Introduction
Style, repeated in countless arenas of contemporary life, seems to be an intangible, slippery subject that ‘transcend[s] topical boundaries’ (Ewen 1999: 2), yet Ewen (1999: xviii, 10) acknowledges that style is associated with consumption, influenced by social and economic conditions and the power of mass media. When television entered suburban life, style entered into a postmodern culture, in which ‘rational modernism gave way to a self-conscious and promiscuous play of images.’ (Ewen 1999: 230) This entry discusses how style is articulated in the postmodern consumer culture using Home Box Office’s (HBO) hit comedy series Sex and the City as a screen example. Sex and the City has been widely acclaimed as a breakthrough approach to the television’s representation of gender and sexuality (Arthurs 2003: 315); therefore, I will also examine the politics of style in a gendered discourse. By analysing a screen text that interweaves postmodernism, feminism and style, I argue that despite of the fact that postmodern television reconfigures cultural materials to manufacture commodity culture and ideologically constructed pleasures, its transgressive and democratic implications cannot be undermined.
Style -> Postmodern Aesthetic -> Televisuality -> Commodity Culture
Style constitutes the ‘intimate component of subjectivity’, and at the same time, the ‘decisive component of politics’ and the commodity in consumer market (Ewen 1999: 22); therefore, style itself illustrates the postmodern reconfiguration of culture materials in which the lines between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, art and culture, culture and commerce have been systemically blurred (Adair 1992, cited in Sim 2002: 185; Featherstone, cited in Barker 2000: 185). The process of stylization discontentualises the content, perceives the world in a flux of images, appropriates and commodifies meanings; it is the postmodern ‘aestheticization of everyday life’ (Feathersome 1991, cited in Barker 2000: 155), the shift from ‘discursive’ to the ‘figural’ (Lash 1990, cited in Barker 2000: 153) and the construction of ‘hyperreality’ (Baudrillard 1983, cited in Barker 2000: 158).
To examine postmodern aesthetic in television, Caldwell (1995) provides a thorough discussion of “televisuality”. The term describes an aesthetic tendency towards “narrow-casting”, “excessive stylization”, and “structural inversion” (Caldwell 1995: 352). Televisuality is a product of the rising competition of mainstream network and cable, with the later offers consumers a broad range of more specifically designed options (Caldwell 1995: 10-11). Postmodern television programmers value economic, racial, age and regional differences by developing highly distinctive and coded styles that mapped their narrow niche markets. (Caldwell 1995: 251) This ‘narrowcasting’ process results in the reconfiguration of both the content and the audience to cultural and ethic specific styles. Sex and the City pitches at white, heterosexual, and affluent females by branding its identity as ‘bourgeois bohemians’ (Arthurs 2003: 316) articulated by ‘excess stylization’. The way televisuality and stylization function is similar to Deleuze and Guatarri’s (1983) ‘desiring-machine’.
‘Desire constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented. Desire causes the current to flow, itself flows in turn and breaks the flow. ‘ (Deleuze and Guatarri 1983: 5)
Television is perpetuated with flows of detached and fragmented images, spectacle and semiotics that stimulate desire; However the desire flow does not stop at looking, it continues when spectators, other media and cultural institutions interpret, decode, deconstruct and reconfigures.
Sex and the City utilizes semiotic excess of fashion and mis-en-scene, modes of sexual behaviours and ironic humours as its stylistic marker. In Sex and the City, the ‘bourgeois bohemian’ style is not explicitly presented as commodities to be purchase but a consumer lifestyle to be imitated (Arthur 2003: 322). In the series, the moods, the personalities and the attitudes of the embodied characters are expressed as commodities, whether Manolo Blahnik shoes, Cosmopolitan cocktail or Harry Winston diamond. In the episode ‘Just Say Yes’ (4: 60), Carrie express her doubts of Adrian’s engagement proposal: ‘How can I marry a guy who doesn’t know which ring is me?’ To which Samantha responds, ‘Exactly, honey, Wrong ring, wrong guy.’ At the end of the episode, Carrie accepts the proposal after Adrian changes the ring to a Harry Winston emerald-cut three-carat diamond. But Carrie eventually calls off the engagement when trying on an elaborated wedding dress. Although other events contribute to the progress of narratives, the ring and the wedding dress appear central to the state of emotions and the suitability of partnership.
