The Second Coming: Sex and the City 2





The man most often blamed for ruining New York City’s West Village—and some say a generation of women—is Sex and the City scribe Michael Patrick King, who unleashed on the neighborhood’s cobblestone streets a cupcake-crazed mob of stiletto-wearing, Cosmo-slinging single women proclaiming their independence with their credit cards. Or so the story goes. King, for his part, isn’t buying it. “Where’s the article about men who crowd sports bars in Yankees shirts?” he demands. “Can’t the girls have a team?”

He has a point: If Sex and the City dismantled some female fantasies, like Happily Ever After, only to replace them with others, say Manolos falling within the budget of freelance writers, the seminal series’ first big-screen incarnation—which King wrote and directed—was also a very real reminder of women’s clout at the box office. The film grossed $55.7 million in its opening weekend alone, dethroning Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones sequel from its No. 1 spot. (King now calls it “Super Bowl Sunday for women.”)



Sure, Carrie and co. may have sexed and shopped with abandon and kvetched far less about their careers than their conquests, but they were also, from the beginning, single thirty- and forty-something women—previously dowdy and pitiable in pop culture, if we heard from them at all— recast as savvy, glamorous, realistically flawed, and having a great time. Which is why it’s a relief to hear that Sex and the City 2, rather than blowing up Carrie’s dream wedding, has what King calls “a romp feel.”

He even sends the girls to “one of the global futuristic cities of the Middle East” to escape the dour economic climate (where, he reveals, they filmed on the same sand dunes in Morocco as Lawrence of Arabia). But what happens to the brand that defined conflicted single womanhood in the new millennium when all our heroines, save Samantha, are happily married?


King says the sequel grapples with tradition, or “how we even in this day and age, in a cosmopolitan city, struggle with the idea of tradition and traditional roles, even after everything women have been through.” He’d never marry off all four girls at once, of course—that would be “a betrayal” to single women—but he’s also adamant that he was never really writing about fashion, sex, or even girlfriends, anyway. “That was the fireworks display to get your attention,” he says. It wasn’t really about choosing a man or choosing a bag or choosing a life: “It was about, choose yourself. ”

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