The real Charlotte, Carrie, Miranda, and Samantha or the imposters from the movies?
As usual, I’m way behind the curve, and I’m only now catching up with the news that people have been going to see a movie called Sex and the City 2 with the expectation that it is a continuation of the TV show Sex and the City.
This is the second time fans have been fooled like this. A couple years ago there was another movie called Sex and the City that was supposedly a continuation of the TV show.
The thing is the TV show can’t be continued. It ended. I don’t mean that it finished its run on HBO. I mean that its story---woven out of the intertwined stories of its four main characters---concluded.
There can’t be a continuation because there is no more story to tell.
For one thing, Samantha is dead.
That should be a big clue right there that the movies are something different and separate from the TV show. In the movies there’s a character named Samantha who happens to be played by the same actress who played the Samantha who was clearly going to die from cancer, if not right away then soon, in the TV show.
The movie character Samantha’s cancer is so completely in remission there might as well be a scene in which she goes to Lourdes.
But the TV Samantha’s coming to terms with her imminent death was the conclusion of her story.
The movies also have a character named Miranda, played by the same actress who played the Miranda in the TV show, but this Miranda is a rich and successful rising star at a high-powered law firm, which is exactly the life the Miranda on the TV show had to give up in order for her story to end.
Charlotte’s and Carrie’s stories came to definite conclusions as well.
You can’t continue to tell a story that is finished being told.
Some stories, the best stories, really are done when the narrator says, “The End.”
There’s a reason for telling a particular story and if that reason isn’t clear at The End, if the ending doesn’t end the story, the story either wasn’t told right or well or it wasn’t a story. It was an anecdote or a sketch or the first chapter.
Harry Potter’s story is told in one big long book that happens to be seven book-length chapters long.
There are no sequels to a good story. Casablanca, Gone With the Wind---supposed sequels have been made and written and they’ve been ridiculous. Fans who thought they wanted to know what happened to Rick and Ilsa and Scarlett and Rhett after found it more satisfying to go back to the originals to enjoy having the old story re-told rather than suffering through new stories with new characters who happened to have the same names as the characters in the original.
The characters in the sequels were not the characters from the originals.
That’s because Rick and Ilsa and Scarlett and Rhett are fictional constructs. They have no existence outside the stories that made them. The reason we are interested in these characters is that they are parts of a story. Without them the story is a different story. Apart from the story they are different characters.
The Huck Finn who tells the story of Huckleberry Finn is not the same Huck who pals around with Tom Sawyer in Tom’s book and the Tom who shows up in Huck’s book is a different, less interesting, and less likable kid.
Wanting and expecting characters to go on, to be parts of new stories, is wanting and expecting them to have lives, as if they are human beings.
Obviously there are plenty of famous fictional characters who have “lived” beyond the stories in which they originally appeared and who have “survived” new story after new story as themselves. But Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Tarzan, Indiana Jones, Nancy Drew, Pippi Longstocking, and Anne Shirley are peculiar because they are some things other than characters or rather in addition to being characters---they are stand-ins for us.
They are our way into a story. You could call them our guides. They carry us into the narrative and they act as our eyes and ears and through them we see and hear other characters’ stories unfold. Each new story they appear in isn’t about them. It’s about the strange, new worlds they lead us into and the natives we meet along the way.
A proof of this is the way Sherlock Holmes can disappear from his own adventures for pages at a time and not be missed.
I am a member of the quasi-secret and generally embarrassed and apologetic club of straight men who liked the TV series Sex and the City. It wasn’t great. There were things about it that annoyed me. But it was smart, funny, and very well-done. The acting was good, the writing was usually good, and there was always a chance we were going to see Kristin Davis or Sarah Jessica Parker naked---that possibility was always more intriguing and exciting than all the scenes of Kim Cattrall naked, although those had their pleasures too.
And part of the show’s smartness was that it didn’t accept its main characters’ view of the themselves as the view we should have of them.
