Sex and the City: Andrea, October 26
Ocean Hill, Brooklyn
Ladies,
I don't know how to say this, but I think... I like this show?
I know. I know.
About a week ago, to my horror, I realized that in order to have finished the entire series by this writing, I would need to watch over fifty episodes. My girlfriend was out of town. I committed.
And then, bit by bit, the show became bearable. It became agreeable. I started caring, despite myself, about the characters. At some point I found myself looking forward to it: the low hum of it, the familiar rhythms, like a deep cushion I could sink into at the end of the day.
It turns out that Sex and the City rewards monogamy. When I first started watching this show, I regarded with scorn what I knew to be the inevitable gravity that coupledom would exert on our leading ladies. On a show whose premise was promiscuity, settling down would mean selling out. But now, living through it—Charlotte has had one marriage and is moving towards another, Miranda has a kid, Carrie has had two great loves, even Samantha got exclusive with that rich prick for a minute there—I fill with gratitude. The truth is, the breezy manthropological shtick gets very old very fast, and for two seasons the only week-to-week continuity to be found is in Mr. Big, who resists commitment as a cat its Halloween costume. But long-term monogamy is a narrative boon: it allows the characters to flesh themselves out by doing other things.
I started multitasking while watching: doing research, shopping for clothes, dicking around on Twitter. I was raised to have contempt for people who did this: put shows on in the background, used television as white noise. I think this was a class thing, adumbrating a hierarchy of attention. Yet here I am, right now as I type these words, literally watching it out of the corner of my eye. Carrie just rushed from her apartment to the New York Stock Exchange to some jazzy minor-key bop. The joke was that traffic was so bad that she had to take the subway. Gooseflesh. (In the time it's taken for me to write this down, the girls have gotten together for brunch in the meatpacking district. Samantha just said, "When I moved to this neighborhood, the only thing that cost $20 was a hand job from a tranny.")
Earlier today, I opened the HBO Go app on my phone, placed my phone in my back pocket, and listened to two episodes of Sex and the City on my headphones while cleaning the floor in my apartment—rug and hardwood. I am here to tell you that Sex and the City, a mediocre television show, is an excellent radio program. The plots are telegraphed, the dialogue is rapid-fire; Carrie's narration doubles the action, so you never miss a beat. In the season five episode "The Big Journey," Carrie travels by transcontinental railroad to San Francisco to give a reading of her new book, Sex and the City. (As a sidebar: Molly Shannon and Amy Sedaris turn in exquisite performances as Carrie's publishers; Sedaris's eye-winking tic is so brilliant and all Sedaris, given that Carrie never mentions it and this is exactly the kind of show where characters only have weird facial tics if they are going to be remarked upon in voiceover.) The train ride is dismal, and Carrie, who has been excited to get laid with Mr. Big (now running a vineyard in Napa), doesn't even bother to phone him. To make things worse, at her reading, Carrie finds that she's opening for a dog who is very famous on the internet. Here's what happens next, as I heard through my earbuds while mopping my bathroom:
CARRIE
So, if there are no other questions about my book...
(Beat.)
Uh, yes? I see a hand, but I can't see the man. Could you shift, sorry...BIG
Yes, I have a question. Um, this Mr. Big character, does he have a real name?CARRIE
Yes, but I can't reveal it. I have to protect his privacy.
As pure sound, this scene was delightful. It's already an easy guess by this point in the episode that Mr. Big will show up, unannounced, at Carrie's reading, so the moment Carrie mentioned a manless hand, I knew what was up. When I rewatched this scene to transcribe the above dialogue, I saw—for the first time—that before he speaks, Mr. Big does become visible to Carrie; he even stands up to ask the question. In my ear, this had been twice as charming: I assumed that Carrie only discovered Mr. Big when I did, at the moment of his line, her eyes darting over to the source of the voice. And all of this transpired without my having to so much as glance at Chris Noth, about whose face I have, as you know, several opinions.
It's not that Sex and the City isn't pretty to look at; on the contrary, it's gorgeous, like the fall line sprung to life, with the thinnest of intradiegetic justifications. How, exactly, are we to suppose that these successful career women find the time to hunt down and purchase the seven or eight unique ensembles that appear in each episode? We aren't: we merely accept it, like Monica and Rachel's impossibly large apartment, or sound in space. The visuals and the dialogue run in parallel, never intersecting; it's like you synched up a wordless video doc of Fashion Week with an unusually spicy episode of A Prairie Home Companion.
"You never look at me anymore," I can imagine Sex and the City telling me, pouting over dinner at a Chinese restaurant where we are regulars, not because the food is fantastic, but because the location is convenient and, well, it's our Chinese place. "Sure I do," I might reply, checking Twitter. "You look at me, but you don't see me," she says. "Your food is getting cold," I say.
With my girlfriend out of town, the show began to provide me with that comforting feeling of someone else's being more or less around—chatter in another room, the warmth of a vague twoness. Had my girlfriend been home, we probably would have been watching TV together anyway, bouncing intimacy off the screen like two kids with a racquetball and time to kill. God forbid we be expected to make conversation with each other; that's what friends are for. A true partner is someone you never have to talk to, or even make eye contact with. Pure company.
By its later seasons, Sex and the City has become a show primarily about what we could call postintimacy: what remains, or would, in the wake of a critical event that should have ended things, but somehow, didn't. Postintimacy is when a character says something like, "I still love you, but that's not the point"—and it isn't. Postintimacy is Steve coming, unasked, to Miranda's mother's funeral; it is Charlotte and Trey, who must separate before the latter can get it up. Taken on its own, it is neither good nor bad. Big is best at his most postintimate. "He's in my life," Carrie tells Aidan, even if she cannot say how or why.
We do not have to say that all intimacy is postintimacy in order to say that all intimacy includes postintimacy, even when things are going well. Commitment is a vow that relationality will outlive intimacy. This is why every wedding, as Charlotte learns the hard way, is also a breakup.
Nonbeing clings to every relationship, like a burr in your four-thousand-dollar Prada wool coat. Postintimacy is the bed death at the heart of all sex. "Not having sex was the only thing holding us together," says Miranda after she sleeps with Steve, with whom she is raising a child. The postintimate can be safer than intimacy, more secure. Sometimes all you want is to be the furniture in someone's life, hanging around like the chair Aidan made for Carrie that she can't bring herself to throw out.
This could be a sober, but not unsentimental, definition of love: a thing that's best when you leave it on in the background, like a television show. As I sailed off into the final episodes of season six, I couldn't help but wonder: Do any of us really want to be watched all the time?Love,
Andrea
The Slow Burn, v. 4: An Introduction
Ivan Ramos (Guest Post), October 1
Audrey Wollen (Guest Post), October 22
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The Slow Burn, volume 4, will run in this space all summer. Previous summers can still be found on Post45:
2015: A Summer of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels - Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards
2016: Summer of Knausgaard - Diana Hamilton, Dan Sinykin, Cecily Swanson, and Omari Weekes
2017: Welcome (back) to Twin Peaks - Michaela Bronstein, Len Gutkin, and Benjamin Parker