Sex and the City 2
Monday, June 21, 2010
5:42 PM
0
Marxian Rating
Princesses of Persia: The Sandals of Time
By Gabriel Tupinambá
The Scene
After being rescued by Arab women in a public market in Abu Dhabi from men who were outraged with their flamboyant dresses, our protagonists are taken by their saviors away from the public gaze, where it is revealed to them that, underneath those women’s burqas, they are all wearing haute-couture outfits, just like their new foreign friends.
The Mise-en-Scene and the Ob-scene
Sex and the City 2 (2010) is the sequel to a film, which in turn is based on a tv series, which is itself based on a book by Candance Bushnell. To sum up the whole thing, let’s quickly turn to Cyriaque Lamar’ review of the film, which not only painted it with interesting colors (Sex and the City 2 as a Sci-Fi), but also managed to condense the entire franchise in five bullet points:
“1) The lead of SATC2 is book writer and former sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica-Parker). Carrie is the main character but also the least likable one. Her defining character trait is vacillation. Carrie ≠ SJP's witch in the seminal Neopagan documentary Hocus Pocus.
The Scene
After being rescued by Arab women in a public market in Abu Dhabi from men who were outraged with their flamboyant dresses, our protagonists are taken by their saviors away from the public gaze, where it is revealed to them that, underneath those women’s burqas, they are all wearing haute-couture outfits, just like their new foreign friends.
The Mise-en-Scene and the Ob-scene
Sex and the City 2 (2010) is the sequel to a film, which in turn is based on a tv series, which is itself based on a book by Candance Bushnell. To sum up the whole thing, let’s quickly turn to Cyriaque Lamar’ review of the film, which not only painted it with interesting colors (Sex and the City 2 as a Sci-Fi), but also managed to condense the entire franchise in five bullet points:
“1) The lead of SATC2 is book writer and former sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica-Parker). Carrie is the main character but also the least likable one. Her defining character trait is vacillation. Carrie ≠ SJP's witch in the seminal Neopagan documentary Hocus Pocus.
2) Carrie has three friends. The first is lawyer Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon). Miranda is the most relatable character but receives only 40 seconds of story arc. Her defining character trait is angst.
3) Carrie is also friends with homemaker Charlotte York-Goldenblatt (Kristin Davis). Charlotte is the least despicable character but also the most annoying one. Her defining character trait is privileged disapproval.
4) Carrie's final friend is PR impresario/erotic conquistadora Samantha Jones (Kim Catrall). Samantha is the most entertaining character but also the least realistic one. Her defining character trait is "anything-that-moves." Samantha is the same exact character as Gracie Law from Big Trouble in Little China.
5) The four of them live in New York City and have sex (not with each other). They eat brunch.”
(We owe this reference to miss Luck)
The first question to be raised then is: Doesn’t Sex and the City 2 go against Lamar’s 5th bullet point? There are brunches, but there is no New York here!
This is exactly what the Scene described above comes to solve, giving a geopolitical twist to the portuguese saying that “If Mohammad won’t go to the mountain, the mountain will come to him”, which can now be read “If Carrie is not in New York, New York will appear to her from underneath a burqa”
The expansion of the City is thus made clear: It is not that the main characters traveled to another country - it is their country which expanded to include new territory.
But let us not be mistaken here: the operator of this expansion is not fashion per se, but the fetishistic relation to it - It would be a completely different situation if the other women displayed their designer clothing in their armoires, but to reveal them underneath the veil, as if they gave ‘the truth’ of their position (we are forced by men to wear this burqa, but underneath we are just like you!) is a completely different matter.
