CARRIE VERSUS DIDO: CONSUMERISM AND EXISTENTIALISM
Sun. November 28, 2004Categories: Abstract Dynamics
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Comparing Sex and the City with Dido provides a telling insight into the current pathologies of postmodern culture.
Both SATC and Dido are predominantly consumed by women, but whereas women proudly display their Sex and the City boxsets, they tend to conceal their Dido CDs in much the same way that men are embarrassed about pornography.
Because SATC is liberating and positive for women, whereas Dido is coffee-table bland neurosis that women should be ashamed of, right?
This is the wrong way round. It is SATC that should be the guilty secret, not Dido.
The standard critique of SATC is that it saw women descending to the level of men: voracious, amoral and casual in their sexual appetites.
The real problem with SATC is that it was exactly the inverse of this. Despite their carefully-cultivated street smart modern urban ironic appearance, the women in SATC were, in reality, as cliched and conventional as the heroines of romantic fiction: a certain steely veneer did little to belie the fact that ultimately they (‘even’ Samantha) were sentimental and men-obsessed.
SATC was just Barbara Cartland with fisting. The alleged daring of the sexual practices acted as a smokescreen for the pathetic simpering mooning of the four leads, allowing the consumers of the show to have their indulgent sentimentalism whilst pretending to be sophisticated and modern.
So the show’s supposed ‘feminism’ was of course anything but. SATC’s relentless message was appallingly man-centred: it left us in no doubt that no woman is complete without a man. Its relentless phallicism (‘Big’, for uttunul’s sake!) was nowhere better demonstrated than when Samantha had a lesbian affair. Did she enjoy the Irigarayan alterity of a diffuse eroticism beyond the pleasures of the body with Organ? Of course not. ‘It’s like TEN dicks’ is how she described the encounter.
The only novelty of the show was to equate heterosexual female equivocation over men with banal consumer choice. Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism indeed. SATC’s Postmodern romantic fiction is pitilessly consumerized. ‘Is HE the ONE?’ (what a question for the sex which is not one to be reduced to posing btw) = ‘should I buy THIS pair of shoes or THAT one… they’re both nice….’ The overwhelming message of the show (in no way diluted by the false note of the final episode) perfectly fitted the anti-existentialism of our times: it is better to be in the anxiety of choice than to actually choose.
SATC relentlessly peddled the postmodern core belief that commitment is a fate, if not worse than, then at least equivalent to, death. To be committed, PoMo assures us, is to have our options closed down, restricted. Hence the grotesquerie of forty or fifty year-olds who still think and behave like teenagers.
Of course, the reality is precisely the contrary of this. You can always reverse a commitment, make a different choice. You can’t reverse equivocation. The time is wasted, gone.
Dido, by contrast, speaks for female disquiet with heterosexuality, not from the point of view of the insatiable consumer (no choice would be a good one, because it would mean that I had left SO MANY other things on the shelf… AND I would have to leave the shop) but from the point of view of disappointed total commitment. A song like ‘Stoned’ stands comparison with something like Annie Anxiety’s ‘As I Lay in Your Arms’ (‘As I lie in your arms, I watch the paint peel from the ceiling… I was waiting to feel the pain/ it never came’) in its anatomy of a relationship reduced to numbed disappointment. ‘When you’re stoned, baby/ and I am drunk/ when we make love/It seems a little desolate /it’s hard sometimes not to look away/and think what’s the point.’
Similarly, the justly celebrated ‘White Flag’ is a song of total commitment, of a refusal to give up no matter what. If it is clear that ‘White Flag’ is about a pyschotically self-destructive passion, then at least Dido is prepared to own her desire, to be consumed by it, rather than retaining forever her consumer rights, i.e. the dubious right to consume, forever.
