Opiate of the Lasses

Bringing Sex and the City to the movies after its initial HBO run (it was a subscriber hit from 1998 to 2004) is like taking it to the prom. This summer blockbuster movie event is a combination coming-out party and graduation ceremony, showing off the successful enforcement—and enticement—of the media class’ will.

Carrie Bradshaw (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) has been idolized as America’s greatest female fictional character even though she’s little more than a good-hearted girl-next-door and a believably obsessed careerist. Actually, she’s a fantastically dressed mannequin, constructed through the alchemy of The Pill and the women’s movement: While embodying autonomous social mobility, she also exercises the freedom to combine bed-hopping with social climbing. Fact is, she illustrates the yearnings of today’s post-feminist media elite spreading their self-interest to the public. Like that bottle of whiskey stereotypical newspaper editors keep in their desk drawer, Carrie Bradshaw is the Barbie doll recessed in the handbag of contemporary white-collar women—she fortified their gaudiest Cinderella dreams through weekly televised teasings of possibility. 

However, as Carrie and her pals Samantha (Kim Cattrall), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) step up from the TV ghetto on to the red carpet of the pop imagination, movin’ on up to the movie big time means Sex and the City can no longer be accepted as just a cable-TV party game. It has to compete with the big girls, Hollywood’s classic representations of female beauty, desire and strength. And it doesn’t.

One of the show’s canniest tricks was its average-girl casting. Parker, Cattrall, Nixon and Davis aren’t movie sirens. Their regular, agreeable looks—plus acting chops—enabled them to stand in for the common Jane; but they were never shown in depth (merely that steady, episodic observation of superficial crises that passes for depth on TV). Fact is, they were hoisted above the mundane—into icon status—by their bourgeois accoutrements, stylish wardrobes, slick photography and a limousine-leisurely approach to life. (That one had to first fork out cable-TV fees for the privilege of observing this upper-class soirée amounted to a capitalist pledge of allegiance.)

Now, watching Sex and the City inflated on the movie screen finally lets you see how two-dimensional its characters really are. There’s simply no way Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte can compete with the shop-girl legacies of Joan Crawford, Irene Dunne, Doris Day, Natalie Wood, Diane Keaton (let alone Claire Danes as Steve Martin’s Shopgirl).

I always resented how the show disrespected that legacy. Warner Bros.’ recent Joan Crawford Collection DVD box set features the remarkable 1934 Clarence Brown film Sadie McKee, the story of a working-class girl who makes good and marries up—but not without wrestling complicated romantic rivalries and regrets. The criminally underappreciated, gothically intense Crawford was Hollywood’s most splendid example of female tenacity. In a less corrupted era, she glamorized a newly urbane American’s honest ambition. (Carrie’s opening line "Girls come to New York City looking for the two Ls—labels and love" is an infuriating canard.) Crawford’s restlessness was specifically feminine yet her social aspirations weren’t just a gender prerogative. Even before Sadie’s social rise, a group of ogling men recognize something genuine and comment “She’s a thoroughbred!” Due to the sly way TV reduces and exploits topical ideas, many Sex and the City fans probably misperceive Carrie Bradshaw as a thoroughbred rather than the mutant spawn of casual feminism and the Elsa Klensch-Bill Clinton 1990s.

But the gimmick of Carrie’s man-hunting, word-processing life (attending fashion shows, turning diaristic musings into “journalism”) contradicts the Sadie McKee virtues of hard work. Instead, in a modern, subtly political twist, emphasis is on the blandishments of Carrie’s success such as writer Candace Bushnell magnified in her original “Sex and the City” columns commissioned by The New York Observer. Collecting those pipe dreams into a book, then adapting them into an HBO series brought ultimate acclaim and justification to Bushnell’s own ambitions. Her post-lib transmutation of Helen Gurley Brown’s 1960s landmark Sex and the Single Girl performed ideological sleight-of-hand, conflating working-girls’ concerns about marriage, pregnancy and dating with a socialite’s property values. Careerism first became a fairy tale, and then it became a prime-time, implicitly unimpeachable TV institution.

The Sex and the City movie doesn’t add nuance to these characters, it simply compliments viewers’ devotion to them. At two hours-plus (the length of five episodes), there’s barely a plot. Extending Carrie’s infatuation with Big (Chris Noth) and her dream of marriage, the shallow events and superficial complications are just reminders of what the series once presented in more facile detail. It's primarily about the core group of girlfriends bonding. Its chick-flick gimmick reinforces the delusion that the privileges on view are common to all females.

