Sitcoms put together characters that quite specifically do not belong together. The longer the show goes on, the more absurd it becomes. The "tight-knit" group was always a plot device. Each episode required conflict, and yet the group needed to stay together. That was the show. That is always the show. Why didn't Wally Cleaver tell Eddie Haskell to get lost? Why didn't Seinfeld lock Kramer out? It might as well be "No Exit":
Three damned souls, Joseph Garcin, Inèz Serrano, and Estelle Rigault, are brought to the same room in Hell and locked inside by a mysterious valet. They had all expected torture devices to punish them for eternity, but instead, find a plain room.... Garcin says that he was executed for being an outspoken pacifist, while Estelle insists that a mistake has been made; Inèz... realizes that they have been placed together to make each other miserable.... [SPOILER ALERT] This causes Garcin to abruptly attempt an escape. After he repeatedly tries to open the door, it suddenly and inexplicably opens, but he is unable to bring himself to leave. The others remain as well. He says that he will not be saved until he can convince Inèz that he is not cowardly. She refuses to be persuaded, observing that he is obviously a coward and promising to make him miserable forever. Garcin concludes that... "hell is other people."
"... seeking creative and sexual fulfillment. The message was that women didn’t have to stay in unfulfilling marriages. That bigger, richer lives beckoned. That message sold more than 20 million copies and made Ms. Jong a celebrated figure. This year, that book got another kind of sequel, when Molly Jong-Fast, Ms. Jong’s only child, published a memoir called 'How to Lose Your Mother.' The book depicts Erica Jong, now suffering from dementia, as a narcissist, a drunk, a disinterested parent who was either mining Molly’s life for material or ditching her to pursue her own adventures. The memoir, like [the sequel to 'Sex and the City'], serves as a generational rebuke to the women who prioritized careers and sex and fame and fortune over family, and a warning to any mothers foolish enough to follow Ms. Jong’s bad example. For those of us who loved the originals, the rise of the reboots feels chilling...."
"... posting and spending their mid-20s away. They all seem to keep impressive workout routines... have no shortage of girlfriends, and juggle busy heterosexual dating schedules. (The boys they consort with tend to be of the fratty variety.) They work in finance, marketing, publicity, tech — often with active social-media accounts on the side. They have seemingly endless disposable income. They are, by all conventional standards, beautiful. Occasionally, they are brunettes. Whatever their political beliefs, their lives seem fairly apolitical; as one 27-year-old lawyer on a walk with her best friend, both wearing identical puffer jackets, succinctly put their collective interests to me one day in April, 'Brunches, coffees, dinners, drinks with your girlfriends — that type of energy.' (They may be more political than they appear: 'You can have a Cartier Love bracelet and still care about immigrant rights,' said one person who lives in the neighborhood.)"
"In the second, Miranda loses her phone on the beach. In the third, Carrie pretends she has COVID to get out of recording her own audiobook. The stories are breathtakingly small, as though the original show has been shrunk down into a vivid maquette. A substantial portion of the fifth episode is dedicated to Charlotte and Harry dressing up as Philip and Elizabeth Jennings from The Americans for Halloween and getting frustrated that no one gets the reference...."
Ooh... just by chance, following my usual blog practice, I seem to have stumbled into a theme day. The theme is: Nothing happens. I haven't used my "blog has a theme today" tag in a long time.
This feels propitious. Things fall in place. Anything falling in place for you? Can you poach an egg? No?! Well, then, pay attention at 0:16 to 0:24 of "Levi eats Green Eggs and Ham Benedict":
"... is just not enough. What does it mean to go beyond consent and discover what you do want?... Understanding our authentic desires has long been hopelessly stymied by politics.... 'Every woman here knows in her gut,' wrote the writer and anti-porn feminist Robin Morgan in 1978, 'that the emphasis on genital sexuality, objectification, promiscuity, emotional noninvolvement and coarse invulnerability was the male style and that we, as women, placed greater trust in love, sensuality, humor, tenderness, commitment.'
