Reading Sex and the City (Reading Contemporary Television)
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 1850434239
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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when it happens in Big’s limousine, is intense and unapologetic. This sexual attraction highlights how powerless Carrie is to Big’s phallic masculinity, which works primarily at a libidinal level. From that first untamed encounter where Carrie wears ‘the naked dress’, theirs is an uninhibited sexual relationship, an attraction that Carrie abandons herself to repeatedly. Like cigarettes, the rush she gets from Big is an addiction that she cannot control. While she initially worries their
hundred dollars on a pair of Manolo Blahnik strappy sandals’ (25) but their male counterparts are richer still, rendering the beautiful and successful women they sleep with successors of earlier urban courtesans – prosperous and feted, but only as long as age and appearance permit. The columns’ opening references to The Age of Innocence and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) announce their literary (or more probably cinematic) sources, but they also signal the continuing dependence of her urban women,
signature cocktail, the cosmopolitan, which ironically also became New York’s hometown cocktail in the late 1990s. The series’ fear-and-fantasy of prostitution continued into season three, in ‘Running with Scissors’ (3:11), the opening sequence of which details the declining venues for Carrie’s and Big’s clandestine affair: roses and champagne at a pricier hotel degenerate into cheese crackers at a hotel at 56th and Eighth, a corner of New York where no one knows them: ‘Our affair, like our
ever heard?’ Coming from Samantha, the most sexually adventurous of the quartet and the closest to being a queer mouthpiece, this is disingenuous. It is notable that for this episode, the taxpaying citizen’s sex, in contrast to the exotic queer sex on offer in the street below, is especially vanilla: it involves the missionary position, a generic hunk, and an insistence on Samantha’s concentration. Is Samantha’s restlessness created by the sex workers’ distraction, or merely fuelled by it? Her
friends above all else. Their stories dominate, and the audience becomes absorbed in what these four girls will do, and the serious issues that could be found in the earliest episodes are not tackled to the same degree and in the same form in the later ones. 158 N E U ROT I C I N N E W YO R K This is especially the case in matters of visual style. Even in the fourth and fifth seasons, Sex and the City is well shot, with generally strong writing (another trait of Allen’s, obviously), but the