The ‘wrong’ ring that Adrian almost gave to Carrie
Classic Harry Winston Emerald-cut ring
Carrie’s engagement drama reveals the ‘commodity culture’ that is interested in packaging the narratives ‘as aesthetic consumables’; the same applies to commodification of ‘gestures of society’ (Colman 2003). For both the characters and the audience, desires and attitudes are transformed into material object forms that enable them to access the ‘single and fabulous’ (‘They Shoot Single People, Don’t They’, 2: 4) self of the idolized characters. On the series’ website, the audience are invited and anticipated to identify emotional states, characters and narratives with consumption choices, such as the Look by Character on HBO website which showcases the character’s dress brands and Guide To NY which maps out each of the restaurant and bar appeared in the series. The website of Sex and the City encourages viewers to convert their knowledge about the series into knowledge of commodity consumption in real life (Arthur 2003: 332). The materialisation of fantasy, for Ewen (1999: 14), is essential to ‘the magic of style’.
Sex and the City, as Klein (2000, cited in Arthurs 2003: 324) claims, is part of a wider cultural condition, labelled postmodernism, a commodified aesthetic with irony as its central component. Irony is a self-reflexive understanding of culture and values (Barker 2000: 153). A ‘pastiche’ is a form of irony as it emulates a particular earlier cultural style or content but without expressing any perspective toward the work emulated (Belton 1994, cited in Sim 2002: 229). The adoption of Woody Allen’s visual and narrative styles is a typical pastiche, such as the wit and creative visual approach, the neurotic romance in response to sexual liberation and the use of voiceover flashback and direct address in romantic comedy. More explicit textual pastiche occurs in Carrie and Big’s carriage ride (‘I Heart NY‘ 4: 18, youtube clip), which pays homage to Ike’s ride with his girlfriend Tracy in Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), with romantic ‘New York’ music and both men commenting, ‘this is corny’ (Akass & McCabe 2004: 155). The music Moonriver is another pastiche to Audrey Hepburn’s classic romantic comedy Breakfast At Tiffany’s (1961).
The Cosmopolitan cocktail constantly mentioned by the characters is another pastiche to the Cosmopolitan magazine (Kingston 2005: 220). Arthur (2003: 322) understands the treatment of sexuality in Sex and the City as a ‘re-mediation’ of the content of women’s magazine and the address of ‘Cosmo’ woman, who is associated with sexual liberation and economic independence. The remediation of women’s magazine by the series exploits affluent and youthful bourgeois females’ experience of women’s magazine as consuming and sexual guide. Carrie’s billboard slogan ‘Carrie Bradshaw knows good sex’ further illustrates that the series’ attempts to empowers its characters as sexual expertise, similar as the way Madonna idolises herself through the postmodern media spectacle (Tetzlaff 1993: 261).
Bricolage, as another form of self-reflexive irony, ‘juxtaposes previously unconnected signs to produce new codes of meaning’ (Barker 2000: 154). Bricolage is best exemplified on Carrie’s screen body. As Carrie says in one episode (‘Politically Erect’, 3: 2), her iconic fashion style is ‘mixing up old ideas and coming up with new’. Her mixing of designer clothes and cheap vintage items is exemplified n ‘Ex and the City‘ (2: 30, cited in Akass & McCabe 2004: 118), in which an unattainable Dior dress appears within affordability with her inexpensive, widely available nameplate necklace (in fact, it can be purchase at $24.99 in HBO online store). Carries’ behaviours and dress styles are not constrained by social or professional structures but are merely personal expressions. Her personal expression is privileged in the series to classic fashion so that he spectacular can be exploited by HBO to support its radical and alternative ‘bohemian’ attitude.
Carrie’s Dior Dress
Carrie’s Nameplate Necklace
In the opening credit, Carrie confidently struts through New York urbanscape when the water splashed by a passing bus on her pink body-skimming dress. While she is depicted as an independent and autonomous woman, the image renders her feminized body to the masculinised cityscape (Akass and McCabe 2004: 120). Carrie, similar as the Madonna analysed by Tetzlaff (1993), has multiple or even contradictory personae, her autonomous feminism, her romantic feminity, her wacky exhibitionism and her self-reconfiguration in her column and public domain. The postmodern borrowing, fabricating and hybridizing of cultural materials and reinvention of multiple personae, as Tetzlaff (1993) states, create multiple points of audience identification, which in turn creates a commercial advantage. The other characters of the show also evolve in such a way to further facilitate diverse audience identifications: Miranda the career woman, Charlotte the sweet traditionalist, Samantha the sexual predator (Akass and McCabe 2004: 137).
