Sex and the City: the Whole Big Thing
It was a usual Sunday evening at the Ollie Martini Lounge, Gretchen, and I was sitting on our futon trying to figure out what to watch. This is typical in our household, with Game of Thrones season 8 not out until next year, we’ve been itching for something to help feel out our Spring/Summer Sunday evening lineup. Westworld has been our main hook up but due to the show being their season 2, it wasn’t too long before we were caught up to the current episodes. Our fling with the assassin turned actor Barry had ended a couple of weeks previous. While John Oliver was fun and informative, this week had already been depressing enough with my patron saint of self-love, Kanye West, losing his damn mind saying “slavery was a choice”. After searching desperately for our next hot thing to watch, I see something that catches my attention. Something I’ve had my eye on for awhile. I turned to Gretchen and asked:
“How about Sex and the City?”
Gretchen’s eyes light up with a bewilderment that exclusively used for when I ask questions that she thinks are me testing her. Was I testing her? No. She had previously mentioned that she really loved the show and I was interested in watching it myself. The show has been a whole culture cornerstone for women in my top demographic of friends, white middle-class women. Sex talk, girl talk, fashionable shoes and exploring the question about whether or not a 30-something woman living in New York City could really “have it all?” was on just a click away. Little did I know what I was about to embark on.
Before we start, I think it is best to explain my relationship with this series. I knew of the series when it was on the air, I had seen some episodes (mostly in later seasons) here and there mostly because I know it was about sex and I was well… a boy going through puberty. You mention something may have boobs in it and you’ve got my attention. Plus I have an open-secret love of just cheesy Rom-Coms. From what I could remember, I enjoyed the show beyond the boobs but never really cared enough try and watch the whole series. Flash forward hand full of years, when I was 19 and got pneumonia. Laying on my mother’s couch too sick to get up to find a DVD in my mother’s huge DVD collection, I watched the one DVD in the DVD player, season 7 of Sex and the City or better known as “Sex and the City the Movie”. I watched it a bunch of times during that bedridden period. I remember enjoying it a lot, it felt like watching an entire season of the show with a much bigger budget and fan service in 2 hr and 30 mins. It was nice to see how the story ended… at the time.
Now in back to 2018, we put on the first episode and begin watching. Little did we know a week and a half later we would be six seasons and two movies in that would very publicly finish. I laughed, I screamed, I got mad and I cried during watching the misadventures of the inquisitive Carrie, the logical Miranda, the romantic Charlotte and the sexually unapologetic Samantha. These four had become my girls… or “women” rather. Each season, I got to watch the Fab 4 grow and learn more about life, love and most importantly themselves. Every episode felt like we were investigating the Human Love Condition, I would get excited every time I watch Carrie type out the question of the episode because I knew shit was about to get real. I remember talking to Gretchen about how I liked that each episode set up a question that needed to be answered. And that was when it hit me, Sex and the City is CSI through a Rom-com lense. With maybe a little less semen but more way more female orgasms.
Now here comes the question of how to do this review. I decided that I’m going to break this down into 4 parts. Part 1 I’ll talk about each lady individually, I gonna talk about I interpreted their characters, I’ll touch on some of their important partners and why I feel like they worked or didn’t work out. In part 2 I’ll talk about the things that I really liked about what I like and what I didn’t like about the show (seasons 1- 6). In Part 3 I’ll talk about the movies and Lord knows I might need to do a whole review on for Sex and the City 2 or as I like to call it, My Fabulous Dark Abu Dhabi Hot Mess Fantasy. Lastly, Part 4 I will answer the age-old question about which one of the Fab 4 do I see myself as.
So without further ado, let’s get a good glass of wine, some fuzzy socks and dig in.
