Sex and the City's last scenes seemed to echo its very first: Both the series' opening credits and its concluding moments feature a self-satisfied Carrie Bradshaw (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) strutting down the streets of her beloved Manhattan. There they part, however. In the opening sequence, a bus going through a puddle sprays the daydreaming, tutu-wearing sex columnist. In the last scenes of the series finale, which wrapped up six seasons of the HBO show on Sunday night, there is no such peril, only Carrie, grinning mightily, folded into the anonymous embrace of a crowd of fellow New Yorkers.
It's a telling recasting -- external reality reflecting a character's internal dreams and fantasies rather than splashing her out of them. The series has always thrived on the friction between a pink-tinted ideal and a nightmarish real, holding out promise with one hand, crushing it with another. The writers may giveth, but mostly they taketh away, raining down plagues of toxic bachelors, nebbishy exes, public pratfalls, unplanned pregnancy, illness, and death on Carrie and her three girlfriends. But, like Job, the girls persevered. Their just reward? Those very same fairy-tale endings the show once questioned, complete with Prince Charmings, all the better to have operatically loud sex with.
Anyone who has winced over a bad Cosmopolitan knows full well the importance of balancing the sweet, the sour, and the medicinal bitterness of alcohol in the show's signature pink drink. Over the last few seasons, the series' writers seem to have misplaced their secret formula, churning out a product that became a bit too sugary with every sip. Like writer Carrie, who pecks out the thematic thread of each episode on her laptop (musings like "When will waiting for the one … be done?"), viewers couldn't help but wonder why this Golden Girls for the younger set was going so very Lifetime in the end.
The show's writers are no strangers to formula, and each member of the show's winsome quartet seems to conform to certain stock notions of modern womanhood: Carrie on first violin, an often shrieky prima donna who swoons for true love and drama; Charlotte (Kristin Davis), the buttoned-up rules girl, seeking a more traditional, understated version of Carrie's dream; Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), the evasive, prickly lawyer on the dark-toned viola; and randy Samantha (Kim Cattrall) on cello, just because she'd enjoy straddling the thing so much. In this formulation, Carrie and Charlotte are the romantic throwbacks who seek out meaning in fairy-tale love; Miranda and Samantha, a cynic and a sexual gourmand, respectively, seem to represent feminism's ambivalent gains, and also some of its wariness about whether getting a man is really the key to living happily ever after.
Despite the potential pitfalls, the four made beautiful, raunchy chamber music, playing out their comedy of (bedroom) manners against a backdrop of larger and more confusing questions by the week. Pundits, academics, and journalists crowded into the performance, trying to figure out -- as the show's quartet did -- what coded messages were being sent about the state of feminism's health, about the collisions between women's need for independence and the desire for interconnection, about the endless juggle of power, work, love, family, and friends. Like people in a new relationship, we Sex and the City watchers were sitting by the phone, scouring every e-mail for a sign: Would this be the one? Is this what a happy ending is in our postfeminist era?
It was a lot for the series to take on, and it began teetering under the weight of expectant scrutiny like Carrie on a pair of her beloved Manolo Blahniks. Perhaps that's why the series finale felt like a bit of a letdown. After all the buildup and foreplay, the show skipped climatic fireworks and went straight for a bathetic snugglefest.
Sex and the City's third act http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2002/02/thrupkaew-n-02-15.html did much to heighten expectations by presenting each character with a tailor-made nightmare. It seemed the series was finally getting to the hard questions, the source of creative tension that could lead to such payoff: How does a woman carve out her own life's narrative? And how are those narratives shaped by external forces of money, power, men, and babies, and internal ones of wish fulfillment, fear, and determination?
