Travel Films Week: ‘Sex and the City 2’: Hardcore Orientalism in the Desert of Abu Dhabi

The story of Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha continued in Sex and the City 2 (2010)

This is a guest post by Emily Contois.

I’m not embarrassed to admit it. I totally own the complete series of Sex and the City—the copious collection of DVDs nestled inside a bright pink binder-of-sorts, soft and textured to the touch. In college, I forged real-life friendships over watching episodes of the show, giggling together on the floor of dorm rooms and tiny apartments. Through years of watching these episodes over and over again, and as sad as it may sound, I came to view Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha like friends—not really real, but only a click of the play button away.

On opening night in a packed theater house with two of my friends, I went to see the first Sex and the City movie in 2008. Was the story perfect? No. But it effectively and enjoyably continued the story arc of these four friends, and it made some sort of sense. Fast forward to 2010 when Sex and the City 2 came to theaters. I had seen the trailer. I’ll admit, I was a bit bemused. The girls are going to Abu Dhabi? Um, okay. Sex and the City had taken us to international locales before. In the final season, Carrie joins Petrovsky in Paris and in this land of mythical romance, Mr. Big finds her and sets everything right. When their wedding goes awry in the first movie, the girls jet to Mexico, taking Carrie and Big’s honeymoon as a female foursome. But the vast majority of this story takes place in New York City. It’s called Sex and the City. The city is not only a setting, but also a character unto itself and plays a major role in the narrative. So, it seemed a little odd that the majority of the second movie would take place on the sands of Abu Dhabi.

In Sex and the City 2, the leading ladies travel to Abu Dhabi

Before the girls settle in to those first-class suites on the flight to the United Arab Emirates, however, we as viewers must suffer through Stanford and Anthony’s wedding. From these opening scenes, there’s no question why this dismal film swept the 2011 Razzie Awards, where the four leading ladies shared the Worst Actress Award and the Worst Screen Ensemble. How did this happen?? These four ladies were once believable to fans as soul mates—four women sharing a friendship closer than a marriage. And yet they end up in these opening scenes interacting like a blind group date—awkward, forced, and cringe-worthy.

As our once favorite characters slowly warm up to one another, Michael Patrick King’s weak screenplay lays some groundwork for the film’s plot, all of which establish that these women are not traveling to an exotic locale for fun and adventure. They’re escaping—and from decidedly white people problems at that. Carrie from a hot marriage settling all too quickly into a routine of couch, TV, and takeout. Miranda from the stresses of a job she just quit. Charlotte from an always-crying-terrible-two-baby-girl and a worrisomely, buxom nanny. And Samantha, well, isn’t escaping anything. Her entire life has been reduced even further to beating menopause with an army of all natural pharmaceuticals, which fuel full-volume sexual interludes. As such, this all-expense-paid vacation to the Middle East serves as an escape filled with a little girl time and a lot of bold, overt, and luxurious consumption.

From the moment our Sex and the City stars have decided to take this trip together, however, Abu Dhabi is viewed through a lens of Orientalism, demonstrating a Western patronization of the Middle East. Starting on the first day in the city, Abu Dhabi is framed derisively as the polar opposite of sexy and modern New York City. It’s also stereotypically portrayed as the world of Disney’s Jasmine and Aladdin, magic carpets, camels, and desert dunes—”but with cocktails,” Carrie adds. This borderline racist trope plays out vividly through the women’s vacation attire of patterned head wraps, flowing skirts, and breezy cropped pants. Take for example their over-the-top fashion statement as they explore the desert on camelback, only after they have dramatically walked across the sand directly toward the camera of course.

Samantha, Charlotte, Carrie, and Miranda explore the desert, dressed in a ridiculous ode to the Middle East via fashion

The exotic is also framed as dangerous and tempting, embodied in Aidan, Carrie’s once fiancé, who sweeps her off her feet in Abu Dhabi and nearly derails her fidelity. This plays out metaphorically as they meet at Aidan’s hotel, both of them dressed in black and cloaked in the dim lighting of the restaurant.

