A Defense of Sex and the City

In the couple weeks since Sex and the City movie came out, the film has taken something of a beating at the hands of the news media. These articles read much less like film review than cultural critiques, perhaps because the movie was poised to disrupt box office trends, or because the four-year hiatus gave everyone an opportunity to say his or her piece about the series and its legacy. Embarrassed by the fan frenzy (female pleasure is just so frivolous), many of these reviewers have taken out on the movie issues that have long been understood about the show. Goodness knows I have plenty to say about what’s wrong with SATC on the big, or small, screens. I’d like to take this moment, however, to stand up for a film that was, at the very least, a love letter to fans, but also significantly more than that.

Anthony Lane begins his snide review in the New Yorker with a reflection on the excitement and secrecy that surrounded this release. Standing in line at the theatre, Lane shares his predictions about the plot with a woman nearby:

I took a wild guess. “Apparently,” I said to the woman behind me in line, “some of the girls have problems with their men, break up for a while, and then get back together again.” “Oh my God!” she cried. “How do you know?”

Already, Lane begins with the notion that the film’s subject matter is too appallingly trivial to care about. What an incisive and witty take-down of those silly female fans: this movie is about nothing but love and suffering, and it definitely wasn’t worth his time.

Lane reveals a nasty condescension towards the subject matter; indeed, many writers seemed mortified by the masses of women who invested their time, money, and emotions into this movie. Slate assembled four of its women writers to dish on SATC, and their conversation was saddled with the persistent need to condemn and distance themselves from the movie’s frivolity.

Meghan O’Rourke: Carrie, after Big Jilts her, says, “I feel like I took a bullet.” Um, really? You mean like a soldier?…

Erin Bucklann: So many audience members were sobbing throughout my screening and I was struck by hearing more crying in that movie than during any serious war movie or mourning scene I’ve watched in a looong time.

Measuring stories of intimacy, friendship, and heartbreak against war, politics, and tragedy, these critics participate in a didactic and classically sexist framework that assigns value to one experience over another and pits the mythical and heroic against the everyday and interpersonal. Historically, women’s stories have always been relegated to second-class art, and it looks like not much has changed. This is a zero-sum game in which women always lose.

Hairspray the (2nd) Movie: Now I’ve Tasted Chocolate and I’m Never Going Back

In Hairspray, Tracy Turnblad’s dream of dancing on “The Corny Collins Show” also propels her into the black kids’ group at her Baltimore high school: desperate to audition for the show, she cuts class and consequently gets sent to detention. Detention, it turns out, is where all the black students hang out, and it’s not a punishment so much as a dance party.

Tracy is one of those sunny, big-hearted kids who doesn’t even notice social boundaries and taboos; interested in Seaweed Stubbs’s moves, she mixes right in with her new companions. She’s white, but, as John Waters wrote in the original screenplay, her soul is black. Tracy’s own efforts to get accepted on television as an overweight, working-class girl with admittedly fabulous hair become much more than that. She vocalizes her generation’s vision of love and tolerance, pushes her mother Edna to find her own sense of self-worth, and instigates a fight for racial integration on the dance show.

As far as Hairspray is concerned, Tracy’s presence on the Corny show is essentially linked to the fact that Lil’ Inez, Seaweed’s younger sister, will also dance her way on stage by the end of the film. This is about any kind of outsider status. “People who are different,” Tracy promises, “their time is coming.”

I Don’t Want No Baby: Knocked Up, Waitress, and Shmashmortions

I may be the only person in the country who cried in sadness during Knocked Up. I did: I shed a tear for Katherine Heigl’s Alison, when she’s weeping at the doctor’s office having just being told officially that she’s pregnant. That moment is so difficult, and not just for Seth Rogen’s awkward Ben who’s standing next to her unsure what to do. It felt painfully accessible–what young woman couldn’t imagine the terror and confusion Alison is experiencing?

