Sex and the City: Ari, January 21

Crown Heights, Brooklyn

Dear Andrea, Lakshmi, and Ned,

We knew right away. None of us worked in film or television, but a draft of the script for the pilot of Girls found its way into our inboxes anyway in early 2011, a year before the show premiered on HBO. Someone sent it to Leon, my complicated best friend and on-and-off roommate since college, who sent it to me with a concession ("Pretty funny, actually") and a caveat ("Don't forward, I'm probably breaking some rules by forwarding to you"). We exchanged a few more messages in a spirit of grudging appreciation; I confirmed on Wikipedia that Lena Dunham was a full year younger than us. At the end of our email chain, I forwarded the script, wordlessly, to our roommate Allison.

We had been characters in search of an author, and then, suddenly, we had one, whether we liked it or not. People came over to our apartment in Brooklyn that night and we watched Dunham's earlier film Tiny Furniture, to see what we were in for. I remember how mad I was, and how impressed. I remember feeling grimly resigned to the loss of the selves we had been before our cohort had inspired anyone to the task of representation, before the cloistered delirium of Dunham's haute art kid milieu, through some trick of the light, had become mistakable for our own.

Sex and the City had been a fantasy about wealthy white women and urban space tailored to the production of their desires. Girls, the show's millennial descendant, presented itself as a self-conscious response to the persistence of that fantasy several years into a recession that had made it strange. As Iván noted, the newer show took a potshot at the older one in its very first episode. Jessa, a glamorous grifter, sees an SATC poster on the wall of her manically dorky cousin Shoshanna's apartment and professes to know nothing about the show. "You're definitely like a Carrie, with like some Samantha aspects? And Charlotte hair. It's like a really good combination," Shoshanna responds in a single breath. "I think I'm definitely a Carrie at heart, but like sometimes...Samantha kind of comes out. And then I mean when I'm at school I definitely try to put on my Miranda hat."

In literary terms, Sex and the City, like the tales of passion and fortune that once drove Emma Bovary insane, was a romance. Girls, self-reflexively featuring characters like Shoshanna, a dissociated Emma B in Uggs, was a novel. At least, that's what I'd thought.


Television, with its episodic structure, has lent itself particularly well to capturing the texture of everyday life in the gig economy. As Annie McClanahan recently wrote in an essay on this site, shows from High Maintenance to Insecure to Vanderpump Rules have focused on characters working multiple contingent jobs, for low pay, often adjacent to the tech industry: they are office temps at startups, baristas in gentrified neighborhoods, and Task Rabbits for other Task Rabbits. This shift, McClanahan argues, has had consequences not just for TV's content, but also for its form. Traditionally, sitcoms have been characterized by "repetitive continuity," a "correlative of endless, unchanging, but also stable waged or salaried work"; in the typical drama, meanwhile, white-collar professionals develop as characters over the course of a series-long plot arc. But a broad swath of contemporary television doesn't fit neatly into either of these categories. Instead, the "episodic, discontinuous, and occasionally surrealist structures" of series like Broad City or Atlanta feel more like "the episodic, fragmented, and profoundly insecure experience" of contingent work itself. McClanahan describes them as picaresques, a term originally applied to novels in which the central characteroften a ne'er-do-well, scammer, or prostituteis thrown from situation to situation rather than developing over time like a respectable protagonist. Romances in which the romance is gone.

