“New York, we are all contingent, but you are necessary,” Cuerda would say if he had to write this article (because, in the city that never sleeps, the dawn is no small thing).
It is difficult to decipher the role that the Big Apple plays in the series: setting, omnipresent character, cause and effect, culprit and redeemer… New York implies and complicates; New York is not the creator of the world, but the world itself is part of New York; New York is everything and outside of it nothing exists.
This last point is not mine, it is God according to Spinoza, the closest simile I could think of given the idolatry professed towards said city to the point of being surprising that Carrie does not end her columns with an amen.
It is clear that it is no longer 2002, little remains of that chic 2000s ideal that was sold to us. Sex and the City of running around (which is a very chic and very 2000s verb) making your way through clouds of pollution with the skill of not sticking your stiletto heel into a sewer crack.
Now we have also stopped thinking about opening local businesses poke bowls in neighborhoods is a sign of prosperity, that tourism is closer to saving us than suffocating us and that, ultimately, cosmopolitan life is comfortable. Young people no longer want to live in Sex and the City, We are satisfied with Straw in Ciudad Real as long as I can rent an apartment that has a separate kitchen and living room.
Living in a big city is like living inside the triptych of ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, but spending all your time on the right side of the board – the one in Hell, doing excels and team buildings – and the only way to catch a glimpse of Paradise for half an hour is to find a place on a terrace at three in the afternoon on a Friday and hope that the waiter doesn’t tell you that there were people waiting.
Don’t believe that hope is the last thing to be lost, the last thing to be lost is the metro card. Here you have to pay for hope.
I know a lot about this because I was one of those girls who, at 18, went on a pilgrimage from their provinces to the big cities in search of fulfilling the American dream of studying a degree that is not in their autonomous community. Like the Camino de Santiago, but with more faith because they are also usually degrees with no job opportunities. I have experienced first-hand what it is like to cross the fine line that separates hope from apathy when you realize – sooner rather than later – that you have not only blindly placed all your hopes and ambition in an unknown city, but that you have also developed a parasocial relationship with it as a side effect of believing yourself to be the main character.
The latter, of course, is a distinctive feature of Carrie Bradshaw, the Manhattan woman. But even for the Manhattan woman, six years of coming and going along the same streets takes its toll: passing by corners where you have cried, places where you felt miserable or – worse – unnaturally happy, buildings where you were someone else, doorways through which you unconsciously quicken your pace, bars that transport you to the past just by looking at the chairs… The city is a minefield for the hippocampus of a cathartic girl and to live in the city is, in part, to resignify and reconquer the places of the past, but it is permissible to get tired; man does not live on Proust’s madeleines alone.
So I’d like to think that this was one of the reasons why Carrie was motivated to leave New York in the final moments of the series, episodes 19 and 20 of season 6 (‘An American in Paris, part 1 and 2’) and not because of the certainly ridiculous and precocious presence of Aleksandr Petrovsky’s character, whose first appearance dates back just seven episodes.
As I said at the beginning, ‘Sex and the City’ can exist without sex, but not without New York, so what better way to end the series? Carrie hasn’t been consumed by her character; she has been consumed by the city and she’s off to Paris, where she doesn’t mind the places.
I find it hard to believe in love without barriers, but I find it even harder to believe in love without logistics, and as a 25-year-old, I would have greatly appreciated the presence of an intermediate episode dedicated solely to Carrie packing boxes, renting out the apartment, going to ask for the family book for the paperwork, taking out health insurance… There is nothing I enjoy more than bureaucratic procedures that I don’t have to do. But we can’t expect pears from an elm tree either, because it only takes a quick look at season 6 to realize that the phrase that had to be said the most in those script meetings was: “Okay, we’re finishing up, these people are going to want to sleep together.”
I can’t say much more about ‘Sex and the City’, except that it ends exactly how you think it will end.
A kiss, Carrie Bradshaw, you would have loved to see who is looking at your stories On Instagram.
