Sex, Actually

Sometimes, trips to the cinema are just laden with problems.

First of all, there's the trailers. The thing that gets to me about these is that they're tailored to the film in question, like those emails you get from Amazon that say "If you impulse-bought Book X (probably because you're stupid enough to have one-click ordering activated... I mean what's the matter with you for Christ's sake, how on earth can anyone withstand that level of temptation? You just click on the picture and then, a few days later, the entire box-set of Sapphire and Steel just magically arrives in the post. For god's sake, turn it off now), then you might also enjoy Book Y. Book Y might be something along the lines of Contemporary Parenting: The Netmum's Guide to a Happier Life, and you'll wonder how in god's name they lumped you in with those people, but anyway... by the same token, there's something... personal about trailers now. What used to be a standard Coming Attractions feature now feels faintly contemptuous, as if the cinema's saying "Well if you're thick enough to pay into Transformers, then I'll bet you're stupid enough to watch The Fast and the Furious 4: Using Ugly Sports Cars to Make Shit of the Acropolis, or Something.

So, first of all you get told that you're the type of person who, the cinema believes, will enjoy a remake of Funny Games starring Michael sodding Pitt. Then you see that the new Indiana Jones film is out, and it just reminds you how it's inevitably going to be bad. And, if all that wasn't enough, you discover that there's going to be a Sex and the City movie.

I mean, really. It can't possibly get worse than that.

Let's be clear about something; Sex and the City is as obnoxious and offensive a piece of work to have been made since Triumph of the Will. It's just horrible. It's nearly too obvious to go into, but it has to be said so I'll say it - the programme's about four horrible women getting laid and changing their clothes, while talking in a non-ironic way about how important handbags are. The thing that always irritated me about the TV series was the way that these four shrieking harpies (the most likeable is the red-head, simply because she doesn't pretend to be anything other than a selfish, uncaring, success-obsessed woman; the others comprise a terminally dull woman who sleeps with lots of men, a terminally dull woman who doesn't, and Sarah Jessica Parker who's about as narcissistic and self-absorbed a character as we've ever seen on television, with the possible exception of that little girl's mother in Dragonfire) sit around asking where all the good single men in Manhattan have gone, without once considering the possibility that there's many years-worth of evidence to suggest that it might actually be their problem. The least hateful phase of the programme was when it featured the character of Berger, since he was the one who made it abundantly clear that the answer to this question was probably "running away from you, you vacuous bint."

It's worth mentioning that the programme makes the mistake of thinking "sexually forward" is the same thing as interesting. The problem with these women isn't that they have sex with lots of people, it's that this is all they do. They're given generic jobs which they never, ever refer to, and none of them ever indicates that they've got any range of actual interests. Even the dull one who owns an art gallery never makes any reference to art - you'd think that she might occasionally go to the theatre, or something. The sad thing is that, in SatC world, hobbies are considered dull and geeky; talking about your terminally uninteresting life, on the other hand, is just what people do. It's unthinkable that Samantha and Carrie (oh god, I know their names) might decide to go to the cinema, for example. Miranda is sometimes seen jogging, but even that's presented as Something Necessary If You Want To Maintain Your Figure rather than Something You Might Actually Enjoy. 'Interests' aren't what your supposed to have, because they distract you from the all-important business of living your life. Even though, without interests, you're going to end up like... well, like the four succubi that we were introduced to every week.

And of course, what the use of words like "bint" and "harpy" will suggest is that I'm just a man who's being misogynistic, rather than someone searching for suitable insults to hurl at four horrible people. The problem is (and I know that this is all completely obvious, but when so many intelligent and thoughtful women will justify their love for the programme by saying 'oh but they wear such nice dresses, I feel I have to put it somewhere) that it's actually the programme itself that's misogynistic; it presents these four horrors as rounded facets of womenhood, suggests that all women should empathise with these awful people. I don't know if women like this really do exist in the real world, all I know is that I've certainly never met any (and if I did I'd send them to death-camps, which would have the double benefit of removing them from the gene-pool and proving me right). On top of all that you've got the moral duplicity that was succintly described by Mark Kermode last Friday - it's consumerist bilge that spends much of its length waving handbags in your face, and then has the gall at the end to say that there's more to life than handbags.

(And I wasn't half annoyed that he wasn't in when the film was released, not least because I emailed in a review of the film that pretty much anticipated everything he said. And I did all this without having seen the thing. Because, as may be obvious by now, I'd rather remove my pubic hair with red-hot pliers than go anywhere near it.)

