Dibs!
Since no one sems to have claimed it yet, I think it only fair that the gay guy gets to cover the run-up to The Sex And The City Movie.
The likelihood - even as it goes up Memorial Day weekend against The Movie That Exhumes Harrison Ford - is that SATC will be a phenomenon. Again. It may well be critic-proof, given that large swaths of young urban women and their gay friends will likely turn out in droves just to see the costumes. Plot, in this case, may be a secondry consideration. Which itself speaks volumes about the phenomenon that SATC hath wrought.
I have a friend who lives for fashion, and is the only person I know who reviews films based on the costume 
design. It’s not, necessarily, as odd as it sounds. Fidelity to historical periods, interesting use of fabrics… you can tell a lot, at times, by the care that was taken in dressing the characters.
Let’s just say she - and I - had a field day with Pat Field and the House of Sex.
It’s hard to believe, now, that all of what Sex has become came out of a series of dark, often dismal articles by Candace Bushnell on the modern sexual mores of hip Manhattanites. “Sex in the City”, Bushnell’s regular sex column in the New York Observer, certainly caused a stir, as much for the trying to read between her clever choices of aliases as for her subject matter. Those who’ve picked up her collection of columns may well wonder how such scenes of empty coupling, meaningless encounters and devotion to status led to the charming adventures of four hip single women in fancy clothes. Bushnell knew not only her subjects intimately, but also her audience, and her column struck, often, a nerve.
Brighter and lighter, SATC didn’t so much strike a nerve as sound a chord. From the beginning, creator Darren Star, along with a team of talented writers, smoothed out the edges of Bushnell’s work. The pilot episode of the series was probably the first, and last, time the scripts showed real fidelity to Bushnell’s darker sense of New York’s single elites and their coupling ways. Jaded cynicism gradually gave way to hopeful romanticism, and the tales of “Modelizers” (men who track down and sleep with models exclusively) and Three Ways gradually gave way to the lighter adventures of four women who were, admittedly, sexually active… but not bad people.
Perhaps the most obvious evolution was Miranda Hobbes, played by Cynthia Nixon, initially conceived as the most jaded of the 4, a single career woman (a lawyer) whose high standards and careerist tendencies precluded meeting the right guy. As the series wore on, Miranda became less uptight, less militant, and wound up with a casual, easygoing bartender named Steve, who showed her how to let go and be herself. It’s to Nixon’s credit (along with co-star David Eigenberg) that this evolution felt entirely natural and earned; but at the same time, it’s a pointed example of how SATC went from jaded, clear eyed look at the singles scene to a hopeful romance with familiar contours.
In that sense, Pat Field’s evolutionary costuming wasn’t just a “fifth character” as so many suggest - it was the vehicle for reimagining the whole story as a consumerist fantasy. I can’t say when it first occurred to me - I was watching, off and on, for the first three seasons, but began regular, appointment television viewing in Season 4 - but there was a moment when it hit me that the dressing on the show was not just witty and inspired… but serious, and expensive. I think it was the moment when Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie had a confrontation with boyriend Aiden (the big, lumpy presence of John Corbett) and I realized her skirt was a piece by Alexander McQueen that I’d seen on the runways, and had to cost upwards of $1,500. And this, from a character who was a freelance writer. In Manhattan. In a rental apartment.
Field’s been candid in saying that the costuming for SATC is ultimately a fantasy: real women couldn’t afford these clothes in these characters’ roles. Yet rarely does this notion get questioned. It’s fun, and flirty, and amusing to discuss the “shoe obsession” and the “outrageous Carrie clothing” the show put forth, rather than wonder, in the final episode, why Carrie was lashed into a $40,000 couture gown that made her every bit the princess she’d become, waiting for her knight in shining armor - by this point, a choice between Mikhail Baryshnikov and mainstay Chris Noth.
It’s Noth, of course, as “Mr. Big” (a fictionalized version of the Conde Nast executive Bushnell dated, off and on, for years, and used as column fodder) who’s also key to the story. When I commented, recently, on the “Prince Charming” phenomenon of recent romantic comedies, and the “aging stud” dynamic of today’s leading men, I hadn’t realized how fully SATC would prove the point: this month’s Vogue features Parker on the cover, facing out in a seated position between Noth’s legs, a surprisingly unsubtle gesture for the magazine. Inside, not only does Noth make a guest appearance in Parker’s spread, but Pierce Brosnan does similar duties in a second spread as well (promoting his turn as the aging stud in the upcoming stage to screen version of Mamma Mia). Men - an aging one, and preferably well off - have become the exciting new handbag of the season. Get one for your arm.
In the end, I will, dutifully, race out to see SATC The Movie (Dibs!). Despite my jaded musings, I do want to know what happens to Charlotte and Miranda and Samantha and Carrie. I was there: that was my city, my Cosmos, my Stanford-like life. But I can’t help but wonder: is this really what we’ve become? Is this all sex - and Sex - ever was? I don’t know that wanting such a bright. clean popular entertainment has ever made me feel so dirty. And yet, here I am, to claim it as my own. I love New York.
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May 21, 2008 at 11:41 am
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May 30, 2008 at 8:15 am
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