Sex and The City: don’t worry, no spoilers!

I made it a personal priority to go and watch this year’s must-see movie and have to admit to feeling a bit deflated this morning in the aftermath of having seen it. I’ve decided to try and write a bit about the film… some thoughts, some recollections, to try and unpack my feelings. I’m wondering why the film has such an enormous draw for me, or what it represents that compelled me, yesterday evening, to don my favourite dress for my highly-anticipated cinema trip. The Cinema was *full* of women… as Mark noted… ‘so many excited women…’

Three years ago or thereabouts, I got into SATC when I was loving being me, loving the life I was living, feeling very happy in my own skin and full of hope for the future. I felt that if any man could ‘add’ to my situation, that would be great, but life on my own – perhaps with a slightly spoiled cat for company – was not an untenable idea or a tragic prospect. I enrolled for my MA at Oxford, I had good strategies in place for dealing with my disability and I had, for the first time in my life, a clear view of what makes me happy. I also had a strong – and deeply precious – group of girlfriends, with whom I am still in constant and necessary contact.

Armed with precious self-knowledge, a solid network of love in my life and – for the first time, I think – realistic expectations about what a relationship could actually be, Mark and I started dating. I was very late for our first date, sashaying up the road to the Phoenix Picture House with a patterned walking stick and Monkl hanging out of my bag as a kind of litmus test (if he ‘gets’ the monkey, then he’ll ‘get’ me…) We watched the inappropriately sexual (given that this was our first ‘date’) Kinsey and then went out for dinner. We had several dates after this and I remember mostly that I was thrilled to be courted in this curious, leisurely, exploratory way. But after a time our feelings got stronger, we began to spend a lot more time together, and we began to move beyond dating towards being in a proper relationship.

Thus when I went to Oxford to begin my MA, I found myself in a truly encouraging and supportive relationship. I started to rent movies as a strategy for distracting myself from night-pain, and it was in this phase of my life that I acquainted myself with the wonderful world of SATC. I found the series reflective of certain ideals I was attempting to embody in my own life. Aside from the material excesses of the show which I could never afford and would never desire for myself, I enjoyed the show’s emphasis on significant female friendships, life situations and female sexual experience etc. To quote from this enlightened article:

Not only is it a programme about women, but one about women who like each other. They identify as each other’s soul mates and provide emotional, practical and moral support. They don’t compete with each other for male attention. They make each other laugh. It is probably the best depiction of the genuine nature and importance of female friendship ever to win an Emmy…

…llness, infertility, bereavement, ageing, single motherhood, sexual discrimination and divorce all play their part in the show’s storylines. Glossily packaged and swiftly dispatched they may be, but you can confidently say that there is more to the programme than footwear.

…but I did always feel that some kind of naughty self-indulgence was involved in following the Big/Carrie storyline. It was almost as if that love story existed to contradict everything practical, realistic, solid and flawed about love that I actually know in my own woman’s heart; that secretly, inside of all imperfect human relationships, lies this one, utterly enormous, romantic ‘bond’ that can be depended on to save the day. Once again to quote;

“The women are still caught in fairytale narratives. The ‘right’ couple were signalled in the first episode [in which Carrie first meets her on-off lover known only as Mr Big] and in some ways the entire show has just been about them getting together – which, of course, has to be endlessly delayed or you don’t have the driving force behind the story.” But this central relationship is clearly problematic. Mr Big is arrogant, egocentric and apparently unable to see a good thing when she is standing in front of him in four-inch heels. Carrie’s own inability to wake up and realise what a terrible cliche she is dating renders her, at best, pretty dumb and, at worst, passive and weak. (At the conclusion of the TV series, she is rescued from Paris – and another unsatisfactory relationship with another alpha male – by Mr Big, her knight on a Boeing 777.)

… Mr Big is such an interesting element. Even his name is masculine. He is like this phallus at the centre of it all.”

…and as my gay, disabled, feminist friend pointed out to me, it is a shame that for a show that was so revolutionary in terms of portraying women’s friendships and relationships, the series ultimately ended up with a conventional happy ending involving two rich white heterosexuals embracing each other for all of eternity.

And in some ways, I felt the film was an extension, perhaps, of that sad tendency towards the fairytale ending, which may account for the feelings I have this morning. I found that the scenes in the film dealing with the friendships between Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte, really delivered. There was honesty, anger, love, fierceness, joy, redemption and support to be found in those friendships – as there is in the real world, with one’s real girlfriends. But I also found the depiction of romantic relationships a bit depressing, and I began to wonder if it really helps us women in our lives to subscribe to theories about finding ‘the one,’ or to engage in dreams concerning happy endings.

The film certainly wasn’t one-dimensional by any means; the characters all have to do their share of emotional work and learning; Forgiveness, redemption and self-discovery underscore the main characters’ journeys throughout the film and it certainly isn’t all lush and pretty throughout. But there is simultaneously an ongoing support for the happy-ending dream throughout the film which I found troubling and a bit disturbing.