If male-centered ideas about sex hardly encouraged self-actualization, neither did this new strain of feminism."
Writes Nona Willis Aronowitz in "I Still Believe in the Power of Sexual Freedom" (NYT). The words that follow "neither did this new strain of feminism" are so convoluted and abstruse that I almost ended the quote with the Robin Morgan quote. But consider whether Robin Morgan said it better than anyone else as you read Willis Aronowitz's effort to say it was wrong. I'm beginning with the very next sentence, and quoting without ellipsis, because I want you to experience how weirdly impenetrable it is. Sorry to bias you, but I'm begging for help. I'm struggling to read it:
I've never given a damn about George Conway and his predictable anti-Trumpism, and, in fact, I have yet to read "There is no one to stop Trump now." But I'm delighted with his column, because I read the title and said "What's that song? Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now?" And 2 seconds later, I had my memory refreshed: "Oh! It's Starship!" And I was mesmerized by this trip back to 1986 (replete with stuff from the romcom "Mannequin"):
It's a festival of 80s hair — wet and dry. The notion that nothing is going to stop women who are mannequins is... interesting. I've never seen the movie, but in the video, the love of a man brings mannequins to life. One of the women is Grace Slick and one is so good looking that I thought Grace Slick should have had the clout to demand that in her videos there can be no woman who is better looking than she is.
Researching the underlying movie, "Mannequin," I see that other woman is Kim Cattrall (familiar to me only as Samantha on "Sex and the City"). I guess the movie came first and Grace was going along with a package deal. I see: "At the time, [the song] made the 47 year old Grace Slick the oldest woman to have a number-one single in the United States, surpassed only by Cher, who was 52 when her song 'Believe' reached #1 in early 1999."
Imagine the thrill of achievement to be in a place where you are surpassed only by Cher.
Imagine the thrill of achievement to be George Conway.... Wait. Let me skim this thing so I can get out of this post quickly now that I've had my 80s-retrospective fun.
When the subject of Attorney General William P. Barr comes up these days, it’s hard not to think of John S. McCain. Not the late senator, mind you, but the USS John S. McCain, the naval destroyer named after his father and grandfather.
That's hilariously nonsensical. Of all the things I find hard not to think about when I think about Bill Barr, the USS John S. McCain is nowhere on the list. Anyway, that turns out to be about how the ship was once kept out of Trump's line of sight, not because Trump demanded it, but "[a]nticipating Trump’s narcissistic whims and desires." So, you get it, that's what Barr must be doing.
I thought this column was going to be about how the Democrats have no one who can stop Trump from getting reelected. I was surprised to think Conway would concede that. He didn't. Now, I will go back to my original position of never reading Conway columns.
"... with many recounting how the show painted a seductive vision of Manhattan: endless brunches with gal pals, rewarding careers, a sea of handsome suitors and, of course, shopping sprees. Lots of these respondents were men" — NYT.
2 days ago, I was making fun of one woman for getting the idea of living like a fictional character. "Who goes about in the real world as the double of a fictional character without knowing from Day 1 that it's a lie?"
That phrase — "living like a fictional character" — unlocked an old memory of mine. I've attempted, at times, to write novels, and back in the early 90s, I worked on something with the title "My Life as a Fictional Character." The first-person voice was not a woman attempting to be some fictional character — like these women who set out to become Carrie Bradshaw (of "Sex and the City") — but a woman married to a novelist who uses her as raw material for his novels.
I'm glancing at some of these stories the NYT raked in, collected at "True Tales of ‘Sex and the City.'" None of the women seem to have fallen for the fantasy. They were just vaguely inspired to love the idea of living in New York. How could someone new to NYC get anywhere close to believing she was living like Carrie? Step 1 would be finding a place to live, which would squelch any fantasy. There's no later step where you are buying a lot of expensive shoes.