Girls felt hyperreal when it came on the air in 2012 in part because it was among the first programs in this genre to make it to prime time. Its novelty wore off after a few seasons, as other shows emerged with sharper, darker perspectives on the lives of weed delivery guys and personal assistants. But the series did have something indelible to say about one gig in particular: the work of internet-style confessional writing. Dunham's alter ego Hannah Horvath wants to be a writer, and what that paradigmatically looks like for someone of her age, gender, and social class when we meet her is that she will farm content in the service of what Jia Tolentino has called the "personal essay boom": an onslaught of click-driven, poorly-compensated, much-maligned, and often comically harrowing first-person tales about incest or unsettlingly lost tampons that for several years dominated websites from Salon to xoJane, and made their way onto the page in tell-alls by media-world diarists like Sloane Crosley and Cat Marnell.Hannah has a kind of superpower that suits her to this brand of work: a combination of "perspective," in the sense of literary voice, to spareshe is highly attuned to her own perceptions and can report on them with cleverness and candorand no perspective at all, in the sense of a broader vision of the world and her place in it. Hannah is ridiculous, and familiar, because she has no sense of scale: all slights, all outrages, are created equal. Nor can she differentiate between work and leisure. Dunham's character is best known for her unearned grandiosity: in the show's pilot episode, she solemnly informs her parents that she may be "the writer of my generationor at least a writer, of a generation," then presents them with a printout of her memoir-in-progress, which appears to be about twelve pages long. But Hannah is also a lowkey workaholic who is never off the clock. To the annoyance of her friends and lovers, she cannot stop taking notes, even while fucking or fighting or trying cocaine (which she does in order to review it for a Vice-style web magazine). Every experience is a standing reserve of content, though the act of actually lying down with her laptop to write tends to lead to disaster. In one unforgettable sequence, Hannah tries to finish her book, spirals into obsessive-compulsive madness, shoves a Q-tip down her ear canal, and ends up in the ER.

Throughout the second half of my twenties, when I imagined myself as a writer I could not conceive of speaking with a voice that did not already belong to her.


What is the work of a sex columnist? Here, in the first episode of Sex and the City, in the first conversation between Big and Carrieunforgettably reinterpreted by Ned and friend-of-the-Slow-Burn Madeline Wiseis a clue that the answer's complicated:

BIG: So what have you been doing lately?

CARRIE: You mean, besides going out every night?

BIG: Yeah, I mean, what do you do for work?

CARRIE: Well, this is my work. I'm kind of a sexual anthropologist.

BIG: You mean, like a hooker?

CARRIE: No. Um, I write a column called Sex and the City. Right now, I'm researching women who have sex like men? You knowthey have sex, and afterward, they feel nothing.

There is something vertigo-inducing about the whole thing. Maybe it's a kind of redundancy. If the distinction between work and leisure is already attenuated for writers (and others) in an economy bent on the total monetization of experience, it becomes blurrier still when writing is specifically tied to datinga practice that, since its emergence in the early twentieth century, has positioned "women who have sex like men" as targets of what Moira Weigel calls "prostitution anxiety," the suspicion that only a fine line separates the trade of sex for money from the more nebulous systems of exchange around which heterosexual dating has been defined.1 What is there to say, then, about Carrie's jobgoing out every night, sorting the specimens of social life she encounters, and reflecting on her own relationships with thembesides the fact that, for a character best known as an icon of consumption, she seems to be working overtime? What could be drawn from thinking about Carrie Bradshaw as a worker, other than concern that the discourse around emotional labor has spun out of control?

My hunch is that reading Sex and the City as a funny kind of workplace comedy can help us understand a basic weirdness of the show, which we've returned to many times on this blog: the way it's structured by a tension between picaresque and marriage plot, with the women at its center making up a kind of ongoing focus group on the subject. Charlotte wants to be always-already married and pregnant (and so the gods of SATC grant her divorce and infertility). Samantha is dead-set against any relationship to relationships besides the episodic (which is why aging causes her such particular grief: its relentless temporal axis causes her life to change, when all she wants is for it to remain the same). And Carrie and Miranda, who spend most of the series navigating a less stable terrain of desire, most directly experience what Lakshmi describes as the show's central concern with the "anxiety of freedom" for the heterosexual women of their time: they like the way they areperennially restlessbut don't want to be that way forever. For Miranda, the conflicting demands of present and future constitute an ass pain, a time suck. The suspense isn't killing her any time soon, but it threatens to eventually bore her to death. For Carrie, however, the traits and feelings called up by the shifting tides of her romantic life and the lives of her friendsindecision, curiosity, stubbornness, giddiness, longing, indignationconstitute captivating material. Carrie is a narratorfor a living.As Sex and the City viewers, we don't know how Carrie became a sex columnist. We don't know whether she'd do it for free if she wasn't on payroll at the fictitious New York Star (though we do know that if she were around today, she'd likely be the kind of online influencer who creates reams of free content hoping to cash in further down the road). We don't know what the "real" financial stakes would be for her if she stopped. But within the laws of the SATC universe, Carrie's income comes from her column, and this means she has to keep writing whether she likes it or notand, by extension, that she has to keep dating as well. In order for the show to go on, she has to keep looking for love; she also needs it to keep slipping through her fingers.