I gather that one of the flaws of the new movie is that the actresses are now too old for the parts they are playing.
To me, this is another clue that the movie is not a continuation of the TV show because in the TV show the characters were aging and if their stories could have continued Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte would be fortysomethings and know it and act it. Samantha, as I’ve said, would be dead so her age would be irrelevant. One of the themes of the TV show was that the characters were already too old for the lives they were living. They were adults in their mid-thirties living as if they were barely more than kids in their early twenties, and this bothered them.
Well, it bothered three of them.
Samantha didn’t care.
But Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte all wanted to be grownups. They just had no clue as to how to go about growing up or even what it meant to be a grown-up. Carrie and Miranda had a vague sense that being a grown-up meant being successful in their chosen careers, and Carrie and Charlotte had a vague sense that being a grown-up meant being married and starting families. That, though, was about the extent of their awareness.
Slowly but surely over the run of the series all four of them learned that being a grown-up meant having to make hard decisions about what you had to give up in order to be marginally happy.
Samantha, seemingly, had made those hard choices already. She had decided that she was going to do without love, without being loved and without loving anyone. She wasn’t going to have a family. She understood that once you start a family, if you are the least bit decent and unselfish, you immediately stop being the star of your own life.
This, in fact, is what Miranda has to face at the end of her story.
Miranda values her independence above every thing else. She believes, rightly, that she has earned that independence by being hardworking, focused, sensible, and responsible. That last quality is key. Of the four, Miranda was always the responsible one or, because she slipped up from time to time, the one who best understood the necessity of being responsible. And in the end, it’s the quality that defeats her. She has to give up the independence she’s earned through being responsible because she is responsible.
This is why our essentially last view of her is of her running through the streets of Brooklyn---not Manhattan---searching for her wandering, senile mother-in-law. Miranda is going to spend the rest of her life being responsible instead of being independent. The rest of her life is going to be devoted to rushing to the rescue of her family.
This doesn’t mean she’ll have to give up her career and become a fulltime housewife and mother. But it does mean that her job is going to be something she does for her family not for herself alone, which will make it that much more difficult for her. We don’t need to see her later on because we know what her life is going to be like from here on---she’ll be running back and forth between home and office, never quite happy or content either place, but knowing she can’t give either one up.
Happily ever after for Miranda is knowing that she’d be miserable living any other way.
Samantha, meanwhile, has been living as if she won’t ever have to grow up and her life as she knows it and loves it will go on as it is forever. Basically, Samantha thinks she is eternally young.
Two things happen to disabuse her. The first is that she falls in love with Smith Jerrod and, almost without realizing it, she gives up her sense of herself as the star of her own life. The second, of course, is that she gets sick. She has to face the fact that she is going to die, which in context is the realization that she will not be young forever put in its harshest and most explicit terms.
When we last see her she is on the brink of death. Not that she’s on her death bed. She’s actually feeling quite well. But it doesn’t matter if death will come next week or if her cancer will go into remission for ten years. What matters is that she knows she will die. Death has become a defining factor of who she is. The defining factor. Which is why I insist that the character can’t continue into the movies. Samantha, that character, is dead, because that character, Samantha as she was throughout the TV series, turns out to have been an impossibility. That Samantha could only exist---really, seem to exist---as long as the person who thought she was that Samantha believed her life as it was would go on forever, as long as she believed she would never age or die, and as long as she believed she was the only person in the world who mattered to her.
Those were contingent beliefs and Samantha gave them up together and when she did “Samantha” died.
In the end, both Miranda’s and Samantha’s stories end the same way, with the heroine giving up her conception of herself as the heroine of her own life.
They both give up their idea of who they were in order to become better, stronger, more grown-up people.
Charlotte’s ending, although not quite as final, is pretty much the same as theirs. Charlotte has to give up her idea of herself as a WASP princess whose destiny is to be rescued by a handsome Prince Charming who will carry her off to live happily ever after.