Like the TV series, Sex and the City never acknowledges that it’s about the benefits of being a middle-class, white New Yorker. The series embraced class, race and gender advantages neutrally (or disingenuously, take your pick), sharing that naiveté with viewers so that they would never question it. Carrie’s shopaholic philosophy: “You want everyday. That’s what you do. You can’t stop being who you are.” She’s simultaneously flirtatious and horrendous; her girlish guile is as venal as Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. Thanks to Parker (who did a more unnerving yet poignant variation on Carrie in The Family Stone) this became the latest spin on that Hollywood hoodwink "escapism." And the fawning, colluding media eagerly promoted it—in fact, saluting the show as a refreshingly honest view of sex simply because it pandered to the empowered class’ wish for a guiltless view of sex and money.

That was genius of the show’s title: Sex was a euphemism for money. Carrie’s obsession with clothes and shoes trumped her interest in men. Men (especially wealthy financier Big) were another means for her to acquire things. In the movie, Big buys her a pre-war Fifth Avenue penthouse condominium (“I’ve died and gone to real estate heaven,” Carrie meows. “Finding the perfect apartment is like finding the perfect partner”). There’s a discomforting illusion of happiness in this modern-world fairy tale. It’s tied to a sociological agenda that assesses the true money/power-fixated nature of Giuliani-Bloomberg New York but then goes: “Fuck it, I want in, too.” It’s amazing to see the women’s movement come to this: An Equal Rights Amendment fashion show.

Writer-director Michael Patrick King makes his film images as bland as TV. It’s not as egregious as I feared, just meretricious. King’s biggest departure from the series’ formula is the brief inclusion of a young black woman, Louise (played by Dreamgirls’ Jennifer Hudson) as Carrie’s er...uh, “assistant.” Watching Parker’s cynical chic angles face-to-face with Hudson’s broad-featured innocence confirms that they have nothing in common. Their employee/servant camaraderie isn’t any more enlightened than in the Joan Crawford era; they simply gush over Louis Vuitton bags—the sisterhood of consumerism. Sex and the City doesn’t improve on the questionable white dominance of Woody Allen’s Big Apple movies; but what’s more dismaying is that 22 years after Hannah and Her Sisters (praised in Vogue as “This is a movie about our kind of people, the things we like to do, the places we like to go”), a still-biased view of New York City lifestyles gets celebrated as civic pride.

Instead of modernizing the farcical tone of such classic BFF sex comedies as The Women, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire—or perhaps capturing the authentic sensibility of modern urban romance like Fever Pitch, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Two Can Play That Game or this year’s Chaos Theory—the real drive behind Sex and the City is to replace romance with laissez faire economic ideology. Carrie’s overdressed materialism suggests that she and her friends are fashionista offspring of women’s lib. Samantha’s hot-pants self-sufficiency (the film’s most interesting element), Miranda’s self-indulgent resentment about her weak husband and Charlotte’s pampered, rich-girl goofiness are all subordinate to Carrie’s cutesy greed. (During a Mexico retreat, she isn’t licking her wounds over Big jilting her at the altar; she’s missing that condo!) These beneficiaries of the women’s movement share a peculiar self-righteous insistence that a modern Cinderella fantasy is, in fact, a liberated woman’s entitlement.

They haven’t inherited a political struggle, just a wardrobe and (at least in the TV series) sex toys. This blissful, solipsistic complacency might explain Sex and the City's once ironic appeal as gay-male camp—although the movie downplays the girls’ intrepid sexual exploits. It no longer represents a surrogate/subversive gay-male dream because the show’s romance with privilege has prevailed; it’s now everybody’s dream. Proving that television had become the new opiate of the people, Sex and the City indoctrinated viewers into the religion of acquisition and leisure—unexpectedly accomplished through the feel-good shibboleths of frivolously sexualized feminism.

When Carrie wonders, “Why is it we’re able to write our own vows but not our own rules?” she isn’t rethinking the institution of marriage. Her glib surmise betrays a particular modern bias—ignorant of the hard-won truths in Hollywood’s history of women’s emotions (the ambivalence about marriage and independence that the strongest actresses defined) yet pandering to fashionable, contemporary attitudes.

Carrie Bradshaw can’t rival a truly great American fictional character like Scarlett O’Hara, whose unapologetic willfulness continues to expose the pretenses of every generation. (Although Michael Patrick King came close with Lisa Kudrow’s powerful characterization in the HBO series The Comeback.) Carrie is a figment of what both the ruling class and the working class want to believe when they sentimentalize their lot. Sex and the City pretends to be feminist, but the truth is in the movie’s wedding-gown fantasia. Showing off designs by Chanel, LaCroix, Lanvin, Dior, Herrera, De La Renta and Westwood suggests a cavalcade of indestructible Little Girl illusions. The alarming truth is that this scene’s luxe and sensuality drives home feminism’s secret affluent dreams. Smart people congratulate themselves for enjoying the Sex and the City juggernaut as a cultural advance; but are they smart enough to see that its sexy fun is the inevitable expression of invisible hegemony?