Caldwell’s observations of ‘excess style’ or Collins’ (1992, cited in Barkers 2000: 156) ‘postmodern semiotic of excess’ exemplifies a ‘structural inversion’ that challenges the established television hierarchies (Caldwell 1995: 6). Style, long perceived as a ‘signifier’ or carrier for content and ideas has now itself stepped forward as the ‘signified’ and the defining subject of television in order to maintain a distinctive look to compete for commercial audience share. In Sex and the City, the costumes, mis-en-scenes and other visual spectacles that produce commodified pleasures become primary, relegating the narratives to the background. Each of the four characters is developed and stereotyped through their modes of self-presentation; in some cases, the fashion spectacle even exists as an independent force, intruding and destabilizing the narrative (Akass and McCabe 2004: 123). In Episode 33, after her confrontation with Big’s new partner, Carrie exchanges her feelings with Charlotte while Charlotte sympathetically comforts her. However, Carrie’s highly elaborated and jarring clothes – ‘blue striped and fringed golfing trousers, cropped floral burgundy shirt and a red and cream Chanel jacket’- distract and obscure the narrative emotion. (Akass and McCabe 2004: 126)
When screen style is translated into lifestyle, television aesthetics have been fabricated into an anthropological condition in which capitalist power is formed and cultural identities are formed. As Caldwell 1995 (353) says, television’s search for style opened up new modes of discourse and new forms of structure. In this perspective, style and televisuality are not just defining aesthetic practices, but also cultural operations with marked ideological implications. For critics, postmodern culture has ignited divided opinion on its ideological implications.
According to Baudrillard (1983, cited in Barker 2000: 157), postmodern culture is a ‘superficial’ culture in which no object has ‘essential’ or ‘deep’ value; rather the value is determined through a commodity without use value but ‘commodity-sign’ or exchange value. Jameson’s (1984, cited in Barker 2000: 158) rejects the idea that postmodernism is superficial and argues it represents the cultural style of late capitalism, which extends commoditification to all sphere of contemporary life. Both of Baudrillard and Jameson’s arguments share common roots in Marx’s (1867) ‘commodity fetishism’ and Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘cultural industry’ ((1993). While Marx critically explains how capitalism functions, Adorno and Horkheimer (1993: 29) denounces that the cultural industry submits to capitalism, and as a result, the society has ‘lost its capacity to nourish true freedom and individuality’. Sex and the City has created its own ‘commodity fetishism’ as a part of ‘cultural industry’. The ‘in’ places to eat, the trendy bars, the shoes and the clothes all offer desirable consumption choices, generating new capital and cultural values. Just as the series auction off the commodities in its virtual shopping mall for charity, HBO uses Sex and the City to secure its brand label associated with its up-scale demographic (Akass and McCabe 2004: 6-7). Tetzlaff echoes (1993: 248) that postmodernism applies commodity fetishism to aesthetics while anesthetizing commodity exchange into spectacle for mass consumption.
Auction Item – Carrie’s Dries Van Noten floral silk dress
However, bearing in mind the conditions Adorno and Horkheimer offered the vision of ‘cultural industry’, theorists have argued that although ‘cultural industry’ serves capitalist system, it also provides opportunities for ‘individual and collective creativity and decoding’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1993). In contrast to Baudrillard and Jameson’s views, Chambers (1987, 1990, cited in Barker 2000: 159) argues that the ability of consumers to freely select and arrange elements of commodities and signs into a personal style implies ‘the democratization of culture’ and new political potentials. Carries’ fabrication of her own style and her multiple identities can be read as a radical cultural attitude, but it is also exploited by HBO for the channel’s brand identity. In addition, the series’ fashion manifestation is not limited to consumption market but produces cultural value in fashion press, with ‘fashion’ widely regarded as the progressive (Akass and McCabe 2004: 141). Ewen (1999: 29) echoes that style ‘speaks for a democratic society’, in which deconstruction enables reinvention and images mark individuation; consequently, the identity one wishes to construct is often seen as more significant than one’s real identity. The subjectivity of individuals is no longer a reflection of the society’s hierarchy structure but an autonomous self-expression. This leads to the next part of discussion on postmodernism in gendered or feminist discourse where its political and ideological implications are further debated and the representation of women’s sexuality is discussed in more details.
