“Smell is very nostalgic.”
Sarah Jessica Parker is talking about her latest perfume. She’s also, indirectly, talking about her appeal, her brand, what she does for a living, the reason why an audience in the low triple digits (mostly female, mostly younger than the actress by a decade) has rushed to the Times Center on a Friday evening exactly four weeks before the premiere of the Sex and the City movie, to see her interviewed on stage by journalist William J. Castle. I was invited to the event as a member of the press; I accepted the invitation in the spirit of making an honest effort to learn something about why adult women find Parker and the Sex and the City phenomena appealing.
The two women sitting next to me, who breathlessly climbed over my legs a few minutes after the program began, left behind their own fragrance trail: hair products, manicures, menthol cigarettes and pink drinks. A surface-only snap-judgement says these women were a representative sample of those in attendance: young(ish), upper-middle-class, not particularly cosmopolitan but enthusiastic about both cosmopolitans and Cosmopolitan.
I assume most of these gals were not members of the press, which means that most of them spent $25 on the privilege of spending an hour in the same room as Sarah Jessica Parker, which probably indicates that some or most of them are die hard Sex and the City fans. Sex and the City fandom is a curious, powerful thing: there are women for whom the show was not just a show, but an articulation of a kind of post-post feminism in which conspicuous consumption and low-level self-destruction become a kind of political statement, where concerns about independence and empowerment have become so moot that something as seemingly provincial and outdated as “marrying well” has come back around as a reasonable goal for working women. In other words, it allows well-heeled, probably intelligent but politically unconscious women to do what they would have done anyway, and feel really, really good about it.
The women who became attached to Sex and the City as an avenue towards feeling good have spent the past four years deprived, able only to replay the DVDs or watch sanitized reruns on TBS in an attempt to recycle old highs by tapping into overused veins. With the series no longer generating new fantasy images, the fans can only essentially masturbate to their memories of the old fantasy. The arrival of the Sex and the City movie and its attended media storm represents these junkies’ best chance for a last hit.
If moderator Carter’s interest in the matter can be seen as reflective of his audience’s desires, these hungry junkies have apparently supplemented their consumption over the years by supporting Sarah Jessica Parker: The Brand. About a third of the hour-long Times Center conversation is devoted to what the actress has been doing in the four years since her most famous gig came to a close, and for Carter this means conspicuously avoiding mention of films like Failure to Launch (which, it should be noted, made real money––it’s the 27th highest grossing romantic comedy of all time, right behind When Harry Met Sally… at 26 but ahead of The Wedding Singer and Moonstruck) in order to discuss Parker’s fashion line, her fragrances, her shoe closet. Carter also fails to inquire about Parker’s gig shilling Clairol at-home hair dye; I wonder if this job could be seen to devalue Parker’s status as individual brand––and a brand based on some interpretation of individualism––demoting the actress into just another in a long line of gals paid to purr, “I’m worth it.”
About half-way through the show, the lights go down so we can watch the Sex and the City trailer. I’ve seen this before, of course, but the reaction of the audience suggest that most people in the room haven’t. I suddenly become aware that there’s not much of an overlap in demographics between the type of person who consumes media like Sex and the City, and the type of person who reads about movies on the internet. Perhaps this is why just being in this room makes me uncomfortable. Maybe there are some girls who are not a Carrie, a Samantha, a Miranda or a Charlotte––maybe there are some girls who are just nerdy.
In any case, the pubic hair jokes in the trailer get the biggest laughs, and this gets me thinking about the split between what we might as well call Sex and the City fangirls, and the kind of person we usually refer to as a fanboy. I imagine a 22 year-old boy who’s really into comic books, who, as I was sitting next to the pink martini ladies, was maybe lining up to see Iron Man, maybe for the second time. When I think of that boy, I imagine that he understands that a billionaire industrialist is not really going to build his own indestructible suit and rescue the innocent people of Afghanistan.
But Sex and the City exists on just as deep of a fantasy plane as any comic book world, and when I think of a Sex and the City fan, I imagine a 22 year-old girl who really believes that she’ll someday be rescued by a billionaire (industrialist or no). Am I just being unfair? I don’t know. I do know that during the brief Q & A session, the majority of questions asked by members of the audience had to do with the overlap between the real-life Sarah Jessica and the character of Carrie Bradshaw, with whom the actress has become synonymous, as if there’s something crucial about sorting out where fantasy ends and reality begins. It played as a managing of expectations and aspirations, as if each woman was really asking, “Best case scenario––how much of this fantasy is attainable?”
At one point during the evening, I wondered if there would be any celebrity for whom Carrie Bradshaw might give up her Friday night dinner date. I conclude that Carrie Bradshaw would not be one to assign aspirational value to a celebrity. I conclude that Carrie Bradshaw would rather be drinking. In this moment, I feel closer to Carrie Bradshaw than I ever have in my life.
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