Subject: [Marxism] Apropos Sex and the City Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 07:24:49 -0800 (PST) From: eiza segal <eizeiza at yahoo.com
Carlos,apropos Sex and the City:
it's indisputably true that the gals in Carrie Bradshaw's picaresque tales of Manhattan, are somewhat crippled by the great invisible, cast-iron corset of repression which they all wear like girdles of glory. But not only is that self-punishing trait apparent in the way that Carrie B. deals with cigarettes (as you point out) I think it also informs alot more besides ,including the attraction to cold, self-regarding men that afflicts all these characters.
The big problem for us outside the US is how to handle the puritan streak in the characters (it's in that tendency to define people via their social size--mr. Big--or rank --"he was an investment banker from out of town...".as if it were completely normal.) I"ve noticed that puritan element in even the most cheeky and irreverent of comedy series from the US and to a lesser extent Britain.......it's there in Seinfield as well as Will and Grace, the Golden Girls, Queer as Folk..... for all their wild erotic escapades and blunt talk, characters seem oddly horrified by basic bodily functions and attributes.. fat, lapses of hygiene, cheap apartments..baldness, false teeth,signs of aging, poverty, failure.
I still have not recovered from the episode where all the women in SAC seemed equally as appalled as Charlotte, by the idea of a man who is uncircumcised. Charlotte's uncut partner eventually submits to the chopper in order to please his future sexual partners. Why bother? As I recall, there is not a glimmer of consciousness evident anywhere in this episode , that the prejudice against prepuce is peculiar. Where else on earth would sassy, secular-minded, cosmopolitan women of independent means, treat uncut men with such disdain?
Mind you,I too (along with legions of gay men) often watch this programme. I like the frankness, the witty, bawdy repartee that passes for bonding between women. It's both tonic and funny. But like you I find my amusement too often tempered by disappointment. At the oddest moments the characters just sink into the big , brown, bleary bog of conventional angst without a fight. There is Samantha the libertine, our answer to Don Giovanni, suddenly fretting herself into a major depression because menopause is imminent. What garbage. Or worse still, following and spying on her wayward lover like some besotted harpie. Is the great American tradition of sexy female jesters so soon forgotten? Mae West and Sophie Tucker, where are they now that we really need them?? I cannot imagine Diamond Lil taking these guys so seriously or giving a damn about the onset of middle age. Didn't SHE leave any crumbs of mockery for the current crop of funny girls? I wish that an occasional episode of SAC would confront womens' problems with a bit more of that defiant, bohemian audacity---sorry that's not quite it(??)which Mae and Sophie embodied. Whatever you want to call it, it was a great weapon in the war against those legions of wowsers and sanctimonious hypocrites that they waged to the end of their days.
Of course SAC does not pretend to have a leftish-slant or an anti-authoritarian slant or a good old , robust, working class slant on sex like the old music hall comics and vaudevillians. It does not take a really satirical approach to the Manhattan socialites and try to puncture the pretensions of the rich and powerful, but despite that, it could have at least once or twice, posed a question about those awful petit bourgeois assumptions that burden its characters - their notions about borrowing money, mothers in law, religion, bedding very young and very old men , notions about farting, flirting, being an artist, privacy, bleeding, scolding domestic servants, marrying, monogamy, jealousy et al.
Maybe the real problem is that none of the characters work at anything they take pride in. That would help wouldn't it? You notice early on that the writer, the lawyer, the P.R. dynamo and expert on modern art never ever have serious conversations about their purported areas of expertise. None of them are intellectually engaged by what they do for a living. Why not? I'm sure it could be done. There was a movie years ago, French Canadian called something like Decline of the American Empire, full of bright (though serious) discussion of road kill we meet via sex drive. FABULOUS MOVIE full of troubled, though unrepentant intellectuals. These people expressed ideas, argued, remonstrated with each other, analysed things.They talked about their work as academics. It was in the end a marvellous homage to the abiding value of friendship. See if you can get hold of it sometime, Carlos.
One day it will be possible for someone to make the great feminist comedy that Sex and the City should have been. It may even be set in the USA, after all one of the best movies ever made about sex and death was Harold and Maude. It had the ineffable Ruth Gordon in the main role as a geriatric anarchist. (Gordon made her name years before in writing great scripts for Tracy and Hepburn).Harold and Maude, as I recall was far more shocking in many ways than SAC and more productively provocative. A chunk of it,namely the wedding night scene, was sliced right out by the puritan censor when it was shown here the first time.The idea of intimacy between the 80 year old woman and the 18 year old boy was just too,too appalling to allow, for Harold (unlike Samantha) did not recoil and flee from the old and dying person beside him in the bed . Butfinally,back to the point about women, self-loathing , repression, Taylorism and Henry Ford: If you are correct about Taylorism and the work ethic as the unspoken ideology driving these episodes of Sex and the City, why is it that we see just as much if not more female masochism in the popular shows from our non-protestant cousins?
