Sex and the developing city

I considered it a mixed blessing that my flight to India left May 30, the same day that “Sex and the City” premiered in the U.S. There was a part of me that wanted to see the movie -- I have seen most every episode of the series, after all. On the other hand, 148 minutes seemed an inordinately long time for a movie featuring story lines that, as far as I was concerned, had been wrapped up four years ago.

Then, not long after my arrival, the movie premiered in India, and I went to see it on opening night.

The two-and-a-half hour screening was the only block of time in which I have felt even a tiny bit homesick for the U.S. Quite understandably, nobody laughed at the New York jokes (Miranda’s line about needing to follow “the white guy with the baby” as she seeks out a new apartment in a gentrifying neighborhood is one of the funniest in the movie, I think). Instead, the audience played right into the hands of Samantha Jones, who I still consider to be the show’s least redeeming character.

For those of you who didn’t watch the show, all you really need to know about Samantha is that she likes to sleep with strangers. Or at least she did. Now she dates a movie star and talks a lot about sleeping with strangers.

It was all this talk that had everyone in the theater rolling in the aisles. Because I didn’t see it in the U.S., I have no means of comparing the manner in which the movie was received by the Indian audience to how it played back home. But I imagine the reactions have been similar – sex is strangely funny, or at least talking about sex is funny, and that holds true no matter where you are.

I count myself among those who appreciate a society’s ability to appreciate sexual humor, even when taken to extremes. While I don’t much care for Samantha, her popularity with the Indian audience in and of itself didn’t bother me. Rather, I viewed it as connoting a commendable refusal to allow outdated value systems to prevail over contemporary impulses.

This interpretation was quickly and significantly undermined by the following:

First: Any scene in which Miranda referenced the fact that Steve cheated on her provoked exasperated outbursts from the man sitting behind me -- It’s her fault! She drove him to do it! By which he presumably meant that Miranda was not having sex with Steve often enough to justify her expectation of fidelity.

And second: When two obviously gay men (I was sitting behind them, and they were very flamboyant) saw a scene in a montage of two men kissing, they thrust their hands high in the air and clapped their hands. Curiously, they also bent their heads downward. The position seemed awfully uncomfortable, and I wondered for a moment what exactly prompted it. Until, that is, I saw handfuls of popcorn flying in their direction.