David begs . . . PLEASE do NOT go and see SEX AND THE CITY 2

OK, I admit, I've not actually seen it. On the other hand, I have always been a huge fan of the series. Just like the Guardian's Hadley Freeman, who has seen this Crime Against Cinema.  She says,

"I'm not asking too much. I just don't want to be sick in my mouth. I don't want to leave the cinema feeling like I've paid £7.50 to be mocked, patronised and kicked in the face. . . . the pink-fringed, cliche-ridden, materialistic, misogynistic, borderline racist SATC2".

The dual thrust of Freeman's blitz is that the TV series was wonderful but that the two films are a travesty in their distortion of the original and feminist themes of that series. 

" . . . the show was fantastic: smart, funny, warm and wise . . . It was about four smart women, three of whom had no interest in getting married . . . it had genuine emotional truth".

Whereas in the films we see "self-obsessed babies with breasts", and in SJP's Carrie, " . . . a demented harpy, one whose response to having been jilted at the altar was 'How am I going to get my clothes?' "

This betrayal of women in general and the series in particular is best seen, says Freeman, via what happens to lawyer Samantha's career. Miranda's partner Steve was unfaithful in the first film because her job meant she did not give him enough time and attention.  Thus the trauma of sudden singlehood was clearly her fault. So in the second film she leaves her job, responding positively to Steve's suggestion she could "be at home and help around the house". Freeman: "Sorry I think I just burned my fingers while retrieving my bra from the fire".

Then there's the racism. SATC the TV show was always vulnerable to that charge.  Without major black or ethnic minority characters, "the only ethnic minorities you see . . . are waiting behind counters to sell the women expensive handbags".  SATC2 cranks this up a notch, as the gals decide, bizarrely, to take a holiday in Abu Dhabi.

"Not since 1942's Arabian Nights has orientalism been portrayed so unironically. All Middle Eastern men are shot in a sparkly light with jingly jangly music just in case you didn't get that these dusky people are exotic and different".

Thus Freeman concludes "The death of Sex and the City is not just a shame for fans, but for all women".

Just from seeing "the hideous trailer" (and so before reading Freeman's review) I was instantly struck by that "beyond its' use by date" feeling you get when smelling a particular object just taken from the fridge. Readers, in the next sentence you will think I am being appallingly sexist, but please persist. Because the fabulous foursome just look TOO OLD.  Samantha looks like she has been dead for a week. Charlotte's Kristin Davis, one of the most beautiful and elegant women on the planet, looks like an over-made-up tart. But I do NOT mean as women they ARE too old.  I'm 54 so all 4 of these women represent spendidly attractive younger women to me.

In the film they LOOK to old for the function the characters play in the too-long extended narrative theme of the overall SATC project. The actresses are NOT too old for the characters, who are meant to be women in their 40s and 50s. It is the characters that are too old for the socio-economic narrative which lies beneath the personal human stories. 

Freeman seems in touch with this: "A woman can love fashion without looking and behaving like an international call girl".  In fact Hadley, in recent years Lady Gaga, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera have done exactly that in music videos to great artistic and commercial effect. All of them building on the principle established by Madonna back in the 80s that women's autonomy includes the right to dress like a whore.

The difference is not just that Lady Gaga is 30 years younger than Samantha's Kim Cattrall. The characters in SATC are past their sell-by dates in two other ways.

Freeman rightly, being a feminist, deplores that the women now "want a ring at all self-abasing costs".  That "self-abasing" is the clue.  Like ageing prostitutes they have all left it a little bit late for the ring-snaring, Hence more and too many layers of make-up are needed. That's not your reviewer being sexist. That's the reality of the situation the characters find themselves in, living in a patriarchal, sexist society and having spent 10 years since the series began in 1998 enjoying a crypto-feminist life of independent careers, independent sex and, um, independent shopping. 

Having suddenly decided to jump back into Doris Day-land they are playing an embarrassing catch-up. Hence Samantha's 44 pills per day "to trick my body into thinking it's younger".  And Miranda's retort that she has "tricked my body into thinking it's thinner - Spanx!" I assume this is not what suffragettes starved themselves and threw themselves under horses for.

As an outsider on the female race, I found SATC 1 and the trailer for SATC 2 embarrassing precisely because of this 'self-abasing".  Especially when unsuccessfully spun as feminism - we are asked to be on board with it being these strong, independent women's right to choose to dress like this and look to snare a man.

