From BLM to LGBT+: why Sex and the City will need a 2020 rethink
Sex and the City is back, with a new name – And Just Like That … – and a new cast, which is to say, the old cast, minus Samantha (Kim Cattrall). Anyone who is surprised to see them recovered from the bruising experience of the movie sequel just has too long a memory. Sex and the City 2 was more than 10 years ago. The statute of limitations on awful moments in culture has long since expired.
To revisit that film for a second, though, its flaw was neither the excruciating dialogue nor the amateurish, uncertain plot; rather, its gorging consumerism, the signature shoefetishism of the series applied to every known item that a woman could buy. It held up a mirror to 21st-century excess and nobody, but nobody, liked what they saw. One IMDb reviewer called it a “terrorist motivational tool”. (In this it had a lot in common with the third volume of Fifty Shades of Grey; I have thoughts on that segue, from genuine lust to a sad, consumer simulacrum, as a metaphor for late capitalism, but I’m saving those for my PhD.) In the series itself, the shopping element was more of a running joke, a self-deprecating nod to the fact that intelligent, empowered, evolved women can still do really stupid things, such as spending their lunch money on earrings. There is no reason for the film to have stained the televisual side of the franchise.
Yet how will a show created at the apex of the 90s play in the 2020s? One wag on Twitter pointed out that the age of the characters – 52 – is the same of that as Blanche in The Golden Girls, but I think we can feel relatively confident that they won’t have receded into the classic post-menopausal territory, someone-else’s-aunt (nor did they, in fairness, in The Golden Girls). One thing about SATC that you had to admit, even if you hated it, was that it always took a proposition that would normally turn a woman into an antiheroine – promiscuity, ambition – and reworked it as something to be celebrated.
Yet the world has changed in important ways, and the race politics of And Just Like That… will have to up its game if it is to seem as anything other than a period piece. Cynthia Nixon, who played Miranda, has said as much already in interviews. Sex and the City was considered too white even when it was made. I remember interviewing Cattrall in the early 00s, and saying that what I found odd about the show was that there didn’t seem to be much friendship between the genders. Immediately defensive, she countered: “I don’t have very many black girlfriends. Most of my friends are from very similar backgrounds. A lot of people have said, ‘Why don’t you have an AfroAmerican [friend]?’, but that’s not what this story is about.” It was a fantastically weird response to a charge I hadn’t made (this show is very white because I don’t have any black friends). But the rest of the cast, Nixon especially, were very receptive to the criticism, and later vocal allies of the Black Lives Matter movement. And Just Like That … is un