{"id":954,"date":"2010-06-06T00:54:03","date_gmt":"2010-06-06T07:54:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rickyopaterny.com\/blog\/?p=954"},"modified":"2010-06-06T10:28:37","modified_gmt":"2010-06-06T17:28:37","slug":"too-much-sex-and-the-city-a-review-of-satc2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/2010\/06\/06\/too-much-sex-and-the-city-a-review-of-satc2\/","title":{"rendered":"Too much Sex (and the City): a review of SATC2 featuring Susan Sontag"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are many cringe-inducing moments in the second Sex and the City film<\/a>\u2014the poor jokes, the cheap moralizing, Samantha waving around condoms and giving the finger to an angry mob of locals in Abu Dhabi\u2014but the one that really got me came at the very end of the film when Carrie places her latest book\u2014its subject is marriage, and the New Yorker pans it complete with a cartoon drawing of Carrie Bradshaw\u2014on a shelf next to Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation<\/a><\/em> in her apartment. It’s the same Picador paperback edition of the Sontag book hat I purchased when I was fresh out of college and living in New York. It’s an excellent collection with two very well-known essays, the first of which I’ll mention is “Notes on Camp.”<\/a> The appearance of the Sontag volume finalized what was already obvious: SATC2 went too far\u2014it was Camp that acknowledged itself as such, it went beyond Camp so as to be meaningless. <\/p>\n

Sontag’s most famous lines on Camp: “the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration” and “The ultimate Camp statement: it’s good because<\/em> it’s awful.” The HBO series of SATC always had some qualities of Camp about it. The characters, while developed over time, remain, with the possible exception of Carrie, archetypes. The jokes and situations were often clich\u00e9d and predictable. But the show always had what Sontag considers an essential quality of true Camp: it was dead serious. And that it maintained that seriousness throughout six seasons is what allowed audiences to love it unequivocally, to feel connected to and care about the characters. <\/p>\n

I confess to the potentially unforgivable sin of being a straight, white male who fell for the show. I appreciated Carrie’s outfits as much as someone in that position could, which is to say that I thought she looked interesting and I now know the name Manolo Blahnik, but I wouldn\u2019t stand a chance of picking a pair of his shoes from a lineup even if the other suspects came from Nike. Although I’ve lived in New York City twice, SATC probably did more than any other media to shape my idea of New York\u2014the way I think about the City when I\u2019m not there. I mentioned clich\u00e9s, and it occurs to me that there are good and bad ways to employ clich\u00e9s in art: you can use them out of laziness because you can’t come up with anything better to resolve a conflict or a silence or you can use them to give a universal quality to some experience, some emotion. SATC the series did both, but more often it did the latter, and sometimes it did so extremely well\u2014nailing the perfect pitch of a line or a break-up or a fight that you, as an audience member with a history of relationships, couldn’t deny of its elemental truth. Yes, sometimes SATC was Camp, but sometimes it wasn\u2019t, and when it wasn\u2019t it was real and relatable and brilliant. <\/p>\n

In the show and into the first movie, there were real things at stake for the characters. Sometimes they were disappointed: think of the end of season four\u2014Carrie\u2019s engagement has ended and Big has decamped to the other side of the country, Miranda has become a mother on her own, Charlotte is divorced, and Samantha\u2019s boyfriend has cheated on her. A happy ending was, by no means, assured, and so we watched on for two more seasons.[1. I actually haven\u2019t seen most of these seasons, but I feel I\u2019ve seen enough to have a perspective.] Even in the first movie, it was unclear whether Big and Carrie would ever marry or see each other again after he left her at the altar. It might have carried the prefix of melo-, but this was dramatic tension. Perhaps, as a novice fan, my viewing here is na\u00efve. That, I\u2019ll admit. But I heard the biggest gasps produced by the second film\u2019s plot, and they came when Carrie accidentally left her passport in the stall of a shoe vendor in Abu Dhabi. Did anyone ever doubt she would get it back? <\/p>\n

As for the film\u2019s plot, there isn\u2019t much of it. Each character begins the film with a dilemma: Can Miranda have a fulfilling career and her family? Has Carrie\u2019s marriage become staid and stale? Will Samantha maintain her sex drive and sanity with the onset of menopause? Is Charlotte\u2019s husband cheating with their bra-less nanny? That said nanny turns out to be a lesbian at the movie\u2019s conclusion tells you everything you need to know about how low the stakes are in this film\u2014for the characters and, consequently, for the audience.[2. The absence of plot doesn\u2019t bother me. In fact, I tend to find plot cheap and distracting from character development. However, the absence of any sense of risk in this film is inexcusable.] <\/p>\n

