Watching the television show is not a lonely exercise. The clothes are pretty, the shoes are shiny, and usually the question Carrie asks – a question like, “Were we all in fact just dating the same person over and over again?” – rings a bell with your own life. Each of the four characters has a different answer to the question and chances are good your emotions echo one of the responses. And because you are in three dimensions watching these two-dimensional characters, they aren’t your friends, exactly – they won’t pull up a fifth chair for you at brunch – but in their familiarness and reliability, they feel like your friends.
Brunch is key to each episode. Carrie’s questions are hashed out over hash browns (carbs I’m sure not one of those actresses actually eats) and its constancy stands in sharp relief to the unpredictableness of their every day. We are shown episode to episode that your friends will always be there for you. We are shown rerun after rerun that the show will always be there for you.
I would’ve said that would’ve been the one predictable theme of The Movie: sisterhood wins out. Go girl power! Woooo. What a fab four.
But as you can tell from the poster, The Movie is about the power of one. Actually, The Movie is about the power of two – about how, at the end of the day (or the long movie) we’re all just living to find that other one.
Were The Movie an episode, Big would’ve never resurfaced after he ditches her and the blue bird on her head at the altar. Were this an episode, she would’ve gone to Mexico, licked her wounds, moved back to NY and into an apartment where she could’ve licked the walls, they were so prettily decorated. Such is the structure of an HBO narrative: messy, unresolved, life-ish.
The Movie is… well, a movie. Completely different narrative structure: if there is a wedding at the end of the first act, there are only – narratively speaking – a few ways a story can go. Like a song that resolves, the most satisfying end to a wedding story is to have a wedding. In this case, it was not a wedding. It was The Wedding. Then – and only then, post-marriage – is Carrie truly happy. Nothing else seems to matter – not her lady friendships, not her shoes, not even the labels (ah, may YSL RIP) she has come to worship, as she marries in a “dress without a label.”
Why wasn’t The Movie called Amnesia? Again and again, Carrie forgets what a big egghead Big is.
The show fed us a steady diet of HBO yet The Movie is an updated Cinderella story with a Prince Charming who says “I got it” when the bill comes for a pre-war penthouse. Cinderella:2008 is a fable that any thirty-fiver can smell isn’t quite right. We pay our fourteen dollars and hope, like girls on a first date, for HBO. Instead, we get Disney. The Movie betrays us. It betrays its audience as Big betrays her, and then expects us to forgive it, as she forgives Big. It ditches us, stranding us in our seats, alone. We are ditched for Big.
Leaving the flick, shushing to my car through the lobby, stunned, I passed a display of celebrity photos from the 80’s – Joan Collins, Suzanne Somers and, according to the nametag beside her photo, Victoria Principle. I got out a pen and etched in the correct spelling of the name over and on principle; my 2nd favorite Dallas star cannot be sullied by spelling. I was taking care of my lady, like I expected the ladies in The Movie to take care of each other. Which, they did. They helped each other move and cry and poop, but ultimately, nothing was more important in the beginning or the end than Carrie’s Big day. With our girlfriends, we occasionally do this – choose the boy over the brunch – but the television show gave us the illusion that we, like motherhood and a great career, could have it all: our ladies with our boys, sunny side up with runny centers or hard boiled.
As I got behind the wheel of my blue car, I couldn’t help but wonder, when it comes to relationships with our fictional friends, how do you know when enough is enough?
love the name, dorothy.
as one who hasn’t seen enough satc to comment i’ll take a shot at the last question.
i had a soft spot for the violent “misunderstood” loner of many 70’s films but have been getting to a place where many of my old righteous buddies might better be seen as scary misanthropes who aren’t acting out any kind of fantasy i can imagine having in the first place.
travis bickle, i’m talking to you.
and thanks for standing up for victoria principal-i’ve liked her since her first film, the life and times of judge roy bean.
If there is a wedding at the end of the first act, someone must get shot by then end of the third act?
Interesting analysis of the difference between series and movie. I don’t know how messy SATC episodes were, really, as opposed to serial — to keep you coming back from week to week. These long-form HBO narratives are now getting us all to recognize movies for the bite-sized narratives they’ve always been.
My Susan, life partner extraordinaire, got wrangled into seeing SatC over the weekend. She reported, “There were only two men in the theater and everyone was dressed up. It was an event.”
Nice piece, and I love how you wrap it up with a Carrie-esque ‘brunch question.’ Since most of my friends are fictional, I try not to chase them away.
The Great Brain was one of my earliest best friends, but he was always one-upping the Mormon kids, which left me a bit conflicted. We still hang out some times, except now I am the one trying to figure out how outsmart the Mormon kids.
Leslie Burke was my first girlfriend (Bridge to Terabithia). That didn’t end well.