In his new book, Living in the End Times, Zizek gives a brilliant account of the relation between the veil and the face talking precisely about burqas:
“why does the encounter with a face covered by a burqa trigger such anxiety? Is it that a face so covered is no longer the Levinasian face: that Otherness from which the unconditional ethical call emanates? But what if the opposite is the case? From a Freudian perspective, the face is the ultimate mask that conceals the horror of the Neighbor-Thing: the face is what makes the Neighbor le semblable, a fellow-man with whom we can identify and empathize. (...) This, then, is why the covered face causes such anxiety: because it confronts us directly with the abyss of the Other-Thing, with the Neighbor in its uncanny dimension. The very covering-up of the face obliterates a protective shield, so that the Other-Thing stares at us directly”
(Zizek, Living in the End Times, p.2)
And he concludes:
“Alphonse Allais presented his own version of Salome’s dance of seven veils: when Salome is completely naked, Herod shouts “Go on! On!”, expecting her to take off also the veil of her skin. We should imagine something similar with the burqa: the opposite of a woman removing her burqa to reveal her face. What if we go a step further and imagine a woman “taking off” the skin of her face itself, so that what we see beneath is precisely an anonymous dark smooth burqa-like surface, with a narrow slit for the gaze?”
And he concludes:
“Alphonse Allais presented his own version of Salome’s dance of seven veils: when Salome is completely naked, Herod shouts “Go on! On!”, expecting her to take off also the veil of her skin. We should imagine something similar with the burqa: the opposite of a woman removing her burqa to reveal her face. What if we go a step further and imagine a woman “taking off” the skin of her face itself, so that what we see beneath is precisely an anonymous dark smooth burqa-like surface, with a narrow slit for the gaze?”
(Zizek, Living in the End Times, p.3)
In Sex and the City 2 the dichotomical relation between face and veil takes place within the scene, so that as we identify with the gaze of the main characters, which merely observe while the Other divides into two, we are on the side of unity. But, with a little help from Lacan, we can remind ourselves of a way out of this idealist, double-reality structure: the fact is that “it is not reality which divides itself, what gets divided is the subject when faced with reality”. And so we should turn this division back into Carrie and her friends, who are otherwise just ‘being themselves’ and ask what is the burqa they are wearing beneath their Halston Heritage dresses.
Many many years ago, in a land not that far away...
Knowing that the biggest mistake one can make with an ideologically charged film is to dismiss it as ‘just fun’, let us take this film seriously and do some serious historical research on its foundations. And what could be a better foundation to understand what is happening in the United Arab Emirates today than a look into the Achaemenid Empire, back in 400 b.C? We have a faithful source of historical material for analysis in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010), Jerry Bruckenheimer’s attempt of finding a new Caribbean for his Pirates.
Many aspects of the two films point towards the fruitfulness of this historicist endeavor of ours: Both films pretend to take place in other areas of the Middle-East while being actually shot in Morroco - where they can get cheap labour and the authorities don’t mind the distortions of the portrayed countries’ cultures; the two films are accounts by the same group of materialist democratic ideologues (Hollywood) and were shot around the same time, so the ideological distortion in them take similar patterns, making it easier to cross-reference the discourses without losing important information due to lack of understanding of the political developments of the time, as it could happen if we went back to more traditional sources of historical data...such as a proper book.
So, let us turn our attention to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and see if we can spot Carrie Bradshaw’s ancestors in the background somewhere.
Prince of Persia gives a strange twist to Marx’s “first as tragedy, then as farce”: The film revolves around the turning back of time so that the same event is experienced first as a tragedy - the invasion of a Holy City by the Persian Army, the killing of innocent people, the forced marriage of the sacred city’s princess to a persian prince and the bringing about of the end of the world - and then as a farce - the invasion is not needed because the main character, the young, illegitimate prince who lived to see the consequences of the tragic invasion goes back in time and prevents it from happening, only to be rewarded with the love of the princess (and thus uniting of the Holy City into the Persian Empire anyway!).
This shift from invasion-as-eradication to invasion-as-appropriation could help us to understand the terrorist dimension of the anti-terrorism campaigns propagating quickly around the globe today, specially in the guise of the ‘tolerance discourse’. It is not difficult to see the conceptual problem with tolerance: It implies that we already have common ground with the other - otherwise, I could tolerate the other but not be tolerated! Zizek, apropos of Wendy Brown’s Regulating Aversion, writes:
“there are all the self-referring paradoxes centered on the impasse of tolerating intolerance. Liberalist multiculturalism preaches tolerance between cultures, while making it clear that true tolerance is fully possible only in the individualist Western culture, and thus legitimizes even military interventions as an extreme mode of fighting the other's intolerance - some US feminists supported the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as a form of helping the women in these countries...”
