In 1998, when Sex and the City first aired, I was 24 and living in New York. At that stage of the game, however, my concerns were distinctly on the twenty-something side of things. I hadn't yet realized that the life I was living was in fact my life, rather than the dress rehearsal for my real life, and while I wasn't the kind of girl that threw up on the beach (I'm referring to the episode "Twenty-Something Girls vs. Thirty-Something Women" from Season Two), I was irresponsible and young and I was, that summer, renting a house in Southampton with thirteen other people.
By the time Sex and the City closed up shop in 2004, I was 30. People I knew were getting married, having children, and buying property. Everybody seemed to be growing up, and growing up meant having to deal with Real Questions about what we wanted in life, about who we were and who we were going to be.
What made Sex and the City so valuable, to this viewer at least, was the way the collective experience of Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha provided me with confirmation of my own experience (oh my god, I've totally been through that). That's not to say that the portrayals of these women's lives were always believable. As a fellow writer, Carrie's ability to afford her fabulous lifestyle was always a source of confusion and frustration (and envy, if I'm going to be totally honest) for me. How can a newspaper columnist with no other visible sources of income (no trust fund, no other freelance gigs) wear such fabulous clothes? Ultimately, though, I was willing to let it slide. SATC was accurate where it counted—in its frank presentation of female desire and the way that women think and talk about sex.
Sex, and to a lesser degree, love (both platonic and romantic) was the glue that held the show together. Women (at least the women I know) are pretty graphic in their discussions about sex, and SATC showed it like it is. The women on that show had appetites, particularly Samantha, and they were not afraid to talk about and act upon those appetites. In the world of Sex and the City, even good girls like Charlotte wanted to get laid.
I'll be honest: I didn't have high hopes for the movie, which, as it turned out, was a good move, since I wasn't disappointed. That's not to say that everything about the movie was bad. Two scenes in particular spring to mind: Charlotte yelling at Big to stay away after he stands Carrie up at their wedding, and Samantha feeding Carrie breakfast in Mexico after the four ladies have fled the scene of Big's crime. These moments captured the fierce loyalty and love that these women feel for each other, and they seemed the most true to me, both to the series and to real life.
One of the show's strengths was its ability to dissect and comment on the minutia of even the most seemingly insignificant social interaction. The movie didn't have time for that kind of intensive character development, and as a result, many of the film's most interesting narrative threads were lost. The most glaring problem, of course, was the fact that in two hours and fifteen minutes the famously sexy and sex-loving Samantha never once had sex. Come again? (Um, no, unfortunately.) Neutering Samantha, however, meant that the film could avoid dealing with a sexually active and sexually compelling woman in her fifties.
Sex and the City showed women the challenges of single motherhood, the importance of continuing to believe that love exists, despite all evidence to the contrary, and the ways in which women struggle to balance the different roles they play—lover, friend, mother, professional. The show didn't and couldn't cover everything, of course, but it did make single life more bearable by allowing us to see the humor in the pathos. Thing is, life doesn't end after the Happily Ever After, and that's where the movie fumbled. The big question seemed to be, how do we fill the time until we can get everybody back together again, rather than how do we deal with the hurdles that relationships face once they make it to the next level?
Look—I have no trouble with happy endings, and frankly I would have hated to have the movie end any other way. What made the show great was its ability to find meaning in the mundane. Where the movie lost me was in its failure to achieve that same depth of feeling, that degree of human complexity that made me invest in the show and its characters, that special thing that kept me going back for more.
