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Sex and the City: The Magic Show
SATC: At heart, it is not about sex or the city
Posted June 12, 2008
No spoilers, I promise. But really, do you have to see the "Sex and the City" (SATC) movie, or read any of the reviews, to forecast the plotlines?
How about these possibilities:
• Will he stay or will he go?
• Will their relationship survive?
• Who will end up together?
Ask someone who has seen the movie what it was about, and most likely, she (the appropriate pronoun here) will provide answers to these kinds of questions. Push for more detail, and maybe you will hear, also predictably, about the shoes, the sex, the fashion, the apartments, and the drinks.
There's plenty of all of those themes in the movie, but they are the distractions. They are signs of the movie-maker as magician, coaxing and tricking the audience to gaze away from the real action: "Hey, look at this guy! Look at that glitz! Can you believe the size of that closet! Can you believe the size of that..." (Oh, never mind; I never did identify with Samantha.)
SATC - the TV series and the movie - has been unabashed, unconventional, and explicit about sex. By equal measure, though, it has been reticent, conventional, and indirect about the real emotional power of the show.
There was a point in the movie when I thought that one of the women would dare to say, clearly and unambiguously, what she really did care about. Samantha was standing on the sands of the Pacific, outside of her spectacular beach house she shared with the guy who adored her, pondering all that she had in her life in L.A. But, we learn in the voice-over, something was missing.
This was the point at which I thought the show would bare its emotional soul. I thought Samantha would say that despite all that she had in L.A., her life was not the same without those three women who had meant so much to her for so many years. I thought she would say that she yearned for her friends.
Instead, Samantha's eyes alighted on the naked hunk next door.
No matter what these four women faced, in the end, they were always there for each other. The crises in the TV series went beyond the break-up by post-it note, to include the decision to have a child, a diagnosis of cancer, the death of a parent, and more. We, the audience, saw the women drawn toward one another, in sickness and in health. But we were rarely treated to storylines powered by the dynamics of their friendships (or their careers - but that's another topic). Somehow, the explicit narrative was almost always about The Guy.
So it is in our society, our customs, our conversations and our laws. The sex-based couple is privileged and protected; to some extent, so are parents and children. In the Terri Schaivo case, the sparring was between Terri's spouse and her parents. But if Carrie Bradshaw were a real person and stricken with Terri's fate, who would be most likely to know her true wishes? I don't think it would be her parents or Mr. Big. I think it would be Miranda.
I was born in 1953, and that's long enough ago to seem like another era. I was one of four children. My father had just one sibling, but my mother had six. I had cousins, aunts, and uncles who lived within a few miles, and I treated that as walking distance, so I could spend time with them without always asking for a ride. Just about every holiday or minor celebration was cause for an extended family gathering.
Those days are mostly gone. As family size decreases, people grow up with fewer siblings. As grown children criss-cross the country (and the world) in pursuit of whatever attracts them, fewer people can walk to the front door of the relatives they grew up with. Now that Americans spend more years of their adult lives unmarried than married, a spouse is not so reliably the person who is there for you, always. I think that all of these trends point to the growing importance of friends in contemporary society.
SATC is not the only popular show that is frivolous on the outside and deep on the inside. In the soap-opera silly Desperate Housewives (which offers much to dislike, including heaping dollops of singlism), the friendship among the four women is its emotional force. The theme song of the Golden Girls was "Thank You for Being a Friend." The show was broadcast from 1985 until 1992 and is still attracting enough viewers to continue airing in reruns.
If there are any media-studies scholars out there, I'd love to know whether there is a link between our changing national demographics and the prevalence and popularity of shows that have friendship at their core.