In Sex and the City 2 the dichotomical relation between face and veil takes place within the scene, so that as we identify with the gaze of the main characters, which merely observe while the Other divides into two, we are on the side of unity. But, with a little help from Lacan, we can remind ourselves of a way out of this idealist, double-reality structure: the fact is that “it is not reality which divides itself, what gets divided is the subject when faced with reality”. And so we should turn this division back into Carrie and her friends, who are otherwise just ‘being themselves’ and ask what is the burqa they are wearing beneath their Halston Heritage dresses.
Many many years ago, in a land not that far away...
Knowing that the biggest mistake one can make with an ideologically charged film is to dismiss it as ‘just fun’, let us take this film seriously and do some serious historical research on its foundations. And what could be a better foundation to understand what is happening in the United Arab Emirates today than a look into the Achaemenid Empire, back in 400 b.C? We have a faithful source of historical material for analysis in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010), Jerry Bruckenheimer’s attempt of finding a new Caribbean for his Pirates.
Many aspects of the two films point towards the fruitfulness of this historicist endeavor of ours: Both films pretend to take place in other areas of the Middle-East while being actually shot in Morroco - where they can get cheap labour and the authorities don’t mind the distortions of the portrayed countries’ cultures; the two films are accounts by the same group of materialist democratic ideologues (Hollywood) and were shot around the same time, so the ideological distortion in them take similar patterns, making it easier to cross-reference the discourses without losing important information due to lack of understanding of the political developments of the time, as it could happen if we went back to more traditional sources of historical data...such as a proper book.
So, let us turn our attention to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and see if we can spot Carrie Bradshaw’s ancestors in the background somewhere.
Prince of Persia gives a strange twist to Marx’s “first as tragedy, then as farce”: The film revolves around the turning back of time so that the same event is experienced first as a tragedy - the invasion of a Holy City by the Persian Army, the killing of innocent people, the forced marriage of the sacred city’s princess to a persian prince and the bringing about of the end of the world - and then as a farce - the invasion is not needed because the main character, the young, illegitimate prince who lived to see the consequences of the tragic invasion goes back in time and prevents it from happening, only to be rewarded with the love of the princess (and thus uniting of the Holy City into the Persian Empire anyway!).
This shift from invasion-as-eradication to invasion-as-appropriation could help us to understand the terrorist dimension of the anti-terrorism campaigns propagating quickly around the globe today, specially in the guise of the ‘tolerance discourse’. It is not difficult to see the conceptual problem with tolerance: It implies that we already have common ground with the other - otherwise, I could tolerate the other but not be tolerated! Zizek, apropos of Wendy Brown’s Regulating Aversion, writes:
“there are all the self-referring paradoxes centered on the impasse of tolerating intolerance. Liberalist multiculturalism preaches tolerance between cultures, while making it clear that true tolerance is fully possible only in the individualist Western culture, and thus legitimizes even military interventions as an extreme mode of fighting the other's intolerance - some US feminists supported the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as a form of helping the women in these countries...”
(Zizek, Tolerance as an Ideological Category)
Isn’t this paradoxical issue the one obliterated by Sex and the City 2 when the film posits as the truth of the veil the dress underneath it, a dress just like ours, so that the obscene terrorism of the Manhattan-girls behavior can be understood as “girl bonding”?
And the narrative of Prince of Persia tracks the opening of this possibility. It shows us the passage from a direct Mastery to a form of indirect one, one which first posits in the other a certain common ground, so that there is a turn from eradication of otherness into a ‘recognition’ of the same, thus making it an indirect form of subjugation, which cannot be tracked back to the workings of a Master, because the first step of assimilation was a given, it was naturalized into a ‘common feature’.
By the time the hero, Dastan, has turned back time, stopped the war from happening and unveiled the plot of his uncle to take the throne, what we find out is that Princess Tamina, the guardian of the sacred city of Alamut, would have given the key to the city out of love for the Prince. This strange redundancy allows us to sum up the film as:
1) First Dastan lifts Tamina’s veil, and finds horror and destruction.
2) Stop, Rewind.
3) Now Dastan lifts Tamina’s veil, and finds a woman who (really) looks just like him.
