Girls Just Want to Have Fun

Women suffer through interminable summer movies centered on the kind of comic book heroes that delighted little boys. Now recast as “thoughtful,” “complex” Incredible Iron Bat Guy Men because they suffer and struggle. They are now soulful. And dark. We have to listen to all of the critical excavation of depth and subtext in the big summer bang-bang, kapow, muscle-bound multiplex product. And one summer, a movie comes along that women like. It’s called Sex and the City. Women eat it up, partly because it treats female friendship and relationships and infidelity and marriage with the earnestness they deserve. But also because like a drink of water offered to a dying desert traveler, it is blessed, sweet relief. But are women allowed to enjoy the escapist pleasure of a summer movie? Hell no. We get writers who use film criticism as a venue for their erotic fascination telling us Sex and the City is shallow and insipid. These women are too old. Superficial. Too into shoes. And closets. Consumers. Shoppers. You know: women. The ugliest word you can muster.

I think we’ve all spent some time giving men the benefit of the doubt. The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up lent some charm to male anxiety. But by the time the witless Porky’s redux Superbad rolled around, I for one was over it. All the praise seemed very familiar: like the hosannas that greeted another teen boy fantasy, American Pie, all those years ago. I for one have lost my patience for indulging stunted adult male egos, and their teen movie proxies. I think any of us, male or female, can relate to panic over the scariness of adulthood, marriage and child-rearing. But suffering through a prolonged snickering quest for beer and sex disguised as a sweet coming-of-age buddy film a la Superbad? Umm: No. If you want real male panic and angst worth getting ga-ga over, check out Old Joy. Now that is a film about boy-anxiety with some poetry and pathos I can relate to.

I thought the above illustration accompanying Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review of Sex and the City pretty much summed up just how this film has turned into a forum for some pretty nasty misogyny. Women as monsters. Harridans. Lacking the dignity to die and give up when they pass 25.

I liked the film. I thought it was transcendently escapist and deeply pleasurable. I sat in an audience of mostly women (and their boy-pals), packed on a Monday night at Landmark Midtown and marveled at the communal experience of cinema I have so rarely tasted in the age of movie cell phone calls and moronic chatter. These women were juiced for some entertainment and it struck me as tragic that Hollywood seems so disinterested in making smart, snarky films for women, films with fleshed-out characters and a rude sense of humor beyond the chick flick sucking chest wound of 27 Dresses and the whole regrettable Sandra Bullock canon. I can’t say that I feel a solidarity with womankind on a daily basis. But that night I did.