Style, Postmodernism and Consumerism in Gender Discourse
Barker (2000: 153) suggests that postmodern reflexivity enables the playful self-construction of multiple identities and requires comparison of one tradition to ‘another’, and consequently, invites the ‘other’ that is suppressed by modernity to voice out. Such voices include those of feminists or postfeminists. Critics have acknowledged that postmodern representations of women such as Madonna and the four potagonists in Sex and the City are transgressive as they celebrate female sexuality and reject the patriarchal virgin/whore dichotomy (Tetzlaff 1993: 249; Arthur 2003: 326). The recurring theme from the first episode is Carrie’s quest of female sexuality ‘can woman have sex like a man’ (‘Sex and the City’ 1:1). In the four protagonists’ searches for the answer, their sexuality is freed from the bonds of marriage or commitment to any single partner. Like Madonna, the foursome in Sex and the city offer their fans access to semiotic and social power to break the limiting patriarchal paradigm. The empowerment may transfer to the fans and thus affects their behaviour in real social situations (Fiske 1989, cited in Tetzlaff 1993: 242). Therefore, the trasgression is not limited on the screen but is transferred into social transgression. In addition, female protagonists in Sex and the City confront and reverse the norms of the male gaze by its ‘persistent denuding of male bodies’ (Akass and McCabe 2004: 36). Although in some cases the protagonists offer their body images as objects of gaze, such as Samantha who often present her body as sexually appealing, the postfeminists view this ‘visual sexual appraisal’ as liberation and empowerment (Owen et al. 2007: 113).
On the other hand, critics have pointed out that postmodernism might conform to the dominant ideology (Kaplan 1987, Kellner 1995, Ang 1996, cited in Sim 2005: 236-238). As a postmodernism ‘pose’ can be easily appropriated, postmodernism may turn out to be ‘more style than substance’. In Tetzlaff’s (1993: 253) analysis of the Madonna phenomenon, he claims that by ‘appropriating powerful symbols and stripping away their historically and socially situated meanings’, postmodernism contributes to the established ideological structure. This is supported in Owen et al.’s (2007) exploration of the representations of ‘transgressive women’, in which they argue that mass media employs ‘commodity fetishism’ to portray feminism as fashion, and lifestyle choices. In this way, feminists’ social and political concerns are undermined by popular culture where women enjoy freedom to choose as consumers, but rarely as political agents (Owen et al. 2007:10). Carrie’s statement self-consciously addresses Sex and the City’s invitation for women to move from political arena to consumer arena – ‘He was adept at politics. I was adept at fashion.’ (‘Political Erect’, 3: 2). The series tends to avoid feminist issues such as political rights, job equality or ethic divisiveness; rather, it trivializes and domesticates feminist political issues through commodification (Owen et al. 2007: 121).
The narratives and characterization of Sex and the City are celebrated as liberated and empowered; yet all four characters desire the conventional romantic fulfilment – finding Mr. Right. One of the prominent themes in Sex and the City and other contemporary postfeminism screen texts is the old princess fairytale, evident in the final episode (Youtube Clip) when Big rescued Carrie from her disappointment of a failed relationship and her loneliness in Paris. Although the series rejects traditional notions of appropriate sexual desires and behaviours for women, it ends with all four characters abandoning their desires to enjoy ‘‘sex like a man” and safely engaging in committed ‘happily ever after ‘relationships. Constructions of female desire in the series present that women as single, economic independent and free to desire, but romance and finding the right partner is still the ‘most pivotal life decision’ (Kingston 2005: 221). In this sense the seemingly liberated women “appropriate the language of radical feminist politics” but only to retell old patriarchal narratives of women desiring to be rescued and ‘swept away’ (Akass and McCabe 2004:180).
The series’ ‘double coding’ is similar to Madonna’s Boy Toy postmodern feminism; although independence and power create postmodern feminist appeal, both of them also had strong appeal in traditional patriarchal terms (Tetzlaff 1993: 251). For Tetzlaff (1993: 251), double coding has the commercial advantages of multiple audience identifications. By activating contradictory discourses and tensions, it also helps to make Madonna or Sex and the City a continuing subject of public controversy and debate, further enhancing its fame and status, and in turn its commodity value. Sex and the City self-consciously addresses the battle of male and female in its exploration of sexual freedom and ironic parodies. In the battle, the four characters are neither winners nor losers, yet as they fight, they gain public attentions as well as fans’ love. For fans immersed in postmodern pleasures, both sides in these unresolved conflicts cancel each other, leaving a residue of emotional intensity attached to the spectacles and the floating signs.
The ‘double coding’ in Sex and the City is probably most evident in its incorporation of feminist ambivalence of self-aestheticization. The aestheticised self is both ‘a source of confident autonomy and of disempowerment’ in tensions (Arthurs 2003: 327). The series centres on Carrie’s first person narrative constructed around her role as a successful sex and relationship columnist. She is both an objective observer of her own and her friends lived experiences. She ‘self-reflexively and playfully’ comments on what occurs during the episode, not in a political or ethical position but from ‘an aesthetic point of view’. Sexual issues are translated into witty, readable column humours and ‘comedy embarrassment’. The audience were not objective observers or physically aroused of their sexual experiences, nor as participants in the evaluation of their sexuality or morality; rather they are just spectators immersed in postmodern pleasure, that is, amused in the ironic humour.