Carrie “plays with fire” when she meets old flam, Aidan, for dinner in Abu Dhabi

Sex and the City 2 also comments upon gender roles and sex in the Middle East. For example, in a nightclub full of belly dancers and karaoke, our New Yorkers choose to sing “I Am Woman,” a tune that served as a theme song of sorts for second wave feminism. As our once fab four belt out the lyrics, young Arabic women sing along as well. And yet the main tenant of the film appears to be an ode to perceived sexual repression rather than women’s rights.

The ladies of Sex and the City 2 sing “I Am Woman” at karaoke in an Abu Dhabi nightclut

Abu Dhabi is a place where these four women—defined in American culture not only by their longstanding friendship, but also by their bodies, fashionable wardrobes, and sexual exploits—must tone it down a bit. For example, Miranda reads from a guidebook that women are required to dress in a way that doesn’t attract sexual attention. Instead of providing any context in which to understand the customs of another culture, Samantha instead repeatedly whines about having to cover up her body. Our four Americans watch a Muslim woman eating fries while wearing a veil over her face, as if observing an animal in a zoo. The girls poke fun at the women floating in the hotel pool covered from head to ankle in burkinins, which Carrie jokingly comments are for sale in the hotel gift shop. In this way, Arab culture is both commodified and ridiculed. And rather than finding a place of common understanding, the American characters are only able to relate to Arab women by finding them to be exactly like them, secretly wearing couture beneath their burkas. While fashion is the common thread linking these American and Arab women, the four leading ladies don’t really come to understand the role and meaning of the burka. Instead, after Samantha causes a raucous in the market, the girls don burkas as a comedic disguise in order to escape.

At this point in the film, the main narrative conflict is again a very white problem—if the ladies are late to the airport, they’ll (gasp!) be bumped from first class. Struggling to get a cab to stop and pick them up, the women have to get creative. In a bizarre twist that references a scene from the first twenty minutes of the film, Carrie hails a cab by exposing her leg, as made famous in the classic film, It Happened One Night. While she gets a cab to stop, one is struck by the inconsistency. The women were just run out of town for Samantha’s overt sexuality and yet exposing a culturally forbidden view of a woman’s leg is what saves the day? Or is the moral of the story that a car will always stop for a sexy woman, irrespective of culture? Either way, our leading ladies make it to the airport, fly home in first-class luxury, and arrive home to better appreciate their lives. No real conflict has been resolved—though a 60-second montage provides sound bites of what each character has learned.

In homage to It Happened One Night, Carrie bares her leg to get a cab to stop in Abu Dhabi

Throughout the course of Sex and the City 2, the United Arab Emirates doesn’t fair well, but neither does the United States, as the land of the free and home of the brave is reduced to a place where Samantha Jones can have sex in public without getting arrested. Sex and the City 2 stands out as a horrendous example of American entitlement abroad, a terrible travel flick, and a truly saddening chapter for those of us who actually liked Sex and the City up to this point.



Emily Contois
works in the field of worksite wellness and is a graduate student in the MLA in Gastronomy Program at Boston University that was founded by Julia Child and Jacques Pépin. She is currently researching the marketing of diet programs to men and blogs on food studies, nutrition, and public health at emilycontois.com.

Travel Films Week: Why I Reject the Ending of ‘The Wizard of Oz’

Written by Lady T 

Dorothy and friends skip to the Emerald City
The Wizard of Oz is my favorite movie. There are movies that are more artistically accomplished, movies that are more sophisticated, and funnier films that make me laugh my butt off, but no film I’ve seen has the same sentimental, emotional effect on me as The Wizard of Oz.
I love this movie as I love no other movie. And I hate the ending.
Let me explain.  
The plot of the movie is fairly straightforward. Dorothy and her three male companions go on the same quest: to meet the Wizard of Oz. Each member of the original Fab Four has a different reason to meet the Wizard. The Scarecrow wants a brain, the Tin Man wants a heart, the Cowardly Lion wants courage, and Dorothy wants to go home to her Auntie Em and Uncle Henry in Kansas.
In the end, their quests prove to be unnecessary, and not just because the Wizard is a charlatan who cannot give the characters what they desire. As it turns out, each character already possesses the quality he or she was seeking. The Scarecrow doesn’t need a brain — he’s already the smartest person in the group, a quick thinker and problem-solver who comes up with the plans to break into the Wicked Witch’s castle. The Tin Man doesn’t need a heart — he’s already emotional, crying whenever his friends are in trouble. The Lion doesn’t need someone to give him courage — he already steps up to every challenge that’s presented to him, even when it scares him. And Dorothy doesn’t need to go home — she’s been there the whole time, because the entire colorized section of The Wizard of Oz was all just a dream!
BOOOOO. (Just to make myself perfectly clear, I am, in fact, saying “Boooo!” and not “Boo-urns!”)

