Things I Learned from Movie X:
Sex and the City 2
By Edwin Davies
December 24, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
That's better. Yes, Sex and the City 2: The Skankquel (as our own Reagan Sulewski dubbed it) is every bit as terrible as everyone says it is. It's a uniquely punishing and soul-destroying experience, and I say this as someone who has willingly sat through both Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom and Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen. Yet, despite its unmitigating awfulness, Sex and the City 2 can offer something to the willing student, such as:
As George Lucas is to Star Wars, so Michael Patrick King is to...
When the first Sex and the City movie was released in 2008, it knocked Indiana Jones and The Regrettable Franchise Extension off the top spot, in doing so sparking off hundreds of reductive articles about how Sex and the City fans seemed to be engaging in the sort of fanboy rush usually associated with traditional, geeky properties like Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Because, as we all know, no woman could or would ever be a fan of Star Wars. That's just flat out ridiculous. Anyway, the association between these two franchises which could not be more different has become stronger with Sex and the City 2, as Michael Patrick King, creator of the original series and writer-director of the two films, has wandered into the same creative cul-de-sac that George Lucas has found himself in since 1999. They often have each other over for tea and to discuss the ways in which they will tarnish their respective legacies.
When Lucas sought to relaunch the Star Wars franchise with The Phantom Menace, he took a long hard look at the original films, figured out what made them such memorable classics, and then discarded all of those elements in favor of empty spectacle. Fun, well-drawn characters and elemental plots were out, CGI monstrosities and trade disputes were in. King does much the same thing, except with Sex and the City 2 he jettisoned the well-drawn characterizations and genuine struggles that made so many people, including myself, fans of the series in the first place. (Though in my case it was more because I was a teenager and would watch anything with "Sex" in the title. This also explains why I read Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, despite it being unlike anything else I was reading at the time.) In place of the four iconic characters are shallow facsimiles obsessed with shoes, attainment and how difficult it can be to raise children when you have a full-time nanny. (Oh, how do they manage!) It doesn't even have a podracing sequence to redeem it.
Maybe we've wildly misinterpreted the film and its meaning
Despite the series being so firmly, firmly identified with New York, the film takes place mostly in Abu Dhabi in the UAE, the result of Samantha (Kim Cattrall) being asked to work on a hotel deal by a Sheik (or, a "chic Sheik," as the movie refers to him in just one of dozens of incidents of tortuous wordplay standing in for actual wit), a deal which is never really explained and which she does not seem to actually work on. It serves much the same function as the moment in Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen when the cast teleport to Egypt. It makes no sense other than as a cheap way to move the characters to an exotic locale with minimal fuss.
Whilst they are in Abu Dhabi, the film traffics in the sort of broad caricatures of the Middle East that wouldn't have been out of place50 years ago. It indulges in lazy orientalism, playing up how mystical and mysterious the place is, whilst the characters occasionally talk about the plight of women in the Middle East in the most painfully shallow terms possible. The movie simultaneously celebrates the exoticism of the setting whilst also deriding how weird and silly the customs appear to the characters. It's this aspect of the film that makes me think that everyone has misread it; it's not a film about a group of characters whose view of the world is so stunted that it verges on the offensive and whose priorities are so horribly misguided, it's a satire on the sort of vacuous people who go to see Sex and the City 2 and come out thinking, "I want to be like them!" It's a satire of Swiftian brilliance and, much like A Modest Proposal, it seems to have been misinterpreted as a celebration of the very subject which it is actually damning. Well played, Michael Patrick King.
In a broader sense, it could also be seen as a satire on the myopic way in which some Americans perceive that part of the world. What other explanation is there for the scene towards the end in which the girls meet a group of Arabian women who, underneath their burkhas, are wearing the latest Louis Vuitton collection? Surely no film would seriously suggest that peace and unity can be achieved through commercialism, because deep down, aren't we all just vacuous morons obsessed with ephemera?
You cannot judge the entirety of a saga when only part of it has been released
Okay, maybe the satire interpretation was a bit of a stretch, but I've got a theory that perfectly explains not only why Sex and the City 2 is the nadir of all human endeavor, but why Sex and the City 3 will turn everything around.
A few years ago, I was idling around the TV section of a music and DVD shop I frequent when I happened to see a stand displaying all six seasons of Sex and the City. As I starred at them, I realized that there was an odd pattern to the box art; on each cover, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) is highlighted, whilst the remaining three characters are faded out, and are often pushed into the background. At first I just assumed this was due to the natural egotism of the star - an idea supported by the fact that on Seasons 5 and 6, Carrie is the only character featured - but then it hit me, the big secret at the heart of Sex and the City:
Carrie is the only character who is real, the other three are figments of her imagination.
Think about it; the entire story is told through her writing, meaning that she is the only one whose word we have that anything depicted in the series or the films actually happened. So, if she is an unreliable narrator, we can only assume that she is making up the stories as means of coping with how crushing her real life is. Kind of like how Roseanne ended.
How does this tie into Sex and the City 2, then? Well, at the end of the first film Carrie married Big (Chris Noth), the man of her dreams who she has been pursuing for so long, which in a figurative sense could represent the point at which she made peace with her personal demons and resolved to leave the world she had created behind. But in the second film, she is still married to Big and we learn that their marriage has hit a rough patch. She has clearly relapsed, and she escapes even further into the fiction that she has created, resurrecting her "friends" and flying off to Abu Dhabi, a place that is so wholly different to New York. Because of her deteriorating mental state, she creates a fantastical story that makes no sense, whisking her away to a land far away from the drudgery of her life, and which sees her strutting across the desert in outfits so garish she looks like she is the star of a Baz Luhrman adaptation of Dune.
Following this logic, Part Three will be one part Sex and the City and two parts Shutter Island, with maybe a bit of Inception thrown in for good measure; fabulous costumes and terrible banter mixed with an attempt to help Carrie reconnect with the real world lest she get a lobotomy.
Note: This theory relates specifically to the UK box art. If the American box art is different, then we can only assume that the whole thing is real, in which case I have no possible explanation for why Sex and the City 2 is so profoundly awful.