InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "I woke up singing top cat!"

missizzy (missizzy) wrote,
@ 2008-06-08 19:21:00

Entry tags:

moviephile

And the lesson of the day is: Sex and the City is like Fanny Burney!
I was worried about how exactly mom would react to the movie, but she reacted very well indeed. I understand why the series appealed so much; it's fun and frothy and melodramatic and there are too few female friendships on television.
We got home and discovered, much to our dismay, that there is still no air conditioning, so we will not be able to cook tonight. I think we're sending out for pizza, since going out for it would be a long wait in the restaurant. A long wait in the air-conditioned restaurant, mind you, but a long wait in the restaurant still.

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Fanny Burney lives!
(Anonymous)
2008-06-10 05:30 am UTC (link)

A few notes from "Mom" (aka Miss Drake)

I really enjoyed it. Both of us did. I came near to crying twice. Isabel denies crying, but she was near crying once. I can see why it was popular. It's very much a woman's film -- one mark is the four girls at the center. Women's films so often center on these utterly loyal friends in a little knot who stay together no matter what. It's a fantasy. It was in _Friends with Money_, _Bridget Jones's Diary_, Lovely and Amazing. So maybe women do long for supportive continual friendship. I did get a kick out of the fashion show.

I could also see how it was related to the TV show. This is the same characters ten years on. Samantha didn't quite work; she was too old for the role, but there was amusement and I suppose this kind of promiscuity is iconoclastic. In her story I saw something which I've noticed (my view) in women's films made by men: the sexual psychology of men is given to women. Enacted is the idea that women pant after men by seeing their body parts in the way men do for women. The film did show women's psychology sexually, for example, in the desire for a relationship that is meaningful as central to sex, but there was much in the film which simply applied men's psychology to women.

Another aspect of this: The men are really all emasculated; they do not act in the hard cold ways men and women too often do. This is common in lots of women's novels. Austen gets rid of the macho male. For one of the stories the wife leaves the husband for having sex outside the marriage but once. Meanwhile she had been putting him off for months. It's improbable that a woman would leave such a sweet man for having sex but once, improbable he'd tell her etc. But the emotions they experience are real, and I just burst into tears when they got together on the bridge. By keeping the real things away the author can provide happy endings.

It will sound weird but it reminded me of Fanny Burney's fiction, _Cecilia_. What she does in that is provide the reader with real emotion. You are asked and occasionally (only very occasionally) made to feel real emotional pain, distress, laughter, anxiety, worry, but the situations which give rise to these emotions are extravagant, absurd. Something not realistic, mechanical somehow, which would never happen is made the motive. Like the heroine is not permitted to marry someone unless she keeps her last name, and making her take his last name is the one indispensable demand the hero has. So for hundreds of pages misery may be brought forth. So what happens is you are made to suffer without considering the real things that make for such suffering; they are kept at arm's length. It's utterly improbable that Carrie's boyfriend would act the way he does on their wedding day. No one worries about money. Carrie as novelist simply makes tons; once she voices some worry but it never comes near to depriving of her anything.

I could also see how it was related to the TV show. This is the same characters ten years on. It's a white program and they did add a black young girl who become Carrie's personal assistant and we were show a black world which was presented as a white world with people who are black. They are all really doing versions of the same thing. All middle class.

Carrie's husband is a Mr Knightley; the man who had sex once with another woman and was punished so strongly is an Edward Ferrars. Carrie is such another as Elizabeth Bennet.

Miss Drake

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