Why the Sex and the City 2 reviews were misogynistic | Bidisha
Ididn't enjoy Sex and the City 2. The script was blunt and repetitive, the characterisation illogical, the set-pieces overlong, the direction sloppy, the tone erratic. The scenes in Abu Dhabi were shallow, baffling and ignorant. Writer/director Michael Patrick King now has to tote this big glittery cake of caca on his CV for ever.
Oddly, though, for a film written by a man, the critics' insults were reserved for women, in a dazzling display of put-downs. Sukhdev Sandhu in the Telegraph sneered at the women for "all getting older" adding that Sarah Jessica Parker "looks like a cross between Wurzel Gummidge and Bride of Chucky", while Miranda "looks badly embalmed". In the Observer, Philip French ridiculed the "bitchy heroines" who enjoy "an orgy of self-pity" and described Carrie as "equine" (horse-like, people).
In the London Evening Standard Andrew O'Hagan seethed like an Olde Worlde pontiff giving himself a hernia over the vile perfidy of Woman. "These girls are so hung up on looking great they've forgotten there are several ways to be ugly." The women are "greedy, faithless, spoiled, patronising . . . morons". Samantha is a "blonde slut" with "the desperate mentality of the School Bike", Miranda is "the ginger one", Charlotte plumbs "the depths of her own venality" and Carrie is stuck in a "wind-tunnel miasma of selfish needs. Yuck." The women behave like "materialistic whores".
So, the critics didn't like it. Neither did I. But they went one further. They used the opportunity to open their mouths and spew out a sexist torrent completely out of proportion to what they were reviewing. The spectacle of a lot of grown women together – particularly ones who are not suffering – apparently fills them, bafflingly, with contempt. The women/actresses/characters/whatever are old, ugly inside and out, bitches, lewd sluts, whores, venal, selfish, haggard, vulgar, self-pitying, neurotic "girls". These are all words from the reviews.
Those I've read by women were equally negative, but contain some basic human respect and don't stoop to insulting women's looks. Times critic Kate Muir wrote, "As subtlety and wit drain away, you feel a sense of loss . . . this sequel is not Sex and the City – it is Menopause in the Desert, and a waste of four great characters."
Given the critical bile on offer, you would think that Sex and the City 2 had been made by a convicted rapist such as Roman Polanski, a famous misogynist such as Lars Von Trier (the plot of all his films: brutalised woman suffers), featured a convicted rapist such as Mike Tyson in The Hangover or depicted women being grateful for hate-filled violent sex before being murdered, such as Michael Winterbottom's acclaimed The Killer Inside Me. Yet none of these films, even when reviewed badly, attracted any of the sizzling contempt reserved for Sex and the City.
It's jaw-dropping. Reviewers do not appear to despise a real rapist such as Polanski, but they do seem to despise four fictional women who are portraying mildly silly lives. Similar treatment was meted out, with hilarious obviousness, to the first Sex and the City film (Anthony Lane in his infamous New Yorker review: the women are "hormonal hobbits") and also to the hugely successful, women-led and, one would have thought, totally inoffensive Mamma Mia.
SATC2 is currently topping the UK box office, above Streetdance 3D, Prince of Persia, Robin Hood, Tooth Fairy, Iron Man 2, Space Chimps 2, The Losers, Bad Lieutenant and Four Lions. The Streetdance boys and girls are buff paragons of unalloyed dance ambition. Space Chimps is a searing portrayal of the effects of astral travel on primate development. The other seven films are all standard ignorant, cliched, macho, brutal, brainless, gung-ho, numb-knuckle, totally male-dominated, exhilarating toss. They feature large clubs of self-involved obsessive stupid men and their multiple male nemeses and cronies and one or two completely outnumbered women in demeaning, underscripted roles. All but one or two blockbuster films are about men – many men, sometimes all men – and are often a thousand times more venal, selfish, avaricious, consumerist, ignorant, aspirational, shallow and one-dimensional than Carrie and co. But there is no critical hate for them and their values – or their faces. That is saved for four women in one film no stupider than anything else Hollywood produces.
Yesterday I watched a comedy that seemed like the boy version of SATC2: Hot Tub Time Machine. Four forty-something guys assess their lives. One plot quirk delivers them back to their 80s youth. And there follows a deluge of overt sexism in script, characterisation, subtext and sight gags. The plot hinges partly around the indignity of a man having double-barrelled his name with his mean, lying wife's. This provokes absolute horror from his friends – being publicly associated with a woman is apparently deeply degrading. He goes back in time, finds his wife when she is nine years old, phones her and verbally abuses her. Back in the present, freshly re-masculinised and single-surnamed after his retro-corrective abuse, his wife is docile because she's been traumatised by a nasty phonecall she got when she was a kid.
The film is one big male attack on women, who are all written as lying, controlling, craven, castrating, brainless bimbo deceivers.
Hot Tub Time Machine is like a thousand other successful films, a sexist piece of trash written, produced and directed by a club of men. The guys' interests are just as small-scale, culturally myopic and selfish as those in SATC2. You'd think the critics would have the same response to these loathsome lads as to the loathsome New York ladies.
Ha! French called Hot Tub Time Machine a "lively comedy . . . an amusing homage to the genre . . . funny, sexy . . . among its pleasures is . . ." yeah, great, thanks, whatever. James White in SFX magazine said it was "disarmingly fresh and very funny". Tom Huddleston in Time Out called it "post-pub perfection". Hey, only if you don't particularly like women. But hey again, maybe I'm just being selfish and mean, just like those old, selfish, ugly, stupid, vulgar whore-bitch-neurotic slut-hags in Selfish in the Slutty.