Sex and the City: Ned, November 21

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Bed-Stuy, New York

Dear Girls,

I can't believe we've reached the end. In lieu of collecting my thoughts and actually writing something about Sex and the City, I've decided to embrace the best alternative and do some acting. Here are six scenes—a scene per season—between Carrie and Big.

In transcribing the scenes back into scripts, it became clear to me how bare they were. Carrie is chatty and verbose with her girlfriends, and has a near-constant theoretical dialogue going in her head. In her interactions with Big, though, she stops, starts, censors herself.

She quiets her analytical impulse in order to be more mysterious for him, to communicate his way. Their talks are mostly glib and insinuating, the rhetorical equivalent of a wink.

These scenes between Big and Carrie circulate widely as meaningful and iconic representations of love found, lost, and rekindled. Yet the actual dialogue between the two is notably empty. Acting these scenes requires one to fill the spaces in between the yeahs, reallys, and, every now and then, a reference to St. Bart's, cigars on the porch, or "the wine business." But with what?

This cryptic communication style becomes a gag in Season 5, when Big reads Carrie's book about their relationship. He tracks Carrie down and speaks, as Dilara wrote, "the words every girl dreams of hearing": "I had no idea I hurt you so much." But Carrie doesn't want to talk about her book. Exasperated, she doesn't want to have to teach Big about subtext; the book wasn't for him, and she's over it. "Now please kiss me, or at least—lie on top of me?" she begs as he attempts to process. Finally, he wants to talk, but she just wants to get laid.

These "acting class" versions of the scenes are an attempt to defamiliarize interactions that, on paper, struck me as even more absurd than they seem on the show. The result became something between a sketch, a bad student film, and a mumblecore nightmare.

Big is played by Madeline Wise, who has never seen Sex and the City. Carrie by me. Shot by Amelia Golden.

Love,

Ned

ALSO IN THIS SERIES:

The Slow Burn, v. 4: An Introduction

Lakshmi, July 10

Ned, July 18

Andrea, July 24

Ari, August 16

Ned, August 22

Andrea, August 30

Ari, September 13

Ivan Ramos (Guest Post), October 1

Lakshmi, October 13

Audrey Wollen (Guest Post), October 22

Andrea, October 26

Dilara O'Neil (Guest Post), November 8

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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