Marxist analysis of Sex and the City 2 by Mark Kermode

[Ireland-lover]

Hot damn, i cant post links yet. Someone youtube it and post it.

[The Idler]

uHeQeHstrsc

[Glenn Beck]

Absolutely brilliant

[Leonid Brozhnev]

Not so much of an analysis than a rant, but its understandable. My gf likes Sex and the City so I've had similar rants about the exact same subject. I could imagine Big as an Arms Dealer actually...

[x359594]

Why I Liked Sex and the City 2 by Jodi Dean

Already the Guardian is saying that Sex and the City 2 is on its way to becoming one of the most critically derided films of all time. Here are a few examples:
New York Post:

The transformation of the girls from winsome wisecrackers into whiny bling-obsessed chuckleheads is complete.

New York Times:

But the ugly smell of unexamined privilege hangs over this film like the smoke from cheap incense. Over cosmos in their private bar, Charlotte and Miranda commiserate about the hardships of motherhood and then raise their glasses to moms who "don't have help," by which they mean paid servants.

The Guardian:

Not since 1942's Arabian Nights has orientalism been portrayed so unironically. All Middle Eastern men are shot in a sparkly light with jingly jangly music just in case you didn't get that these dusky people are exotic and different. Even leaving aside the question of why anyone would go on holiday to Abu Dhabi, everyone who has ever watched a TV show knows that the first rule is: don't take characters out of their usual environment.

Last night, two friends and I went to see it. We saw it in the Geneva, NY movieplex. It wasn't sold out, but it was full and, yes, women outnumbered the men by at least 12:1. The crowd was appreciative and enthusiastic. Both my friends liked it--and one had hated SATC 1. A bit more background--all 3 of us are over 40, have been married, have had kids. From here on in, there will be a lot of spoilers, so if you want surprises and plan on seeing the movie, stop reading now.

The movie explores fantasy and disappointment (I wonder if the critics saw the movie or even recognize the fantasy components; my god, one of the framing devices is old black and white movies, the first with Clark Gable--It Happened
One Night--and the second with Cary Grant--I didn't recognize it; if those don't signal Depression-era escapism, what does?). The television series always had a fantastic element--fantasies of great clothes and apartments on a writer's
income, of fulfilling careers, of complete sexual enjoyment. So not only did the series actively invite women to imagine themselves as one of the 4 characters, but it also staged fantasies of fashion, success, romance, and sex. The best
episodes pressed the limits of fantasy. Particularly after 9/11 there was increasing pressure to wake up from the dream. One could almost say that the failure of the first film was its inability to resolve or represent the tension between the fantasy of the wedding and the reality of the end of Carrie's life as a single woman.

The two primary sites of fantastic investment in SATC2 are homosexuality and a mythical Middle East. Since 3 of the 4 women are married and Samantha is having a hard time holding onto her mojo (her fight is admirable, making me wonder why
fighting cancer is glorified and fighting menopause is roundly condemned; misogyny anyone?), straight love has lost its allure and become a lot of work. Marriage and babies, marriage without babies--not what it was cracked up to be, a giant pain, and not the source of completeness at the heart of their fantasies. With straight marriage on the decline, who can believe in it anymore? Who really wants it, anyway? The gays!!

Gay marriage is the one cultural site where marriage means something. Weddings can be over the top (there really is something to celebrate) and maybe the rules are different, easier to renegotiate. The guys' solution to pressure for
monogamy--infidelity is only allowed in states that won't recognize their marriage--at first seems a gesture to the fantasy of fabulous, frequent, promiscuous sex in which gay men are often cast, yet the explanation--it's not because he's gay, it's because he's Italian--situates the solution back within one of the main issues of the movie, how will the women deal with being with the same person, in the same bed, most every night, FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES. It's like a prison sentence, a kind of capture, maybe even a form of cultural silencing.

So, the wedding is totally over the top--more perfect than any wedding ever, complete with swans, a gorgeous men's chorus in white, and Liza. Liza's rendition of "Single Ladies" was unlike anything I've ever seen. The closest I can come up with is Tom Delay on Dancing with the Stars.

So, Liza does Beyonce, Carries wears a Tux, and a cute man flirts with Big. Safely enveloped in gay fabulousity, even the most stilted interactions can be a little wonderful. But life isn't a great big gay wedding. Miranda has an asshole of a boss who makes her life miserable. Charlotte is cracking under the pressure of cheerfully acting like some Betty Crocker ideal of total mommy completion. Carrie is frustrated by the everyday-ness of married life: after the apartment is decorated, then what? And, as mentioned, Samantha is courageously pursuing experimental vitamin treatments for menopause.