“Wait – I thought it was a trip, but I was really just tripping?”

I hate “it was just a dream!” endings on principle, because if the entire conflict takes place in the main character’s head, there’s no real urgency, nothing really at stake.
I hate that the message — “What you thought you wanted is something you really had all along!” – is applied differently to Dorothy than it is to her friends. The Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion are told that they always had a brain, a heart, and courage, and the Wizard giving them their “gifts” is affirmation of their strengths. Dorothy, on the other hand, gets a lecture from Glinda and has to realize that “if I ever look for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard.” Her friends get to realize that they were always smart, emotional, and brave, while she has to learn a lesson about being grateful for what she already has.
I hate the ending because it breaks my heart to think that Dorothy’s friendships were all a product of her fantasy.

Dorothy yearns for life somewhere over the rainbow

The truth is, Dorothy doesn’t have a bad life on her farm in Kansas. Her aunt and uncle love her and take care of her, and the hired hands on her aunt and uncle’s farm treat her with kindness and consideration. I don’t mind that she takes a minute to appreciate that and realizes that running away is not the best idea.
But even though a loving family is invaluable, guardians are not the same thing as friends.
In Oz, Dorothy has friends and equals. She and the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion share the same adventures and support each other. She invites them on her quest to find the Wizard, giving them hope where they had none before, and in turn, they save her from the clutches of the Wicked Witch of the West. They don’t treat her differently because she’s a girl; any concern they have for her is because they fear for her life in an enemy’s hands, not because they doubt her abilities or strength.
There’s mutual respect and love among Dorothy and her friends and equals, something she doesn’t have in Kansas because there’s no one her age to relate to her — and we’re supposed to happily swallow that this is all just a dream, and there’s no place like home?
Well, I don’t accept it. I refuse. In my mental version of the ending, Oz is real. Dorothy traveled there and came back, and even though she has a renewed appreciation for her day-to-day life, the door is still open for her to return, where the new rulers of Oz — the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion — will all be waiting for her, ready to go on their next adventure.

Dorothy and her three best friends



Lady T is an a writer and aspiring comedian with two novels, a play, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at The Funny Feminist, where she picks apart entertainment and reviews movies she hasn’t seen.

Travel Films Week: Let’s Keep Goin’: On Horror, Magic, Female Friendship & Power in ‘Thelma & Louise’

This guest post by Marisa Crawford previously appeared at Delirious Hem as part of their CHICK FLIX series and is cross-posted with permission.

Geena Davis as Thelma and Susan Sarandon as Louise
When I think about Thelma & Louise, I have to start at the end. When Thelma says, Let’s not get caught. When she says, Let’s keep goin’. I’ve wanted to incorporate that line into a poem for years now. But I’m not sure I’ll ever find anywhere to put it because it’s just too powerful to me.

After its release in 1991, Thelma & Louise stirred up controversy mainly surrounding its connection to feminism, its use of violence, and its presentation of male characters.[i] It was criticized for its portrayal of men as one-dimensionally negative. The two heroines were accused of male bashing. It was condemned for advocating violence as a solution to women’s problems. Over twenty years later, though, I think that Thelma & Louise is most often thought of as a wild, raucous outlaws-on-the-run movie, but with girls. A buttered-popcorn, butt-kicking chick flick about female empowerment. Two strawberry blondes in a sea-foam T-bird convertible. Lite feminist fizz.[ii] It’s unthreatening. And yet, it threatens me.

I find it deeply and profoundly scary.