Carrie Bradshaw is a hot mess. Carrie is hot mess but she is our hot mess. Hot mess with a shoe collection that rivals that of “Blackish” Dre Johnson’s sneaker collection. We all have that friend, hell, I’ve been that friend, that can’t just seem to get it together. Watching Carrie go from a struggling writer to a bonafide novelist was really great. I love the character and Sarah Jessica Parker does a beyond fantastic job of portraying her. I don’t think anyone could do what she did with the character. Carrie is the POV character for the whole series, everything that we experience in this show has to go through her first. She is our gatekeeper. These are her stories. I only mention this because it is something that we need to remember when we talk about the show. It is the reason why all the other characters are such archetypes. It is important to remember when viewing her love interests that Carrie is not a reliable narrator, especially when it comes to Mr. “I can’t get out of the car” Big. This is why Mr. Big is shown at such extremes compared to the other men on the show. When Carrie is happy with Big, he is the most charming, fun person to be around. As opposed to when Carrie is fed up then Big he is the biggest idiot. No other person Carrie has dated is shown to extreme throughout the all of the series. Watching her go from chasing after Mr. Big to well… Mrs. Big was both frustrating and fun. I’m a real sucker for this soulmate, rom-com shit. Leave me alone on a Friday night and chances are good that I’m gonna be watching some C-list rom-com on Netflix (looking at you ‘Boy Bye’). But all of this it shows you what Carrie really wants, she wants the BIG adventure. Every relationship was an adventure to Carrie but none of them quite the adventure that Big was. It was always interesting watching Carrie trainwreck through these relationships with other men mostly because I knew that the only person for was Mr. Big. The show makes it very clear that Big is endgame from the get-go. The best example of this is her relationship with Aiden. Aiden is the anti-Big. He commits, tells dad jokes, likes to camp and has a dog. You can tell from the moment that he makes her quit smoking after taking her out on one date that this relationship isn’t going to work. Carrie the author knows this even if she doesn’t want to admit it. Sure, Aiden would never put her through the same stuff as Big, but Big would never try to make Carrie change like her other lovers did. Big for all his many, many, many flaws always accepted Carrie for Carrie. Aiden to Carrie was never an adventure, he was a relationship. And you can tell because she writes about him the least out of all her other relationships. It was frustrating watching Carrie give the men she was dating all the cards getting “Carried Away” on the drug known as love and then complaining about not knowing how to play the game over and over again. Carrie’s all or nothing mindset is one hell of an adventure to tag with. In season four, Carrie tells a photographer that she was so poor when she first moved to New York that she would purchase Vogue instead of dinner. That’s Carrie for you. You can tell that when she moved to the City with probably no real plan, clutching on her dreams of being a famous writer like an expensive clutch purse while walking down a bad down the street in a bad neighborhood. Another thing I did love was how she always tried to do the right thing. For example taking her ex’s soon-to-be-ex-wife who she was having an affair with to hospital after Natasha fell down the stairs after discovering Carrie in her apartment. That’s who Carrie is. She mess up but at the end of the day you know that she will do the right thing. Her love of shoes made me reawaken my love of shoes and fashion. Her love of the New York City, makes you love New York City. Her love of her friends, make you love her friends. That’s why we love Carrie. Despite her shortcomings, Carrie Bradshaw is a great tour guide in the amusement park that is her life.
Miranda Hobbes yields to no man, woman or child. She is going to get what she wants, if she doesn’t stop herself first. Miranda is type A kind of person. Which is great because that that makes her the perfect counterbalance to Carrie. Miranda is the Ying to Carrie’s Yang. Where is Carrie is indecisive and all over of the place, Miranda knows what she wants and knows how to get it. Or at least she thinks she does. She want to be earthquake proof but refuses to be flexible enough to actually survive the first shockwave. And oh boy, did the universe give her a lot of earthquakes. Watching Miranda was frustrating at times, “WHY CAN’T YOU LET STEVE LOVE YOU!” is something I would be screaming out to the screen throughout their entire relationship. Miranda was her own biggest enemy, granted you can say that for each of the main characters but it really shows in Miranda. Miranda was also probably the best friend out of all of them, you can really tell that Miranda doesn’t have a lot of friends so the ladies are super special to her. When her mother passed away, it was a rare vulnerable moment for her and boy was is it insightful. Miranda is the one that I related to the most, so seeing her having to lean on the other three characters shows you how much they mean to her. That’s not something she does easily. Miranda is the wall that others can lean on but it takes a lot for her to count on others. This also shows up with her relationship with Steve. Steve is one of the good ones, the kind of guy that you can take home to meet the folks and know that he can talk to your dad about the playoffs and your mom is going to say is cute and “ so helpful” because he picked up some plates after dinner. He’s not going to be threaten by your career but he will support you when your sexist boss is treating you like don’t exist. In fact he will support you wanting to quit and take some time off. He’ll probably give you foot massage and be surprised when you give him a blow job. But you can’t tell that to Miranda. Those kind of guys don’t exist to her. She made up her mind on that a long time ago. Watching Miranda’s and Steve’s will-they-won’t-they was more frustrating then Carrie and Big. Mostly because, unlike Big, we all knew that Steve was a good guy. And that Miranda deserved this good guy and she was the only one stopping her from being with him. Not to say that Steve was perfect,cause no one is but we all know that Steve is in the top 3 for any of the lovers on the show. Where Big and Carrie are two hot messes trying to work it out, Miranda and Steve always comes off as Miranda being afraid of being hurt, making her very hot and cold when it comes to who she lets into her tightly managed life. This is probably the product of past relationships gone bad, and not just the romantic kind. Look at how Miranda talks about her mother and her family, there is a lot unspoken hurt feelings there. It can also explain why she has trouble letting Steve go during parts after they have broken up later on in the series. All of this comes to head in the show after she has Brady, at first she wasn’t going to tell Steve, I’m talking about after had decided not to have the abortion, and then keeps him at arm’s length. It was very clinical, and everyone but Miranda could see what she really wanted, a family. Just on her own terms. Which nothing is wrong with that, I think it is one of the things I really liked about the character. But sometimes you have to look around and not just focus on the goal post or you’ll miss out on the adventure.