None of the self-repressing behaviour in Carrie Bradshaw's world even begins to compare with the endless, silent, purgatorial pain, enjoyed by the heroines of the popular Latin American and Middle Eastern soap operas whichI've seen here. I remember 2 in particular that caught an enormous cult following in the 1980's. Both "Rosa de Lejos" from Argentina and "Cueva de Lobos" from Mexico , showed us simple, trusting gals, seduced by handsome cads and wastrels from the higher echelons of society. After having bastard children and realising that they had been duped by the scoundrels, the women slowly (in a somewhat bovine stupor)overcome adversity and settle down triumphant in the end. Although the characters were not afflicted with the traits of puritanism that we saw in Carrie's Manhattan friends and lovers, both programmes taught us that it took years (if not decades) of penance and exquisitely borne humiliation to clear us of the stain of our sex.
They taught us that mature contentment with a sincere though stolid man may one day be possible, if we are lucky.We must endure patiently and forfeit ugly urges we may feel toward those who exploit or injure us. Part of the reason Rosa acquired a cult following here was because people were stunned by the sheer perversity of the virtuous characters , their improbable dialogue, luminous imbecility and unconcealed Oedipus complexes. Certain critics speculated about the connections between Argentina's sadistic military junta ,which recycled propaganda from the Third Reich , which tortured young people before hurling them alive out of aeroplanes .......and the masochistic values extolled by soap operas like Rosa de Lejos? Interesting stuff. I could never quite work it out.
Can you see a connection here with Henry Ford and Taylorism or the dictates of Friedman and the Chicago school of economists? If so, do tell.
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Carlos Eduardo Rebello <crebello at antares.com.br wrote:
From: Louis Proyect : <<Sex and the City I would also have to confess that I became a big fan of this show over the past few months.<<
I too, Louis, I too...But in my case that had perhaps more to do with the fact that I begen watching the show justly after I had watched my last Xena episode, therefore I had some kind of a craving for a women-centered show. Well, I believe S& TC fares badly in comparision.
Since I wrote I whole book on Mass Culture centered on Xena, I think I should be able to explain the reasons for my particular preferences. What made for me the charm of Xena was its unbalenced character, the fact that the abduction of the heroine as a lesbian icon by the show's fandom left its writers and producers threading on very thin ice in their attitude towards postmodern petit-bourgeois radicalism, eventually failing to justify their (conventional)closing of the show by making Xena dye for the Greater
Good - and heterosexual morals.
Nothing of this kind is to be found in Sex and the City, which is the usual portraying of the _via crucis_ of four dysfunctional females struggling towards their final - and willingly - acceptance of monogamy and family values, admittedly with some good jokes in-between (most of them, by the way, vernacular and leaving me somwhat at a loss as far as prompt understanding is concerned). As far as I'm concerned, my interst in S & TC began to flag somewhere during the third season, when character Carrie Bradshaw decided to quit smoking in order to get back her romantic interest Aidan ( a good decision prompted by the most obnoxious, priggish reasons, to say the least).
Those who, like Adorno & Horkheimer, resume Mass Culture under the notion of "mindless entertainment", seem to me to be unaware of the element of the pedagogics of suffering that's to be found in it, or better, what Gramsci called the ethics of Fordism, that's to say the huge amount of _internalized repression_ the lead-characters must self-inflict in order to arrive at the happy ending - the same pedagogy of suffering that seems at work in Mel Gibson's late cinematic rendering of Ultramontane Catholicism. As carrie Bradshaw must renounce tabagism for romantic love's sake, and Xena renounce Gabrielle for the Greater Good's, so Gibson's Christ must willingly embrace the most senseless torture in order to redeem Mankind (remember, by the way, that there were some very popular early heresies who, opposedly, made the Passion a sham by proposing that what had been crucified was Christ's ghost, and not the real Christ, as God cannot possibly suffer physical pain). It's in this pedagogy of suffering, perhaps, that reside the most obnoxiously reactionary traits of Mass Culture; as there is something akin in it to the acceptance of Taylorism and Henry Ford's social experiments by the working classes...
Carlos Rebello