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Sex, Information Ricochet, And The City
By Ed Driscoll · June 1, 2008 11:51 AM
· Bobos In Paradise · Hollywood, Interrupted
Kyle Smith has a great piece at the New York Post on the obsessed nature of Sex And The City's most die-hard fans, which would would be instantly recognizable if the genders were reversed and the costumes changed: Suppose there were thousands of men who, every Thursday night, dressed up as Chewbacca or Boba Fett and headed en masse to an inviting "Star Wars"-themed neighborhood where they could discuss their strange obsessions at bars like Cloud City or Jar Jar's Joint while guzzling specialty cocktails (the TatooTini, the Hothmopolitan).Smith sounds like he's describing a textbook example of what Tom Wolfe once called "Information Ricochet". As Wolfe noted, there were no Hell's Angels (or if there were, they were in a pretty nascent form) before The Wild One, but once young motorcycle aficionados saw Marlon Brando projected on a fifty-foot high screen on his bike, they instantly, maybe even subconsciously assumed, "This is how we act! This is what we wear!" (The "Mutt" character in the New Indiana Jones movie is a sort of cartoon illustration of that exact phenomenon in action.) And then, when Hollywood went back to make more biker movies in the 1960s, they could then crib from the real Angels, who in turn stole ideas from those movies as Information Ricochet feeds on itself. Of course, there were millions of single professional women living in New York prior to Sex And The City, but seeing the rules codified on TV makes for a powerful subconscious incentive to more carefully hone one's own lifestyle to the examples played out weekly on TV, and now movie screen. Or as Newsweek's Julia Baird wrote, "It revealed what they were already doing – and emboldened them to do more." On the plus side, at least the average Sex And The City-obsessed woman is light years more aesthetically pleasing than the sort of fellow who fancies himself living in Mos Eisley. Related: This is a riot: Come on, I’ve been to a sci-fi convention. And once you’ve stood in the dealer room and pondered dropping $45 on the Battlestar Galactica Boardgame you had when you were five years old, you can’t really fault a woman for getting excited about a $600 pair of purple fuzzy pumps that look like they should come with their own stripper pole. I mean, who the f*** am I to judge? But Ch***t in a bucket people, did we need so many montages of them doing it?Hey, the series didn't earn the sobriquet of "Shoes And The City" for nothing.
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