Chrissy and I watching it, drinking whole bottles of vodka in my studio on Mission Street. Her curly hair/my straight hair.

We called it a horror movie.

Because of the end. Because they almost made it. Because they maybe could’ve made it. Because they never could’ve made it. Because the world we live in wouldn’t have let them. And because they knew it.

Still from Thelma & Louise

There’s a trail of breadcrumbs that Thelma and Louise follow out of the confines of the real world. And there’s a thread of mistrust in that world that leads them out of it. After Louise shoots & kills the man who tried to rape Thelma, she says they can’t go to the police because nobody would believe them. Because everyone saw Thelma dancing with him all night, cheek to cheek. And I saw her shirt keep falling off her shoulder.

It threatens me because it happens in my world too. It obscures my view.

When Thelma says shouldn’t we go to the police & Louise says we just don’t live in that kind of world.

When Thelma says how do you know ‘bout all this stuff anyway.

When Thelma says it happened to you, didn’t it.

The trail of breadcrumbs starts with rape & the thread is a product of rape.

They follow the thread in circles, refusing to go through Texas.

Still from Thelma & Louise
When Steph and I were wailing along to “I Can’t Make You Love Me If You Don’t” while driving down Highway One. Her blonde hair/my brown hair.

In Europe when Jenny and I slept in the same bed every night even though there were two.

How in Spain Lana and I would sit in coffee shops for hours and get drunk on the beach and take pictures in Zara.

When we were in Western Mass and Tina brought me to the train and I didn’t want her to leave.

Geena Davis as Thelma in Thelma & Louise
Road trip logic: How you start off making small talk and three days later your hair is dirty, and you lost all your makeup and you’re attached like Siamese twins. And the top is down, and you’re singing into the hot desert wind.

Thelma and Louise being pursued by police
In Thelma & Louise, adult female friendship is a rock-solid and ecstatic alternative to female subjugation and the traditional romance plot. A joyful, vibrating vehicle through which one can achieve true freedom and meaningful self-expression. Until that vehicle drives itself off a cliff.

If men didn’t rape, Louise wouldn’t have shot the rapist. If the system didn’t blame rape victims, they wouldn’t have gone on the run. If men didn’t rape, they could have driven through Texas. If the system didn’t blame rape victims, Louise wouldn’t have been so afraid. If women weren’t taught they deserve to be treated like shit, they wouldn’t have had to become fugitives in order to feel free. If there was a place for liberated, powerful women who live on their own terms in this world, they wouldn’t have had to create their own. If there was a place for liberated, powerful women who live on their own terms in this world, they wouldn’t have had to plummet into the Grand Canyon in order to feel free.

The logic falls in on itself. Like a sea-foam T-bird falling into the Grand Canyon.

When there’s a wall of cop cars behind them and the canyon is in front of them and Thelma says let’s keep goin’.

Thelma with a gun

There’s an alternative ending to Thelma & Louise that you can watch on the Internet.

It shows the car falling all the way into the canyon instead of freezing the frame with the car in mid-air, flying outward on an upswing. Watch it. Because you can see the car getting smaller and smaller, as the canyon gets bigger and bigger. And it starts falling at an angle that no longer looks controlled, no longer looks triumphant. Which is exactly how it should look — the logical conclusion that joyful, strong women have no place in this world.

 

The way they freeze the frame with the car on an upswing at the end is why people call Thelma & Louise a “chick flick.” It’s why it’s remembered as a girl power-powered outlaw movie, rather than a horror one.

How me and Carrie wrote a song about Kim while she was in the other bedroom.

When Tina and I were drinking sangria in San Francisco, and we couldn’t stop prank-calling you and laughing into our sleeves.

How we were in the Catskills and I yelled at Janie, well why don’t you just eat.

Louise with a gun

Roger Ebert says that the film’s last shot, the freeze-frame of the car going off the cliff, fades to white with “unseemly haste.” He writes, “It’s unsettling to get involved in a movie that takes 128 minutes to bring you to a payoff that the filmmakers seem to fear.”[iii]

Before the credits start to roll, the white screen flashes with a montage of images showing the two women, happy and alive, suggesting a weird kind of magical realism.

