Why Sex and the City is the great­est block­buster of the 21^st century

In 2008, Sex and the City pre­sent­ed an improb­a­ble lifestyle in the heart of New York City. In 2016, the work, the play and the avid mate­r­i­al con­sump­tion feels like an impos­si­ble mem­o­ry. A rel­ic of our pre-finan­cial cri­sis world, the film stands as a por­trait of ear­ly 21^st-cen­tu­ry deca­dence before the dream of free spend­ing cap­i­tal­ism came crash­ing down. Pick­ing things up years after the show’s finale, which aired in 2004, the film revis­its the famil­iar tri­als and tribu­la­tions of Car­rie and her friends, explor­ing their chang­ing rela­tion­ships and the grow­ing frus­tra­tions they’re expe­ri­enc­ing as they grow older.

More broad­ly com­ic than the show ever was, the Sex and the City movie does not trans­late the appeal of the tele­vi­sion series to the big screen. Wild­ly suc­cess­ful, mak­ing more than six times the bud­get costs, the film was crit­i­cal­ly maligned – and with rea­son. It feels cheap, in terms of pro­duc­tion and writ­ing. The char­ac­ters, who were fleshed out over the course of six sea­sons on HBO, feel flat­tened, run thin of any­thing like nuance or depth. The plot is osten­si­bly about Sarah Jes­si­ca Parker’s Car­rie Brad­shaw final­ly con­vinc­ing on-off squeeze, Mr Big (Chris Noth) to mar­ry her, only to have him run out on her before the cer­e­mo­ny. It exploits near­ly every imag­in­able self-heal­ing cliché in the process.

The film’s humour, debased and taste­less, mines the sur­face for as many jokes about fae­cal mat­ter and body hair as is pos­si­ble. Almost as if the writer and direc­tor (Michael Patrick King) hat­ed the four women that audi­ences had fall­en in love with, they are rit­u­al­ly humil­i­at­ed and insult­ed over the course of the film’s run time – and things would only get worse a few years lat­er for Sex and the City 2.

Once upon a time, Sex and the City rep­re­sent­ed a sort of ​‘com­ing out’ for white upper-class women. The glam­orous out­fits, the frank dis­cus­sions about sex and its cel­e­bra­tion of wom­an­hood all felt rev­o­lu­tion­ary. The show retains some of that ener­gy, though not with the same con­sis­ten­cy as when it first aired. It was light, but the inti­ma­cy between char­ac­ters allowed for moments of real depth and insight: it’s no sur­prise that women, in par­tic­u­lar, felt a close kin­ship to the expe­ri­ences and per­son­al­i­ties of these four mod­ern idols.

At the time, one of the great­est vic­to­ries for the show was that the women had lev­elled them­selves to spend like men. The ​’90s ide­ol­o­gy of ​‘shop, shop, shop’ might seem trite now, a cod­ed mes­sage of cor­po­ra­tions to get you to spend more, but it was and still is lib­er­at­ing in how it treats the val­ue of women’s wants and desires. Rather than con­demn them for being friv­o­lous, it rais­es them to the same lev­el as the Wall Street play­ers whose van­i­ty pur­chas­es are social­ly accept­ed and even cel­e­brat­ed. The free­dom of an econ­o­my that seemed to be work­ing allowed for this kind of frank cel­e­bra­tion of greed to feel empow­er­ing, how­ev­er short-sight­ed that seems today.

Trans­lat­ed to the big screen, the air of empow­er­ment fad­ed. Maybe it was time, maybe it was a shift in con­scious­ness on the part of the creator/​writer/​director. What once felt like a cel­e­bra­tion of prob­lem­at­ic ideals turned to poi­son. Parker’s Car­rie, who remark­ably brings a lot of love to the part in the film, puts on a fash­ion show of her ​‘great­est hits design­er out­fits’ to ​‘Walk this Way’ by Run-DMC fea­tur­ing Steven Tyler and Joe Per­ry of Aero­smith. It feels not only like the most egre­gious fan ser­vice moment, but an affront to the audi­ence and char­ac­ters them­selves. Cheap­ly con­ceived, it’s a raw and vio­lent cel­e­bra­tion of the worst things about fash­ion and style – reduc­ing these art­forms to a parade of dol­lar signs that no week­ly colum­nist could ever dream of achiev­ing. The sequence that was meant to rep­re­sent ​“mov­ing on” became code for ​“mov­ing up”, hit­ting the next mile­stone in finan­cial suc­cess through marriage.

Defend­ers of the film sug­gest­ed that the vehe­ment dis­like of Sex and the City was root­ed in a deep­er loathing of women and their expe­ri­ences. This does ring true for the TV show at least, which has received improb­a­ble and uncrit­i­cal blow­back for no oth­er rea­son that it stars women – in par­tic­u­lar, women who are not straight out of col­lege. But, more inex­cus­able is the idea that this kind of film­mak­ing is the best that women deserve. Women make up the major­i­ty of film­go­ers – in 2015 they account­ed for 51 per cent of all the­atri­cal patrons accord­ing to that year’s MPAA The­atri­cal Mar­ket Sta­tis­tics report. Yet, accord­ing to the 2015 Hol­ly­wood Diver­si­ty Report released by Bunche (spon­sored by the Ralph J Bunche Cen­tre for African Amer­i­can Stud­ies at UCLA), women rep­re­sent­ed an aver­age of just over 25 per cent of lead roles in the­atri­cal­ly released films since 2011. That num­ber does not seem to be climb­ing, due to a num­ber of fac­tors behind the scenes.

The Sex and the City movie stands among a num­ber of films tar­get­ed towards women that don’t seem to strive for qual­i­ty, know­ing full well that, due to being a part of a well-estab­lished fran­chise, the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor might be enough to appeal to an audi­ence starved for rep­re­sen­ta­tion. As a cel­e­bra­tion of mon­ey and the upwards mobil­i­ty it affords you, the film may feel par­tic­u­lar­ly alien­at­ing for con­tem­po­rary audi­ences who sim­ply don’t remem­ber the free­dom and oppor­tu­ni­ties of a pre-2008 econ­o­my. What once was meant to be a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of hard work­ing women who have carved out their space in a man’s world, now feels like an affront, a dan­gling steak just out a starv­ing audience’s reach.

What do you think is the great­est block­buster of the 21^st cen­tu­ry? Have your say @LWLies