4) The end.
Not only this gnomic arrangement of the film already makes it clear that Carrie Bradshaw is a descendent from old Persian Kings (what would explain a lot just by itself), it also shines a light on the mechanism at play in both films. Couldn’t we say that:
1) works with the structure of Terror: the forcing of the Event, taking the veil off of Being, looking to force the Trauma by trying to escape the order of the Symbolic (the city was sacred, but they invade it anyway, moving away from the paternal-symbolic prohibition towards the ‘integration’ of the City-Thing)
But then, 3) doubles this structure, because 1) was the terrorist forcing of the Event - but after it happened the Terror should have been inscribed into the Symbolic order as a failed-Event. What the ‘second coming’ does is that it obliterates this inscription and turns it into the first movement of a real Event (Love, between Dastan and Tamina).
We should ask ourselves if the Trauma doesn’t come about not by the first tragical situation, but because in its repetition as farce, the first tragedy is left unnamed.
And, by the end of the film, every bit of the terror inflicted by the Persians (who are the bad guys in the film, invading Almut in the beginning, trying to kill Dastan when he flees, etc) is neutralized because we don’t have to inscribe it in the past, it got caught in a time-loop, it is ‘what could have happened’, an ‘alternative’ reality. This is the important aspect here: it never happened, but at the same time it did happen: It actually fills the place of the well-known freudian ‘Other Scene’ - The phantasm implicated by a certain situation, though not directly enacted in reality.
The Princesses of Persia!
And, mutatis mutandis, isn’t this the same ‘Other Scene’ taking place in Sex and the City 2?
Couldn’t we imagine that when the four friends left their hotel to go shopping in the market in Abu Dhabi, they had at first decided to dress more appropriately - but still their behavior offended the locals, creating a big confusion which ended with the brutal death of three of them, stoned to death because they didn’t know that making flirty comments with everyone was not well taken by the population.
We should ask ourselves if the Trauma doesn’t come about not by the first tragical situation, but because in its repetition as farce, the first tragedy is left unnamed.
And, by the end of the film, every bit of the terror inflicted by the Persians (who are the bad guys in the film, invading Almut in the beginning, trying to kill Dastan when he flees, etc) is neutralized because we don’t have to inscribe it in the past, it got caught in a time-loop, it is ‘what could have happened’, an ‘alternative’ reality. This is the important aspect here: it never happened, but at the same time it did happen: It actually fills the place of the well-known freudian ‘Other Scene’ - The phantasm implicated by a certain situation, though not directly enacted in reality.
The Princesses of Persia!
And, mutatis mutandis, isn’t this the same ‘Other Scene’ taking place in Sex and the City 2?
Couldn’t we imagine that when the four friends left their hotel to go shopping in the market in Abu Dhabi, they had at first decided to dress more appropriately - but still their behavior offended the locals, creating a big confusion which ended with the brutal death of three of them, stoned to death because they didn’t know that making flirty comments with everyone was not well taken by the population.
Luckily Carrie escaped, with the help of a woman who was oppressed by her husband into wearing a burqa, and who helped her and taught her that they are share the same dream (Manolo Blahnik shoes etc). They then looked for a magical shoe, which turned back time, so that the american-quartet managed to re-live the situation, now dressed like ‘themselves’, and safely escape, because all the local women could identify with them now.
The passage from the ‘old mystical dagger’ to the ‘Manolo Blahnik shoe’ is also very fruitful to our analysis, because it is the very combination of the two which gives us the double dimension of the structure of the commodity: it operates a condensation of both Time and Space.
What was not clear in Prince of Persia gets explained through Sex and the City 2: the dagger does not only turn time back, so that things can be re-enacted, it also operates a change in space, it brings America to Persia, because this very re-enacting is done in accord to the most democratic materialist principles.
And the other way as well: We can now understand that the ‘shoe’ doesn’t only bring New York to Abu Dhabi (after all, the film is called ‘Sex and THE CITY’, not ‘Sex and MANY CITIES’), but it does so by re-introducing the temporal logic which is structural to the inner-working of the modern capitalist discourse - terror as the Other Scene, while the mise-en scene is of tolerance/love.