This is one of the first places where the reviews miss. Critics say the women are bling obsessed--false. There is no bling obsession, if bling means jewelry. Carrie says that Big could have gotten her a ring as an anniversary present, but that's as a counter to the television in the bedroom, not a statement about jewelry. Charlotte gets upset because her daughter apparently ruins a vintage designer skirt, but, again, this isn't about the clothes per se--it's about Charlotte's stressed out enfrazzlement with cupcakes, a screaming baby, and another kid insisting on attention at exactly that moment. Critics say that the women's careers have been sidelined: wrong again. Miranda doesn't quit her job to stay at home and be a mom--she quits because her boss is a jerk and she can find something better. Carrie goes to her old apartment to work on her writing,
has a book come out, and stresses over a bad review. Work matters--to them. And the whole trip to Abu Dhabi is connected to Samantha's job as a publicist.

The second site of fantastic investment is Abu Dhabi. It's not portrayed ironically because it is portrayed fantastically. It relies on Orientalist fantasies stretched into camp. The shift in setting works because it enacts the change in NYC as a figure for fantasy: NYC can't or doesn't function in the same way it used to (in the show, perhaps in the world). It's not invincible; it's not ideal. It doesn't welcome anyone from anywhere. It's harder to make it. But the Middle East, in this fantasy, has unfathomably rich sheiks; they build new sparkling cities; they attract money, fame, luster. Just like the women's old dreams of romance, sex, fashion, and success don't fit the realities of their lives as straight middle aged women, NY has lots it magical allure.

So, enter Lawrence of Arabia style fantasy, complete Orientalist escapism (including camels, a gorgeous man riding a jeep over sand dunes, World Cup finalists showing off their abs in the pool). Everything is completely over the top--and we know from the beginning that they don't have to pay for it (even their 13 hour plane trip is the fantastic air travel promised in the 60s and now the privilege of our global financial overlords). They are guests. They get 4 cars, 4 butlers (completely hot and also continuing the fantastic element of hot gay men). The hotel and their suite was so over the top that it made me think of
old Marx brothers films where the guys find themselves in luxurious environments that will ultimately become the setting for mad cap adventures.

Of course, the fantasy can't hold up under any scrutiny. We learn that one of the butlers is Indian and has to work months at a time to save money to go home to see his wife. I guess the reviewer who mentioned unexamined privilege was in
the bathroom during that scene.

I wonder if that same reviewer is over 25--I doubt it. She didn't get at all the scene between Miranda and Charlotte where they talk about how much it sucks to be a mom. Do reviewers not want to hear this? Do they want to think that it's
really fulfilling to spend hours on end with crying kids? In the scene, Miranda helps Charlotte to be more honest with herself, to let go of the fantasy that motherhood provides serenity and completeness. Before each hard admission, they take another drink. And they let go of the guilt and the pressure and the illusion. Really this is the ideal drinking game and the mommies in my small town multiplex loved it (Miranda was my hero throughout the whole thing). The reviewer slams the film for an implicit elitism when they raise their glasses to women without help. The moms of Geneva, NY--most of us who get help where we can find it, from friends, from neighbors, from relatives, from paid day care providers when we can afford it and when there are openings in the few available places--raised our imaginary cosmopolitans and toasted right back.

The fantasy also can't bear up under the tensions over the veil--choice? tradition? custom? oppression? In fact, grappling with restrictions around dress and sexuality becomes one of the central problems the 4 women encounter during their visit. While the other 3 seem to want to 'respect local customs,' Samantha is having none of it. She's not a good girl in the US and she isn't going to be one here. And, as usual, she pays a price for her sexuality: the scene where she is on the ground in shorts and a tank top, her purse broken and her condoms and other belongings strewn all about, sweaty with messy hair, messy make up, exhausted, hungry, menopausal, furious and surrounded by robed men (they looked like sheiks to me) yelling and condemning her seemed one moment before a public stoning. She was close to humiliation, but fighting it, not giving in.

In fact, Samantha's sexuality, her fierce commitment to her own enjoyment, ruptures the fantasy Abu Dhabi and opens their way back home: because she is charged with open displays of sexuality, she loses the business opportunity and
the women have to either pay for the hotel themselves or leave; at 22 k a night, they have to leave (of course they can't afford this!); and now instead of 4 nice cars, they have trouble getting even a couple of pretty crappy taxis. They
don't look particularly glamorous, either.

