Cash And Carrie

So to the third and final of my extraneous whinges on T Lee’s blog. My trilogy, if you will, one that people are already calling ‘probably more appropriately hosted elsewhere.’

I thought I’d turn to a big question that vexes many. How did Sex And The City become so thunderingly culturally obnoxious?

The title’s become a shorthand for untrammelled cinematic shit-blasts, but worse, a certain type of hen night/Here Come The Girls advertising-friendly Tampax Pearl version of femininity. The ladies who use brand names as nouns and peddle a kind of fluffy-cute that many of our betitted number would rather do a Chaz Bono than sign up to.

(‘Squeeeee SATC! LOVE. IT. DOT. COM. Which one are you?’ Sorry, my brain function exceeds that recognised by the Glasgow Coma Scale, we can converse no further. Goodnight, dear imbecile.)

Plenty of people say, simple: it was always terrible. I disagree. In its earlier incarnation, it was a sharply written, funny drama. Stylistically, very much a Marmite flavour, sure, but not the festival of over-priced shoes and dung-minded giggling its detractors imagine.

I say imagine because often they object to an impression of it, rather than having seen it.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t try to win any converts, there was plenty to dislike if it wasn’t your thing. Such as the trite Carrie philosophical puzzler of the episode. (‘I had to wonder: do we obsess over appalling bags or are we obsessive appalling bags?’) Kim Cattrall’s fairly grotesque ‘cougar’ cartoon. (That’s not sexism, she struck a blow for equality by proving rapey libidos are universally off-putting. If Samantha was writ as an older man with a permanent stalk-on for young tail, we’d all be going YEUGH GROSS and douching with Domestos.)

And for a programme essentially about dating, the love interests tended to be undeveloped.  The Hunky One Who Chops Wood. The Writer Who Says Rude Stuff. Ze Nasty Forrin Russian. And of course, Mr Right – The Smug One Who’s Rich. Reader, I merged with him in a mutually advantageous piece of corporate synergy.

But as a way to while away an hour in your decline into the eternal dark void of ex-existence, it passed muster as sparky distraction.

It wasn’t anti-feminism, either. I hesitate to say it was ‘ground-breaking’ for fear of winning the Mark Lawson prize in media blather bingo, but pre-SATC, show me the show that had female leads who were a) over 30 b) not housewives, mums or district attorneys determined to get to the truth and c) able to have sex without it being about looking for love.

And SATC even cast a woman who was not a conventionally pretty ten-out-of-hard-ten in the central role. Some men are still struggling to process this flagrant insult to penises in an HBO series they wouldn’t have watched anyway. Our gender got James Gandolfini, Edward James Olmos and Lovejoy with a Brylcreemed fanny-parting, you’d think we’d give something back.

If these are pitifully small steps, well, yes. Exactly. This is where we be. And maybe progress doesn’t always come in the packages we’d wish them to.

Somehow, when the SATC TV team got the film deal and gathered for that doughnuts meeting, they managed to lose all the wit and occasional acuity about modern lives in their creation, find its worst or most irrelevant facets, then blow them up to big-screen size. They even added some new ones for luck. ‘Cultural imperialism, perhaps a little racism? We never did that before, bar the dubious Ruski, throw it in. Are these custard centres or jam?’

As a result, there’s so much to go at here, especially in SATC 2, that you could have an all-night pub Top Trumps game of their low points. I’m picking one aspect that offended me: the rampant materialism.

On TV, the fact Carrie mostly looked like a streetwalker who’d grabbed what she could before the tags set the alarms off was one of the loveable quirks. Yes, she mentioned the now-dreaded Manolos but the fashion was mainly just there in the way New York was just there, there weren’t endless scenes set in ateliers, discussing Vuitton. In the films, the fact these women SHOP and HAVE STUFF became all-defining. As if that’s what fans of the series wanted to see, not familiar characters being glamorous and witty and seeing some action, no – retail therapy.