1001 Nights revisited
Another comparison which is well worth attempting to make is regarding the particular place of narration both film-fantasies.
Sex and the City (the tv series specially) works in an almost anti-Altman narrative way: All the different threads of each woman’s storylines are united by Carrie’s narration of the episode, normally ending with a ‘moral of the day’ speech, one last thought by the main character, showing us what they learned from the conflicts they went through. This can be set in opposition to Altman’s exquisitely crafted stories because rather than exposing the contingency of the fragments, her final narration (accompanied by hovering shots of all the characters going to sleep safe and sound) comes in to tie all the loose ends, to show us that whatever tragedy might have happened, it was actually just part of the farce.
Prince of Persia also features a sort of narration, but a slightly different one: Every step of the way, while Dastan and Tamina are trying to prevent Armageddon, Tamina constantly introduces new - completely out of the blue - information on what they are doing. They go into a cave, fleeing from bad guys, and suddenly she starts...”Oh, this is the mystical cave of xxx! If you do this and this, x will happen!”. Then the dagger stops working and the sand that went inside of it - before said to be irreplaceable - is gone...then Tamina starts again: ”Oh, but there is a secret place, where the wizard kept some of the sand!”. Most of the back-story she slowly unveils has no place whatsoever in the plot, or is related to things which already happened (a bad guy is killed and we see he was infiltrated amongst the good guys...then she says “He was an assassin, but he infiltrated in the order of the priests! That’s the curse of xxx!!”). Here, the farce is directly superposed to the tragedy as they go, almost bluntly improvised by the Princess, to make sure that the much more intricate situation actually turns into the magical adventure they actually want to live. (The american crusade for nuclear weapons in the Middle-East strangely springs to mind here....)
We should ask ourselves here what it would mean to have these entropic narrations removed from the films. Wouldn’t the Other Scene shine through a bit more?
(In a sense, this is a question worth asking regarding V for Vendetta (2005) as well, since one of V’s main character traits was narrating his own adventure as it happened, some sort of revolutionary subject who tells himself the revolution is happening now, so as to be aware of the moment of the Event)
Final note: Alice as a friend of Carrie
As a quick final note, it would be also interesting to sketch the parallel between Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Sex and the City 2. Don’t we get the exact same narrative structure? Woman with marital problems escapes to magical Wonderland to deal with her problems.
It is enough to shed some light towards the turning points in these narratives - they are always similar moral deadlocks, which end up justifying the intrusion into the world of an Other, the staging of this other territory as a place to articulate problems which don’t belong there, at the cost of their very difference. The disavowal of these deadlocks turns Descartes’ insight...
“I further recognized in the course of my travels that all those whose sentiments are very contrary to ours are yet not necessarily barbarians or savages, but may be possessed of reason in as great or even a greater degree than ourselves.”
...into:
‘I further recognized in the course of my travels that all those whose sentiments are very contrary to ours are yet not completely barbarians or savages, but are possessed by the same reason as ours, they are just unable to articulate them because they don’t know freedom of speech’
And wasn’t it that the way Tim Burton managed to transform Carrol’s Wonderland into Carrie’s Wonderland was by portraying it not as the Other place, the place where the Symbolic articulates itself without the inertia of our own imaginary identifications (even if there is an Imaginary consistency to Wonderland, Alice didn’t understand its coherence), but by turning it into a continuation of the same Scene? The whole Wonderland became a big farce staged for Alice to solve her issues with her family, by listening to everyone’s stories and finding they all share a lot in common. Underneath the Symbolic, Tim Burton unveiled a beautiful Imaginary tapestry.
No wonder the Mad-hatter became such a prominent character in his film - isn’t he the fashion designer of this Wonderland?
The passage from the ‘old mystical dagger’ to the ‘Manolo Blahnik shoe’ is also very fruitful to our analysis, because it is the very combination of the two which gives us the double dimension of the structure of the commodity: it operates a condensation of both Time and Space.
What was not clear in Prince of Persia gets explained through Sex and the City 2: the dagger does not only turn time back, so that things can be re-enacted, it also operates a change in space, it brings America to Persia, because this very re-enacting is done in accord to the most democratic materialist principles.
