I feel like in order to talk about Sex and the City in any depth more than I already have, I have to tell you a little something about my personal worldview, to explicate how it’s possible that a pushing-30 single gal living in New York could not only not identify with but actually feel hostile towards, as Susie Bright put it in an excellent piece in Salon, the “racket part of what once was recognizable as the sexual self-emancipation of the feminist movement.”
Fortunately for all of us, talking about my personal life on this blog is the last thing in the world I want to do. So, instead, I combed the panoply of reviews of and writings about film that have come online over the last week, in order to cull five different commonly-cited grounds for why this film is a toxic scourge on the entirety of the human race. Or maybe just not the best possible way to spend 2.5 hours.
1. The women aren’t attractive!
Proponents: Anthony Lane, Roger Ebert, Noah Forrest, Armond White, virtually every male blogger with aspirations to be Harry Knowles.
Representative Pullquote: “The most human character is Louise (Jennifer Hudson), who is still in her 20s and hasn’t learned to be a jaded consumerist caricature…Louise is warm and vulnerable and womanly, which does not describe any of the others.” — Ebert.
Who Says it Best: Lane, who hasn’t produced a review to gain this much traction in the blogosphere since his legendary pan of Revenge of the Sith. Still, it’s not so much what Lane says (he makes fun of not just the ladies’ thirst for expensive outfits but the outfits themselves, complaining that all four are “little better than also-rans” compared to Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face) as the illustration the New Yorker saw fit to attach to his review. A masterpiece of grotesque caricature, it’s the only piece of critique of the film that this self-professed third (or is it fourth?) wave feminist considers to be truly, maliciously misogynist.
…Read more
If my Twitter stream is to be believed, I was the only female, 20-something writer in New York City who was NOT invited to the Sex and the City premiere last night. (Could it have been because of this? Or this? Or this? Hmmm.) Certainly, each picture Julia Allison staged at the event offers up at least 1,000 word on the matter, but who has time to do all that reading? Jeff Wells‘ take is much more succinct:
The film is another Taliban recruitment film — a grotesque and putrid valentine to the insipid “me, my lifestyle, my accessories and I” chick culture of the early 21st Century. Guys everywhere — if you’re in a brand-new relationship, take her to see this thing. If she even half-likes it, dump her and walk away cold. Save yourself!
Funny side note: I remember the moment when, as a senior in college, I decided that I could no longer in good conscience watch Sex and the City. It was, I think, the premiere of the first season to air after 9/11, and there was a scene where Carrie announced that she was going to help rebuild downtown by going shopping. It was such a direct aping of George W. Bush’s commerce-as-opiate for the troubled masses prescriptive of the time that it seemed like the ultimate sign that the show had cut loose the thread of critique that once seemed to be woven into its pornographic depiction of excessive consumption.
We obviously couldn’t have hoped that the movie would have transcended the worst aspects of the show––at least, not after having heard Fergie’s theme song––but I honestly didn’t think it was going to go as far as this, to become the embodiment of not just what *I* hate, but Why They Hate Us.