It’s all in that phrase: let’s keep goin’. As if by driving off the cliff they really did keep going. As if they had reached a parallel universe in which their journey did not have to end. It reminds me of the end of Pan’s Labyrinth, before the little girl is shot in the labyrinth. In the scene where we see her stepfather watching her talking to thin air, we see a crack in the magic into a horrific reality. The last scene in Thelma & Louise shows no definitive cracks in the magic. Only a triumphant freeze-frame that loops back almost instantly to images of the heroines’ lives.

Thelma and Louise going over the cliff
Rock journalist Ellen Willis writes about how Janis Joplin’s music captured a specifically female pain and longing; pain that was caused by men — and how the emotional risk of expressing that longing was ultimately perhaps what destroyed her. Willis suggests that Joplin opened up this territory for later women artists, and brilliantly frames Thelma & Louise as “perhaps the memorial Janis deserves.”[iv]

I think, for instance, of two movie heroines, born-again desperadoes, who smash one limit after another, uncover the hidden places where anger and despair, defiance and love converge, and finally leap into the Grand Canyon because freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

I can’t decide if I think Willis is letting the film off too easy here, but I love this comparison anyway. Janis Joplin was real; her struggle was real and her death was real. But for me, growing up in the 80s and 90s, she wasn’t a real woman so much as an icon; a symbol of wild, defiant love and art, tough, complex femininity and unrelenting sexuality, her life remembered for the spirit of freedom that she embodies, rather than for the sense of tragedy. And so are Thelma and Louise, for better or for worse — their car still goin’, the music still blasting, the camera still clicking images of them, first in red lipstick, sunglasses and hair kerchiefs, and later in dirtied jeans and cut-off t-shirts, their hair whipping wildly in the wind.

Thelma & Louise DVD cover

[i] This info was found in Karen Hollinger’s book, In the Company of Women: Contemporary Female Friendship Films, University of Minnesota Press

[ii] “Light feminist fizz” is borrowed from Bill Cosford, Miami Herald movie reviewer

[iii] Roger Ebert, “Thelma & Louise,” Chicago Sun-Times

[iv] Ed. Nona Willis Aronowitz, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music, University of Minnesota Press


Marisa Crawford is a poet, writer and editor living in Brooklyn, NY. She’s the author of the poetry collection The Haunted House (Switchback Books, 2010), and the chapbook 8th Grade Hippie Chic (2013 Immaculate Disciples Press). Her writing has recently appeared in Fanzine, Black Clock, Delirious Hem and HER KIND, and on Feministing’s Community blog.

Call for Writers: Feminist Travel Films

Call for Writers: Feminist Travel Films
It’s almost summer in the states, and we’re thinking one thing: Road Trip! 
To gear up, how about some good feminist travel films? Whether by land, air, or sea, let’s look at how travel and gender are represented when movie characters take a trip. 
Want to take on a classic road trip movie and its (lack) of gender diversity? 
Is there a bromance road trip movie you’re dying to critique? 
Do you have a favorite travel flick and want to tell us why it’s so good?
Here are some suggestions, but feel free to propose your own! 
10 
2 Days in Paris
Amelie 
Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert 

The Beach

Before Sunrise
Before Sunset
Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Bonnie and Clyde 
Boys on the Side
Brokedown Palace
Easy Rider 
Eat, Pray, Love 
Enchanted April
Flirting with Disaster 
The Holiday
How Stella Got Her Groove Back 
Little Miss Sunshine 
Lost in Translation
Natural Born Killers 
Roman Holiday
Sex and the City 2
Shirley Valentine
Sideways 
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Thelma and Louise
Under the Tuscan Sun
Vagabond
The Wizard of Oz
Y Tu Mama Tambien
Here are some basic guidelines for guest writers:
–Pieces should be between 700 and 2,000 words.
–Include images (with captions) and links in your piece, along with a title for your article.
–Send your piece in the text of an email, attaching all images, no later than Friday, May 24th.
–Include a 2-3 sentence bio for placement at the end of your piece.
Email us at btchflcks(at)gmail(dot)com if you’d like to contribute a review. We accept original pieces or cross-posts. 
We look forward to reading your submissions!