At the start of the Season 5 episode "Plus One is the Loneliest Number," Carrie, dressed in spring linens, descends a spiral staircase, her gaze alighting upon elegant floral arrangements, as her event plannerlifted directly from Charlotte's first wedding assures her that everything, the flowers and the tablecloths and the food, will be "W-H-I-T-E, white." Over the sounds of a waltz, she explains in a voiceover, "There is one day even the most cynical New York woman dreams of all her life. She imagines what she'll wear, the photographers, the toasts. Everybody celebrating the fact that she finally found"

dramatic pause

"a publisher."

"It's her book release party."

If Sex and the City were more straightforward in its feminist signalingand more pat and self-satisfiedthe show would have ended right there, with Carrie happily marrying her career. Instead, SATC keeps going for another season-and-a-half. Carrie's book party, like Charlotte's white weddings, turns out to be a blip of concentrated feeling in a longer, less shapely storyin part because Carrie, like a runaway bride, gets cold feet about playing the role of romantic lead her own book casts her in. As a weekly columnist, Carrie can bounce from situation to situation, illuminating each while committing to none; this is the classic position, as McClanahan notes, of the picara, the picaresque heroine who, in classic works like Moll Flanders, often makes her way through the world as a sex worker. Put together, however, Carrie's columns add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Or so says the character Andrea once described as "an old meal, a slice of tilapia, a lonely, tremendous badger." Carrie and Mr. Big are broken up and out of touch when Carrie's book comes out. He has moved to Napa, under cover of "the wine business." Carrie, obviously hoping for a rendezvous, schedules a reading in northern California. Big shows up. The book has affected him deeply. Yes, he says, he has read her columns before, gradually, as they came out. But now, confronted with them in aggregate, he understands for the first time "that I hurt you so much." These are, Dilara writes, "the words every girl dreams of hearing"; they indicate that he has listened. Confronted with the consummation of this fantasy, Carrie stares at Big in alarm. "Oh, c'mon!" she says brightly, like a child who has just discovered it's possible to lie to yourself. "It's fiction!"

They go to bed together. Big continues to seek exoneration for the crimes laid out in Carrie's book. She wants to drop it, and then, once again, wants to drop him. Can't be done, says Big. "You're going to need material for the sequel."

It is a come-on, a threat, and Big's closest reading yet; it explains why Carrie can't really leave her book, or Big himself, at the altar. Carrie's friends can remain single or marry, jet to Rio or reproduce; her life alone must lend itself to the production of "a sequel." One wonders whether being a professional narrator has also led Carrie Bradshawlike Hannah Horvath later onto become a steadfastly unreliable one, unable to differentiate between her desires and the simple demand to keep her story in motion at all costs. A story that, at the nexus of picaresque and marriage plot, offers only, in the end, repetition. Unable to resolve this tension, television would default increasingly, in the years that followed, to picaresque.


I came into this project trying to understand what seemed to be a bafflingly large gap between Sex and the City's moment and the one we occupy today. How did we get from there to here? I think I understand it a little better now.