The word "fantasy" appears once in the set of mini-essays, and it's one by a man: "'Sex and the City' created an unrealistic fantasy for some women. I dated one." He has one anecdote to tell — it's about her preference for a brand-name bakery — and dismisses her with contempt:
Our relationship crumbled within weeks. It wasn’t until months after the breakup, while walking past that infamous bakery that I realized how the idolization of her basement apartment (on the perfect street!), the move, the shopping, the shoes and the disappointing birthday pastries were all linked to a fantastical life she saw through a TV series and rewatched exhaustively. It was a life I found too banal.
"I was riding in an Escalade en route to the 'Sex and the City' movie premiere in Midtown with a Bravo camera crew in tow. When the SUV door opened, I stepped onto the pink carpet in my Allison Parris dress and Chanel bag. I felt like a star. I felt beautiful. I felt proud. I was rubbing shoulders with celebs and the goddess herself: Carrie Bradshaw, a k a Sarah Jessica Parker. Since moving to New York City four years earlier, I’d established myself with my own dating column and graced the cover of Wired magazine...."
I was considered by many to be Carrie Bradshaw 2.0. And I was happy to be given that identity for a while, but it was all a lie.
Oh, come on. Carrie Bradshaw is and always was a fictional character. Who goes about in the real world as the double of a fictional character without knowing from Day 1 that it's a lie? I can't believe I'm supposed to read how she believed she embodied a fiction and took some time to discover that it was a lie. I could just as well read a column by a 12-year-old who used to believe she really was a magical princess but finally figured out it wasn't true and — don't tell me let me guess — that real life actually is more satisfying than the fiction. Let me glance forward into this mess:
I lived on food bought for me on dates... Different men I dated gave me YSL shoes and status purses... I also subscribed to Carrie’s ethos when it came to men. There was no such thing as a bad date — only a good date or a good brunch story....
In 2008, my two best girlfriends and I... were all invited by a 40-something billionaire to his Miami mansion; he even sent his private jet for us. It was just him, the three of us and his butler and chef. I don’t think this man was used to being told no, and he started chasing me around his mansion. I finally had to lock myself in the bathroom. The worst part: He sent us back on JetBlue.
Right. Flying cheap is worse that being the victim of attempted rape. What a wit you are! Bleh.
I got to that article via Instapundit who seems to accept Allison's blaming "Sex and the City" for the fact that Allison's career of being a Carrie type eventually got played out. It seems to me that "Sex and the City" was a TV show. It mixed fantasy female fun with some serious material about finding love, and viewers with half a brain knew what we were looking at. Who goes out and tries to be one of the characters on a TV show then blames the show for how it didn't totally work? Allison got plenty of attention, amusement, and material gain working this career she chose. I don't for one minute believe she was tricked by the show. I think she exploited it. And it would be silly to empathize with her now that she has her own career reasons to reinvent herself. She's once again trying to use our interest in the excellent TV show to leverage her career.
So if I have nothing to say then I wasted 148 minutes. To try to salvage my lost time, I'll go with a numbered list:
1. Why is a comedy 148 minutes long? Especially a comedy based on a half-hour sitcom. It was like 5 TV episodes stuck together. Except 5 TV episodes would have been more fun because there would have been a lot more random, go-nowhere plots and not a true-romance story arc for each of 4 characters. They'd have thrown in some extra bad boyfriends. Instead, each aging diva has the love of her life to come to terms with.
2. Hollywood is back to casting black women in the role of the maid: Jennifer Hudson won an Oscar, then plays the "personal assistant" to Carrie Bradshaw in "Sex and the City." My heart is too full to tell you how just how I feel:
3. Why did Carrie Bradshaw even need a personal assistant? She's been using that damned Apple laptop for over a decade. Doesn't she know how to click the "junk" icon in Mail? Also, if she's such a big Apple user, why did she shun the iPhone? Well, the answer is, of course, these were all plot devices. How can you generate enough miscommunication to make a modern love story when everyone has instant communication? You have to have kids hiding cell phones, cell phones thrown into the ocean in anger, unusual cell phones that a person who isn't supposed to be an idiot can't operate, and personal assistants to set up password-protected email boxes.
