The final film in the iconic franchise celebrates its 15th anniversary this year. Although critically reviled, it serves as a fascinating timecapsule of the early 2010s. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a glitter. This year, I finally immersed myself into the glamorous world of Sex and the City, an utopian parallel dimension based on the writing of Candace Bushnell in which a weekly sex and dating column in the fictional The New York Star affords Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker in her most notable role) a seemingly infinite amount of Manolo Blahniks, boozy brunches and a gorgeous “rent-controlled” brownstone apartment on Manhattan’s coveted Upper East Side. I immediately became obsessed with the trials and tribulations of Carrie and her friends Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha. My heart ached for the impossible love triangle Carrie finds herself in between Wall Street enigma Mr. Big (Chris Noth) and hippie-adjacent loser Aidan (John Corbett); I drew inspiration from Charlotte’s pursuit of the Perfect Marriage; I thrived on the sexual escapades of the fearless cougar Samantha; and as a freelance writer I deeply related to the professional ordeals of Miranda. Perhaps surprisingly, my boundless admiration for these characters also extends to their most outrageous adventures in their second big screen outing, Sex and the City 2 (2010), a film so universally derided that its harshest reviews have become more iconic than the botched movie itself. As Lindy West penned in her ultimate take-down: “SATC2 takes everything that I hold dear as a woman and as a human (...) and rapes it to death with a stiletto that costs more than my car.” Fair point. As the third and last season of the long-in-the-tooth spin-off series And Just Like That… reaches its own shit-stained finale, I can’t think of a better time to revisit this 15-year-old reviled film in the Carrie Bradshaw-verse to discover what might be the ultimate pop-cultural time capsule of the early 2010s. Undoubtedly this is an inherently broken film, with some of the most egregious orientalist depictions of Middle Eastern people in contemporary blockbuster history – a feat in itself given the stiff competition – and a torturous runtime of 2.5 hours that slows the “plot” down to a grinding halt. But still, perhaps because Sex and the City 2 is so bad in so many baffling ways, it lingers in my heart as an endlessly fascinating cultural artefact that deserves to be explored more in-depth. As the opening sequence conjures sparkling CGI stars on stock footage of the NYC skyline while Alicia Keys’ cloying ‘Empire State of Mind’ torments the soundtrack, one must brace for the nadir of American pop culture. Welcome back to 2010. Two years into the 2008 financial crisis, right around the time of Obama’s first mid-term, the economic depression weighs so heavy on this new decade that common people need to escape into the power fantasy of extravagant Great Gatsby-coded parties. At least, that’s what writer and director Michael Patrick King believed when he sat out to write a grandiose sequel to the lucrative 2008 first feature, one in which the ladies are flown into a shining new beacon of global capitalism: Abu Dhabi. Channeling the girls’ trip narratives that had previously transported our stars to Atlantic City, Los Angeles and the Hamptons – arguably the lower-tier episodes of the series – Samantha is invited by a sheikh to do PR for his luxurious Abu Dhabi resort hotel. Literally no expense is spared in this business transaction: every girl is bestowed her own chauffeured Maybach, a palatial hotel suite and a personally assigned Arab manservant who will gladly pour her a cup of cinnamon-infused hot milk in the middle of the night. It’s notable how all these amenities create an unusual rift between the women. Where the show was admired for how it depicted the collective experience of and unconditional solidarity around womanhood, the late-capitalist deluge of SATC2 has turned the bosom friends into entitled, resentful and highly atomized individuals that are chained to their private luxuries. A purer cinema of excess has yet to be made. In classic sequel fashion everything here needs to be bigger, better and more bejeweled. So why not fly in Liza Minelli to perform a rendition of Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)’ at a distastefully expensive wedding ceremony? Why not organise a parade of random guest celebrities like Miley Cyrus and Penelope Cruz, who show up to do basically nothing but sell their face? Why not present a flood of product placement, so we can all buy the same computer Carrie writes on (I personally never pegged her as a HP girl) and drink her favourite SKYY Vodka cocktails? And never forget: you’re a bad spouse unless your anniversary gift is a Rolex…The lavish dresses, exotic locales and starry cameos naturally appealed to a global audience that yearned to spend more time with their fictional heroines, making Sex and the City 2 the highest-grossing romantic comedy of that year. All this splendour, however, also revealed the inherent creative bankruptcy of what was once a groundbreaking show about fiercely independent women navigating high-level careers and the slippery NYC dating market. Of course, Sex and the City was also enamoured with money, but at least in the HBO series it only functioned as a means to an end – a resource that afforded our protagonist to explore the layered textures of the multi-faceted American metropole. But there’s the rub: it’s all the fluff, broken scenes, internal contradictions and messy politics that make SATC2 such a fascinatingly rich text. Here we have a film that completely fetishizes the nouveau riche of the Middle East, while being so violently Islamophobic that it makes total sense all exterior location shooting was done around the more western-friendly Marrakesh, instead of the actual United Arab Emirates. Against the political backdrop of Obama amping up his international arms trade agreements with UAE and banking on their vast oil reserves to combat the financial crisis, SATC2 now serves as a perfect illustration of America’s thorny relationship with the east. A.S. Hamrah was right on the mark when he framed this film in the context of America’s disastrous imperial wars, as SATC2 plays like a cultural bombardment. Armed with Hermès dresses and mounted on camel-back, Carrie’s battalion invades the Middle-East as arrogant Americans who marvel at the wealth of the Emirates while violating its cultural fabric wholesale. The most telling scene reveals that niqab-cladded women – for the New York socialites the ultimate symbol of oppression – secretly wear western luxury brands and lingerie under their cloaks, emphasizing that America may be falling behind in the global economy, but reigns supreme when it comes to cultural expressions of freedom. The irony that all of this happens in a film with virtually zero emotional substance makes SATC2 all the more potent, albeit in unintentional ways. Even the scandalous reappearance of Aidan in the spice market – my personal scourge as a firm Mr. Big-believer – can’t make up for the fact that this film is essentially about nothing. In a complementary fashion, all this nothingness is captured in a funky-looking hybrid between opulent film stock and a hyper-digital postproduction, decorating the blatant artifice at the core of the film with the most uncanny of glimmering sheens. I don’t know any other film that looks like this. King cites David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia – another key text to illustrate Edward Said’s point that western media subjugates the east with its orientalist gaze – when Carrie et al traverse the Saharan desert on camel. This allows Samantha to make the most egregious joke ever put to script, recalling an explosive night with a Danish architect she describes as the “Lawrence of My Labia.” Such an insulting throwback to a genuine classic of film history only reinforces what a brazenly shameless film SATC2 actually is. With the luxury of hindsight, it’s fascinating to see how with And Just Like That…, Parker and King completely dialled back the tone-deaf xenophobia and openly racist rhetoric in favour of a more performatively woke and Ultra-Correct™ stance. How can we ever forget the somewhat baffling inclusion of the incredibly vocal non-binary comedian Che Diaz (Sara Ramirez), Miranda’s queer partner we all loved to hate? When SATC2 was released, critics lamented how the film tarnished the legacy of the show. Now it serves as an important hinge point in this fictional universe; a signpost of when Carrie and company abandoned their free-spirited joie de vivre, as well as a harbinger of what was to come with the even more unhinged spin-off series that has tested even the most hardcore SATC-fan. More so, it’s an pertinent illustration of the American empire in decline, desperately trying to keep the party going in the face of abject misery. The post Sex and the City 2 and the end of America first appeared on Little White Lies.