But it is ‘Life for Rent’ that is the ultimate riposte to SATC. It is like Carrie Bradshaw after a dose of Sartre. Here is a thirtysomething wealthy white woman who comes to the realization that the gap in her life, the lack, the ache she cannot satisfy, arises precisely from her own indecision. It is not that she has been disappointed or let down by external forces (also equated in SATC with MEN, of course), it is that she has never wanted anything enough to really pursue it.
Is there a more acute account of the desolation of the existential void of postmodernity anywhere in pop than in ‘Life for Rent’s’ first verse? ‘I haven’t really ever found a place that I call home/ I never stick around quite long enough to make it/ I apologize that once again I’m not in love /But it’s not as if I mind/ that your heart ain’t exactly breaking…’
It is precisely ‘buying’ – making a definitive choice, and then leaving the emporium to live the commitment – that Dido’s postmodern everywoman finds so difficult. Better to rent, to borrow, to wander round the store forever, than to actually face the anguish attendant upon real commitment. ‘But if my life is for rent and I don’t learn to buy/ well I deserve nothing more than I get…’
The mobile phone is the paradigm case of the indefinite postmonement of postmodern consumption. Even though we are always paying for the phone, we never really own it, because there is always the prospect of the upgrade, the improvement. ‘Life for Rent’ understands that this possibility of paying without owing – we pay AS IF we own, but we never do, we are always prey to the ‘constant craving’ of the consumer itch to get something ‘better’ – is the existential reality of the lives of those condemned to wander in a somnambulent haze through the always restocking aisles of Kapital’s overlit shopping malls.
But ‘Life for Rent’ is the moment of Sartrean crisis and realization that Carrie Bradshaw, endlessly at the counter, endlessly prevaricating about choices she will never fully make in the future and choices she has already failed to fully make in the past, could never come to.
satc is a boy band: you pick out the character that best suits you. dido is real (or as real as she pretends to be).
there are people who will proudly say they love dido (as well as/or satc). maybe you haven’t met them, but they do exist. one of the reasons i loathe dido as much as i do is because she represents a cliche yet hides her *true* self (whatever that is ey?) when recording music yet not in interviews. “white flag” may seem more real because it’s from *exerience*. satc is a cartoonesuque show. there’s no way you can really judge the people because they don’t really exist. it’s in a way escapism away and towards sth. there’s never a longterm relationship because the focus is on the woman. in life that doesn’t work out that way.
i am always very reluctant to proclaim sth should be a secret, especially when it comes to art.
Great post, Mark. I withered every time Carrie Bradshaw started talking about the one – though only after (foolishly?) expecting that she would, in her monologues, against all odds, pull out something truly insightful for a change. It’s kind of the same dynamic that irritates me if I ever go to church (for the tokenistic Christmas visit with the family) and listen to the homily: the priest poses difficult existential questions, highlights certain inadequacies that ‘we all feel from day to day’… but then inevitably, the whole thing fizzles, because the answer that he gives is, time after time, God. Just like Carrie letting the whole thing deflate by bringing up, once again, The One. I don’t know why I keep on falling for it – after all, these are surely the wrong venues in which to be holding out any hope for unexpected insight!
Again, great post 🙂
Your bits on Dido look worryingly like Patrick Bateman’s loving appraisal of Huey and the News and Genesis in American Psycho!
Your bits on Dido look worryingly like Patrick Bateman’s loving appraisal of Huey and the News and Genesis in American Psycho!
Can you quote such passages to substantiate this claim? 🙂
Any way, it could be worse than Bateman, believe it or not, there are still people around who believe in ‘real’ selves, and who think that ‘escapism’ is not ideologically significant, could you imagine _that_?
Just read the book, I’m sure you’ll see the similarities. your other comments don’t make any sense.
I have the book, tell me whereabouts it is, I’ll read it.
My suspicion, however, is that your point depends upon an equivocation between Huey Lewis and the News (who were of course CRAP) and Dido, who is not. Or perhaps you think that any remarks along the lines of ‘the existential void of postmodernity’ in connection with pop music are pretentious and silly? In which case, I give up.
btw, would it be too much to ask for you to sign your comments?