It’s easy to bash the show’s over-the-top materialism, but “Sex and the City” has never bothered to rationalize it, no matter how absurd or overpriced an item may be. (Nor has the show explained how a freelance writer could afford all those clothes.) It simply accepts that fashion is good and assumes the audience, just like Carrie, so badly wants to be a part of Vogue.
It's a little game we play. Does it hurt anyone? We all like a walk-in closet, so why not show us the ultimate dream closet... and show our Carrie having glorious make-up sex in it?
6. I say "our Carrie," because it seems we're supposed to identify with her, but why on earth do we? Is she our fantasy? We might like to maintain our skinniness as we age, but we don't visualize it turning out that stringy. How many tendons are there in the human body anyway? I tried counting that one time when we got a horrific closeup of the axilla:
7. Meanwhile, Samantha is supposed to get shockingly fat (from living in Los Angeles and having to consume food instead of the usual smorgasbord of men that she got in New York). But the actress, Kim Cattrall, declined to put this kind of dedication into acting:
8. But credit where credit is due: Cattrall puts in the effort where the result is to make her look pretty. I'm thinking about that sushi scene. (Which was another place where they figured out how to make the telephone unanswerable.) And let's be fair. Cattrall has a beautiful body at age 51, and stretching it out at this point could be catastrophic. Couldn't they have made some sort of fat prosthesis to make the fat scenes big and believable? What percent of the women in the theater were slimmer than the supposedly fat Samantha?
9. And if Carrie is so horrified by fat, why is she so hung up on Mr. Big, who is fat? Hey, I'm just seeing that Chris Noth (who plays Big) was born in Madison, Wisconsin. That's nice! But still, the man is substantially overweight, and in profile, at least once, it was very obvious that he was wearing a powerful girdle.
10. Noth had to act like a pussy about going to his giant wedding, and it was completely unbelievable. I can't believe the whole audience didn't audibly scoff.
11. Because the audience was breathing and sighing along with ever emotional moment in that damned movie. Dog? Awwww. Baby? Oooohhh. Women go to that movie to have their emotions played. Suspend your critical mind and flow with it. If you don't want to do that... really, you shouldn't go. (It's like pornography.)
12. The most pornographic part of it all is the fashion and the interior decoration. You'll never be bored if you can pay attention to the details of costume and set decoration.
13. For me, the most astounding thing in the movie was the chest of drawers in the Vogue office. I have this old chest of drawers — my parents bought it in the 1960s — that earlier in the day I decided I had to get rid of. I was thinking about rearranging the furniture in my living room and I realized that the awful thing had to go. It's black with three wavy gold squares on each drawer and a big gold door-knocker pulls. Then — unbelievable! — there's that very chest in the Vogue office. Weird!
ADDED: Sean says:
My parents had that exact same chest (at least as described: I didn't see the movie). It's by Dorothy Draper. You can google her. My sister saw one in the window of an antiques store in Greenwich so it's worth something, although she didn't stop to check the price.
"... the ones I'm buying are getting creepier and creepier." I found that quote pretty interesting. Where does it appear and who said it? It appears in this month's Lucky magazine and is said by the magazine's creative director (referring to her favorite jewelry pattern). Lucky is a completely mainstream fashion magazine, in case you don't know. The lead cover story, for example, is the thoroughly banal "Thick Lashes: Make Your Eyes Look Huge." But fashion magazines season their crushing banality with their special kind of insanity. The most ordinary products--a handbag, a pair of shoes--are labeled "Our Obsessions." Lucky's fashion director explains how she feels about buying camisoles like this: "I'm powerless against the allure of anything little and strappy and lacy."
