Over the holidays I had a semi-heated discussion with friend on the merits of Sex and the City. He hated and thought it just a half-hour of product placement. I defended it, not too articulately. In hindsight, I realized I don’t mind the show’s consumerism — unlike true product placement which tries to add glamour to dull products by associating the film or TV narrative with them, SATC was initially at least about using consumer products to lend glamour to the narrative. In that regard, it mimicked (self-consciously) the role that consumer products play in the lives of singletons, particularly straight women and gay men, and the quasi-utopian character they lend. It’s like Sister Carrie found an echo a century later in Carrie Bradshaw.
But if it were merely that, the show wouldn’t work as soap opera or comedy, nor would it encapsulate gay subcultural identity so well. So I was pleased with Francine’s latest post summarizing the show:
After all, SATC was a big hit with the ladies, who identified with Carrie and her friends’ search for heterosexual companionship in the big city, but less popular with their boyfriends. And let’s not ignore how popular the show was with the gay boys. Why? Simply, that chatty foursome were gay men in women’s bodies. No show on television boasted a more gay sensibility than SATC, what with the alternative friends-as-family model, the bitchyness, and the serial boyfriendizing.
She brings it up to wonder about the representational possibilities for female desire in SATC and the L Word. Admittedly, I’ve not gotten into the latter show (essentialist reasons? You decide.). But in many ways it’s the anti-Sex and the City as much as it’s marketed as the lesbian Sex and the City. And it’s fascinating as ego-ideal if not (for me) as id.
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