You can make the case that Harry is a Prince Charming, just not a WASPy one, but if he is he’s more of a frog prince who is not fully transformed by Charlotte’s kiss. In fact, with apologies to Disney who stole the idea from Fractured Fairy Tales anyway, Harry’s kiss turns Charlotte into something of a frog. That is, in order to live happily ever after, Charlotte has to come down off the pedestal she’s placed herself on and live down here in the swamp with the rest of us. She has to accept that life is messy, that it has edges that can scrape and cut her, that it isn’t always pretty and fun, and that she won’t find happiness through getting everything she always wanted because nobody gets everything they always wanted. Sometimes people don’t get anything they always wanted.
Charlotte gets more than most people, but that’s really the result of the writers rewarding her for having been the most decent and loving of the four main characters. The main point is that even Charlotte has to give up her sense of who she is and what she’s entitled to be in order to grow up.
Of the four main characters, then, only Carrie is granted an easy and unambiguously happy ending. But then Carrie was always the most unrealistic of the four in that she had actually wandered into the story from a different kind of story.
Charlotte thought of herself as a fairy tale princess. Carrie really was a fairy tale princess.
She was Cinderella, updated, with a host of unpleasant characters, many of them men, some of them boyfriends, coming and going over the years acting as her mean step-mother and ugly step-sisters and with no one but herself to act as her fairy godmother.
And like a character in a fairy tale Carrie’s story ends, which means that she ends, with the words “And they lived happily ever after.”
That the movie’s Carrie is not living happily ever after with Big may have struck the writers and producers as a nod at realism is a sign that they were refusing to face who and what Carrie was and that her story, the story, had reached The End.
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I didn’t see the first movie because of my feeling that the story was over. I didn’t feel a need to know any more about the characters because I already knew all that there was to know. But I also suspected that the only way there could be a movie “continuation” of the story was if the producers undid the ending the of the TV series. Which is apparently what they tried to do.
So I wouldn’t see the new movie even if it was any good. Which it apparently isn’t.
Apparently it’s bad.
You've mentioned before that you thought it was obvious that Samantha was going to die. I didn't agree then, and now that I've seen some of the last few episodes again, I still don't. The only question after the series is if she would realize what a bore Smith is. She did.
The first movie was a fairly logical extension of where they might have been, and I guess the second is considered to be a waste of time.
Either way, it's odd that you would decide that the movie(s) conflict with where the characters were positioned at the end of the series. It's a completely predictable series of events that a woman like Miranda would find her career in the backseat during a period of time in which her child is young she has an ill family member AND equally believable that as a few years go by those responsibilites ease (for good and for sad reasons) and the career and even the glamour come creeping back in.
It's even more true to the story that Mr. Big would have the freak-out he did in the first movie, and that most of the film would revolve around Carrie being depressed and pissed off at him. Nothing could be truer to the series. That was, like, the main story arc every season.
We've covered Samantha. I'm not interested in Charlotte, though her husband is charming as can be.
Well, I haven't thought about BP for 10 minutes, so I that's something.
Posted by: velvet goldmine | Thursday, June 03, 2010 at 11:19 AM
Lance,
While someone needs to start accumulating your stuff on the politics of economics lately, nice to see some meat-and-potatoes character analysis. Think what you may of Samantha but as for Kim Cattrall, um ... gracious. Speaking as one of those fellow apologetics, none of the others are near so easy on the eyes. Nor, with the exception of what Charlotte kept bottled in her doll's-house concept of living, did any have the gusto, even if that was often sadly misused to keep the messier emotions at bay.
On a tangent, sad to note the passing of Rue McClanahan, the Samantha of the silver foxes.
vg,
It is a good BP break, isn't it?
Posted by: El Jefe | Thursday, June 03, 2010 at 02:18 PM
What you mentioned about sequels being disappointing is interesting, i.e. that it's not just the sequels that others write to famous stories that fail to satisfy, but often the sequels written by the original authors.