Yes, give up.
‘existential void of postmodernity’ is a nonsense phrase. ‘Existential void’ is precisely the alienated, modernist concept that postmodernism baniches.
‘existential void of postmodernity’ is a nonsense phrase. ‘Existential void’ is precisely the alienated, modernist concept that postmodernism baniches
Really? How?
Yes, give up.
OK, i’ve asked politely. Any more unattributed comments will be deleted, and the IP address from which they have been sent will be blocked.
Fair warning.
This is getting like Echo Friendly all over again.
“who think that ‘escapism’ is not ideologically significant, could you imagine _that_?”
Well, they might refuse to accept it because they don’t want to be judged. It’s a bit like twisting your perception reality so it fits your views on life. Take for example: “whereas women proudly display their Sex and the City boxsets, they tend to conceal their Dido CDs in much the same way that men are embarrassed about pornography.” This can’t be scientifically proven. wink wink nudge nudge.
Wearing sunglasses at night…
K-Punk dissects S & The City and Dido. Now as much as I love the piece, I can’t help thinking: how do you (or he) build up a piece and not realize that the very foundation is so wobbly. You…
well, that sort of assumes that ideology isn’t a form of escapism, now don’t it?
being largely unfamiliar with dido and sex in the city, i got a kick out of this entry.
luv,
mike
could I just point out the post after ‘yes, give up’ isn’t me. That’s the problem with anonymity, – people continually impersonating you. I’m very glad though to have stimulated a debate, even if it results in my cyber excommunication. Good luck everyone!
the problem is also that i *did* say that there’s no real self (hence my words in between brackets) and that, of course, escapism is tied to an ideology. what i did want to imply is that 1 he’s drawn his conclusions from his own experience (and might have *twisted* his perception) and that maybe just maybe people do not want to analyze there enjoyment of it nor use it to construct their ideology or that there might be other reasons… oh blabla. lastly: maybe the anonymous user is ashamed of reading k-punk just like some are ashamed of listening to dido. wink wink
(oh fek, never mind the typos, i am belgian/dumb.)
I always saw SATC in the same way you do, K-. But would women have appreciated characters who really were as cold disposable consumerists as they pretended to be?
‘Hence the grotesquerie of forty or fifty year-olds who still think and behave like teenagers.’
This is the deeply conservative core of your critique. If SATC is so wrong, why is it liked? Althoug much of what you say is accurate, much of it is not: being a drama it is *about* the choices/struggles/compromises you touch on. It certainly does not unequivocally champion the cause of ‘the one’ or phallocentricism. Big was bad news for most of its run.
Theres something of SATCs extreme culture of choice in the strapline to Londons 2012 Back the Bid campaign: The decision will go to the city that wants it the most. With such desire requited, could London be the one?
If SATC is so wrong, why is it liked?
‘If cigarettes cause cancer, why do ppl smoke them?
If burgers cause heart disease, why do ppl eat them?
Many millions of ppl the world over freely choose to consume these products. Who are we to judge them? It’s all a matter of opinion, isn’t it?’
Thus spake Kapitalist ideology.
Uh, so you’re basically saying S&TC’s bad for your health? I thought you (and HKM) were talking about esthetics, not bad in the sense of health.
He’s probably really saying sex is bad and women shouldn’t have it
just in case anyone gets the wrong idea, i’m not responsible for the anonynous comments. so there.
So without capitalism we wouldn’t want to smoke because um we’d all be rendered rational decision-making subjects? And therefore no longer would people want to live frivolously? And bad food would be a distant memory? I think you’re confusing principled commitment to anti-capitalism with Peter Hitchens-ish moralism.
‘Many millions of ppl the world over freely choose to consume these products. Who are we to judge them? It’s all a matter of opinion, isn’t it?’
isn’t something I said, but actually yes: *why* are we to judge? Why is your choice of consumer products (Baudrillard texts) better than my hypothetical co-worker’s (SATC DVDs)?