At this point of discussion, the debates surrounding the ideological implications of postmodernism in both economic and gender discourses seem to validate McRobbie’s (1994, cited in Sim 2005: 239-241) defence of postmodern style. McRobbie argues that postmodernism’s diversity provides a platform, or more critically, a starting point for interrogation of mass media and every aspect of lived experience, and thus for the development of intellectually stimulating social and political debates. McRobbie goes on to argue that although the postmodern mass media appears to be market-driven, audience are not merely receptor of capitalism. Cultural, communication and anthropology studies act as ‘facilitators of media scrutiny’ so that they are unable to dominate and control as they wish.
Conclusion
While the first part of the essay closely analyses style as a postmodernism cultural practice, the second part further examines this cultural practice in gender discourse. The transgression of the four women in Sex and the City as economically independent, sexually free and autonomous ‘bohemian bourgeois’ may challenge the traditional patriarchal ideology; however, their commodified bodies may still conform to capitalism . As postfeminism is reduced to consumption and lifestyles, whether it is an radically subversive act or merely a style serving dominant ideologies is questioned. Although the postmodern self-stylization is criticised as ‘commodity fetishism’, it can be seen as an emerging point for cultural democratization. Furthermore, cultural and media studies will continuously facilitate scrutiny of cultural and media practices, evident in the ongoing critics and analysis of Sex and the City’s capitalism and patriarchal discourse. Although postmodernism itself may reinforce the established capitalism and patriarchal structure, the social and political implications brought by the discussions of postmodernism cannot be undermined.
References
Akass, K. and J. McCabe (2004) Reading Sex and the City. London, New York: I. B. Tauris.
Adorno, T. and M. Horkheimer (1993) ‘The Culture Industry: enlightenment as mass deception’ pp. 29-43 in S. During (ed.) The Cultural Studies Reader. London & New York: Routledge.
Arthurs, J. (2003) ‘Sex and the City and Consumer Culture’ pp. 315-330 in H. Newcomb (ed.) Television: the critical view. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Ang, I. (1990) ‘Melodramatic Identifications: Television Fiction and Women’s Fantasy’ pp. 75-88 in M. E. Brown (ed.) Television and Women’s Culture: The Politics of the Popular. London: Sage.
Barker, C. (2000) Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Caldwell, J. T. (1995) Televisuality: style, crisis, and authority in American television. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
Colman, F. (2003) ‘The Sight of Your God Disturbs Me: questioning the post-Christian bodies of Buffy, Lain and George.’ The Refractory: a Journal of Entertainment Media 3,
http://www.refractory.unimelb.edu.au/journalissues/vol3/colman.html
Ferriss, S. and M. Young (2006) Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction. New York, NY: Routledge.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1983) ‘The Desiring Machine’ pp. 1-50 in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Karl, M. (1867) ‘The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof’ pp. 42-50 in D. McLellan (ed.) [Das Kapital] Karl Marx Capital: An Abridged Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Kingston, A. (2005) ‘The Unwife’ pp. 200-224 in The Meaning of Wife. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Markle, G. (2008) “‘Can Women Have Sex Like a Man?’ Sexual Scripts in Sex and the City”, Sexuality & Culture, 12, 45-57.
Owen, A. S., Leah R., Vande Berg and Sarah R. S. (2007) Bad Girls: Cultural Politics And Media Representations of Transgressive Women. New York: P. Lang.
Sim, S. (2002) ‘The Aesthetics of the Postmodern: Postmodern Culture, the Arts and the Critical Disciplines’ pp. 185-250 in Irony and Crisis: A Critical History of Postmodern Culture. Cambridge: Icon.
Tetzlaff, D. (1993) ‘Metatextual Girl: -> patriarchy -> postmodernism -> power -> money -> Madonna’ pp. 239-263 in C. Schwichtenberg (ed.) The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities and Cultural Theory. St. Leonards, Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Television Programs
Sex and the City, (1998-2004) HBO Television
Films
Manhattan (1979) Woody Allen, Jack Rollins & Charles H. Joffe Productions, USA, 96 mins.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) Blake Edwards, Jurow-Shepherd Productions, USA, 115 mins.
For further insights into politics of style and postmodern aesthetics -
Cough’s short essay on postmodernism and Madonna
Brad’s illuminating essay on Terrorist Chic and MIA (Highly Recommended)
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