You mentioned Tom Sawyer showing up in Huckleberry Finn where he more or less ruined the last few chapter of the book. Even as a kid I was baffled at the childish and solipsistic way he was allowed to act out his fantasies at Jim’s expense, and shocked to discover that Jim was free all along. I’ve wondered why Twain did it, basically sullying one of his most popular creations in that way. Was that his intention -- was he sick of Tom -- or did his publishers tell him he had to bring back Tom to make the book popular?
Anne Shirley and Jo March too – as girls and young women they’re independent, free-spirited and fighting to make their own way in the world. But once they’re married, their creators can’t think of anything for them to do and they turn into matronly bores. Anne drifts through the later books like a wraith, saintly but distant. You wonder what all that feistiness in the early years was for, if she’s just going to become Mrs. Dr. Blythe taking soup to the poor. And Jo does get to be a novelist and run a school but she doesn’t seem to have much fun.
I guess all my examples come from characters who are children and I suppose it must be hard for their creators to help them make the transition to adulthood and still be interesting in the eyes of the readers who loved them.
Posted by: MaryRC | Thursday, June 03, 2010 at 06:50 PM
Should have added that there's one essential (as in "the very essence of") difference between Samantha and Blanche. (That comes with the further straight male apologia that I had active and lively grandmas in the Eighties who liked their programs of choice :) Blanche, when we meet her, is back to being a Samantha-like star of her own life because shes lost George, the love of her life, and now take's the starring place in part to fill the enormous empty space she feels beside her, and within her. Which led on occasion to some of Rue McClanahan's best work.
Posted by: El Jefe | Friday, June 04, 2010 at 01:10 PM
The movie may be bad, but the reviewer also displays internalized misogyny in spite of her presenting herself as a defender of true feminism.
Tom Sawyer's re-introduction into Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was just about the worst possible way to end Huck's story that Twain could have devised The "evasion" section almost ruins the entire story. The fact that it doesn't indicates just how great the first two-thirds of the book is.
But I never understood Tom Sawyer's lovable scamp reputation, and I don't see how he changed in any way from his book to Huck's. In fact, one of the nastiest things Tom ever did was in his book - he allows his aunt to go on believing he is dead and even spies on her grieving for him - and even THEN doesn't tell her the truth. What kind of human being would actually do something like that?
And in fact, I would suggest that it was the public's love for Tom Sawyer in spite of his sociopathy that caused Clemens to write the Evasion section of Huck's book. He was convinced the public would be pleased by reading another lovable Tom Sawyer prank - and if a boy could still be lovable after playing such a heartless trick on his aunt (who was for all purposes his mother) why would anybody have a problem with him risking Jim's life and freedom because he wanted to have fun pretending to free Jim when Jim was already free?
The main value of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer IMO is that it is a prequel to the Huck's story.
Interesting paragraph in this piece about the gradual decline of Tom's popularity in favor of Huck's:
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/tomsawye/nostalgia/movies/tsmovieshp.html
Posted by: Nancy | Saturday, June 05, 2010 at 03:01 PM
MaryRC,
Good reminders about the sequel lives of Jo and Anne. At the Louisa May Alcott and Monsters discussion I went to last month, Alcott's biographer, John Matteson, said Alcott didn't enjoy writing the books she is now most famous for. He said she called them "moral pap for children" and preferred the thrillers and horror stories she wrote under pen names in order to make money. Which reminds me I better write up that post soon, as in today.
Nancy, Ralph Ellison has an interesting defense of the Tom sections of Huckleberry Finn in an essay in Shadow and Act
. He argues that that section actually saves the story because it's where Huck finally comes down on Jim's side and against slavery. Tom's prank is a bratty game but Huck's resolve to go to hell if that what it means to help Jim escape is real and truly ennobling.
Posted by: Lance | Tuesday, June 08, 2010 at 06:49 AM