Cinderella and Bridezilla

There’s a scene in the new movie Sex and the City, the reunion of the four stars of the popular HBO TV series, in which Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) reads “Cinderella” to the adopted Chinese daughter of her friend Charlotte. Closing the book, Carrie tells the little girl that sometimes life doesn’t turn out the way it does in "Cinderella." Unmoved by Auntie Carrie’s bid for realism, the little girl pipes up, "Again!”

Tell the fairy tale again.

That’s kind of what Sex and the City, the movie, does to its female viewers: tells them "Again!" the fairy tale about the handsome, wealthy prince who rescues the unmarried Manhattan maidens from the doom of spinsterhood.

There’s plenty to object to about the movie: its embarrassing attempt to revive the rampant, thoughtless consumerism it portrayed in the ‘90s –closets full of of Manolo Blahnik shoes, Louis Vuitton handbags, Botox, a Vivienne Westwood wedding gown, endless Cosmopolitans at chic Manhattan clubs, and a Fifth Avenue penthouse bought with the flick of a checkbook. It may have been a fun fantasy to imagine that Carrie, who when the series began was a sex columnist for an alternative weekly newspaper, could actually afford all that stuff, including the spacious Manhattan apartment — because as we know, freelancers for alternative weeklies really rake in the dough. (In one episode, Carrie calculates that she spent $40,000 that year on shoes.) But there’s something grotesquely anachronistic about this lusty bacchanalia in 2008, in the climate of foreclosures, food shortages and widespread economic suffering.

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