Between Reviews: Relax, it’s just… Sex
RELAX, IT’S JUST… SEX
JUNE 22, 2008 - THE RELEASE OF THE SEX AND THE CITY MOVIE has left a few American critics with the perplexing need to confess to (a) being male, and (b) being, therefore, wholly incapable of comprehending the water-cooler phenomenon that the TV show once was (and that the film now is). With Horton Hears a Who!, for instance, you wouldn’t find a male critic admitting to being, well, too “adult” to equitably parse the animated feature for merits and demerits, because the wholesome underlying assumption is that there’s a child inside all of us, whereas enjoying the adventures of Carrie & Company might imply something far more terrifying – that, perhaps, there’s a woman inside each one of us.
Even a decade ago – when men weren’t as brand conscious as women, or as adoptive of earrings, or heck, as likely to pencil into their diaries a waxing appointment – this attitude would have been understandable, but today, it’s hard to see what the fuss is all about, especially when women critics don’t seem to find the need to broadcast their femininity while brooding over the latest blow-things-up blockbuster. They appear far more comfortable with the it’s-just-a-movie notion, that putting yourself through two hours of Michael Bay doesn’t quite mean you’re going to wake up next morning with a hairy beer gut and the overwhelming itch to scratch your privates in public. It is, of course, natural to gravitate towards certain kinds of entertainment, but doesn’t being a critic mean you keep open not only your eyes but your mind?
I guess I got into these thoughts because we live in India, where – at least with respect to popular culture – we barely think about gender-appropriateness. This is, after all, a country where you’d sooner find a road free of potholes than a college photograph of young men who aren’t throwing their arms around one another, where adult males think nothing of bouncing about in brightly coloured kurtas, where Shah Rukh Khan, our top male star, has zero qualms about sliding into a bathtub littered with rose petals, and where the most popular genre of filmmaking is the lachrymal romance. It’s hard to get overly into gender-dictated modes of movie-watching in a nation where the average male is as likely to leer hungrily at the slightest hint of rain-soaked cleavage as weep torrents over unrequited love.
What made the TV show work for me – a male who writes for a living and is inordinately fond of wordplay – was the inexhaustible supply of sexual puns that drove each episode (and I’m not even talking about the coinage of neologisms such as “teabagging,” though I must add that it’s impossible to look at the Taj Mahal TV commercials with a straight face after you’ve heard Samantha put a characteristically salty spin on this most innocent of breakfast-table staples.) At its best, Sex and the City was a sweetly witty sitcom, where a typical rat-a-tat exchange went along these lines: city girls Carrie and Samantha are sulking about roughing it out in the countryside, when a handsome bloke tootles up in a tractor; the perpetually horny Samantha wonders who that could be; “Young MacDonald?” Carrie suggests, as Samantha positively purrs in appreciation, “Ee-eye-ee-eye-oh!”
Even without all this wink-nudge, locker-room dirty talk, there was a lot in Sex and the City that men could identify with – the fact that Carrie was a smoker whose dates detested the habit, the fact that Samantha preferred flings to committed relationships, the fact that one of Carrie’s boyfriends, a struggling writer, couldn’t handle her success as a writer (hello, Abhimaan), and, oh, the fact that Carrie had uncontrollable bodily functions. The latter revelation may not warrant a “Eureka!” but you have to admit that pop-culture representations of women are typically along the lines of the Archie comic strip, where, on an impossibly hot day, the evergreen teenager asks his women friends if they’re as sweaty as he is, and he’s silenced by this Veronica Lodge putdown: “Women don’t sweat, Archie. They, ah… perspire.”
And here’s Carrie, this exotic, fashionable, New York creature who doesn’t just sweat, but… farts. So, yes, the show may have gone on about fashion and labels and high heels and other one-gender-specific magnets, but the scraps that remained were hardly exclusive of male interest. So what a pity, then, that the Sex and the City movie is – as those male critics denounced it – strictly for the ladies. Take away the fashion and the labels and the high heels – which I doubt even the women over here will lapse into ecstasies over; it’s all too weird and couturey and out-there – and it’s too long, too uneventful, too deplorably zinger-free. But there is one spectacular moment with Samantha, when she breaks off a relationship with a workaholic because she’s tired of pottering about an empty home. Her parting words – “I love you, but I love me more” – resonate true, loud and clear, a self-aware clarion call for those that perspire as well as those that simply sweat.
