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.
2. The men are ciphers!
Proponents: Ebert and Lane, as well as Manohla Dargis,
Representative Pullquote: Ebert again, speaking of Chris Noth’s Mr. Big: “He’s handsome in the Rock Hudson and Victor Mature tradition, and has a low, preternaturally calm voice that delivers stock reassurances and banal cliches right on time…But he’s … kinda slow. Square. Colorless. Notice how, when an old friend shouts rude things about him at an important dinner, he hardly seems to hear them, or to know he’s having dinner.”
Who Says It Best: Though Lane gets off a cute line about Evan Handler’s resemblance to Dr. Evil, Dargis beautifully encapsulates why shallow love interests make a film like this fall flat: “Unlike the show, which allowed the men to emerge occasionally from the sidelines with lines of actual dialogue, the male characters in the movie stand idly by, either smiling or stripping, reduced to playing sock puppets in a Punch-free Judy and Judy (times two) show. I’m all for the female gaze, but, gee, it’s also nice to talk — and listen — to men, too.
3. It’s racist!
Proponents: Ed Gonzales at Slant, Matt Zoller Seitz (commenting at The House Next Door), White.
Representative Pullquote: “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.” — White.
Who Says It Best: Gonzales, who makes it the lede of his review: “Is a demeaning representation better than no representation at all? … American Idol also-ran [Jennifer Hudson] allows herself to be typecast as a modern-day mammy to Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw…[director Michael Patrick] King’s desperate attempt at “racial balance” pathetically backfires but at least proves useful in putting the show’s inherently materialistic and borderline-supremacist ethos into sharper focus.”
4. It fails to critique free market capitalism/irrational economic exuberance!
Proponents: Pretty much everyone. Except for Owen Gleiberman, whose B+ review gives a big “You go, middle aged girls!” to SatC’s embrace of “the holy right to be cosmetic, acquisitive, and — yes! — superficial.”
Representative Pullquote: Jette Kernion at Cinematical: “I never was able to sympathize much with these high-strung, high-maintenance, over-privileged characters. What can I say: I wear flat sandals and tennis shoes, I thought the designer purses were ugly as sin, and I don’t think every woman needs a Brazilian in order to keep her man.” See also, once again, White: “Carrie’s opening line ‘Girls come to New York City looking for the two Ls—labels and love’ is an infuriating canard.” Oh no — not a canard!
Who Says It Best: Dargis again, who illustrates how the obstinate lack of politics in the world in which these gals consume is, of course, its own kind of politics: “Awash in materialism and narcissism, a cloth flower pinned to her dress where cool chicks wear their Obama buttons, this It Girl has become totally Ick.” See also Jezebel’s Tracie Egan, speaking in that same Salon article in which Bright was quoted (much of the SatC coverage on her own site was handed over to Emily Gould, internet pariah du jour): “I feel like Carrie’s spending habits are so much more dangerous than her sex habits. A bad credit history is more dangerous than herpes.”
5. It wants you to think it’s progressive, but it’s actually old-fashioned, and that makes it hypocritical!
Proponents: Forrest, White, Egan, Bright
Representative Pullquote: One last gem from White: “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.”
Who Says It Best: We comes back to the Salon piece for a lengthy quote from long-time sexual historian, educator and advocate Bright: “[The SatC girls are] desperate to get married. They obsess about their marital status…I can’t watch these women, you know, make asses of themselves and be so petty and small-minded about sexual possibility. I take it too personally. I feel like someone drove over me with a truck. I feel invisible. I feel — you know what I feel like? I feel like Trotsky when Stalin airbrushed him out of all the pictures of the Russian Revolution. I feel like the revisionist version of the sexual liberation movement is so stupid and shallow…This used to be something.”
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