"It’s fascinating to watch a someone in their twenties try to figure it
out. It’s not so interesting to watch a middle-aged person still trying
to figure it out." It was a bit of wisdom someone in their fifties
offered to me the other day (in reference to
Emily Gould's disappointing, self-absorbed New York Times Magazine story), but it was also the line running through my head as I watched
Sex and the City
last night. Instead of adult women acting "adult"—making choices and
reacting to situations with some amount of wisdom and dignity—the women
of SATC are still so self-absorbed that, although they may no longer
have the energy to chase men and gab about sex indiscriminately, they
still appear to be little girls rather than women.
Perhaps it's a more realistic representation of New Yorkers in general.
Even at the press screening last night, the “press” became pushy,
shrill and obnoxious as they tried to ensure they had a prime seat in a
theater full of “press.” Being self-obsessed is just the name of the
game, and everyone was there to workout some sort of
Cinderella fantasy.
The movie is all the things that folks who love the show hoped for: it is indeed
the finale the should have had.
It can also be used as proof that women past 40 can indeed carry a
summer blockbuster (it just takes four of them to do it). I was most
disappointed in the fact that fortysomething (and one fiftysomething)
women have to do it by acting like little girls—with Sarah Jessica
Parker as the main offender.
I’ve watched my female friends switch gears from normal speak to a
mousy whisper whenever a straight, available man is in the room, but
the way Parker/Carrie moons over Big (Chris Noth), coos, meows and
whispers, forever making little-girl eyes at him, you wonder how
they’ll ever have a fulfilling relationship. And the more Carrie
twitters with her little-girl affectation, Noth retreats into big,
quiet (stiff) male-type.
Even when Carrie is supposed to be “real” (meaning, sans makeup)—during
her “Mexicoma”—she’s coddled by her girlfriends as if she were a
fragile bird. I finally reached my breaking point when Samantha (Kim
Cattrall) actually
feeds Carrie with a spoon, making the infantilization complete...
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