Fifty-fucking Thousand

How can you not love this show? How can you not? Ahh!

Jon was saying the other day, dapper young man that one, that the movie betrayed the shows. The series is witty and unsentimental, and the movie is not. At least, that’s the essence of what he said... I’m not quoting directly.

And, you know, he’s right. I’ve been watching the commentaries to the episodes. I’m watching the one to the movie right now. And the show is a farce—if not at the core than at least somewhere. Michael Patrick King, his majesty director, talks many times in the show commentary about cream pie-ing. Whenever a character has got it figured out, is sure, is at the top of the world, she gets a cream pie in the face.

God, I love this movie. And I’ve had maybe a little too much beer to write this well. And of course it was supposed to be the blog of all blogs. Forget whatever happens in my life.

Stanford knows that Marcus is the perfect boyfriend, beautiful and young, and it turns out Marcus used to be a male escort. Splat.

Trey is the perfect prospect, rich, WASP, and mannered. Charlotte knows she’s finally found her perfect husband, and then there’s the flaccid penis problem (first time I’ve had to spell flaccid, I think) and the not wanting children thing. Splat. Cardboard baby, splat.

I read something on Focus on the Family’s blog about Sex and the City. It criticized the show in the following way: it’s a blah blah blah show blah blah blah desperate women (or women desperate for sex) and then something else. And I thought—exactly! The success of the show, in my mind, exists because these women are not the poised figures that women are supposed to be. They are a desperate deranged coping reactionary lively fabulous representation of what women are in real life. And anyway they laugh.

I was justifying my love of Sex and the City to Jon Fox, once, in the following way, “It’s way funnier than Gray’s Anatomy.” To which he responded, “Well, Sex and the City is a comedy and Gray’s Anatomy is a drama. So it had better be.”

So anyways, in the shows, for everything serious or sentimental there is a back cutting of a joke, a self-awareness, or a cream pie. MPK says that there were originally more jokes written in the movie. They were discarded in lieu of the pain of the plot—again would never have happened on the shows.

And here’s where I get to the point: the second movie’s coming out and we couldn’t be more excited here at Westover (or what’s left of it). What if the movie was a giant cream pie? How fabulous. The first movie set us up with marriage and children and Samantha being free to have sex like always. And what... what! if they had an existential crisis! What if the dresses, clothes, fashion weren’t good enough any more. Splat. What if they came out front with the theme of the show—not sex, but how to live life not alone. What if everyone gave in not to cosmos but to knitting?

Maybe the cream pie in all of our faces is that we die. Or finally, finally, get old enough that our bodies (trusty companions) betray us. Or we are no longer beautiful... except my friends, y’all will always be beautiful (until you’re not, of course. Splat.). And what we’ve really got isn’t the stuff that we’ve trumped up and gotten so happy and sure about; it’s, well, smaller and harder... it’s... it’s... aw, fuck if I know, I’m only 22.