So if you want to look for misogyny, the real misogyny is that one that makes this film / series in the first place - a piece of work made by a bunch of men, who've clearly decided that plot / characters / moral spine are completely unimportant if you're making a product for women, since if you make the outfits pretty and the handbags stylish then they're too stupid to worry about the rest. So when women who aren't stupid tell me that they don't worry about the rest, you can see why I might be grumpy.

And yet...

...and yet this isn't really what annoys me.

Why on earth is Sex and the City in the cinema anyway? Why?????? Try and imagine an episode of Friends appearing in the cinema and you might understand what I mean. It is, fundamentally, a television product. A series with six years of back-story has to work pretty hard to transform itself into a film that's consistent with what went before - even Serenity, the Firefly movie spin-off, struggled with this and ended up being something of a mess as it tried to tie up far too many plotlines in far too short a period. The question here is what cinema and television, respectively, are for. There is, obviously, a difference; anyone who watches the Simpsons movie can tell that it's not really a film, and Borat is clearly not even close to being a film, but the question of why is a touch more fuzzy. I recently went to see Outpost - that'll be that movie with the Nazi zombies, then - and while it wasn't unentertaining (it had Nazi zombies in it, for heaven's sake) it was impossible to shake the feel that it was really a TV movie, even if I couldn't begin to explain why.

Or could I? It's a question of evolution. Cinema comes from a director-lead tradition - it was initially a silent medium - which means that the question of what the camera does is still the most important thing. Obviously a film is nothing without a script, but even a down-at-heel and grim-up-North film like This is England is massively concerned with how it's shot (those wide-angled views of the countryside for example, showing us a country without people that adds to the irony of the film being about people without a country). TV's evolution is the polar opposite - it talked from the start, and was generally shot on locked-off cameras in much the same way as theatre. Even if the two media have come closer, there remains a difference.

Television is lighter, more dynamic. It's part of the mass media, if you like; there's no ceremony of viewing, no distraction from everyday life. The Awesome-O episode of South Park went from inception to completion in three days (that's the whole episode, not the script), and the series was able to take punches at the Gore/Bush bitchfight just weeks after it happened. People who sniff at TV often call it 'disposable' or 'throwaway', but the greatness of television is that it can be throwaway - without pomp and ceremony, it can present clear and light insights into what's going on around us. TV is divorced entirely from the ponderousness of cinema, and when it's shorn of the structural requirements of a film it can do so much more. It's part of the real world in a way that cinema isn't, and probably never will be.

Cinema, though? The first thing you do, when watching a film, is to isolate yourself from the world. Even when watching films on DVD, many people will choose to turn the lights down first. If television makes things that are current, cinema makes things that are timeless.

Seeing that quality eroded is what really bothers me. There's something terrible about seeing Russell Brand pop up in the cinema, not because he's an obnoxious git, but because he's not part of that isolation - someone who's ubiquitous in the media just shouldn't be in cinema, because it's not what cinema does. More than any popular medium, it's about escaping from the real world; of course, once you've distanced yourself from the real world, you can see it clearer. There are few films as current and as insightful about contemporary culture as The Assassination of Jesse James by The Coward Robert Ford, for example, but it doesn't feel like part of that culture. It stands alone from our culture, separate, as cinema should.

And Sex and the City? It isn't a satire about our culture, it's part of our culture. It's instructive to note how the film has been accused of product placement in a way that the programme never was, because it makes more sense for a TV product to be about brands and consumerism and what we can buy. TV is part of the real world; cinema isn't. And ultimately, seeing Sex and the City in a cinema just seems unseemly, like it's broken down the walls and charged its way somewhere that it simply shouldn't be. On television, it was nasty. In the cinema, it's... unseemly. And while the thing offended every ethical sensibility I had many years ago, I now feel it's offended the aesthetic ones as well.

Footnotes

- Yes I know that Sarah Jessica Parker isn't a man, and is one of the production's most important figures. But she's not a woman, either, any more than Margaret Thatcher was. She's a Nazi. In fact, one of the zombies in Outpost looks a bit like her.

- It's also struck me that I walked out of the James Bond movie for exactly the same reasons as I hate Sex and the City, but I can't be bothered analysing why the two films are gender equivalents of each other. It should be obvious by now, anyway.

- And yes, I did watch quite a lot of Sex and the City when it was on. That doesn't prove anything, you hear? Nothing. Good.