Warning (if you care): Plot Spoilers Follow

How I came to see Sex And The City is irrelevant, other than to say it was caused by an injured sister-in-law, pre-paid tickets, and me being a wonderful husband who would crawl across broken glass for my lovelywife. By the end of the evening I was wishing there’d just been some broken glass, or perhaps a cheese-grater with which I could masturbate.

I counted nine HABs (Husbands And Boyfriends) in the entire cinema. We exchanged sympathetic and vaguely embarrassed glances, all of us wondering if we could dig a tunnel and escape to a pub.

Now don’t get the idea that I went in with a totally negative attitude; despite its lack of explosions and Bruce Willis, I always found SATC amusing, and it was handy to have some kind of a window into the world of women’s brains. I lost interest toward the end, though, when all the girls started to lose their edge, the humour was old, and I got sick of Carrie going back to Big.

More of that later, let’s talk about the movie.

It’s not giving anything away to say that it’s centred around Carrie and Big’s wedding, and gee whiz it doesn’t all go smoothly, and of course the other three chicks will have their own little dramas, but it’ll end up perfect for everyone. It’s also no secret that the movie has paid for itself before even selling a single ticket, because the product placement and brand-name recital must have been worth a zillion bucks. The Chanel shopping bags carefully loaded into the back of Samantha’s Mercedes, the Mercedes Fashion Week scene, the quasi-religious chanting of Louis Vuitton, the omnipresent Starbucks cups. The cynicism is just breath-taking.

When Carrie was modelling wedding dresses, and reverently intoning the designers’ names, I started wondering if there had been some kind of pay-scale for the order they were mentioned in, how many seconds their dress was shown and so on, then I thought: how dumb am I? Of course there was. This movie was all about cashing in.

Before I really launch into my tirade, I have to admit that there were a few good moments. Miranda and Steve getting back together after a nasty breakup almost had my eyes misting up. Steve’s a great character who was always, in my view, deliberately written into the sidelines because he was the only likeable person, male or female, in the whole series.

There’s a diahorrea joke which, while pretty funny, really should’ve gone on a lot longer (they obviously hadn’t taken notes from Dumb and Dumber).

There’s a small dog which humps everything it sees, and that’s mildly amusing.

Samantha has a male model living next to her, and he gets to shag lots of hot chicks and we get to watch. That was pretty cool.

Charlotte’s twee little anal-retentive princess thing really jars, but she gets some of the best scenes, particularly the couple of times she fronts Big after the wedding disaster.

One really good thing was how they were prepared to show a bunch of women in their forties actually looking like they’re in their forties (except Kristin Davis, of course, who still looks twenty-four; I have this nightmare where all her years catch up to her in one minute, like that Raiders Of The Lost Ark scene). It was the one hint of realism in the whole thing, the admission that a forty-three year old woman who’s had her heart broken and has done nothing but sleep for three days is going to look like shit. Big thumbs up for that.

So to the major issues in SATC, and why I hated it. The less said about the Magic Negro Woman the better.

There.

Miranda is being a total bitch, working all the time, snapping at Steve, and they’re not having sex. Steve cheats on her, once, and confesses, giving the reason that, well, they weren’t having sex, and it was just one time, and he loves her and he’s sorry. Ouch. They separate. The other girls are supportive, but the message sent is that it was all her fault; she was a bitch for not putting out, and she’s being more of a bitch for not forgiving him for what was just basic male behaviour, apparently. I thought we’d evolved beyond “Keep on shaggin, sisters, or he’ll go out and get it somewhere else” as a basis for a happy marriage.

Now I hinted earlier that I really don’t like the Big/Carrie thing. He gets touted as the Bad Boy who can be tamed, or some kind of Prince Charming fantasy. What he really is, is a vacant, distant, emotional cipher, with a lot of money, no friends (um, where’s your Best Man, ya gimp?), and nothing to offer except a cocked eyebrow, lame one-liners, and pain.

He leads her on, abandons her, stands her up, plays with her, cheats on his wife with her, and has made her utterly insecure and dependent on him. And I hate him for that. Not because I particularly like Carrie, but because there are thousands of men like him out there, hurting and ruining women for us good men. We should get together and beat the motherfuckers to death.

So he pulls the ultimate Big Bastard Act on her, and leaves her stranded on her wedding day, with only a phone call: “I don’t think I can go through with this”. Not because he’s fallen out of love with her (again), or because he’s realised he really doesn’t want to commit (again), or he’s in love with someone else (again), it’s just a little bit of stage fright, disguised as “Is it still going to be the real us?”

So once again his feelings matter more, and Carrie’s destroyed. At this point I just knew I was going to get very angry, because I knew she was going to take him back, in typical Big/Carrie fashion. And I was right.

The ultimate message of this film is this: do what you want to her. Hurt her, manipulate her, humiliate her. Destroy her. Keep her weak and vulnerable and dependant on you, and you can get away with anything. You can fix it with any kind of second-hand romantic gesture, and she’ll find a way to forgive you, and she’ll be back, right where you want her, ready for the next time.

Yes, it’s only a movie, but we’re better than this, aren’t we?

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