In this week's print issue of the Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz brought a much-deserved axe to the execrable film adaptation of the TV series "Sex and the City." I don't want to repeat what he said, but I do have some further barbs of criticism to hurl at the film.
First of all, you might be wondering what I was doing at a cinema watching "Sex and the City." Suffice to say, there are certain things that a husband of a certain age willingly does to ensure domestic tranquility. Besides, and I admit this with some trepidation, I sort of enjoyed the TV series. The episode where Samantha took a new lover, Carrie used a lot of puns, Miranda was off-puttingly brittle and Charlotte endearingly clueless especially stood out. Even though I put up a stink as we trundled off to the cinema, I secretly wasn't all that unhappy to see the movie. (Don't tell my wife - as things stand now, I get to choose the next one.)
Even though I liked the show, I never understood why it sparked such passion among its fans. The characters were to varying degrees wretched people. Their defining characteristic was their narcissism.
That doesn't mean the show failed to entertain. After all, the brood of gangsters and sociopaths that populated "The Sopranos" were a lot worse than the four horsewomen of the Metropolis. But I never could understand why "Sex and the City" fans loved the characters. Writing today, I find it somewhat distressing that 20-something girls were going out in vaguely feral packs to see the movie this weekend.
I think part of the reason why those who didn't know better fell in love with the characters is that "Sex and the City" wimped out. "The Sopranos" will go down as the one of the greatest artistic achievements of the past 50 years because of its auteur's brutal honesty. David Chase knew he was making a show about murderers, and he wouldn't let the viewer love them. Many of the show's viewers found "The Sopranos" frustrating because David Chase didn't let Tony Soprano become a beloved figure like Vito Corleone. Tony was a sociopath and a killer, and Chase never shied away from that reality. For the viewers who really appreciated the show, Chase's fidelity to this truth is precisely what made his show so brilliant.
"Sex and the City" showed four women who enabled each other to perpetually rattle along in a state of dysfunction. And yet by focusing to such an extent on their fashion sense and their sexiness, the show obscured its characters' ugliness and glorified their pathologies. "Sex and the City" made it easy to love characters who were anything but lovable.
Ultimately, both the show and the movie ignored Truth in order to better focus on some really snappy outfits. Of course, the truth would have made the proceedings rather unpleasant (which much of the movie was, anyway). Supreme narcissists don't have happy endings and their stories are sad ones, regardless of how fashionably they may dress.