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brangan: What a riot of a read this one was — I rapaciously ripped it to shreds, yessss! And who cares if I were sitting at the library — and not the lounge of a nightclub –right now, all coz your server has chosen to play hard-to-get with my router at home, yet again.
To think I’m yet to watch a single episode of Sex and the City (thanks to our home being a TV-free — more importantly, HBO-free — zone since the last six years or so, until just last month when I threw in the towel and said: I love the movies way too much to banish them to the garage!). You just made me wanna rush to rent the DVD (not the movie, but the series…Gotta start at the very beginning of the wordplay-is-foreplay, risque-is righteous phenomenon that also just happens to be penciled into some of our collective consciousness already). Thanks for this wonderful roadmap on what really resonates about the series, and by extension, the movie.
i knew you’d do an awesome job reviewing this! haha, totally loved the ‘hello, abhimaan’ bit…paragraph 3 is a real eye-opener in terms of how different the typical American male is as opposed to the typical Indian male…i loved the satc series for all the same reasons you did…but the movie turned out to be too girly even for the girls! awesome review - totally loved it.
Sagarika: Thanks.
SB: Hey, thanks - you’re the one who suggested the topic by the way. So thanks for that too
As for the film, “too girly even for the girls” is a great summation. I’d have written it, but didn’t want to risk the one gender-specific bashing 
Guys have action movies to indulge their macho impulses, so girls use movies like this to vicariously shop for shoes
I didn’t realize the show was the origin for the term “teabagging” ! If its the Taj Mahal commercial for you, its the gym for me. The joke never seems to get old for the guy spotting you on the bench press. The show was always about Samantha for me. I’m pretty sure if I get around to watching the movie, it will be about her too. I used to get a lot of crap from my buddies for watching the show, but its dynamite conversation material, whether its at the water cooler or at the wine cooler.
And in other news today the GRCA along with the PETM (People for Ethical treatment of Men) would like to register its complaint against the shabby treatment of Aidan Shaw
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Can I just say thank you for the article!
None of my male friends have ever followed the series or watched the movie and every time we have a discussion about it, I end up saying you would like it if you get over the sex part. I could never put in as many words what it was I liked about the show.
I loved the movie thoroughly and have a feeling even my husband enjoyed the experience. Although true to his genes, he vehemently denies liking the movie
brangan: “..enjoying the adventures of Carrie & Company might imply something far more terrifying – that, perhaps, there’s a woman inside each one of us.” You needed Carrie & Company to cork open that wine bottle of realization for you?
What about Mr.Vairamuthu penning poetry in your very own backyard? And to think that when you’d confessed to realizing there may be a man hiding inside each woman (Of Thamarai’s words in VV, you wrote “…she writes about love from a man’s point of view, ‘Vaa vandhu ennai sernthidu, en tholgalil theynthidu.’ He isn’t merely asking his lover for an embrace; he’s asking her for an embrace so tight, she’ll abrade away against his shoulders”), I’d naively presumed you were channeling its much-softer, woman-inside-man equivalent from Vairamuthu’s “manadhai thazhuvum oru ambbaanaai” (yes, Sangamam’s Sowkiyamaa).
On a similar note, to your “Could a man have confessed to yearnings such as ‘oru porvaikkul iru thookkam,’ indicating that love, sometimes, is simply a couple’s shared slumber under a sheet?” — Certainly not. And btw, the woman inside Vairamuthu had already, if ever-so-softly, sung the answer to that, several years prior, in (the National-Award-winning song lyric) Mudhal Murai: “…oru vidhai uyir kondadhu, aanaal, iru nejil ver kondathu.”
And on an unrelated-to-the-point-above-but-related-to-the-post note, your “Ee-eye-ee-eye-oh” offered such a beautiful tangent to (and if raj is still in a “shall skewer if you read more than the creator intends” mode, he’ll surely vote to banish me from this blog) Enigma’s Return to Innocence. Thank you…haven’t heard that song in almost a decade.
Deepauk M: Did I actually just bear witness to the breaking of rule #1 — of the-organization-that-must-not-be-named — by its very maker, the rule-is-not-for-the-maker adage notwithstanding?:-)
And I bet you PETM was coined by some ignoramus who was wholly unaware of the ubiquity of its parent organization (yes, all the world needs is just one more PETA offshoot).
