> Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2004 10:52:56 -0500 > From: Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: [Marxism] Sex and the City > I would also have to confess that I became a big fan of this show over > the past few months.
I too, Louis, I too...But in my case that had perhaps more to do with the fact that I begen watching the show justly after I had watched my last Xena episode, therefore I had some kind of a craving for a women-centered show. Well, I believe S& TC fares badly in comparision.
Since I wrote I whole book on Mass Culture centered on Xena, I think I should be able to explain the reasons for my particular preferences. What made for me the charm of Xena was its unbalenced character, the fact that the abduction of the heroine as a lesbian icon by the show's fandom left its writers and producers threading on very thin ice in their attitude towards postmodern petit-bourgeois radicalism, eventually failing to justify their (conventional)closing of the show by making Xena dye for the Greater Good - and heterosexual morals.
Nothing of this kind is to be found in Sex and the City, which is the usual portraying of the _via crucis_ of four dysfunctional females struggling towards their final - and willingly - acceptance of monogamy and family values, admittedly with some good jokes in-between (most of them, by the way, vernacular and leaving me somwhat at a loss as far as prompt understanding is concerned). As far as I'm concerned, my interst in S & TC began to flag somewhere during the third season, when character Carrie Bradshaw decided to quit smoking in order to get back her romantic interest Aidan ( a good decision prompted by the most obnoxious, priggish reasons, to say the least).
Those who, like Adorno & Horkheimer, resume Mass Culture under the notion of "mindless entertainment", seem to me to be unaware of the element of the pedagogics of suffering that's to be found in it, or better, what Gramsci called the ethics of Fordism, that's to say the huge amount of _internalized repression_ the lead-characters must self-inflict in order to arrive at the happy ending - the same pedagogy of suffering that seems at work in Mel Gibson's late cinematic rendering of Ultramontane Catholicism. As carrie Bradshaw must renounce tabagism for romantic love's sake, and Xena renounce Gabrielle for the Greater Good's, so Gibson's Christ must willingly embrace the most senseless torture in order to redeem Mankind (remember, by the way, that there were some very popular early heresies who, opposedly, made the Passion a sham by proposing that what had been crucified was Christ's ghost, and not the real Christ, as God cannot possibly suffer physical pain). It's in this pedagogy of suffering, perhaps, that reside the most obnoxiously reactionary traits of Mass Culture; as there is something akin in it to the acceptance of Taylorism and Henry Ford's social experiments by the working classes...
Carlos Rebello
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