You see SATC is, for me, like a giant mirror of my own experiences. OK I don’t live in New York, those high heels make me wince at the thought of trying to walk in them and cocktails make me feel sick. But the women gathered around a table – as at a knitting circle – talking about everything from stomach cramps to a bad sexual experience to illness to pregnancy to jobs, is something I love about the show and something that I deeply identify with. The shopping trips, the mutual learning of female friendship, the frank discussions of relationships exhibited in the TV show… all of those things I relate to. So much of the TV show is affirmative and celebratory, and I’ve always found room for myself in amidst its portrayal of female, emotional life. But the film is somehow different; the film is somehow narrower in its focus of what happiness, for a woman, looks like.

I’d like to think that with no wedding plans in mind, no perfect dress, no grand affair, no giant closet, no pregnancy, no new sexual adventure in the future, no raising of children, no New York apartment in the immediate horizons, that my relationship as it stands, is good enough. Things on my relationship tick-list for the immediate future are generally modest. I’d like to see the Damson Tree we planted this Valentine’s day grow bigger, or see the Mulberry tree we planted a couple of years ago bear its first fruit. It’d be nice if we could establish a couple more beds in the garden for veg. I’d like if we could do more hobbies together – like the storytelling events we have been recently experimenting with – and get a decent holiday together this year. I’d feel good if I could keep my own confidence nice and high in spite of still feeling a bit new to, and isolated in, Reading, and I want to feel sexy and delicious again in the aftermath of my operation. I’d like to sort out my eating and body-image in such a way that it is no longer necessary for me to have sets of clothes in three different sizes hanging in my closet, and I think that confidence and joy in this aspect of my self, would have positive consequences for the relationship. Likewise I’d like to earn more money after my PhD and perhaps even look (very long-term) towards jointly buying a slightly larger place… or extending this one. A life together is made of a lot of small decisions stuck together to become bigger decisions. How you’ll live, where you’ll live, what you’ll prioritise, what you’ll drop… what you both need, what you both want, from dinner tonight, to in-ten-years’ time.

And I’d always considered SATC to be a show which would support my innate and authentic lifestyle choices/desires as a woman. ‘A woman’s right to shoes‘ is one of my favourite episodes, for example, not because of the expensive shoes, but because of the episode’s subtext concerning our support for, and validation of, alternative lifestyle choices for women.

But sitting in the cinema and being subjected to the predictable roll of hair-removal, diet, sanitary pad and other feminine (insecurity-driven?) product advertisements running before the show, I began to wonder if the SATC movie hasn’t just been killed by greed. The spin-off merchandise associated with the show (CD compilation, anyone? Carrie T-shirt, anyone? etc.) is just enormous and, as we know, manufactured desire sells product. I’d always overlooked the offensively decadent commercial excesses of the TV show before, feeling that the storylines were gutsy enough to override their own glossy packaging, but watching the film I felt that the translation into Hollywood film reversed that relationship. At some moments I wondered whether the SATC Movie wasn’t just venal manipulation and manufacture of feminine desire concealed beneath an apparently woman-centered storyline.

I still enjoyed the film’s focus on the four main leads and it would be unfair to say that the plot revolved entirely around the dreamed-of happy ending. In some ways the movie says what I am saying; that relationships are precious, fragile and flawed, and that we must define the rules ourselves if we are to ever be happy in them… that our ‘perfect fairytale endings’ are somehow not ever as we may imagine…

…and I was happy that the film ended with more realism and modesty than it began with. But I wonder if those things in the film outweigh the crazy excesses displayed elsewhere in SATC-dom. The assumptions about what makes a relationship work were presented as being almost self-explanatory in the film. Drastic rage followed by reflection and forgiveness appear to be all that is needed to even out the kinks of love; apparently all you need is an overwhelming desire to be together. This prescriptive view of love leaves some of the most important questions surrounding our happiness in relationships, unanswered. But maybe it is asking too much of SATC to expect it to do that, and to revisit the intelligent Guardian article already quoted;

It also 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.

So maybe I’ll return to my feminist reading list (currently Housewife by Anne Oakley, The Obstacle Race by Germaine Greer, Home Truths by Sarah Pink and My Struggle as a Woman Artist by Judy Chicago) for answers about feminism; my garden for answers about my future happiness with the lovely Mark; my friends for consultation and guidance on the complex issues surrounding happiness in love and my WW books for assistance with the eating. Re: SATC, well, maybe I’ll content myself with the joyful news that at least one film got made this year with 4 over 40 female leads, and that men everywhere have witnessed, in dinemas, a little of what women talk about, dream about and long for.

And maybe that’s enough.

7 Responses to Sex and The City: don’t worry, no spoilers!

  1. Pingback: The Domestic Soundscape » Blog Archive » A good start

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Copyright statement

You may transmit content found on this website (excluding my knitting patterns which are protected under International copyright law) under the following conditions:

- You always attribute my work to me, Felicity Ford, including a link back to this site
- You do not alter my work
- You do not use my work for commercial purposes

To discuss any other uses of my work, please contact me directly on the telephone number and email address provided at the top of this blog.

Creative Commons License
All the work shown here by Felicity Ford is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

From time to time I feature images, sounds or words on this blog which are not my own: in all such cases the original copyright owner is named. International copyright law requires that in order to republish their content, you must seek out their permission.

Thank you for respecting these terms and conditions.

Search Form
Archives