But there is a level here deeper than Freeman's rather routine feminist analysis and critique.  For her this all amounts to a male patriarchal conspiracy, in the world at large but also in the Hollywood system that has subverted the genuine feminism of the TV series. All of which is true.  

But patriarchy brings about a downside for men, which more and more of us began to understand in the late 20th Century. It is correct that men in general have more wealth and more power globally than women in general.  But patriarchy, strictly speaking, is the rule of SOME men over the rest of us.  All women are subordinate, but so too are many men. Hence the 'pater' (Father) in patriarchy and the Mr Big in SATC.

Freeman is correct to lament that "There is a deep sadness in the sight of Carrie and her friends defining themselves by . . . their ability to snare and keep a man".  But we can reach deeper than her feminist analysis via Marcuse, who lamented that human beings define themselves by their consumption of pointless commodities. Jimmy Choos, anyone?  Throughout the high-flying period of the TV series, no one, least of all within the programmes, did anything other than enjoy and envy the 4 women's glorious lifestyles. In which buying clothes and accessories were actually more important than careers and sex.

For Marcuse, the enjoyment of this consumer lifestyle is not only illusory but damaging. It makes us "unfree". We are enslaved in the minds just as once humans could be enslaved in their bodies.  In this state of unfreedom "consumers act irrationally by working more than they are required to fulfill actual basic needs, ignoring the psychologically destructive effects, ignoring the waste and environmental damage it causes, and also by searching for social connection through material items" (Wikipedia).

Throughout the TV series, Miranda, Carrie, Samantha and Charlotte were never, um, actually seen working very much, though all had jobs or careers. Something else in SATC2 is past its' sell-by date, not just the make-up and fashions of the foursome. In a patriarchal system it is men who are expected to pay for all those consumer items as the 'father-provider'. Both women and men work to create the commodities. But a small minority of men have far more purchasing power than the rest. Few men watching the TV series could afford to buy their wife or girlfriend a pair of Jimmy Choos. 

This is what Mr Big represents - the patriarch, the father, the rich man.  When the women get round to self-abasement time they are not bothered if he oppresses them. They just want him to pay for the shoes. They are now, as Marcuse would say, so addicted to their high-end consumer lifestyles that they will do anything to catch-up and snare their meal ticket man.

SATC was at its' height throughout a lengthy but ultimately fake boom in consumer capitalism. Which began to fall around our ears in 2007. Both the boom and the bust resulted from an over-reliance on financial services and banking.  Real economies, like the current Chinese one, manufacture things. The late 20th Century free-market economies of the USA and UK relied increasingly on people making fake, digital money out of fake, digital money.  And then spreading enough easy but unreliable credit around for buying and selling in an over-inflated property market. And buying Jimmy Choos at the top end.

That system has not now ground to a halt. But a lot less of us will be able to afford Jimmy Choos. Hence back to SATC2. Any young gold-digger knows very well that you need to snare your millionaire early in life. That way, when he dumps you aged 40 or even 30 for a younger model you can already have squirreled away enough to live on. Not to mention that divorce settlement. The unreality of SATC is that these characters are desperate to snare their men at the sort of age when any self-respecting Mr Big would be dumping them. 

The fantasy that got millions of women to pay to see Bridget Jones was that you can be fat and snare Colin Firth (yum). The fantasy of SATC2 is that you can be in your late 40s or early 50s and snare Mr Big and his millions (yum, yum).  During the worst global recession in 70 years.

Hence the self-abasement. I repeat, the 4 lead actresses of SATC2 are all beautiful, desirable women.  The characters they play are past their marry-by date in a patriarchal and consumer capitalist society.  The designer clothes and hideously excessive make-up which makes them look like "international call girls" represents a huge denial of that depressing fact.

Millions of women will pay to go and see SATC despite my and Freeman's imploring to the contrary.  They will face a deep psychological choice as to the message they derive from the film.

Level One is the anti-feminist message that Freeman deplores: you MUST snare a man and your appearance will determine your success. Level Two is even more misogynistic: same as before, but if you are over 30 at the very oldest then you've left it too late and will look like a trollop.

Sadly most of us will also not realise that the financial services-based, free market, inequality-stretching, brain-numbing consumer capitalist system on which the SATC franchise is based is also past its' sell-by date. It will limp on, smelling worse and worse like that thing at the bottom of the fridge as long as fashion shoes are so important to us.  "This is the best mirage I've ever seen", says one of the random male sex / money objects in the film.

So true, comrade, so true.