‘Kapitalist ideology’ is about parting you from your surplus value; what you do with the residue is of interest, but does not constitute an alternative position.
Agree entirely about SATC – not so convinced by Dido As Existentialist… brave effort tho.
Re HKM’s question – “If SATC is so wrong, why is it liked? – note the implicit suggestion that people’s “likes” are or should be correlated with righteousness.
And: was SATC in fact “liked”? There was always something staged about people’s professed attachment to the programme – we watched it in order for others to watch us watching it.
Commitment to non-commitment perhaps?
Maybe the SATC gals realise that the everyday simulacra of late capitalism is all there is… They make the most of it, they want the more-dick-than-dick (Big and ’10 dicks’), or, better yet, they want the ecstasy of unresolved selection.
Big seems to be the embodiment of Carrie’s model man. The problem is that Carrie must know that models can never be realised in all their glory, all that reality gives us are low level simulacra masquerading as the ‘real thing’. Reality is relational and not absolute, ie the difference between low-level simulacra. So what happens when Big comes along and appears to fufill the requirements of the impossible?
Carrie hesitates, Big is more-dick-than-dick and for all that all man as well, but something is off… To consumate with the Big-ness would trigger a paradoxical situation of the end for her own probe-head search of the low-level Big-simulacra.
Commitment is not something _you_ ‘own’ as if it totally belonged only to you. The mob-phone, for example, illustrates a commitment to the variability of the variable – not just in terms of consuming a ‘pomo’ artefact of late capitalism. The commodification of this commitment, the rent accrued through owning a piece of the telecommunication network, and exploitation of the labor-value of speaking (on the phone) is much more interesting that any close-minded understanding of the mobile as ‘upgradeble-consumption’.
All we have are ethical commitments to our simulacrum and, as in the case of Carrie, this may mean never allowing ourselves to consumate with the Big-ness of the simulacrum. To do so would entail the opposite of what you suggest, the impossible living out of an _END_ to our (well, Carrie’s) commitment. Why do you think of commitment in such conservative humanist/modernist ways?
Maybe the SATC gals realise that the everyday simulacra of late capitalism is all there is.
This is a Big claim, and one that, thankfully, is in no way substantiated. The SATC harridans are not committed to simulacra qua simulacra, they drift along with the simulacra on its false promise of being real (with the real understood in the least Lacanian, most naively supernaturalist way). What is more conservative, humanist and phallic than the belief in the One?
As Catherine suggests above, the belief in the One is a degraded, humanistic version of a religious impulse.
My detestation of SATC and the kapitalist ideology which it presents and you celebrate is undoubtedly modernist. But I am very far from seeing a problem with that. What could prove Jameson’s point that postmodernism is the cultural logic of late kapitalism more than your apologia for commodification and consumerism?
You seem to miss the basic point of the show’s utterly conventional libidinal-romantic economy, which turns on the depressingly dialectical relationship to commitment. It is not as if Carrie wants to AVOID consummation with (the) Big per se; she wants to equivocate about such commitment, endlessly. And of course the only model of commitment she has is that of the heterosexual romantic couple, in which commitment entails subordination to the phallus.
The kapitalist ideology Carrie and the rest of them embody runs like this. First, everything is seen in terms of personal relations. These personal relations are understood in terms of consumerist logic. Then this logic is generalised to cover everything.
Of course,the very fact that commitment can only be understood in terms of some supine swoon in the face of the other, a gaze into their eyes, forever, to be interrupted only by the arrival of a little Oedipus… this is itself an ideological move.
As Zizek rightly says, the model for a successful couple relation cannot be based on an arid shared interiority, but on a relationship to an outside. Not staring into each other’s eyes, but both looking together towards a collective Cause. You see yourself as a component, a machine-part of an anti-natural nu-earth constructivist machine. What’s humanist about that?
Belief in the One?