Knocked Up is #3 at the box office right now. It’s a great movie, but there’s no doubt Judd Apatow’s strength is in capturing the male voice, as Dana Stevens notes on Slate. The film succeeded not just in the extended stoner scenes and bathroom jokes–which got a little tiresome if only by their length–but in the poignant conversations between the men, between Ben and his friends, his father and, especially Paul Rudd’s character, Pete. Stevens cites the moment between Pete and Ben, when, high on shrooms in a Las Vegas hotel room, they share their fears and disappointments in a scene that is “as revealing as it is hilarious.” Suddenly honest with one another, they express their feelings and, indeed, their love and respect for the women in their lives, the women who, earlier, had seemed like nothing so much as intrusions on good old masculine fun. A.O. Scott identifies a larger critique here, one that is cheerily embedded in jokes about bongs and getting laid:

A Woman Like a Soldier, Holding Him Down: Fabolous, the Angel in the House, and Club Security

“Make Me Better” is a recently released single by Fabolous, featuring Ne-Yo. The lines of the chorus are, “I’m a movement by myself but I’m a force when were together/ Mami, I’m good all by myself but baby you, you make me better.” The song praises that supportive girlfriend, the woman who stays by her man, encouraging and guiding him. This is sort of what Beyonce is talking about in “Upgrade You”: “I can do for you what Martin did for the people/ Ran by the men but the women keep the tempo/ It’s very seldom that you’re blessed to find your equal/ Still play my part and let you take the lead role…I’ll follow…I’ll be the help whenever you need me.”

Such a woman is essential to any man’s success. The old adage goes something like, “Behind every great man is a great woman.” In Fabolous’s song, it’s a little different: “Beside every great man you can find/ A woman like a soldier holding him down” (emphasis mine). There’s an ongoing battle, and women have their part to play as well. Clearly there’s some history here, the image of the strong black woman floating in the background as Beyonce sings those lines. Women are supposed to do that essential work behind-the-scenes, to hold down the home front, and, in any war, to give their men something to fight for. Fabolous declares, “I’m a need Coretta Scott if I’m gonna be King.”

No Sex For You: Apparently, Sex Has Consequences

The cover of today’s “Week In Review” is all about sex–but not the fun kind.

Randy Kennedy reports on a recent trend in art and literature of sending increasingly severe messages about sex. Instead of having sex, people are “waiting and wondering, longing and thinking,” and probably also agonizing and regretting. Caution and denial shade the portrayals of sex in such works as Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach or Tom Perrotta’s upcoming The Abstinence Teacher. Nowhere near this grim but still sharing some of the same hopes about sex, we find Judd Apatow’s recent hits, The Forty-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up (a post on this last film is forthcoming). Kennedy writes:

Saving Yourself for The One

If there is an exact opposite of having Sex Like Men, it’s saving yourself for The One. People might think this doesn’t happen much anymore–whether or not that’s the case, many adolescent girls, and probably some guys, grow up thinking they’ll wait to have sex until marriage. Not for religious reasons, necessarily, but for idealistic ones. Whenever I contemplate the idea of The One, I can’t help but think of the fabulously bad Marisa Tomei movie, Only You (1994): when she was a little girl, a Ouija board told her she would marry Robert Downey Jr., so she chases him through Europe to make this happen. Or something like that.

I Don’t Have Sex But I Watch It On TV

Two recent articles in the New York Times identified opposite trends in the television and film industries. While fewer movies today are being geared toward a female audience, television networks like ABC are newly immersed in “a sea of estrogen,” their most successful shows for and about women.

In “Hollywood’s Shortage of Female Power,” Sharon Waxman reports on the decline of romantic comedies since the 1990s. Romantic comedies fare worse in international markets “than male-led action movies or fantasy adventures heavy with special effects,” and there are few women today with the kind of star power we saw 10 years ago. Back then, Julia Roberts could demand $20 million for a “chick flick,” but studios are now less willing to shell out that kind of cash on an actress. Waxman suggests a link between this trend and the shortage of women executives in the industry. Women have been pushed out of top positions at Hollywood studios and replaced entirely by men (some may have left in the apparently nationwide trend of women “opting out” of their careers—after all, the former chairwoman of Paramount says, “How long am I going to get up at 6 a.m. and go to bed at 11 p.m., six days a week?’ Women also want to be in love…They want friends. They want life.”).

Apparently, women also want sex. In “Having Your Beefcake and Talking About It, Too,” Alessandra Stanley writes that in the last couple years, ABC has built a formidable line-up of shows that are the, admittedly better-written, “television version[s] of chick lit.” Desperate Housewives, Brothers & Sisters, and Grey’s Anatomy are about family, relationships, politics, betrayal, but mostly about sex. “Male viewers click off in droves.”