Sex and the City focus on the sex lives and loves of four professional women: Charlotte, Miranda, Carrie, and Samantha who live in Manhattan and spend most of their time talking, thinking, and having sex. (Creed 3) The peculiar feature of the series is that having a rather restricted theme it does not resort to a mere presenting the characters’ sexual intercourse but counts a number of devices that help the director throw light on different aspects of young American women’s lives.
The use of jokes, irony, and metaphors throughout the program makes it an easy-to-watch and fascinating work and renders different meanings of the issues the director paid the viewer’s attention to.
According to Fiske (1987) jokes work through the collision of discourses (87). In Sex and the City, there is a bunch of jokes that the characters make. The focus of the program on the characters’ sexual relationships with men presupposes the jokes related to the problem. Thus, the viewer can often hear the characters’ jokes concerning the guys they dealt with, or the jokes the women address to each other, or the jokes that present their views on different problems they come to experience. For instance, once Charlotte says that she read that if one doesn’t have sex for a year, he/she can actually become “revirginized”. Carrie admits that the most exciting, challenging, and significant relationship of all is the one “you have with yourself.” We hear Miranda and Carrie chatting about Miranda’s pregnancy:
Miranda: I didn’t tell Walker I was pregnant.
Carrie: Miranda!
Miranda: It didn’t come up! If Walker had said to me, “Have you given birth recently?”, I would have said, “Well, first of all, define recently.”
In the latter example, the joke attempts to show the difference between feminine and masculine views on pregnancy. Most jokes in the program aim at laughing at the inadequacy of men in different situations and admitting women’s dominance over men.
One more device that the director resorted to creating polysemy is the use of metaphor. There are a number of them in the program. Samantha airs one of the brightest metaphors: “My name is Samantha and I’m a Loveholic.” “Loveaholic” seems to be the most appropriate description for all the characters. Sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously each of the characters strives for love. On the other hand, the very word “Loveholic” is pronounced “in an exaggerated tone of voice that draws attention to its metaphorical nature and thus its artificiality” (Fiske 87). This means that Samantha herself does not take the word and the state it denotes seriously.
The use of irony is another device used in the show to admit the polysemy of the situations in which the characters occur. In an ironic context, the series presents a discussion of what women want from relationships. The viewer believes that they want to get commitment and domesticity but observes different problems that appear when the character finds a potential partner. For instance, when Samantha finds a man of her dream she discovers that he has a tiny penis that influences her decision to break up with him. Samantha sounds rather ironic about the problem that encourages one to think of different meanings that love might have for Samantha.
Symbolism is also rather obvious in the program. The way the characters dress, communicate with each other, and react to different events symbolizes the different moods they have in a concrete situation. The viewer thus can easily predict the women’s behavior in various situations depending on these factors.
As for the visual style of the drama series, it follows the principles outlined by Barker (Barker 2000). The show’s creators maintain effective control and manipulation of screen space. Among the numerous ways to establish this control, two elements can be distinguished: camera space and performer space. Camera space in its turn consists of two elements: horizontal field of view and “camera proximity” (Barker 172). As for the horizontal field of view, the viewer of Sex and The City, as represented by the camera does not remain in one viewing position. Instead, he or she sees the action from both close range and at distance.
One more peculiar feature of the show is that Carrie constantly breaks the fourth wall: she looks into the camera and speaks to the audience directly that increases their confidence.
This means that the creators considered the second component of camera space – camera proximity. The location of the camera in relation to the performers varies – in front of them, behind them, etc. – that does not allow the audience to get bored with the same picture shown. The same variety can be observed in performers’ positioning and movement along axes.
The sound style of the series aims to render the characters’ feelings and to evoke them with the viewers. There is not much music in the show but it helps to depict the nature of different relationships that the women had. It should also be noted that the performers are very emotional and the sound used in the show corresponds to this or that emotion displayed.
In general, the show is very sensitive. As Gitlin says about the genre it’s “necessarily somewhat sensitive; in its rough outlines, if not in detail, it tells us something about popular moods.” (Gitlin 581) The drama series of the fictional narrative program under analysis tells us about the moods of American women in their thirties. The creators managed to make the program as much realistic as possible and to cover a wide range of problems the modern woman deals with.
Sex and the City is a multiple Emmy Award and Golden Globe winner. I believe that the aspects I talked about above served as determining factors for the program’s success.
Works Cited
Barker, David. “Television Production Techniques as Communication.” Television, The Critical View. Ed. Horace Newcomb. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 169-182.
Creed, Barbara. Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality. Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2003.
Fiske, John. Television Culture. London: Routledge, 1987.
Gitlin, Todd. “Prime Time Ideology, The Hegemonic Process in Television Entertainment.” Television, The Critical View. Ed. Horace Newcomb. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 574-594.