Some might say the movie tries to make Samantha stand in for all women, for the true woman behind the veil, and thus for a universal feminine against patriarchal sexual oppression. Such a reading makes a kind of liberal capitalist subject into the universal subject. It makes sense given the scene that follows: a group of women in abayas rescue Samantha et al. Of course they are all wearing cutting edge designer clothes under their abayas. And, like Samantha, they are reading Suzanne Sommer's book on dealing with menopause. Women across the world are united in their love of shopping, good clothes, and courageous battle over hormones. Unsurprisingly, the four heroines themselves have to put on the robes in order to escape from their predicament and get their first class seats for the flight home. The veil is a vehicle for escape as well as capture.

The fantasy of underneath it all women are basically the same, the liberal feminist message, also drives one of the most difficult scenes: the four heroines karaoke performance of "I am Woman." It's a nice parallel to Liza's "Single Ladies." On the one hand, the cringe factor is nearly as strong. On the other, the almost unbearable cheesiness and absence of irony actually lets a sincere aspiration shine through. The camera moves to the different faces of the women in the audience--heavy, older, global (although clearly all wealthy), to the heroines, to the belly dancers now doing some kind of weird muscle man dance, to the soccer players flaunting their 12 packs. It's too strained to be joyous or even emancipatory. But they persevere, nonetheless. They don't flee into the safety of irony but actually persist in a kind of stand, a kind of fierce insistence --"I am woman." The truth of the anthem is realized in its liberal capitalist form, but that doesn't make it less of a truth (ideology always has to include an element of truth).

The film wakes up from its Middle Eastern fantasy into the fantasy of liberal feminism (gay salvation remains: Charlotte is saved from her fear that her husband might have an affair with her buxom Irish nanny by the nanny's lesbianism). It's still a fantasy and maybe even the notion that this the biggest thing the women have to deal with is the biggest fantasy of all. But it rattles the supposition that having it all is possible, it addresses disappointments and pressures, and it guarantees that finding a straight man and settling into straight domesticity is not a sure path to happiness. Since that fantasy is the primary motor of the chick flick, disrupting it is pretty satisfying. Friendship, connection with other women, is a much better fantasy.

[Chimurenga.]

That video was fantastic.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Lindy West's review of it is pretty good (and has made the rounds on the Internet lately):


We've been thinking it for two long years. All of us. Gnawing our cheeks at night, clutching at sweaty sheets, our faces hollow and gray, our once-bright eyes dimmed by the pain of too many questions. Sometimes we cry out, en masse, to a faceless god and a cold, indifferent universe that holds its secrets close. What... rasps the death rattle of our collective sanity. What is the lubrication level of Samantha Jones's 52-year-old vagina? Has the change of life dulled its sparkle? Do its aged and withered depths finally chafe from the endless pounding, pounding, pounding—cruel phallic penance demanded by the emotionally barren sexual compulsive from which it hangs? If I do not receive an update on the deep, gray caverns of Jones, I shall surely die!

Please don't die. The answer is... fine. Samantha's vagina is doing fine. She rubs yams on it, okay? She takes 48 vagina vitamins a day. It accepts unlimited male penises with the greatest of ease. Now let us never speak of it again.

Sex and the City 2 makes Phyllis Schlafly look like Andrea Dworkin. Or that super-masculine version of Cynthia Nixon that Cynthia Nixon dates. Or, like, Ralph Nader (wait, bad example—Schlafly totally does look like Ralph Nader in a granny wig). SATC2 takes everything that I hold dear as a woman and as a human—working hard, contributing to society, not being an entitled **** like it's my job—and rapes it to death with a stiletto that costs more than my car. It is 146 minutes long, which means that I entered the theater in the bloom of youth and emerged with a family of field mice living in my long, white mustache. This is an entirely inappropriate length for what is essentially a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls. But I digress. Let us start with the "plot."

Carrie Bradshaw: At the end of the first SATC movie (2008)—after eleventy decades of chasing his emotionally abusive jowls through the streets of Manhattan—Carrie finally marries Mr. Big, the man of her shallow, self-obsessed dreams. It has now been two years since their nuptials. Carrie already hates it. She hates that he sits on the couch. She hates that he eats noodles out of a take-out box. She hates that he wants to spend quality time with her in their incredibly expensive and gaudy apartment. She hates that he bought her an enormous television. When Big suggests that they spend a couple of days a week in separate apartments (they own TWO apartments, because life is hard!), Carrie screeches, "Is this because I'm a ***** wife who nags you?" Congratulations. You have answered your own question.

Miranda Redhairlawyerface: Miranda is a lawyer who has red hair. She also has a child. As a working woman, Miranda is forced to miss every single one of her child's incessant science fairs (as though children know anything of science!). Also, her lawyer boss is a cartoon dick. Miranda quits her job, and everyone is much happier. This is because women should not work. It is terrible for the children.

