Drawing a Blahnik: Should
we care about SATC, the movie?
When filming started in New York last year for the Sex and the City: The Movie, blogs were created expressly to record the fashion choices of the show's four stars, and gossip sites snarked predictably about whether SJP and Kim Catrall were a big too long in the tooth for their Patricia Field-styled getups. But the excitement that hit many of the series' diehard fans was accompanied by healthy dose of embarrassment. We're still looking forward to this, five years after the show ended? Why hasn't something even better come along? Why haven't we moved on?
The questions are worth asking, especially given that the copycats that have risen in SATC's wake--most notably this year's network snoozers Cashmere Mafia and Lipstick Jungleâ--have blurred the original into an eye-rolling cliche, little more than a pastiche of high heels and bedroom drama, martinis and money.
While these symbols remain behind in SATC's less successful spawn�as do the many still-legitimate dilemmas facing successful women limned onscreen--much of the meat of SATC's plots and dialogue has faded from collective memory. Did all those true-ringing conversations about self-esteem, bad judgment, sexual autonomy, abortion never really happen? Or were those very conversations still too radical for television to build upon?
The series that was supposed to blaze a trail into a new era of females on television and film has blazed more of a cul-de-sac. "[Sex] gave voice to a group of people--single women in their 30s," Sex and the City writer Jenny Bicks told Entertainment Weekly this past March. "The question is, who is the next group that hasn�t had a voice yet? I don�t think it�s anyone sipping a cosmopolitan in a bar." Indeed. But rather than spawning shows about women in all walks of life�college students, single moms, waitresses, scientists�who get to talk and be funny and have adventures, epiphanies, and lots of sex, we've gotten a parade of knockoff Manolos.
And that's where the embarrassment comes in, even for fans. We shouldn't really crave a Sex and the City movie, because it's not fair to all the amazing, honest and complex women characters who ought to have sprung up in the five years since the show ended and haven't. Maybe the movie's writers can remind audiences of what made the show better than its imitators. Hopefully the film will at least set off bells among TV executives that SATC's success was due to its characters, not their Cosmos.
--Sarah Seltzer
Bitch Magazine #40, "Genesis Issue," Summer 2008 | p.19-20