Like the belief in the couple? ‘Romantic’ coupling is the production of yet another One. (WTF, I agree with Zizek about something! Of course it is a _model_! Simulacrum!) By turning away from Big, Carrie turns away from this becoming-One produced by a humanist/modernist coupling. Here is your humanist/modernist and thoroughly Oedipalised commitment.
Your misrecognition of my sympathies with a thoroughly modernist capitalist ideology is interesting; I am not sure what I said above that gives you that impression? Perhaps it is your reading-event of SATC, which places the characters, the sex and the city under the territorialisation of capital, that infects what you read in my post? Or your becoming-One with the facile belief in hard-core anti-capitalism? To denouce such anti-capitalism, sorry, anti-kapitalism, must mean that I am a raging capitalist fuck who wants the world reflected in the dollar. Obviously!
‘The false promise of the simulacrum’ is indeed the irony of Big’s more-dick-than-dick and Carrie’s non-failure to ‘couple’ and become-One. There is no _false_ promise. Big is the more-dick-than-dick, to submit to the becoming-One of coupling would be to _buy_ into the ‘utterly conventional libidinal-romantic economy’ of the show. I am certainly not denying this as a good, albeit partial, description. However, I am unwilling to accept that this is necessarily how the show is played out. Carrie’s experimentation with coupling (literally and sometimes metaphorically) is a dissolution of the ‘utterly conventional’ happy ending of the becoming-One with Big.
You may be reading what you understand as a lack of social/romantic commitment in SATC as a metaphor for a lack of commitment to politcal projects in broader social relations. I would partially agree. However, the answer is not to produce the best and Big-gest One on the block, by committing to the more-dick-than-dick simulacra in some personal and thoroughly Oedipal way, your avowed and implicit anti-kapitalism. What is wrong with Carrie’s commitment to her friends? Four enough for a multitude? Why should she have to submit to the becoming-One of a heterosexual (or otherwise) couple?
The shared ethical commitment of Carrie and her friends to each other and other domains is only ever partially shared. To imagine it is possible ‘to look together towards a common cause’ does not mean you are looking at the cause in all its One-ness glory (ooh ooh out of the cave now are we?) or even that the cause is readily identifiable.
Over and out.
If you find any television programme offensive you can always turn it off!
Your misrecognition of my sympathies with a thoroughly modernist capitalist ideology is interesting; I am not sure what I said above that gives you that impression?
Hmmm, yes, I wonder where I could have got _that_ impression from? 🙂 Could it perhaps be this:
‘Maybe the SATC gals realise that the everyday simulacra of late capitalism is all there is…’
That’s pretty much a statement of capitalist ideology I would say.
Perhaps it is your reading-event of SATC, which places the characters, the sex and the city under the territorialisation of capital, that infects what you read in my post?
Yes, that perverse and utterly unjustified ‘reading’ which claims that a show devoted to the uncritical reification of sex and shopping (and their equivocation) is ‘under … capital’ – not the territorialization of capital, naturally, because the one thing that capitalism doesn’t do is territorialize, it deterritorializes and retetteritorializes.
Or your becoming-One with the facile belief in hard-core anti-capitalism? To denouce such anti-capitalism, sorry, anti-kapitalism, must mean that I am a raging capitalist fuck who wants the world reflected in the dollar. Obviously!
The false dichotomy is all yours, my friend. Being anti-capitalist does not necessarily equate with ‘facile’ beliefs, although it seems that your version of ‘resisting capital’ is the universally-endorsed university-endorsed one of ‘reading against the grain’ and ‘avoiding closure’ – as if by watching TV you are not by that fact along going along with exactly what Kapital wants.
Carrie’s ‘ethical’ commitment to her friends is nothing of the sort; their friendship is based on neurotic back-biting and insecurity and revolves around the absent but still all too present phallus, since it is based upon talking about what they are doing with men. The frustrated desire for female collectivity is the disavowed desire on which the series depends, but remains complicit in frustrating – because the women continue to believe that they need a man.
Of course, no-one needs a man.