The show's last seasons seemed to skirt these questions. Miranda and Charlotte had both stumbled their way into happy marriages; the writers, meanwhile, tried to up the ante for both Carrie and Samantha. Paired up with an arrogant, self-involved Russian artist (Mikhail Baryshnikov) who whisked her off to Paris, Carrie came to the brink of throwing away her sense of herself before falling into the arms of her big love, the unpredictable Mr. Big (Chris Noth). And Samantha, the goddess of zipless eros, found herself dealing with a bit of thanatos: a breast-cancer diagnosis. But while these plotlines were shaped around the high dramatics of the figurative and literal death of the self, they remained surprisingly flat and unaffecting. It was Miranda and Charlotte's less sensationalistic, more "ordinary" stories -- the quartet's interior voices -- that kept the series going.
Perhaps it was no surprise that Miranda is the one to show us the labor of marriage and childrearing (she always was the workaholic). But she also has great reserves of love under her stressed-out exterior, which have surfaced in a realistic and natural way. So by the time we see her bathing her stroke-impaired mother-in-law in the series finale, the growth of her character seems lived-in and organic, not the result of a plot twist designed to teach her a lesson.
Charlotte was forced to abandon her picture-perfect ideals. (Her first husband seemed a WASP knight in shining armor, but he was a mommy-whipped, impotent bore, and she couldn't conceive a perfect baby to round out her perfect family.) But just when all seemed lost for this patrician princess, she found love in the most unexpected of places: with her bald yet hirsute, sweaty but loving Jewish divorce lawyer, Harry, and in a pop-eyed little show dog. And for a woman who had been so tied to conventional, impersonal notions of fulfillment, it was a huge step to lay those dreams down. Her declaration that marriage wasn't necessary for her made me bawl large, embarrassing tears (twice!); her small act seemed profoundly brave and freeing, a tossing away of glamorous chains to grasp an offbeat, and true, happiness. (Of course, Harry did then immediately propose to her.)
Miranda and Charlotte both seemed to have wrestled their way to happiness, Miranda through tender grit and Charlotte through wide-eyed, determined optimism. But when the writers try to force their characters' growth through dramatic means -- Paris! breast cancer! -- they fall flat. Certainly Samantha and Carrie have been through enough to deserve their happy endings -- it's just that the writers haven't. Watching the slightest character put on a brave cancer face reminded me that Samantha works best when she only hints at darkness and isn't forced to bear all of it. And Mr. Big? I'm not convinced that he's reformed his rakish ways enough to merit the saccharine wave of music that greeted his appearance in the finale.
While the series ending left the romantic Charlotte-Carrie part of the viewer feeling pleasantly fulfilled, the skeptical, detached Miranda-Samantha half was eyeing it askance. The show's creators had crafted a particularly brutal farewell to the played-out single girl, pitching Carrie's blowsy, coke-snorting former friend out a window to her death. This, plus the fact that each of its foursome end up coupled (even Samantha is deeply in love with a much younger man), seems to imply that the prospect of staying single is too terrifying to contemplate.
Although the show ultimately shied away from the political questions that it raised, I can't fully begrudge the characters' personal happiness after all they've been through. I might, however, have traded in some of the finale's couple-y resolution for more of the show's other romanticized element: the depiction of unflinching, intimate female friendship, which is one of the more moving aspects of the series. As it was, though, the four women were let loose to resolve their own story lines, with Carrie reminding us that "the most exciting, challenging, significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself."
So I'm choosing to think of the finale as a sort of solo encore for each of its performers, and not its true ending. Rather than the half-sweet, half-cheesy Danish pastry of a valentine the last episode served up, I'd like to remember Sex and the City a different way: as a giddy, uncertain, ensemble exploration of loneliness, and of frustrated and fulfilled fantasies -- and of the reality of hard-earned love between men and women, between women as close as sisters. Carrie may be walking toward her happy ending by herself in that last scene, but there's no way she could have done it alone.
Noy Thrupkaew is a Prospect contributing editor. She was amazed (and a bit dismayed) at her predominant Carrie-and-Charlotte tendencies as revealed by this scientific quiz http://quiz.ivillage.com/astrology/tests/sexandthecity.htm .