Charlotte York is the one you think has it all from the start. She is the most traditionally good looking one out of the bunch and it is not so subtle the producers did this to remind that she is the most traditional one out the four. She works a an art gallery. Comes from a “good” family. Charlotte like Miranda live the their lives with certain expectations in a world…a city that could care less about what they want. She is also the toughest out of the four. I don’t think the other three could handle the same problems that Charlotte could do and make out of it standing as straight as her. Which is really interesting to considering that she is the most overtly femme out of the four too. Maybe it was a way to show that audience that strong doesn’t always mean you have to be masculine. It might also be a way of showing us the dumb dumb shit that mothers and grandmothers had to deal with from our fathers and grandfathers and the world as a whole. That’s one of the things that I really admire about all four women on this show but especially in Charlotte. Maybe she reminds me of mom and mother figures, throughout my life, seeing them promised a storybook ending and have the rugged repeatedly pulled from under them and watching them having to pull themselves off. Charlotte is also the romantic of the group, constantly looking for “the One”. Which is great because when she find the one is literally when she stops looking for him. Harry is her “the one” and I just love how he is the one person she would never had dated before ED Trey. Trey was her perfect guy on paper, handsome, comes from the rich family, easy to manipulate but that exactly why that marriage was destined to fail. Charlotte needed someone like Harry, someone that she would be forced to really get to know, hairy back and all, in order to really love him. Also it is kind of funny to think about it, but Charlotte and not Samantha that was also the most adaptable out of the four. Despite being constantly knocked down by life she adapts and tries to find the silver lining. Can’t find a job on the same level as her old, gets a volunteer job at the museum and works her way up. Having trouble having a baby, she decides to adopt. When life gave her Trey, she turns it into Harry. It’s great. It is inspiring in a sense and I think that is why Charlotte’s story was the only that made me cry during the TV finale. Charlotte had earned that happy ending.
Samantha Jones is who actually has it all from the start of the show. She has her own successful business that allows her to hang out with Manhattan’s elite. She has her pick of the litter when it comes to hot, sexy, young men which is interesting because she is also the oldest of the four. Samantha is also the one that I hear the most often referred to as the man out of the four, which is kind of true. She fucks like a man, she talks like a man, but most importantly she lives like a man. Well, idolized version of a man’s life. Samantha uses the myth that men just want to have sexual relations and nothing else to keep them at a distance. If Miranda kept her love interests at arms length then Samantha keeps hers away with the proverbial 10 foot pole. Everything about Samantha is used to help her live in a fantasy. It is shown in the show that Samantha, a person who gives off the aura of Kanye West levels of self confidence, has been lying about her age for who knows how long. A common lie that we hear women, especially those from Samantha’s generations, do all the time on television. This joke that at first seems like a throwaway joke, is actually really insightful of who you Samantha is. She wants to be the fantasy. And she is that fantasy, rather it is inspirational or more importantly sexual, to everyone. Everyone but her girlfriends. They are the only people that Samantha really allows to see the real her. For someone who tries to come off as carefree and fun, she is the one who has the most rules out of all of them when it comes to men. She doesn’t allow them sleep over, making most of them leave within an hour after they are finished having fun. Samantha does not make love, she “fucks”. Another example of this is during season 4, during of the Fab 4’s famous Saturday brunches, Miranda talks about this guy that she was seeing trying analingus on her. The ladies all start talking about if they would let a guy try that on them. When it gets to Samantha’s turn, she admits that she would allow one of her lovers to perform this sexual act on her but she would never do the same for them. Right afterward, it was revealed that the often punish, Charlotte, admitting to be down to “toss some salads”. Which I find really funny on so many levels. Samantha tries to come off as sexually forward, but is actually kind of sexually backwards by 2018 standards. Samantha views sex as a conquest which something that today’s more sex-positive people would look down on. Being a (relatively) young person in the Me-Too era, we are seeing effects of men who view sex in the same way that Samantha does, as something that needs to be taken and conquered and dominated instead of as a form of expression, an experience to share with another person (or people, whom I to judge?), it is interesting to see today. I say all this, not to drag Samantha. I really like the character but I wonder if I saw this 20 years ago when the show first premiered, or 5 years or 6 months ago, would I view her in the same light? There are many, many, many reasons to love Samantha, she is a fun character. She is a good friend, and even a good person but I’m not really adding new into that pot. Plenty of other people have talked that part to death, not a lot of people get to experience Samantha for the first real time in the Me-Too era. It’s something that I’m still pondering about and might not be something I can even have answers to. I think I might be the point of Samantha (and the show really), to get me to think about sex and relations from a different angle.
And with that, I going to end Part 1 of this 4 part review. Next, I’ll talk about the television series as a whole.
tangentwithtanner
prguitarman
gummygunk
pixelskylines