And the other way as well: We can now understand that the ‘shoe’ doesn’t only bring New York to Abu Dhabi (after all, the film is called ‘Sex and THE CITY’, not ‘Sex and MANY CITIES’), but it does so by re-introducing the temporal logic which is structural to the inner-working of the modern capitalist discourse - terror as the Other Scene, while the mise-en scene is of tolerance/love.
1001 Nights revisited
Another comparison which is well worth attempting to make is regarding the particular place of narration both film-fantasies.
Sex and the City (the tv series specially) works in an almost anti-Altman narrative way: All the different threads of each woman’s storylines are united by Carrie’s narration of the episode, normally ending with a ‘moral of the day’ speech, one last thought by the main character, showing us what they learned from the conflicts they went through. This can be set in opposition to Altman’s exquisitely crafted stories because rather than exposing the contingency of the fragments, her final narration (accompanied by hovering shots of all the characters going to sleep safe and sound) comes in to tie all the loose ends, to show us that whatever tragedy might have happened, it was actually just part of the farce.
Prince of Persia also features a sort of narration, but a slightly different one: Every step of the way, while Dastan and Tamina are trying to prevent Armageddon, Tamina constantly introduces new - completely out of the blue - information on what they are doing. They go into a cave, fleeing from bad guys, and suddenly she starts...”Oh, this is the mystical cave of xxx! If you do this and this, x will happen!”. Then the dagger stops working and the sand that went inside of it - before said to be irreplaceable - is gone...then Tamina starts again: ”Oh, but there is a secret place, where the wizard kept some of the sand!”. Most of the back-story she slowly unveils has no place whatsoever in the plot, or is related to things which already happened (a bad guy is killed and we see he was infiltrated amongst the good guys...then she says “He was an assassin, but he infiltrated in the order of the priests! That’s the curse of xxx!!”). Here, the farce is directly superposed to the tragedy as they go, almost bluntly improvised by the Princess, to make sure that the much more intricate situation actually turns into the magical adventure they actually want to live. (The american crusade for nuclear weapons in the Middle-East strangely springs to mind here....)
We should ask ourselves here what it would mean to have these entropic narrations removed from the films. Wouldn’t the Other Scene shine through a bit more?
(In a sense, this is a question worth asking regarding V for Vendetta (2005) as well, since one of V’s main character traits was narrating his own adventure as it happened, some sort of revolutionary subject who tells himself the revolution is happening now, so as to be aware of the moment of the Event)
Final note: Alice as a friend of Carrie
As a quick final note, it would be also interesting to sketch the parallel between Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Sex and the City 2. Don’t we get the exact same narrative structure? Woman with marital problems escapes to magical Wonderland to deal with her problems.
It is enough to shed some light towards the turning points in these narratives - they are always similar moral deadlocks, which end up justifying the intrusion into the world of an Other, the staging of this other territory as a place to articulate problems which don’t belong there, at the cost of their very difference. The disavowal of these deadlocks turns Descartes’ insight...
“I further recognized in the course of my travels that all those whose sentiments are very contrary to ours are yet not necessarily barbarians or savages, but may be possessed of reason in as great or even a greater degree than ourselves.”
...into:
‘I further recognized in the course of my travels that all those whose sentiments are very contrary to ours are yet not completely barbarians or savages, but are possessed by the same reason as ours, they are just unable to articulate them because they don’t know freedom of speech’
And wasn’t it that the way Tim Burton managed to transform Carrol’s Wonderland into Carrie’s Wonderland was by portraying it not as the Other place, the place where the Symbolic articulates itself without the inertia of our own imaginary identifications (even if there is an Imaginary consistency to Wonderland, Alice didn’t understand its coherence), but by turning it into a continuation of the same Scene? The whole Wonderland became a big farce staged for Alice to solve her issues with her family, by listening to everyone’s stories and finding they all share a lot in common. Underneath the Symbolic, Tim Burton unveiled a beautiful Imaginary tapestry.
No wonder the Mad-hatter became such a prominent character in his film - isn’t he the fashion designer of this Wonderland?
0 Response to "Sex and the City 2"
Post a Comment