No Oasis on the Horizon: Essentialism and Conspicuous (Heteronormative) Consumption in the "New Middle East" in Sex and the City 2

I attended the premiere weekend of Sex and the City 2 at my local mall cinaplex (Fairfield- North Bay). Knowing the consumer-heavy emphasis of the show and first movie, I was not shocked to learn of the cross-promotions in cities near mine- such as Macy’s sponsored sneak previews, celebrity DJ midnight shows, and drawings for pairs of Jimmy Choo’s for the first 250 moviegoers, to name a few. Nor was I surprised that the movie was playing on multiple screens in the theater- although, at first, I was taken aback at the small side theater my showing was in- until I realized that A)It was in the front of the cinaplex, and thus very accessible, and B) I went to the matinee. Since Shrek the Fourth had also recently opened, and was an expected big box-office draw, it was commanding more of the large theaters during the day. With a PG rating, this made good business sense; Sex and the City was a hard R if for no other reason than Samantha’s constant, inane sexual-innuendo and the occasional smattering of profanity. My main reason for attending early was the matinee price, which- at $8.00- is somewhat problematic when you consider access to the film, and who such a prohibitive per-person ticket price would exclude from attending it. On top of the ticket price, I was asked to donate money to buy a paper star (which I would then write my name on) to benefit children’s cancer research (more on this later). On an interesting side note, as an aunt many times over, I ended up back at the theater for a viewing of Shrek two days later- the stars were still available, but the ticket seller did not offer any of us the opportunity to buy one when we purchased Shrek tickets. I wondered, later, if this was just an oversight, or implied that the Sex and the City crowd was expected to have more disposable income than families with children, which seemed to make up Shrek’s main audience. Similarly, upon being seated for the Sex and the City movie (and having arrived half an hour early, fearing a lack of seats), I was presented with a half hour show that featured commercials for other productions/special events at the theatre, behind-the-scenes snippets designed to generate interest for upcoming films and TV shows owned by a related corporation, advertising involving rapping hamsters (their “girls” were in tutus, bouncing to the beat- I’m leaving this one alone), and commercials for morning after “party” remedies, Sprite, and Sprint cell phone ads disguised as “turn off your phone” messages.

So, half an hour in, I already had a distinct feeling that this was to be an experience steeped in consumer culture and serious promotion of high end material goods, and began looking around me to see who would be joining me for the film. The theatre was at about half of its capacity, which could be an indicator of many things: The early hour, the large number of screens the film was playing on, or what I later learned were large numbers of 12:01 showings Friday morning in my area, some packaged as “girls night out” experiences that involved cooperation with nearby bars/restaurants. Most of the occupants were women in their twenties and thirties, often in large groups of five to ten people (although there were some pairs of friends, as well) and dressed to impress. Aside from me, the only other people attending alone were two men, and four or five couples out for obvious “dates” made up the remainder of the audience. Perhaps the most amusing moment of my whole experience came when one of the men attending with his “date” began wildly cheering for the car crash/explosion laden trailer for “Knight and Day”. He followed this up by cheering for the next two previews, both for melodramas; while humorous, after viewing the Sex and the City movie, I feel as though perhaps he had a good idea what he was in store for, and this was simply his last bid for freedom from the experience via ejection from the theatre.

The title sequence of the film is spelled out with hundreds of dazzlingly bright diamonds, and we are introduced to the characters in a meld of past and present that enables Carrie to recall how she came to New York and met each of them in the 1980s: As each “younger” version of a character walks toward Carrie in the flashback, we flash forward once again and see the women in the present, also walking toward Carrie in haute couture and six inch stilettos. This five minute stretch of name dropping and high fashion seems aimed primarily at establishing that time has passed, that these women have always been privileged enough to afford designer wear and move in Manhattan’s inner circles (one was a bartender at CBGB’s who became an agent, one is an established lawyer, etc.), and that they have aged and experienced life changes like marriage, childbearing, and extreme career success and advancement while remaining a tight knit group of friends. While the power to establish alternative kinships was a very real possibility in this film, it did not ever seem to be suggested in any serious way. There is a point where the friends discuss women as “soul mates”, regardless of men and babies; unfortunately, the extremely heteronormative focus of the film seems to negate the realization of this potentially radical alternative. In fact, the heteronormative is the second driving force behind Sex and the City 2 (conspicuous consumption being the first and most obvious), and this is why, in retrospect, that paper star makes so much sense. As a film about heterosexual (and highly “heteronormative”) women with money and privilege, marketed to women who want to watch them utilize both in a contrived plot device that sends them on an embarrassingly colonialist visit to the “new Middle East”, a ploy to play to the “savior” aspects of their audience’s conscience in the name of curing children’s cancer starts to seem less random.