I would like to see a movie about a fashion magazine in which the editors actually had the feelings that the pages of the magazine portray them as having. The closest thing we have to that is the wonderful "Absolutely Fabulous." To a lesser extent, "Sex and the City" brings to life the surreal, imaginary people portrayed in fashion magazines.
(And check out the winners of the Ab Fab lookalike contest.)
As noted yesterday, I didn't watch too many situation comedies after 1969 (Seinfeld and Sex and the City are two exceptions), so I was never interested in the TV show The Odd Couple. One situation comedy that I did watch, pre-1969, was Mr. Peepers, which was on in the 1950s. I was a very little kid at the time, so my memory is only of seeing it and knowing that everyone loved it. Tony Randall wasn't the star, but he was the star's sidekick, and the show made Randall popular. Maybe the attention to Randall right now could lead to a DVD collection of Mr. Peepers. I'd love to see that. People who remember loving The Odd Couple should want to see Mr. Peepers, because it featured two contrasting male characters. In Mr. Peepers they were both high school teachers. (I see the name of the high school was Jefferson, and Randall named his only son Jefferson.) Peepers, played by Wally Cox, was extremely mild-mannered and sweet, and Randall's character was brash and swaggering. Come to think of it, many great TV shows have been built on the idea of two characters who are the same sex but have very different personalities. I suppose it all goes back to Laurel and Hardy (or whoever they got the idea from).
March 21, 2004
"Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame, thank you so much--you've been just lovely--a real knock out." That's Prince, at the Hall of Fame show. He gives a great performance--and changes the words to Kiss:
"You don't have to watch Sex and the City to have an attitude."
Oh, but good Lord, the intro is stilted and prolonged. Alicia Keys seems to be auditioning for a movie role, so earnestly emoting her way through the teleprompter script.
"He's the inspiration that generations will return to until the end of time."
I love Prince, but that's just stupid. Keys should have refused to say those idiotic lines. Ah, what the hell. There's always been something incoherent about the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame. And good old Prince is still raving about freedom and spirituality, God bless him.
I hope Tonya TiVoed the adorable Dave Matthews intro for Traffic. ... There really is something wondrous about Mr. Fantasy. And Steve Winwood's voice is wondrously intact.
February 23, 2004
The SAG Awards, Get to Know Your Rabbit. The SAG Awards were awfully dull. One big surprise--Johnny Depp won the best male actor award--but then he wasn't there, so the moment fizzled. The best thing about the SAG Awards is that they give awards for entire ensembles. So they give the TV one to Sex and the City, but Sarah Jessica Parker is a no-show, and then they give the movie one to Lord of the Rings, and a huge group of lesser actors assembles on stage and mills about, while Sean Astin babbles boringly about something Guild-ish, until the hulkish John Rhys-Davies shoves him aside, seemingly for being tedious.
Lately, Rhys-Davies has been having some troubles. As he puts it: "I'm burying my career so substantially ... that it's painful."
It was only through Astin's speech last night that I realized he was Patty Duke's son. He didn't name her but mentioned that his mother had been president of the Screen Actor's Guild, and I put two and two together. John Astin is not his natural father, but adopted him after he married Patty Duke.
So let me just take this opportunity to say how much I love John Astin. And I don't just mean that I love him as Gomez on The Addams Family. I love him as Harry Dickens on I'm Dickens, He's Fenster, And I love him as Turnbull in Get to Know Your Rabbit.
I saw Get to Know Your Rabbit when it was shown, pre-release, in 1971, to a test audience in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I and it seemed like everyone else in that theater experienced it as the funniest movie we had ever seen. Somehow, even though it was directed by Brian De Palma and has Orson Welles in its cast, it fell into oblivion. I still have never come close to laughing as much at a movie as I did that night. I finally found a videotape of it, watched it again, and couldn't recapture the original feeling, maybe because I knew all the surprises. But Astin stands out as especially funny, especially, for some reason, while trying to keep pencils from rolling off his desk. For those in the know: "Pass your hand through the flame!"
