Sex and the Cineplex

Thursday, 06.05.08

Photo by MJ Kim/Getty Images

You Are Not Alone

November 2005

Sheelah Kolhatkar chronicles the rise of the college sex column.

Not Tonight, Dear

6 February 2007

Sara Lipka, in an interview with author Joan Sewell, confronts the politically incorrect reality that most married women just aren't that into sex.

Sex and the City: The Movie continues to lead the box office this week, ahead of Indiana Jones and Iron Man.

Sex and the City's rivals are pumped-up, action-fueled celebrations of grandiose masculinity -- which would seem to cast Sex as the little romantic comedy that could. In reality, of course, Carrie Bradshaw is at least as much a blockbuster property as Indy and Iron Man, and like many other summer blockbusters the big-screen Sex and the City is more or less review-proof.

Which is good news for the filmmakers, since they've given critics plenty to hate: The film takes everything that was unsettling about the series -- gratuitous materialism, deliberate elitism, cafeteria feminism -- and re-serves it up in a grotesquely glittered confection, in which posh real-estate, $55,000-diamond-rings, and gaudy designer bags serve as unapologetic proxies for relationships, and even the main characters' children are reduced to accessories. This visual orgy comes with fewer of the redeeming elements -- the occasional recognition of hypocrisy, the chatty histrionics, the schmaltz -- that swaddled and padded and helped us forgive the irritating unrealities of the series. And since so much of Sex and the City's success was in its structure -- episodic therapy, 30 minutes a week, over six long, tumultuous years -- there's a sense in which the filmic format (here dragged out to two hours and twenty minutes) betray the show's stumbling essence.

And yet, and yet -- the delightfully confused, giddy-but-torn, no-but-yes feeling that washed over so many women as they took in the series is there in the film as well. Despite its annoyances, it's often funny and almost always fun, and its length is a strength as well as a weakness, since it provides more of what makes women return to Sex and the City: Not the happy endings, but all the messy ambiguity beforehand. The willingness to wallow in the mess, rather than racing ahead to happily-ever-after, explains why the Sex phenomenon has provided more fodder for the post-feminist culture wars than any television series or movie before or since -- and why it will be a long, long time before any other pop culture phenomenon usurps its role in those debates. So those wringing their hands over its legacy might as well take their cues from Carrie's fictional Vogue editor, Enid: "Spare me a week of faux-soul searching, and just say yes."

— Sara Dabney Tisdale