After Leslie, I romanced a fair share of elves and halve-elves, but never a halfling or dwarf (the hairy feet thing was too much for my young sensibilities, but things might be different now). I remember none of their names, but boy were they great in bed!
Scully made me reconsider my views on redheads, and Mulder made me reconsider my views on men. I couldn’t figure out who was sexier, and then I stopped carrying. Now we never talk, and when I flip past a rerun on the Sci-Fi channel I quickly move along and hope that neither saw me.
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are my two best friends in the world these days. I think they really get me, and God knows how they have made these last eight years bearable.
Bo Diddley, RIP.
OK, so I did watch the first season of SatC (with, mostly, much shame and guilty pleasure) and sporadic episodes after (with rapidly waning interest), and I was always struck by how conflicted the show seemed. Or, perhaps, in denial? These are supposedly modern women, but they were also obsessed with men and shopping and in many ways seemed not so modern at all. Ultimately, Carrie’s pursuit of Big makes her character seem like some pre-second-wave-feminist stereotype–as if what she’s really pursuing is trophy-wife status, to have everything provided for her (including the glorious Manhattan apartment) by a wealthy business man… Btw, I hadn’t heard anything about the ending (thanks for, like, totally ruining it!)–I wonder if this is what was always supposed to happen to Carrie, as envisioned by the writers of the show, or if, in their desire to cash in, they basically had to adhere to the conventions of Hollywood movies in, as you mentioned, creating a Cinderella, fairytale ending.)
Anyway, what I really wanted to say is–are movies 14 dollars now?
Furthermore: are you taking over the Monday GW spot or just filling in today?
did anyone see the Times review of this movie? It was pretty harsh.
pretty harsh
first line: “A little Botox goes a long way in Sex and the City, but a little decent writing would have gone even further.”
I really like the question you posit, both for its paralleling the standard post-intro question Carrie poses every episode and for its probing our relationships with fictional characters.
Personally, I would follow Philip Marlowe into a darkened alley where there’s a corpse with a coupla slugs in him, but I’ve never been able to follow him down the coast to La Jolla, where Chandler set his last completed novel. I mean, c’mon! Marlowe eat, breathes, and smokes LA.
Also, I loved that you corrected the spelling of VC’s name.
JZ, Friday prime-viewing movies at the Arclight are 14 smackers. At other times, they’re slightly cheaper.
I second the Z-man’s question, Dorothy: is the Gale just blowing through, or is she here to stay a while? There’s no place like home!
This Gale will blow through every other Monday, hopefully in a pair of ruby red slippers.
It is odd that Carrie doesn’t do much writing in the flick — she doesn’t ask a question, as she did each week on the boob tube (as the television is ever more appropriately called). I wonder if that would’ve helped the structure of the film more, though I doubt it.
There are some other choice reviews here (Where it is retitled “The Lying, the Bitch, and the Wardrobe”) and here (where Jennifer Hudson’s role as Carrie’s assistant and magical negro is discussed — a whole other can of worms) and here, (where the girls say what they miss from the film was well… all the talking the girls used to do).
There have also been various comments on SJP herself that seem perhaps unduly mean (”She puts the horse back in clothes horse”) and this screed from Rex in the City about the “wart” on her face — yet the movie as well has little intolerance for the female form — Miranda’s weight gain is a sure sign she should be single. But, as JZ points out, when isn’t the show a series of mixed messages? (JZ, apologies for the spoliers).
Anthony Lane nails my reaction to the whole series: “I walked into the theatre hoping for a nice evening and came out as a hard-line Marxist.”
I was partial to this sentence of his: “Mirth is unconfined.”
Also: Welcome, Dorothy! The title of this post has been giving me an unpleasant, itchy pain in my teeth all day. Well done!
So nobody has asked yet: if Victoria Principal is your second-favorite Dallas star, who is your favorite?
Oh, I was all about Lucy Ewing. I Love Lucy.
Dorothy, your image for Lucy doesn’t work.
Kate, just right click on Gale’s link, choose “Copy Image location”, and then paste into your address box.
(If you want to see a picture of Lucy Ewing I mean.)
Dorothy - welcome and fantastic debut, you are able to write for both the SatC experts and the cheapskates without HBO with equal relevance unlike most TV to Movie scripts. I hope you stay (are we home or Oz? Just wondering.) forever!!
PS - Comment #3 is my favorite comment of all time - Rogan, I think you may be my soulmate and not even know it yet. Let’s have brunch.
PB, this is the Emerald City.
Does that make you, our beloved editor and Supreme Agent Provocateur, the Great and Terrible Oz?
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Senator, I served with the magnificent Oz. I knew Oz; Oz was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no magnificent Oz.
18. Any time PB. Photo-safari, brunch, whatever. I’m game.
perhaps this post should’ve been titled “Big Mistake”