5 behind largely male-driven films like “The Matrix” and “300.”
Chocano concludes her review saying:
As far as big Hollywood movies go, the idea that we might watch movies to empathize with characters whose lives are different from ours but whose humanity links them to us is all but lost.
That’s why it feels unnatural to say that what feels most remarkable about the movie is its unapologetic embrace of middle-aged women…. The fact that Carrie et al. are allowed to be funny, independent, complicated, sexual, cynical and happy still comes across as a delightful surprise.
She adds that what really made the show so loved by its fans is that despite whatever moments of silliness or cliche, ultimately, the show reflected a vision of real life, “one which doesn’t require its characters being frozen in amber after a fairy tale ending and allows life to go on, happily and unconventionally.”
I think to have considered Sex and the City as having no greater appeal than merely a poshed up “chick flick,” is just as erroneous as to consider it to be some un-PC farce “immorally” portraying women as ludicrous cartoons.
All of us who went to high school in the late 90’s had to look a decade back to find the movies (Heathers, Pump Up the Volume, Sixteen Candles) that defined a generation’s adolescence. (American Pie, aside, of course). Now in the next decade, I wonder if Sex and The City might pave the way for new stories and characters that can fill the void in contemporary cinema for movies that can define a generation’s coming to terms with its adulthood.