Sex and the City: Ivan Ramos, October 1 (guest post)
Silver Spring, MD
Dear collective of first time viewers,
In this crowd, I should start with a confession: I watched Sex and the City in its original run. No, I must admit a little more: I didn't actually watch it as it aired. Instead, I tracked it down, at first on VHS (remember those?) when HBO put out a box set of the first season in 2000 and later on as full seasons arrived on DVD. Word of mouth traveled in those olden days much as it does in our modern era—I didn't have cable at the time, and I was still in high school, living in Mexico, but news of SATC circulated through gay circles, publications, and communities on LiveJournal (remember that?). The process of actually getting one's hands on any show past its air date, especially a cable show, however, was much slower before the age of streaming and shared passwords. It involved an element of risk: you invested in a box set and hoped the show inside would be good enough for it to pay off. SATC did.
This summer, my curiosity piqued by the internet's brief celebration of SATC's twentieth birthday, I returned to the series to see if it would hold up. I wasn't optimistic. SATC has languished in popular memory for years now as an exceptionally bad object. Even walking bad object Lena Dunham made sure to mark Girls' distance from SATC by mocking it in the very first episode. Hell, even Sarah Jessica Parker herself recently admitted that in hindsight the show now appears "tone-deaf" to our contemporary woke sensibilities. And so, stationed in a hotel room in Durham for a month, I revisited the show at night on my iPad, this time with the hindsight of having lived in New York myself, and waited for my much better-honed critical knives to come out, as I was sure they would. Instead I found myself laughing, surprised over and over by SATC's brutal sendup of heterosexuality (I still can't really think of another show from its time that is quite as ruthless and unforgiving of straight white men); its simultaneously complex and simplistic portrayal of female sexuality; and in its first two seasons, that most damning crime, the appearance of a New York where people still smoked, even indoors.
Let me first clear something up. For a queer of color viewer, SATC was always problematic. We may now more clearly recognize and readily call out its blatant racism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, and so on, but those qualities were there all along, and if one didn't cringe when the show first aired, the passage of time isn't really much of an excuse. It was just easier to put up with such things in those days, since there were no effective outlets to record one's immediate negative reactions and amass an army of others who agreed; any show of its era would fall apart under similar scrutiny. To point out a pleasurable text's foibles was to be labeled a killjoy much more quickly. Worse, in the case of SATC, it would have felt like an even higher-stakes risk than buying on a box set on faith: if we didn't show up for a series this weird, they might never make another one.
This summer, though, I remembered something that's now easy to forget, which is that before SATC was problematic, it was scandalous. The first three seasons of the show were dark, and the cultural backlash against it was fierce. Commentators fretted: were the sex lives of these characters realistic? Did women really act this way, so callously against men? The show was mocked, especially during its early years, in ways that were themselves extravagantly misogynistic and homophobic. Early internet trolls expressed doubts that a woman with Sarah Jessica Parker's "horse-face" could ever get so many men to sleep with her. Virulently transphobic parodies were commonplace: on Saturday Night Live, for instance, Christina Aguilera portrayed Samantha, repeating over and over again the punchline, "I'm a dude." Above all, SATC at first appeared bothersome and unrealistic to many viewers because it was—as Marge Simpson once put it, and as Ari discussed in a recent post—"that show about four women pretending to be gay men."These comments were not entirely off the mark. Although based on Candace Bushnell's titular columns and book, SATC was developed for television by Darren Starr, the creator of Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place, who was looking to move from his idealized Los Angeles to a fabulous, yet much darker, New York. In the eyes of the American public at the time, New York was in fact too dark to be fabulous at all. Starr made a first attempt to portray the city in the soapy Central Park West, which aired for only two seasons, from 1995 to 1996, on CBS. SATC marked a second attempt to depict his vision of a grimy yet seductive city that came alive with sexual possibility at night. As Jennifer Keishin Armstrong has recently recounted in her book Sex and the City and Us, one of the first questions Starr had to tackle after selling the show to HBO was whether New York could be made accessible to the rest of the country.
At first, it wasn't: the show was just too gay. Starr's New York was campy and dirty, a gay man's fantasy of women's sexual lives in a city less sanitized than his sunny Los Angeles. SATC developed its gay fan base quickly, and gave it a nod in a season 2 episode, when one of Samantha's former lovers appeared as a bingo-hosting drag queen—named and modeled on Samantha. Not surprisingly, Kim Cattrall's character was a particular target of mainstream derision. In 2001, as SATC's fourth season was debuting, MADtv produced an especially crass and vicious parody called Sluts and the City, which opens with a voice announcing, over the HBO logo, "It's not TV, it's porn." The skits that follow mostly consist of the women getting fucked in public: Carrie (played by a male comic, Michael McDonald) while in line at the bank, Charlotte after dropping her purse on the street, Samantha by a hot dog vendor's sausage. In a final scene, Samantha declares to her friends over brunch, "I was at the free clinic. Torn rectum. Again!" A waiter lets them know that lunch will be free because they're all "such smart women, in charge of their own lives" and offers to "bang" them all in the walk-in freezer. And even this skit reminds us that, "finally, there's a true to life show about women written by gay men."