Am I banned or something?
Perhaps you confuse the representation of four people existing in a ‘world of se.x and shopping’, how they survive and so on, for the reification of that world?
Your critique of SATC and what I have written is too easy – “pretty much a statement of capitalist ideology”. Lets bash everything with the anti-kapitalist hammer (and sickle) because, why? what? It makes us feel better? Because it does something? It doesn’t make me feel better! With the way things are going at present I hardly think it does a damn thing besides fill up blogs! What I wonder is how people live their lives as best as they think they can. For you it is as Mark-K, well, good on ya!
The irony is that I have watched very little of SATC, I am mostly going by what you and others elsewhere have written. The SATC four are necessarily more than a mere reflection of the phallus, at least in any simple sense. From what I have seen, the three – the four women, the se.x, the city (the ‘shopping’, although I think it is much more than this) – feed forward and back into each other. Each mutates with every iteration (episode) and yet remains remarkably the same. These are the necessary coordinates of the show, and, thus, let it be damned on capitalist and se.xist grounds. Great! Too easy! It doesn’t allow for much of a discussion of why it was actually popular, or of what minor victories it catalysed in the lives of its audiences (if any).
If the female collectivity of the four was ever allowed to fully actualise, then the show would be over, so, yeah, the tension must remain. But do not all women in western capitalist societies (at least) have to subsist in a _man’s world_? I don’t really know, I am not a woman, nor am I privy to any special.ist knowledge. If this _is_ the case however, then what is left except a constant struggle. Against what? Everything that Big signifies…
So to return to my original point about commitment. Carrie’s struggle to belong to the romantic/libidinal economy that is demanded of her in script and, probably, in life, is in stark tension with the impossible resolution via complicit and complete submission to the phallus-Big. This is the tension that operates as a singularity throughout the life of the show and organises the lives of the four. By your critique, you ask too much of the SATC gals and the show. I believe they have a remarkable fidelity to each other and pragmatic solidarity in helping each other work through this (drama induced) tension.
hmmm, kept getting a “questionable content error”… someone must have this blog set to Zizek mode or something, ha!!
gotta agree with Mark’s point about the utterly unpleasant ‘friendships’ of the four girls – if I had female friends like that I would kill myself. Or befriend squirrels. Or hyenas. Anything to get away from all that neurotic gossiping and carping.
They weren’t supportive in the least – did they ever go round to each other’s houses and help sort things out when things were rough? (no, they just got maids instead). Did they ever say anything remotely compassionate or complimentary to each other? No, they were too busy trying to outdo one other with a supposedly ‘witty’ putdown (and if Carrie is meant to be the ‘intelligently humourous’ one, you really have to weep…come back Mae West and Dorothy Parker, we need you!)
Nope. Not nice girls. They were all driven by pretty horrible drives – to appear ‘successful’, economically and sexually, to appear ‘concerned’, (ultimately, much in the way an air-hostess is ‘concerned’ for you to put your seatbelt on upon takeoff. i.e. not at-fucking-all).
Women are much more interesting than SATC could dare admit….that’s the truth of it.
They weren’t supportive in the least – did they ever go round to each other’s houses and help sort things out when things were rough? (no, they just got maids instead). Did they ever say anything remotely compassionate or complimentary to each other? No, they were too busy trying to outdo one other with a supposedly ‘witty’ putdown (and if Carrie is meant to be the ‘intelligently humourous’ one, you really have to weep…come back Mae West and Dorothy Parker, we need you!)
Obv you must have been watching a different S&TC show because from what I have seen – and no, I am not pretending I watch it, I actually DO watch it for my OWN pleasure – they do help eachother out. This is my problem with a lot of the (negative) criticism here: cognitive dissonance.
There are kapitalist undertones in the show – I fully agree – but it is also about love (or refusal of it). Of course a *real* woman is more interesting, TV makes it one dimensional. It isn’t meant to represent a *real* woman at all.
ok then, give me an example!