February 7, 2004
Things I bought at Border’s today and why.
1. Decasia: The State of Decay. A film by Bill Morrison. Because I read this article by Herbert Muschamp in today’s NYT, I remembered reading about this film before, and now it’s out on DVD. Because it’s got a sticker on the front with a quote from Errol Morris saying “Haunting, Mysterious and Incredibly Beautiful. A definitive work of art” and I love Errol Morris and am a sucker for art as long as it doesn’t trigger any of my many objections. Even though Muschamp wrote:
Already a cult classic, the movie is a time capsule of the postmodern obsession with decrepitude. What a space saver! Just pop this disc in the player and you'll have all the putrefaction you could ask for. Watch the Master Narratives Crumble! Entropy Now! Pomo's Greatest Hits!
2. The Four Complete Historic Ed Sullivan Shows Featuring The Beatles and Other Artists Including The Original Cast from "Oliver!", Cab Calloway, Cilla Black, Frank Gorshin, Soupy Sales, Gordon & Sheila MacRae, Tessie O'Shea, Myron Cohen, Mitzi Gaynor, Allen & Rossi, and many more ..." Because I love a historic mishmash that is likely to give me all sorts of weird mixed feelings of delight, anxiety, regret, nausea, horror, and general sublime awareness. Because tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of the first of the four shows and the DVD empowers the consumer to mark the occasion. Because I want to rethink how I felt when I was thirteen and had to face the reality that not everyone was as much in love with The Four Seasons as I was. (Oh, how sadly they have fallen out of the culture! A search for "Four Seasons" in Amazon did not show them at all on the first page of a list that began with: The Most Relaxing Classical Album in the World...Ever!, Sex and the City - The Complete First Four Seasons, Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long, and Montbell Ultralight #2 Sleeping Bag.)
3. The audio version of Yann Martel's "Life of Pi." Because years ago I learned how to solve my terrible insomnia problem by listening to spoken word. Audio books last years for me, because I can only hear a couple minutes a night. Because I think the elements of the story involving animals and floating in a lifeboat will harmonize well will sleeping and dreaming. Because I've listened to "A Short History of Nearly Everything" for the past year and some aspects of it are not harmonizing well with sleeping and dreaming (e.g., Yellowstone is a supervolcano due to erupt and destroy life as we know it, a large asteroid could suddenly kill us all something like a second after we became aware of it).
4. Sam Kashner's "When I Was Cool, My Life at the Jack Kerouac School." Because there's the adorable Sam Kashner on the cover wearing what William Burroughs called "suspenders of disbelief." Because I opened the book up at about twelve different places and read one sentence and every sentence passed my personal test of goodness (some combination of specific/surprising detail and an arrangement of words that charms me in some way ("I graduated 'in the Earth Horse Year,' whenever that was.")).
Ms. Paglia says, the success of "Sex and the City" marks a defeat for the "1980's anti-porn, anti-sex wing of feminists" and a victory for "the huge wing of us pro-sex feminists who came back with a vengeance in 1990, thanks to Madonna."
But even though "Sex and the City" is all about the spirit of the decade, it's full of what Paglia calls "archaic themes," themes found in trashy novels from the 1950s and 1960s, specifically "The Best of Everything," by Rona Jaffe (1958) and "Valley of the Dolls," by Jacqueline Susann (1966).
Too bad the Times article doesn't give us more verbatim Pagliaspeak. But other scholars must be drawn in to support the theory that the TV show is a "sociological event," worthy of scholarly commentary: Prada handbags and Jimmy Choo shoes are "apotropaic," "female sexuality is still punished," and the show is about "the semiotics of masculinity." That last, which the Times translates as "women trying to understand men," comes from a film studies prof who has written "a study of erotic fantasies about ... 'Star Trek.'"
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