SATC is set in an unapologetic gilded age New York in which beautiful, talented women organize their lives around sucking the dicks of grotesque finance guys in terrible suits. Whether we ultimately read it as an advertisement, a satire, or an object lesson in the inseparability of the two, the romantic side of capitalist realism exists today only in zombie form: house-flipping shows, Melania Trump's Christmas cards, Fyre Festival. But Carrie, our Virgil of Hell's Kitchen, prefigured a set of narrative problems that would only intensify in the years that followed the end of the show. Tolentino describes the personal essay boom as a bubble, one that inflated around the time of the 2008 recession, as reporting budgets were slashed and a generation of writers who learned their trade on LiveJournal became old enough to hire on the cheap. If stripped of her rent-controlled apartment and her dizzy-dame optimism, Carrie comes to look at lot like her stubbornly infantile goddaughter Hannah Horvath: bumbling through psychic economies on pocket money, a speculative bubble in the shape of a girl.

The personal essay bubble burst around the time of the 2016 elections, according to Tolentino's periodization, as readers and writers lost patience with the genre's narrow aperture. On the face of it, I think she is correctnot just about the discrete patterns of online publishing, but in terms of the larger cultural shifts they track. It's certainly true that today, popular consensus even among hardcore SATC fans holds that Carrie, once an object of aspiration, is in fact "literally the worst." Lena Dunhama serious talent whose inherited riches, as in a fable, first blessed and then cursed herhas effectively cancelled herself. The widely circulated term "white feminism" itself might be said to index a political blockage in distinctly narrative form. It describes a pathology in which the subject's sense of protagonicityher belief that she is the "main character" in her "own story"has become bloated to the point that she mistakes this story for the story.

By the same token, though, I wonder if this narratorial mode has simply gone on sale. In her book Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, Merve Emre writes that the elite women's clubs that flourished in the early twentieth-century United States were devoted in part to the proposition, developed by writers like Henry James, that to become cultivated, American women had to learn to speak, think, and act more like literary heroines.2 Today, in New York and an expanding list of other cities, women with sufficiently cultured answers to a membership application and a couple hundred dollars a month to spare can congregate at the Wing, an all-girl coworking-space-cum-social-club founded by Dunham's best frenemy Audrey Gelman, which has attempted to revive the spirit of the women's clubs of old. (Its first location opened in 2016 in a stretch of Manhattan's Flatiron district once so replete with these clubs that it was known as "Ladies' Mile.") The Wing marks the clearest indication that any distinction between the worlds of Sex and the City and Girlsbetween leisure and precarity, pre- and post-recession New York, Charlotte and Woke Charlottehas collapsed, for women who can afford it, into a single lifestyle brand. At its Flatiron location, in a color-coded library of women's writing, books by Emma Goldman and Ayn Rand, with their matching red spines, sit side by side. At long tables between the library and the juice bar, marketing consultants rub laptop cords with aspiring writers.

I know these last details because I tried to infiltrate the Wing once, around the time the club first opened, at an open house shortly after Donald Trump was elected president. I hovered on the edges of a sort of consciousness-raising group. The women gathered appeared to be very young, very privileged, and not very smart, and I assume that they made me heartsick in part because I hardly had a better idea than they did about what the fuck we were supposed to do now. In one corner, a station had been set up where you could compose a love letter to Hillary Clinton. Everything was pink and extremely clean. It seemed important at the time to say something about how awful it all was. I had a fantasy of writing a juicy tell-all, or a serious ethnography: what kind of narratives would issue from these laptops? What fantasies about the cushier side of the gig economy were being spun, and who were their heroines?Then at some point I realized I didn't really care about the Wing, even about taking it down. That what I actually cared about was the desire for a different kind of feminist work space: a cooperative affordable for freelancers struggling to make ends meet; a place where I could hang out with all of you, and maybe get some writing done; a collective worthy of New York. Last summer, while running for governor, Cynthia Nixon held a campaign event at the Wing. I felt a little sad and a little smug. I didn't go.

love always,

ari

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

Ned, November 21

Lauren Jackson (Guest Post), November 28

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

References

  1. Moira Weigel. Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016), 96.[]
  2. Merve Emre. Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), Ch. 2.[]