Monday, November 2, 2009

Carrie Bradshaw's City



The location for the TV series, “Sex and the City,” is arguably one of the most important factors in regard to the success of the show. This is in large part to the classification of the four main characters residence, New York City, as a location of glamour and sex appeal. But for Carrie Bradshaw and her girlfriends, their city is more like a friend than a location alone. In the preceding clip, Bradshaw refers to New York as an entity, telling Mr. Big he owes both of them (herself and the city)a proper goodbye. Here she transforms her city into a thing rather than a place (Barker 403). But as Rob Shields asserts in the Barker text, “while we may happily speak of the ‘reality’ of the city as a thing or form, they are the result of a cultural act of classification” (403). Carrie Bradshaw’s version of New York is just one representation of that particular urban space, but because of the wide reach of cable television it “gives meaning” to the location for people around the country, and beyond (403).

New York, through the lens of this particular show, became classified as sensational, partially through the use of clever writing techniques, but these representations are, as stated in Barker, largely poetic (402-403). They are limiting their scope to only one narrow (and dramatized) aspect of the location, showing their audiences a fast-paced world that begs Mr. Big to “do it up right” just one last time.

At the end of the clip, the four girlfriends sit in a café wondering how anyone could possibly want to leave their great city, and head out for, as Miranda Hobbs so aptly puts it, the “real world.” This further demonstrates the fact that the New York of the famed “Sex and the City” is a television construct, created to entertain and delight rather than to portray a true urban setting.

No comments:

Post a Comment