It's hard to say whether this constant mockery directly caused the show to change, but between seasons 3 and 4, it started to transform. Michael Patrick King took over from Darren Starr as showrunner at the start of SATC's fourth season, shifting its focus from the misadventures of sexually active single women perpetually unsatisfied by the inadequacies of straight white men, to the story of four women who had to learn to tame their own desires and ambitions—to renounce, essentially, their former selves—in order to keep good men who could teach them how to love. Each narrative thread increasingly disciplined its characters. Carrie quit smoking. Cynthia Nixon's ambitious, bitter, and brilliant Miranda probably suffered most, learning time and again to accommodate Steve Brady's aw-shucks good boyfriend demeanor, which hid patterns of behavior we might now describe as gaslighting. Samantha went from self-possessed "slut" to increased humiliation. At the same time, her background was cleaned up. Season 2 Samantha boasts, "I fucked a guy once because his family had a pool. He was pretty much a nerd, but I'd go over there and get all cocoa-buttered up. His mom loved me. She was always serving me Kool-Aid and chips." "Kool-aid?" Carrie asks, puzzled. "Yeah, Kool-Aid," Samantha replies gleefully. "I was thirteen. And honey, you should have seen my tan." Late season 3 Samantha, on the other hand, chastises a thirteen-year-old planning her bat mitzvah for talking too much about sex, too young.
Public perception of SATC changed, too, because of an unforeseeable event that reframed America's relationship to New York in the wake of a different televisual spectacle: 9/11. In the midst of devastation, New York reinvented itself as America's city, its American values so hated by terrorists that they would fly two planes into its buildings as an affront. Such was the goodwill foisted upon New York City's new image that even rat-like Rudy Giuliani—now widely recognized, thanks to his affiliation with Donald Trump, as a reactionary buffoon—became "America's mayor." SATC never actually acknowledged 9/11 in its storylines, instead quietly removing the Twin Towers from the opening credits, and dedicating the season 4 finale "I Heart NY"—which aired early in 2002 but was shot before the towers fell—to the city. But its viewership increased significantly now that New York had become an all-American town. It was no longer gay men and jaded women who loved the show, but instead hopeful straight white women who believed their own Mr. Big could be reformed. I don't have the numbers to prove this, but culturally speaking, this was the moment that those newer fans became the fans. It was then that People started dedicating special issues to the city and bus tours full of single straight white women seeking out Magnolia Bakery appeared in the media to exemplify the show's dedicated fan base, culminating in the publication of a bestselling relationship advice book penned by two of the show's writers based on an infamous line in a season 6 episode: "He's just not that into you." SATC had gone from being a show about the projections of gay men onto heterosexual women to one about the aspirational desires of upper-middle class white women and those aspiring, in turn, to become a part of that demographic.This isn't just hindsight speaking; it was clear during the series' original run. As I caught up in real time after moving to the States in 2002 and finding a friend with an HBO subscription, I became increasingly dissatisfied with the show's direction. Characters moved further away from their original conceptions in order to open themselves to love, family, and stability, and SATC became increasingly praised for its realism, its ability to capture the dilemmas of (upper-middle class straight white) women who could also hope for love, family, and stability, without the messiness of reality. It was that version of the show that Emily Nussbaum defended in a lauded New Yorker essay so formidable that it even makes me fond of those later, increasingly flawed seasons. Even Darren Starr, though, later confirmed that the finale had betrayed his intentions, and that if the show had remained true to its spirit, Carrie would have ended up alone and happy. But by this point, SATC could not betray America's desires.
For all its attempts to play it safe, by the end of its run in 2004, SATC had spent all of its post-9/11 goodwill, and early haters of the bus tours started blaming the end of New York's perpetually-fantasized grimier past on the show's withering fantasia. When the final episode aired, a growing chorus of critics had already declared SATC a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad object for two different sets of reasons—scandalous, problematic—that sometimes blurred into one. Like any object that has to bear such representational burdens, it was blamed for any number of ideological and cultural infractions, the Disneyfication of New York perhaps chief among them. Never mind that The Sopranos, that other television behemoth on the same network, had produced (and perhaps even predated) a similar industry of bus tours and fan pilgrimages to real shooting locations; it was SATC that became the embodiment of Giuliani's sanitized New York. It remains so to this day: on a recent trip to the city, I overheard a group groan with disgust when they were told Magnolia Bakery, SATC's cupcake mecca, was the nearest place to procure dessert. (Although I also have to admit that, even as someone who completely rejects middle-class fetishized remembrances of any city's "authentic" past, I wouldn't dream of going there either—wouldn't have gone even when my love of cupcakes was at its peak.)
I don't know why, or if, I feel particularly moved to defend SATC from its armies of detractors ready to once again pounce on the show's inadequacies. I'm not even sure that I would recommend it to first-time viewers who may not be able to disengage from the crimes it stands accused of. Perhaps it's my penchant to stand in front of bad objects when derision becomes doctrine. If the show's critics were pointing out the weaknesses in its writing, its sometimes lackluster direction, and its shaky formal elements, I would be more inclined to agree. But the things that make it such a bad object continue to say more about us than they do about SATC. The series itself was an imperfect, sexy, fucked up, hilarious, ridiculous, and unrealistic show that gave us the uneasy pleasure of scoffing, and paid for it by becoming a repository of our projections. Meanwhile, New York has only become more expensive and uninhabitable; upper-class white womanhood increasingly villainous; the show's representational faults more recognizably fucked up; and its sexual and "feminist" politics more hopelessly out of touch. SATC cuts too close: it fulfills all our expectations and their inevitable disappointments, and makes them indistinguishable from each other. This, then, is the challenge for anyone who wants to show us yet again how and why SATC is such a bad object: however basic or incisive your reasons for hating, deriding, or mocking it, someone has gotten there first.
Retrospectively,
Ivan
The Slow Burn, v. 4: An Introduction
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