On Friday, me and a bunch of friends went to see 'Sex and the City 2'. I was, at best, a casual viewer of the TV show and saw the first movie on DVD at someone else's house so my excitement at the prospect of the second film was more muted than most others in the cinema. I've always had a bit of an issue with the sexual politics (women's liberation, for me, has never been about how much sex you can have or how many shoes you can buy yourself) but this film reminded me of another issue I have with this and, in fact, most American TV shows.
'Sex and the City' is supposedly an 'aspirational' TV show; we watch the show and it brings light to our sad little lives to, for an hour, imagine we could have a life like Carrie's. When I see her walk-in wardrobe full of designer clothes or her inexplicably large apartment (do they ever explain how a columnist can afford that?), the fact that they eat out every night, get taxis everywhere and are spoilt enough to complain when a flat-screen TV is not the extremely expensive gift they dreamed of I'm supposed to want to be her. But I don't.
Now, I'm not saying I am devoid of consumerist tendencies. I own iPods and MacBooks and TVs, my issue is not even that these people are rich. It's how they are rich; this incredible sense of entitlement they possess, the fact that their shallow need for the latest Prada handbag is supposed to make me sympathise with them. Be rich, that's fine, I have no problem. But I am not impressed by lavish displays of decadence like these writers clearly want me to be; in fact, I am appalled. The hotel in Abu-Dahbi doesn't make me salivate with jealousy but cringe in disgust. It's a symbol of a society that runs on huge financial and social inequality, on people working inhumane hours for inhumane pay to polish the diamond-encrusted floors of twelve-star hotels. These places aren't beautiful: they are lavish for the sake of being lavish, the equivalent of buying a t-shirt which reads 'I Went To Abu-Dahbi And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt Factory'.
If 'aspirational TV' aims to have me green with envy then it hasn't. Neither the life I have nor the life I aspire to is portrayed in television drama, which is fine, but please don't then pretend this is catering for me. I'm not saying this because I 'don't get' Sex and the City, although I don't. I'm saying it because I honestly think that wealth on that scale means I cannot identify with their problems. So many movies and TV shows now about 'powerful women' have them, essentially, as self-entitled shrews telling men exactly what anniversary gift they want, manipulating them into marriages or explaining to them why they just don't get it. Would real liberation not be a partnership? Don't genuine relationships have a bit more give and take? The TV executives don't even want me to have their lives, they want me to envy their problems. And these women are so poorly portrayed I am nearly always on the side of the men - as during the entire running time of 'He's Just Not That Into You', a movie whose message was decimated by it's own characters.
I know I said I wouldn't get into gender politics but I have one thing I want to take serious issue with. Miranda quits her job because her boss has turned into a cartoon sexist and she immediately runs to her son's science fair. And she sees him and thinks, virtually says out loud 'this is so much better than any job'. This pattern is repeated over and over again in TV shows, this idea that working women should feel guilty. But if it is so easy for her to just give up her job, because clearly they don't need the money to live and bring up a child in New York, what was the point of portraying her for so many series as this hard-driven career woman? And if it's quality time with her son she wanted, maybe less fortnights away with the girlfriends are in order. It, to me anyway, just seems like a cheap way of making Miranda available for the holiday plot but at the same time, in effect, claiming a women's best work is to stand around at science fairs.
I'm ranting about 'Sex and the City' because it is one side of the spectrum but 'aspirational TV' is everywhere. Virtually every American drama is a series of rich people complaining about how difficult their lives are. Again, I'm not saying being rich is a bad thing, but there is no sense of balance. I watch 'The OC' and the only way anyone works their way out of poverty is to be 'saved' by a rich family, you watch 'Desperate Housewives' and it's twenty-room mansions posing as average suburban living, even my old favourite 'As The World Turns' is the story of several rich families in the small town of Oakdale with their own TV networks and private planes on standby. Even 'Friends' is a show about a group of Friends so close it almost sickening and isn't that what we all want, to have friend who become family? We, in the UK, seem to be better at making dramas about reflection. Our soaps are a great way of measuring this; it's not rich people in small towns but the working class in big cities. Unlike America and the American Dream, we don't have a culture of 'everyone can be and deserves to be wealthy' and I think our TV is more balanced because of it.
I understand that the lives of the rich are more aesthetically pleasing, big houses are easier to move cameras in, watching your own 9 to 5 existence on television is hardly escapism. But I, for one, do not want these lives. They are shallow and petty. If I am ever successful in whatever career I ever end up in, I hope I spend my money more frugally, with conscience and not spending for the sake of spending. It's one thing to want a designed handbag because you like the design or even that you want it, it's another to buy it just because you can.
And if I am ever that person, feel free to rip me apart as I just did 'Sex and the City 2'.
A/N: So, that was a rant and a half! Sorry if it's stops making coherent sense about half-way through, I was in one of those moods.