Charlotte Goldsteinjewyjewsomethingsomethingblatt: Life for Charlotte is unbelievably difficult. As a wealthy stay-at-home mom with two children and a live-in, full-time nanny, she sometimes has to bake cupcakes! Also, one time her little child got finger paint on a piece of vintage cloth. Therefore, Charlotte cannot stop crying. "How do the women without help do it?" Charlotte (crying) asks Miranda. "I have no fucking idea," Miranda replies. Then they toast their disgusting glasses of pink syrup. To "them." To the "women without help." "If I wasn't rich, I'd definitely just kill myself right away with a knife!" says everyone in this movie without having to actually say it. Clink!

Samantha Jones: I told you we are never to speak of this.

In order to escape their various imaginary problems, our intrepid foursome traipses off to dark, exotic Abu Dhabi ("I've always been fascinated by the Middle East—desert moons, Scheherazade, magic carpets!"). When they arrive, Carrie, because she is a professional writer, announces, "Oh, Toto—I don't think we're in Kansas anymore!" Each woman is immediately assigned an extra from Disney's Aladdin to spoon-feed her warm cinnamon milk in their $22,000-per-night hotel suite. Things seem to be going great. But very quickly, the SATC brain trust notices that it's not all swarthy man-slaves and flying carpets in Abu Dhabi! In fact, Abu Dhabi is crawling with Muslim women—and not one of them is dressed like a super-liberated diamond-encrusted fucking clown!!! Oppression! OPPRESSION!!!

This will not stand. Samantha, being the prostitute sexual revolutionary that she is, rages against the machine by publicly grabbing the engorged penis of a man she dubs "Lawrence of My-Labia." When the locals complain (having repeatedly asked Samantha to cover her nipples and mons pubis in the way of local custom), Samantha removes most of her clothes in the middle of the spice bazaar, throws condoms in the faces of the angry and bewildered crowd, and screams, "I AM A WOMAN! I HAVE SEX!" Thus, traditional Middle Eastern sexual mores are upended and sexism is stoned to death in the town square.

At sexism's funeral (which takes place in a mysterious, incense-shrouded chamber of international sisterhood), the women of Abu Dhabi remove their black robes and veils to reveal—this is not a joke—the same hideous, disposable, criminally expensive shreds of cloth and feathers that hang from Carrie et al.'s emaciated goblin shoulders. Muslim women: Under those craaaaaaay-zy robes, they're just as vapid and obsessed with physical beauty and meaningless material concerns as us! Feminism! Fuck yeah!

If this is what modern womanhood means, then just fucking veil me and sew up all my holes. Good night.

[ComradeOm]

For what its worth, here's (http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/theticket/2010/0528/1224271261315.html) the Irish Times' take on it. Hint: Donald Clark was not impressed

Edit: Interestingly enough, Mrs Slocombe also gets a mention

[x359594]

I still prefer Jodi Dean's contrarian take to all the negative reviews. I haven't seen the movie, but she raises issues that the nay sayers don't address.

[ComradeOm]

Women across the world are united in their love of shopping, good clothes...It takes a certain kind of mind to see this as a positive thing. The women in SATC are obsessed with material wealth and, as Kermode puts it, "their bodies, husbands, sex". That's it. When they relate to the Arab women (and I confess that I haven't seen the film either) it is because women everywhere are, apparently, equally superficial. How is this a positive, or realistic, portrayal of women?

[ed miliband]

I had a female friend who hated feminism but decided she was a feminist upon watching Sex and the City because she realised "women have a lot to hate men for" :laugh:.

[x359594]

It takes a certain kind of mind to see this as a positive thing...When they relate to the Arab women (and I confess that I haven't seen the film either) it is because women everywhere are, apparently, equally superficial. How is this a positive, or realistic, portrayal of women?

Full context: "Some might say the movie tries to make Samantha stand in for all women, for the true woman behind the veil, and thus for a universal feminine against patriarchal sexual oppression. Such a reading makes a kind of liberal capitalist subject into the universal subject. It makes sense given the scene that follows: a group of women in abayas rescue Samantha et al. Of course they are all wearing cutting edge designer clothes under their abayas. And, like Samantha, they are reading Suzanne Sommer's book on dealing with menopause. Women across the world are united in their love of shopping, good clothes, and courageous battle over hormones. Unsurprisingly, the four heroines themselves have to put on the robes in order to escape from their predicament and get their first class seats for the flight home. The veil is a vehicle for escape as well as capture."

Different nuance.