Before that and other similarly simple resolutions, the girls spend the bulk of the two-plus-hour film in Abu Dhabi thanks to Samantha and a potential hotel client of hers. They stay in a $20,000 per night suite and have individual, chauffeured Maybachs to drive them around until things go wrong and they offend the locals\u2014at least, Samantha offends the locals. Excess is an understatement. Excess is up, but because seriousness is out, the film misses the mark of being even Camp\u2014it’s too awful to be good.[3. Cf. Sontag: \u201cThe hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers.\u201d She might as well have cited Carrie’s gold Louboutins in SATC2.] Carrie runs into her ex- Aidan in the souk, they have dinner, they kiss, she runs away. The kiss is supposed to be the climax of the film, but it feels entirely inconsequential. She confesses it over the phone to an impassive Big, but of course he takes her back at the end shortly after she returns to New York and moments before she puts her book next to Sontag\u2019s. <\/p>\n

Other<\/a> reviewers<\/a> wrong-headedly interpret the placement of Against Interpretation<\/em> as a nod to the women’s liberation movement, in embarrassing contradiction to the film’s message, as they see it. First, if you read Sontag’s journals, it’s obvious that she was just about as dependent as anyone alive on love and affection and relationships. Second, the title essay<\/a> of Against Interpretation<\/em> argues against the marshaling of film and literature and art to serve political causes and for experiencing art as what it is and not what one thinks it might represent. Therefore, I find many of the discussions about SATC and feminism to be entirely off base, especially when it comes to this second film.[4. Jessica Bennett at Newsweek<\/a> takes this the farthest: “But it\u2019s still sad to see the characters go from trailblazers to conformists, suddenly telling us that work and child-rearing actually don\u2019t mix, that it\u2019s a bling on a ring finger that will prove a union to the world, and that we must worry\u2014no matter how stable a marriage\u2014that a husband will cheat. It\u2019s fiction, we know. But these characters, like the lubrication they inspired, helped legions of women embrace their own fierceness\u2014and here they are, 12 years later, nothing more than stereotype and clich\u00e9.”] Yes, three of the girls end up married and yes, the other, Samantha\u2014big surprise!\u2014is on her back at the end of the film. But to focus on this is to miss the point of the film: it’s an extension of the SATC brand.<\/a><\/p>\n

And perhaps, it’s unfortunate that such a lackluster screenplay will still succeed at the box office by trading on that brand name.[5. Cf. Mencken: “No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American Public.”] But for a certain set of fans\u2014those who liked the show more for the clothes than for the content\u2014there\u2019s evidence that this film is actually enjoyable. And by evidence, I mean the oohs and ahhs emitted by girls in the Marina theater on the film\u2019s opening night each time the characters appeared in new outfits\u2014or, to appropriately place the emphasis: new outfits appeared on the characters.[6. When Lori and I left the theater, there were more girls lined up outside for the next showing, girls who would inevitably ooh and ahh in unison at the same scenes because that is what people who stand in line for a film will do. The Marina seems to attract these sorts of people, whom we find hilarious, which is why we went there.] And there\u2019s nothing wrong with a little fun, it just that this sort of fun isn\u2019t really for me.[7. I recently heard Sarah Jessica Parker recount, in an interview, the story of HBO\u2019s refusal to produce the first SATC film. She was convinced, however, as she proceeded to shop around the concept, that the film could be an event for people to get together. Is this a complete dismissal of any artistic value or is the community that the SATC brand created, at the very heart of artistic value? Is it not the very thing that a director or a writer aspires to, to bring people together around her work?] Or rather, I care little about clothes and a lot about character; if it were the inverse, I might have found this film something other than a disappointment. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are many cringe-inducing moments in the second Sex and the City film\u2014the poor jokes, the cheap moralizing, Samantha waving around condoms and giving the finger to an angry mob of locals in Abu Dhabi\u2014but the one that really got me came at the very end of the film when Carrie places her latest book\u2014its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,1],"tags":[173,169,151,171,170,172],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=954"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":974,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954\/revisions\/974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}