The impetus that leads to each woman’s decision to join Samantha on her business trip to Abu Dhabi hinge upon various crises of the heteronormative aspects of their lives, with the exception of Miranda, whose husband’s infidelity was a major plot device in the first film. In the sequel, problems with a chauvinistic boss lead her to quit her job, thus freeing her to be a better mother (she makes it to her son’s school for an event for the first time)- and, of course, gives her unlimited time to travel to Abu Dhabi and enjoy an all expenses paid vacation in a $22,000 a night suite. Since this is a “business” trip for Samantha (who the hotelier wants to impress in order to gain her as an agent), and she is single, her crisis revolves entirely around her trying to come to terms with her age, entering menopause, and- due to the first major culture clash of the film- having to do so without any of the 45 pills and various bioidentical creams she ingests/uses daily to prevent said menopause from aging her further. Her fear of a lessened sex drive leads to a bizarre obsession with yams as a substitute for her lost remedies, and her personal butler (each woman has one- they come with the suite), who is established as gay due to his knowledge of Paula Abdul, caters to her every whim and joins her in an occasional yam face masque. Carrie, happily married to the man she spent five years attempting to get a proposal from, is in turmoil over her fear of becoming overly “domesticated”: She is worried about her husband’s desire to bring home gourmet take out and enjoy evenings in on the special-order, designer couch they waited a year and a half for. Charlotte's crisis is so contrived that it doesn’t exist until a painful moment involving a braless nanny turning cartwheels on a golf course in front of the women’s husbands, who gawk at her slow-motion running, jumping, and gymnastic endeavours. Observed by the women from a verandah where they are enjoying brunch after an elaborate, gay "destination" wedding, Samantha makes a remark that sets doubt loose in Charlotte’s mind. It takes a wet t-shirt scene while bathing the children, however, to cement the panic that sets Charlotte off to the “exotic Middle East” for a much needed vacation.

The rest of the movie really falls into two thematic arcs: Redeeming heteronormativity (in order to return them to their “good” lives as wives and mothers), and the conspicuous consumption the four women engage in as they maneuver within an exoticized trope of a “Middle East” that seems as if it were composed of stereotypes and Orientalist fantasies of several different countries/former colonies. The former comes at the expense of stereotypes of gay promiscuity, “inferior” unions of Muslim (re: oppressed) women, and an ill-advised dinner out and illicit kiss with an old flame, while the latter results in multiple culture clashes that are usually the direct result of the women’s utter disinterest in learning anything about their host culture or its practices. In one such scene, Samantha is eventually arrested for public indecency after flagrantly miming oral sex at a posh outdoor hookah restaurant in front of horrified locals, then going off for an intimate encounter on a nearby beach; another involves a surprise encounter with local women who not only read Suzanne Somers in their book club, but sport the Louis Vuitton spring collection under their niquabs and save the group from a mob of angry men in the market after Samantha again insults the culture with inappropriate clothing, a purse full of condoms, and another mimed sex act. The entire trip works to shore up pervasive and essentialist view of the “Middle East” it purports to feature (although it was shot in Morocco and New York). What could have been an opportunity to break with the binarism of much Western perception of similar societies mentioned by Rahul Hamid in his discussion of post-revolution Iran, ends without opening any meaningful dialogue or presenting a “wider range of positions” (61) that would enable us to look past the women’s obsessive rights-based rhetoric regarding the assumed oppression of the niquabi women around them by the country’s overbearing men. Given Joan Scott’s take on experience as, “… something which can confirm what is already known, (we see what we have learned to see)…” (Scott 23), it saddens me to think that this representation of both groups- American women and various peoples of the “Middle East”- was the second most popular movie in America, as well as worldwide, on its opening weekend, leaving me to wonder at how both groups will be discursively constructed among the millions of people worldwide who attended the film.

Below, I included clips from some of Rudolph Valentino’s work in a series of silent films in the 1920s that featured an equally essentialized picture of the “Middle East”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E97ytcgrTvs&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nXZvMSVyy4