A Film Canon

The most overrated series of the 00s, Sex And The City is less about feminism than commodity fetishism, less a liberating elaboration of sexual positions than a neoliberal elaboration of consumer positions. As such, it correctly identifies the image as the new millenium's foundational commodity, with a radically denuded script, characterisation and narrative trajectory leaving nothing but a series of poses to be co-opted and memorised. Not only does the preponderance of breathless close-ups trap the viewer between the four central women and whatever consumer object happens to be within the purview of their gaze - the claustrophobia of late capitalism - but the majority of each episode is taken up by Carrie Bradshaw's (Sarah Jessica Parker's) inane monologues, which, like the column that she writes, and from which the show derives it's name, invariably analyse or even simply describe what is happening in a clumsy, absolutely redunant way; idiotic discursion. Even the show's own sly recognition of itself as trash isn't redemptive, insofar as all four women work in a quaternary sector whose central recognition is that trash constitutes the most appealing, seductive, and ultimately marketable surplus value. Admittedly, the frankness with with sex is discussed, and brutality with which men are objectified, is novel, and occasionally delightful, but series creator Darren Star too often falls short of Seinfeld's repellent foursome - upon which the women are surely modelled - and, more specifically, that show's magnificent ability to offset the banality and even repellence of the characters' conversational content with the ingenuity and generosity of their conversational style itself.