Ravi K: Hmmm… another thesis statement. This blog is attracting a lot of them these days
Deepauk M: bench press? haven’t stopped laughing at that…
Never Mind: “None of my male friends have ever followed the series” That’s what you think
sagarika, who is going to succeed in banishing you from this blog? Not BR, certainly not me
i saw the film yesterday and i have never followed the tv show….something clicked in the film for me…i found the movie to be entertaining and i enjoyed the 2:15 minutes show thoroughly…
Arijit: Really? Didn’t do it for me at all…
Rangan: Thanks… Wait are you laughing at what I said or ” Neeyellam bench press…” ?
Sagarika: The GRCA decided to make a rare public appearance in support of Aidan (You’ll understand why when you catch up with the TV Series). Ignoramus? hmm…
Deepauk M: Wasn’t meaning that - though, now that I think of it, that’s funny too
Wow i have to say something on Sex and the City too. Holly crap, the TV show is just damn good. I’m not a big fan-atic of the serie, i’ve not seen every episode day by day, season by season, but every time i’ve decided to watch one, it was like a big dose of fresh air. And it’s not just because i fell in love thanks to Carry with Jimmy Choo, with New York City and all, it’s because… it’s so rare today to see on TV 40 year old girls having a real, passionate and fascinating life. And i’m not 30 year old yet ! I just don’t fear that moment of my life anymore.
I have to say frankly that i’m fed of all those teen movies, teen heroes, teen singers, teen crap ! Even spiderman looked younger than me of 10 years; thk god Harry Potter is no more; superman had no sex appeal at all and was a beardless inexpressiv metro non sexual guy ; the hero in the “World of Narnia” is a 27 (!) year old guy who forgot to drink milk to grow up… i mean com’on !!
To conlude : dam*, i have to see that movie LOL !
Why don’t you do a column on ABBA now that the songs are being featured on http://www.mammamiamovie.com/? Would love a trip down memory lane….
SheWhoMustNotBeNamed: Maybe after the film is released, for old times’ sake…
SheWhoMustNotBeNamed/brangan: What???!! They are ACTUALLY releasing an ABBA movie this summer? I HAD NO FREAKING IDEA!! OMG, what a fairytale of a preview that one was - thanks for the link. And oh, how I LOVE Meryl Streep! I saw The French Lieutenant’s Woman earlier this year and…she BLEW ME AWAY. Was wondering what role they were gonna fashion for her after The Devil Wears Prada (my most recent MS movie) - and this seems like just the ball she might enjoy knocking right out of the planet!
Can’t wait for July 18 now - nostalgia ad infinitum (and here’s one of the reasons why): We have a 5-disc CD changer at home (yes, some of us are spoilt beyond measure, I know) and disc #4 has — ever since I bought myself the ABBA GOLD CD in 2000 — been permanently reserved for dispensing daily doses of Mamma Mia (for me) and Super Trooper (for the kids).
brangan: Now that your “blanket judger” has been straightened out, we’re all pretty eager to see your It’s Pop, Not Paap - Part 2. Bring it on! And in case no one told you this before, your ABBA anecdote from ‘04 is the very definition of LOL: “I argued to an ABBA-loving friend that the group was possibly the silliest in terms of lyrics, offering ironclad evidence with these lines from One Man, One Woman: “Our love is a precious thing/ Worth a plane and a submarine.” A-ha, that’ll show him, I thought, until he told me what the words really were – “Worth the pain and the suffering” – and proceeded to attack his dinner, leaving me quite full with the serving of egg on my face.”
Finally i’ve watched it and i felt… not disappointed but not satisfied either. Why ? Because the tone of the TV Show is more grave. Men could easily watch it and understand their pain because of their age, or when they are cheated or unsatisfied by their brief romance, or lost when they make their boyfriend suffer etc… . And they talk about so many things beyond man and woman relationship, even through the silliest story … When you see that missing, you realise that one of the biggest opportunity for us to make understand that there’s no real woman’s world, no real bareer between man and woman (just a different way to express or feel our common emotions) is lost.
Big Letdown : their stylist. I think Manish Malhotra took them all in hostage and made them wear the weirdest clothes i’d ever seen.
Good point : those blue Manolo shooes were hot
(and please don’t say that only girls can appreciate good shoes !!)
Would you say Borat was an either-gender film??
Zap: That’s for everyone, I’d think — everyone who can take that kind of humour