Can you cite for me where anyone argues that the show is “intentionally reflective”? As far as I can tell everyone concedes to you the fact that the creators of the show are gay and don’t have a positive message and that any insights we might glean from the show/movie are probably not intentional.

Why?

Because this is a gay man’s show.

Sure, Candace Bushnell may be a straight woman, but the creator of the series and the guiding light for it the whole way through, Michael Patrick King, is a gay man, and it is pretty much blindingly obvious that the “women” in this show are not women, but gay men in drag. It is reflective of a gay sensibility, gay culture…it’s about the gays, not the women.

Which means, of course, it has a deeply misogynist heart.

I agree that SATC is not written to be an exposition of the lifestyle and it’s problems. I suspect you are right that the intent of the writers is to indulge in fantasies and glamorizing the lifestyle. However, sometimes art goes beyond the artist’s intent. Sometimes it speaks a truth the artist himself does not consciously know. In fact, I suspect that is true much of the time. There is definite truth in the stereotype of the dissolute artist. Many artists are tortured souls living in the muck and yet with the grace of God they are able to portray a truth they themselves are not consciously aware of.

The truth is that sin is sin and no matter how hard the artist tries to glamorize it, that truth often shines through the glamor. Sin makes us unhappy and so even in a work that attempts to paint it in a positive light we can see the true results, the real emptiness and pain that underlies the false romance. People seldom consciously seek that which they think will make them unhappy. In fact their error is not in seeking the bad but in seeking lesser goods and trying to make them do the work of the greatest good. Thus the characters in SATC are seeking love and seeking relationships. They are looking for that which will fill the God-shaped hole in their hearts. Looking for love in all the wrong places? Sure; but they are looking for love. And certainly God tells us if we seek we shall ultimately find.

I’m not saying SATC is objectively good or that it presents a positive image. I’m saying the opposite, I think the glamor it portrays is damaging to young women. However, I think that as RCM says, it often shows more than it knows. It shows the glamor, yes, but it also shows the emptiness behind the glamor. As long as there is life there is hope and it isn’t wrong for a Christian to hope that even those women caught up in the Sex and the City lifestyle may one day find the true love that their heart desires. Perhaps one day their restless hearts may rest in God.

I agree with Melanie. I guess I am arguing that these women in a very secular and atheistic way, convert, even if imperfectly, they convert.

And while I agree with Katerina’s concern that young girls maybe won’t see the negative only the glam, I don’t see how they cannot see it. They may be damaged by life at the end of it, but there is still hope for change.

I’d agree– and I strongly suspect RCM would do the same– that it is a bad thing when young women watching SATC want to emulate the lifestyle they see. But there’s a difference between an unformed or poorly formed person conforming themselves to the secular culture and a person who is conformed to Christ who is able to view entertainment with more discernment. St Paul tells us not to conform ourselves to this world, but I do not think that means we must shut ourselves in ghettos and refuse to participate in culture. We must be in the world but not of it. How can we evangelize the culture if we shut ourselves out?

I’ve never watched SATC and have no intention of ever doing so. But RCM’s description of her experience speaks to me. I’ve been known to find threads of grace in odd places. Pulp Fiction, anyone? I’ve seen it enough times I can quote much of it by heart. Violent? certainly. And full of profanity and fornication and pretty much the whole range of human vices.

And yet we live in a fallen world. One function of good art is to hold up a mirror to reality. And though perhaps works like SATC and Pulp Fiction seek to glamorize vice, they often show more truly than their authors know and reveal the effects of evil, the deadening of the soul. And they also show that even those who are totally caught up in the secular materialist culture may still be striving for the good, however blindly they grope in the darkness. I love the scene in Pulp Fiction where the two hitmen, who are on their way to what turns out to be a massacre, argue about the ethics of one of their fellows giving a foot massage the boss-man’s wife. It speaks to me of the truth of our human experience. All of us except for the most saintly tend to exist in a state of moral contradiction. We might be striving to find the good in one area and yet be grossly blind to our faults in another area. We may know and follow the natural law against fornication while ignoring the prohibition against murder.

I don’t think RCM is arguing that most people should go out and see SATC any more than I would argue that people should watch Pulp Fiction. But we shouldn’t let our indignation to a works’ very real failings blind us to the fact that it might also be a very good mirror. Some works of art function much like Dante’s Inferno, we see sinful nature and its natural consequences. As RCM says their promiscuous lifestyles do not make these women happy. In that perhaps they are like Paulo and Francesca, the doomed souls of two adulterous lovers at the beginning of the Inferno, warning signs to those of us who are playing with fire.

Oddly enough, the apparent celebration of non-marital motherhood put the film in my wife’s non-interest department. I kind of wanted to see it given folks’ recommendations.

Generally,

I have watched SATC a half dozen times in syndication. I couldn’t get into it. It didn’t help that it was on fairly late. I don’t think my wife ever got into it, but she does enjoy Desperate Housewives and used to watch Grey’s. DH is sometimes’s interesting if you follow it. I could never get into Grey’s.

But anyway, as for transforming the world…I think that the movie is not so much that women can imitate them. If that is so, that’s their problem. I did not watch No Country for Old Men to imitate them. Maybe there were people who thought violence was just cool and wanted to be like the killer, but that’s their problem. I think that women like Sex and the City because, as RCM said, it relates to them.

How are we going to transform the world? By seeing reality as it really is. Look at the way RCM analyzed the shows. She looks at movies and shows differently from other women. That is what Christ does. It is not that she cannot see these kinds of movies. It’s that she is still attracted to and moved by the truth and beauty of Christ; she sees movies with the attentiveness to her own heart and that is why she can truly see why the women in the movie will ultimately be lonely.

I think, for example, that Stranger Than Fiction is one of the best “Christian” movies. Does it have Christ written all over it? It even has premarital sex (though there are no sexual scenes as such). But I would recommend that movie over, say, the Chronicles of Narnia. Why? Because it shows the concreteness of reality, that we want to live life intensely. Transforming the world does not mean detaching ourselves from movies with bad scenes and simply going to movies with women not having abortions. It means true judgment. We see a nude scene in a movie and we judge it rightly: is it true to its nature or not? I’m not saying that we should recommend people watching playboy or a violent movie for the sake of it. What matters is what the person loves and he will judge reality by what he loves. Plus…grace is in the world. Christ came here to “reconcile” the dialectic of good and evil: look at the cross. Maybe a Christian in a movie theater is what we need.