Sex and the City

Boys have their toys plus Matrix, Die Hard, James Bond and Val Kilmer films. Girls have Sex and the City.

Who would have thought that a so-so column in a so-so newspaper would become a so-so book would become a blockbuster mass movement?

During my more annoying or pathetic jags my brother will call and say "Hi Carrie, is Samantha there?" in an attempt to conjure a more cheerio my deario attitude, to help me get my groove back. My brother lives in a tiny town in the middle of the bald open prairie -- that he, a man's man in a remote empty wilderness not only knows that there is a Carrie and a Samantha but can articulate their relative merits and differences shows just how deeply the friends from NYC have permeated the culture.

Millions of words have been written about the SATC movie launched last week -- apparently most tickets are being purchased in groups, a sure sign that girls and their girlfriends are flocking; Cosmo parties are held in theatre lobbies; even a group of breast cancer survivors added seeing the flick to the panapoly of things they bond over, as reported in the New York Times.

Critics suggest that the movie isn't that good, which seems to be missing the point of it. The movie exists because there is not a woman in North America who can't identify which of the four friends she most resembles. The series itself was not much more than a fantastic cartoon that somehow wiggled its way into resonating with the way women really live, or would really like to live, in all life's messy glory. As television, SATC dared to show women as both venal or silly and at the same time deeply loyal at least to each other -- as caricatures they managed to be more nuanced than a lot of other versions on a lot of other shows. The fab four were both decent and shallow, they fought and made up, they drank too much and swore far too much, had sex with deeply inappropriate men and were as non-committal in relationships as men appear to be. In the early going someone wrote that SATC was not actually about girlfriends at all but rather about four gay men or more accurately, four big queens. Over time, what made them hugely appealing was that not one of them was good or bad, they were flawed just like real people but they had one huge dreamy advantage over the rest of us -- they had each other, through thick or thin. They didn't have to put their eggs in a relationship basket, each had THREE strong people in their corner at all times.

That bond of friendship is the real appeal, because it's so wonderful to contemplate and so rare. Years ago, when I was suffering my first huge heartbreak a friend -- a guy -- looked at my tear-dripping face and said simply "You need some good girlfriends." He was so right! and yet good girlfriends, or friends period, are hard to find. Twice in my life great friends, colleagues I worked with for years, turned out to be about proximity; once we were no longer in each other's faces, quite literally by means of workspace, I saw little of them. Girlfriends come and go with the vagaries of boyfriends and husbands and babies and soccer to attend to; there is almost always something a bit more important than getting together with your gal pals. So the luxury displayed weekly on SATC, TV version, was not so much the Manolos or the thousand-dollar t-shirts, the luxury was the solid footing each woman had with the others. Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte each knew she could call at 3am and the others would rally, she could count on the others to show up for brunch, she could count on her friends to both celebrate with her and save her as the moment required.

The movie may have messed with this essential DNA a bit, rendering the girls a little less distinct -- one criticism is that in the film they've even started to dress alike -- but the groundswell of grassroots approval shows that real live women, grown ups, weren't ready to say goodbye to their fake friends. Perhaps the series and the movie also stand as a template for creating better real ones.