You’ve got to hand the big hairy bollocks trophy to the writers here, the first film came out in 2008’s recession, when we were all picking the weevils out of tear-soaked Hovis biscuits. Somehow, a quartet of gaudy trinket-whores, perving on designer eye-sores with all the functioning perspective of Gollum, was supposed to inspire and delight.

Things hit the buffers with the extraordinarily misjudged Carrie Strop Gate of film 2, when she threw a fit about her husband anniversary gifting her an expensive telly instead of expensive jewellery. Her ‘journey’ continues with her realisation that perhaps one bit of premium Manhattan real estate is enough, thanks to a heart-to-heart with her economic migrant servant in her luxury freebie Abu Dhabi hotel quarters.

I’m not making this shit up. But someone did. It’s a worry.

Here SATC: The Films are demeaning and trivialising the womenfolk they’re supposed to cater for. It was trying to play off the ‘telly versus jewellery’ fundamentally as a what do you do when he stops making the effort to be romantic quandary. Done 100% differently, it could’ve worked. But the example they chose was from Planet Park Avenue. Marrying someone with obscene wealth and then waiting for him to drop dollar on you in inventive ways to prove his tender feelings resonates as a problem with precisely no-one bar Candace Bushnell.

‘It’s aspirational! You need cheering up, you tramps!’ they cry. I don’t think anyone walked in expecting a Mike Leigh. We’re fine watching people with glossy lives and nice things, when you make pursuit and possession of nice things the point, stomachs start to turn. Questions start to be asked. Shits start not to be given.

Back in TV show land, when Carrie fretted that her boyfriend didn’t get along with her friends, that friends with kids disdained her lifestyle, that she was growing too old for the kind of parties she found herself at – relatable.

Getting angry about top-quality consumer durables? Getting the squits at five star resorts? Samantha chucking condoms around bellowing about her foof in an Arabic marketplace? Donning burkas for a proper lol? Not relatable. Gruesome.

I could get further exercised here about the peculiar misogyny that parachuted in from nowhere in the films (how exactly was it Miranda’s fault her husband had an affair? And how exactly could she give up her job and still run that aspirational domesticity?) but we all have lives to be getting on with.

‘It’s not FOR you, obviously, if you dislike it so much, is it? Why complain! Tchuh!’ – voices off.

But it was for me, on TV. I’m no physics major, as they say. I have a major boner for Big Apple glitz. I’ve accidentally picked up whole box-sets of Gossip Girl and accidentally paid for them and accidentally put them on and tripped up, fallen onto the sofa and watched them all.

Fun need not be so evil, or reduce the spectrum of womanhood to a cluster of depressing, shallow, acquisitive stereotypes doing brunch. Who aren’t funny. God, at least the TV alter egos could crack a joke. What in the hell happened here?

Yet, seems in the face of overwhelming critical derision and making lots of money, SATC 3 is incoming. Gird loins for the tightly-plotted peril of Carrie’s baby (spoiler)dropping (spoiler) a Tiffany sterling silver teething rattle. (spoilt little turd.)

Sample dialogue:

Charlotte: (moron child-woman voice) Carrreeeee! I can’t believe your baby dropped a TIFFANY rattle.

Miranda: (worldly-wise lawyer voice) Kid drops a rattle, it’s gotta be the one you got from TIFFANY’S.

Carrie: (voice of the everywoman) Oh no, Big already didn’t maybe probably want this baby and now it’s dropped a TIFFANY rattle he’ll think it’s a sign. He’s already having difficulties with fatherhood, what with being a one-dimensional avatar for a notion of Wall Street alpha maledom.

Samantha: (Marlon Brando growl voice) I fucked someone in TIFFANY’S once and he stuck the rattle up my bum.

Charlotte: (moron child-woman crossed-eyes of confusion) Ewww, Samantha! What if it was the same one?!

Samantha: Oh no. I left it up there. It’s there right now. You girls should try it. And TIFFANY’S. Because their contract states 17 explicit mentions.

SATC 3 = Empire State Of Mind + PG-13 QVC.