Sex and the City's crass fairytale: a barman writes

“Customers—don’t serve them til you see the whites of their eyes, lads.”

These words of wisdom came from a colleague at a bookshop where I used to work part-time, and they rang in my head last week as I faced an army of women, all heels, elbows and attitude, stomping their way to the cinema bar where I work (also part-time) to lubricate their excitement at the prospect of Sex and the City 2. In the whites of these girls' eyes were cosmopolitan-fuelled sugar plum princesses, dancing in expensive shoes, dreaming of romantic love and material comfort.

Did I resent them, for taking the bar’s promotional slogan seriously and getting “Carried away” by ordering fourteen cocktails in one go? For getting huffy and clicking their heels twice if they didn’t get served in the order of their perceived importance within the group rather than the order of their appearance at the bar? Probably. But did I blame them for being spellbound by fairytale imagery? No.

Let me be clear: I’m a straight man who loves the TV series and so—according to what I have read—I am not supposed to exist. I could have happily challenged any one of my female customers to the Sex and the City board game I own and romped home victorious.

However, the films struck me as a bad idea from the start. Most TV shows that become movies undergo heavy reinvention (Charlie’s Angels, The Avengers, Bewitched) and even then they often fail. At least with the first film, Big and Carrie’s aborted wedding was a centrepiece to hang a theme on, but even then the cast behaved as if they had been coerced into a reunion and given the script for Carrie on—sorry—Carry on Abroad.

Of course, it matters not. In two bouts of cinemania that somehow put higher-grossing movies in the shade, women have turned out in their hundreds of thousands to watch the movies. I recall walking down the street where the cinema is when the first film was released and witnessing the huge outpouring of female cinema-goers. Seeing all these colourfully dressed ladies emerge gingerly from the exit made me think of someone slowly tipping a very large cocktail glass full of women down the street (an abstract image they might want to use on the promotional poster next time). This time around this liquid flow of cinema-goers met with a backwash of criticism that has poured in from newspapers and magazines and then a counter-motion to that, which has stopped short of praise for the film. One of SatC2’s scenes sees Carrie having a trademark anxiety attack about a review of her latest book in her beloved New Yorker magazine—but it’s as nothing to the real-life savaging of Sarah Jessica Parker’s oeuvre:

In the litany of quotes I could use from Andrew O’Hagan’s review in the Evening Standard, let’s cut to the final one, the money shot:

“This could be the most stupid, the most racist, the most polluting and women-hating film of the year, with a variety of ugliness that no number of facial procedures could begin to address.”

Philip French in The Observer, alluding to the girls’ trip to the UAE in the film:

“Most reasonable people would probably prefer to be stoned to death in Riyadh rather than see this film a second time.”

And then there’s Lindy West’s piece in Seattle’s arts newspaper, The Stranger, that has been gleefully passed around the webisphere:

“If this is what modern womanhood means, then just fucking veil me and sew up all my holes. Good night.”

Yowser, as Aidan would say. Was it deserved? Sex and the City 2 is plainly a bad movie. Miranda’s voice of liberal conscience notwithstanding, the trip to Abu Dhabi was a disaster waiting to happen, and has saddled the film with the hysterical baggage of anti-Muslim accusations as well as Carry on comparisons. It’s all down to one scene where a group of women divest themselves of their burkas to reveal the gaudy Western fashions they supposedly aspire to. It’s crass, but as people will tell you, such women exist. The problem is that this scene claims to speak for a majority of them.

In the TV series, Sam is at the centre of a comparable moment when she takes off the wig she has to wear because of her chemotherapy for breast cancer, and the women she is addressing at a cancer fundraiser follow suit in a sign of support. It’s cheesy, not crass, but the intent is the same as with the burka scene: unite the protagonists, uplift the audience. Of course, it’s a lot easier to be on the same side of an issue like cancer than religion. The ham-fisted approach found here was always bound to happen with a plot that at times could be likened to Sam herself approaching me in the cinema bar, shouting “Fuck the credit crunch, fuck religious sensitivity, where’s my fucking cosmopolitan?!”

There was, however, some solace in the two weeks of playing Steve the barman to the heaving masses of cinema-goers who were about to be disappointed by their heroines. After all, wouldn't I rather have women talk to me across the bar about what jeopardy they will need to invent to justify Sex and the City 3—my guess is that Carrie has a large family, Samantha becomes a bigamist, Miranda teaches Steve how be less like a wallflower and Charlotte turns to Islam—than have to talk to (mostly) men who are getting hard-ons about the latest use of gratuitous violence in a film and making tedious, deluded “pseud o’ liberal” justifications for it? You bet your cocktail-guzzling ass I would.