We know there’s not one way, one light, one stupid truth…

Independence, fetishism and finales in Sex and The City

I am young enough to have discovered Sex And The City on its original run – whilst feminism was still something my mother told me was “for angry lesbians” – and I therefore have developed an unashamedly ambivalent relationship with the entire franchise. The show’s well-peddled maxim (now admittedly somewhat crass), manifesting the inimitable strength of female friendships, was one that agreed entirely with my priorities as a ten year old. Before I knew Karl Marx from Manolo Blahnik the show seemed almost revolutionary to me. As an impressionable pre-teen I was wowed by these four women; a small, gutter-mouthed whirlwind of Sapphic power and unshakeable loyalty to female solidarity. It told me that girl friends were all I would ever need. Men, those strange, unfathomable creatures, would perhaps pepper my unabashed romp through adulthood, acting as minor aggravations and constant amusement, however in the end friendships with other empowered women would come first and conquer all. By the time the first season finished I had dumped my long term playground boyfriend, decided I was going to be a sex writer when I grew up, and had a revelation: perhaps my mother had been wrong after all, maybe this is what feminism meant? Smashing patriarchy with $800 stiletto heels, and not a disgruntled lesbian in sight.

Over the last ten years I have always referenced Sex and the City’s links to the burgeoning feminist proclivities of my youth as justification for my washy agnosticism, rather than outright disgust, toward the programme and its representational minefield. For this reason I was greatly concerned when it came to my attention that the multi-award winning 1990’s televisual behemoth was coming to the big screen. I had hoped that Sex and the City would forever remain sepia tinged and harmless in my mind, and that I would not have cause to revisit it, having now read Cixous, Benston and Butler. Imagine then the disappointment for my ten-year-old self that now, no matter how tenuous a justification I can summon, I can never stick up for Sex and the City again. Call me an optimist but I had perhaps hoped, somewhere in the recesses of my mind, that the writers had also spent the last ten years getting to grips with materialist-feminist theory, and were going to explode a fierce critique on the accumulation of capital and the commodifying of ‘femininity’ into my local Odeon. Of course this was not the case, in fact the final result was a film so abhorrent to my very moral fibre that it’s taken two months for me to even gather the wherewithal to write about it.

Shortly after the film’s general release a review in the Independent succinctly stated: “If it were any more taut with product placement you’d hear it go “twang” from here to Manhattan. Those who don’t like watching ads in the cinema should keep well clear.” Indeed first and foremost this issue was my, and many a reviewer’s, borne cross during Sex and the City the film. Admittedly the TV programme always had sympathies toward the materialistically concerned. Episode after episode we saw the characters accumulate clothes and accessories with nonsensical price tags, it name dropped too; “Manolo’s” this “Gucci” that, but somehow spaced out over six seasons it was forgivable. Packed into two hours and twenty five minutes however the need to namedrop sponsors and bellow cultural signifiers seemed relentless, culminating in a bizarre scene in which the main character quite simply lists a stream of fashion designers at her disposal. Why be subtle when you can be obscene? Squirming in my seat I was dumbfounded at how retrogressive this seemed. The writers apparently saw fit to take a reactionary parody on the most materialistic aspects of the television series and make a whole film out if it. In the series there was at least the odd suggestion that money and men weren’t everything; in the episode Take me to the ballgame from series two Miranda says “How does it happen that four such smart women have nothing to talk about but boyfriends? It’s like seventh grade… with bank accounts.” Statements like that were what stuck in my mind from my original dealings with the television show, after watching the film however it seems unthinkable that the one came after the other. And unthinkably embarrassing that I ever held Sex and the City up as a remotely feminist text.

The big event of the film, and perhaps the pinnacle of the abundant commodity fetishism, is Carrie’s wedding to Big (more on him and his ridiculously phallocentric name later). The character’s fetishizing of the wedding as a perfectly structured (and financed) necessity is the reason why the day does not end happily. The groom’s last minute fear of commitment is precipitated by the bride’s anti-carnivalesque, almost military desire to create the spectacle of dreams; and the message, that Vivienne Westwood dresses and Vogue sponsored weddings do not a happy marriage make, is a clear one. This is not-so-subtly compounded towards the end when the not-so-unpredictable union finally does take place, in a registry office with Carrie wearing a plain suit by an unknown designer, and with no one watching – the ultimate sacrifice to prove that it truly is about the man and not the magazines.

