Where to begin? I just arrived home from watching Sex and the City 2 with my mother in our local cinema. It was a unique experience. This isn’t, of course, a review, but I will make direct reference to the film for the purposes of advancing certain thoughts and arguments in relation to the SATC juggernaut (spoilers may feature!). Interestingly, the film pre-empts the criticism it richly deserves by attempting to negate dissenting and specifically male voices through the rather clumsy generalisation that men of the West are innately afraid of strong women (I’m paraphrasing a Miranda/Samantha exchange here). They don’t elaborate on this provocation, but the implication is made that the freedom possessed by the ubiquitous foursome is spent virtuously towards whatever ends they wish, on the grounds that the exercising of freedom in any way is in itself a liberating act. Perhaps so! Don’t laugh.
To show this, Carrie receives a negative review from The New Yorker, maintaining that her recently published book on marriage (and its constituent vows) is guilty of incongruity, in which the angry scribe suggests she adopt a “vow of silence” until she better understands its complexities. How awful that in New York, in the civilised world, a journalist might seek to have a female colleague silenced! Of course, this neatly coincides with the girls’ trip to Abu Dhabi, where sexuality is cruelly repressed and women wear scary things over their faces. Carrie’s reaction to the niqāb: “It kinda creeps me out; it’s like they don’t want them to talk.” The question begged is, yes, “Who are THEY?”, but we don’t have time for that. Nor indeed do we have time to puzzle over whether the sartorial items chosen by the filmmakers to represent The West are comparatively empowering or whether indeed they serve any active vision of strong femininity. Presumably such questions are either far from the minds of all parties involved or, frighteningly, they are actively attempting to portray women in a balanced, intelligent and nuanced way and failing in ways that go beyond the grasp of my vocabulary and, perhaps, understanding.
But yes, I am a man. A man who has seen every episode of the television show (some up to five or six times; the one where Carrie temporarily loses Aidan’s dog is burned into my memory permanently) and the first big-screen outing not once, not twice, but thrice! I don’t exactly wear it as a badge of honour, but I know I’m far more familiar with the show than most men and am, as a result, maybe more qualified to comment critically on it than most male critics, who have, as best as I can tell, roundly and unanimously condemned this film (I haven’t seen a positive review from a female either, but the critical controversy we are interested in here does not extend to female reactions to the franchise). Donald Clarke’s review in The Ticket was particularly entertaining, though surprisingly condemnatory given that he seems to have occupied a supporting role in the film as Carrie’s best male friend: Stanford Blatch. He looks wonderful in his white suit in the film’s opening sequence, for what it’s worth.
What is the point though? Is it even worth criticising the film on ideological or moral grounds? It’s going to be vastly successful anyway, isn’t it? I’ve never had to queue to enter the screening-rooms in Arklow before, nor have I experienced there a genuinely full cinema. SATC2 knows its audience, it seems. It plays like a rousing, phantasmagorical montage: images of the exotic Middle East, erections raising the fabric of white jeans, the splendid, unearthly wealth of the hotel the girls inhabit during their holiday, children being recognisably adorable, Liza Minelli (who beat her husband, no?) performing that fucking Beyonce song, a middle-aged man bouncing over sand-dunes in a 4×4 in slow-motion – it is a visual feast of the derivative, the offensive and the regressive. There are moments that took my breath away with their sheer gall, but the audience around me, at least the more vocal sections, seemed to love every moment. Save, of course, the scenes featuring the Irish nanny employed by Charlotte, whose accent doesn’t actually need to be experienced in order to be believed, but is pretty awful nonetheless. Samantha gets the film’s raunchier sequences, of course, to uproarious laughter and gasping from the congregation: “He certainly had sex with her there! Oh my!”
Sitting in my seat, surrounded by an audience composed of about 95% women, I pined for the company of the strong, liberated woman to whom this film is supposed to speak. There were none there, it seems. Except for my dear old mum. I’ve watched many episodes of the show in female company before, and it can make for uncomfortable viewing. How critical ought I to be here? Is she really enjoying it or is that sarcastic laughter? Shall I just remain quiet? The last time I did it, I was more enthusiastic about watching it than my female companion, and it was great fun. We scoffed at the seemingly inadvertent misogyny of it all, the cognitive dissonance of the brand of economically submissive yet culturally “transgressive” feminism espoused by the writers, the inexplicable valorisation of high-fashion and the ultimate celebration of consumption and social conformity it essentially affirms. It is a dangerous series of sound and image, for the consumption of which I would advise members of both sexes to remain critical throughout.
Words: Oisín Murphy