Just when I began to think that perhaps Candace Bushnell might be a secret endorser of dialectical materialism, it all became clear to me what indeed is the biggest problem with Sex and the City – it is, after all, all about the man. I feel fooled that I could have ever thought it was all about the solidarity and independence of emancipated womanhood, that men are simply the fillers in our epic lives. This film made me finally realise that Sex and the City, along with 99% of all TV shows ‘for women’, are about men. And the silly little things we do when not obsessing about them, around them, for them, are the real paltry fillers in our day to day.

‘Mr Big’ as some central paean to desirable masculinity is a recurring character throughout the series. Janet McCabe, author of Reading Sex and the City writes “The women are still caught in fairytale narratives. The ‘right’ couple were signalled in the first episode, when Carrie and Big met, and in some ways the entire show has just been about them getting together.” Big is bad for Carrie, and bad to Carrie, but it is never truly questioned why there is no doubt that they will get back together. Carrie as someone who women were told to look up to – to respect her sexual liberation, to admire her dream job, and envy her freedom – in the film becomes a weak and wailing child, abandoned by her protector. For a moment it seems like the film will take an unsuspected direction (again I’m mortified to admit to all these naïve hopes for a Hollywood blockbuster), Carrie dyes her hair, throws out old clothes, gets on with her life, stops talking about boyfriends, and starts becoming interesting; and it is during these moments that the audience gets to see signs of all that female solidarity I so desired to see in action as a young feminist. Then out of nowhere Big turns up (in Carrie’s walk in wardrobe no less), proposes to her with a shoe and sure enough her resolve dissolves.

As if this wasn’t bad enough there is a subplot going on involving Miranda, perhaps the most identifiably feminist out of the characters, and her husband Steve. Steve admits an affair to Miranda – a moment in the film which prompted a very real gasp from a large portion of the audience. Throughout the TV series Steve was a sweet dependable man, the sort of man many women ostensibly see themselves marrying someday – cute, nerdy, devoted to you, not threateningly good looking, and was therefore immediately held up as the antithesis to masculine Big. When he admits infidelity Miranda ejects him from her home and asks for a divorce – a very real and understandable reaction. Again I allowed a little hope to creep in – “That’s it Miranda, you don’t need him, go back to your friends!” But, alas, I hoped too soon. By the end of the film all is forgiven, Miranda and Steve are back together, and there is a definite bristle in the audience comprised mainly of women (many of whom I’ll wager have been in that very position) that suggests I wasn’t the only one hoping for a more affirmative, less predictable, ending. Worse than this Miranda allows herself, and he allows her, to take the blame for his mistake- on account of her being uninterested in sex for the last year of their marriage. If this isn’t enough evidence that a heterosexual male directed this film then I’ll eat my cinema ticket. All through the TV series Miranda was the incendiary, ball-breaking tough lover, and yet in the film she too gives up and admits that the final curtain always comes down on a woman in a man’s arms.

My concern about, and obvious disappointment with, this film is not necessarily that I think it gives a bad model for women to admire -although there are arguments for that. Alice Wignal put it well in her Guardian review column when she said “It seems churlish to be bitter about the fact that Carrie et al do not offer a fail-safe model for emancipated womanhood when nor, frankly, has real-life feminism” – with which I am inclined to agree. My main concern is how this film is viewed as a conclusion to all the stories that the television series spanned before it. As an epic denouement to a programme about women, a programme that said ‘cunt’ and made it sexy, that said ‘cancer’ and made it not scary, I find it worryingly anti-woman. Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte all take their stage bow with a man. The final shot may well be of the four woman linking arms, laughing through the streets but the very clear subtext is that they will all go home to their men – to live out the serious parts of their lives – after Cosmopolitans and bathroom gossip. The character of Samantha is the only one out of four who makes what seems like a sensible, pro-self decision. Her break-up words to Smith – the movie star hunk who ‘tamed’ her in the last series – are the words I longed to hear screamed from the HBO rooftops in every episode, words I think every woman should not be afraid to say, words I have essentially been hoping on since 1998: “I love you… but I love me more.”

I left the cinema deflated and suspicious of my friends. When we’re all in our late thirties will we too care more about men than ourselves? Will our finale be gatecrashed by a handsome deus ex machina holding an expensive shoe? Will there ever be a television show for women that offers hope and loyalty without store cards? I need a cocktail…