ABSTRACT
When Sex and the City: The Movie was released in 2008, the cinematic “remake” of the celebrated and contentious HBO series was met both by huge box-office and widespread critical distaste. Key to this reception, this chapter argues, was the film’s focus on the wedding spectacle. This chapter examines how the film’s (over)investment in the wedding spectacle contrasted with the series’ frequently ambivalent, indeed often highly cynical, perspectives on weddings and marriage. It scrutinises not just how the wedding spectacle operates as a key site of expressive struggle for certain contemporary women audiences across the SATC franchise. It also investigates the process of transposing a provocative premium cable TV series to the big screen, asking what work must the spectacle of the wedding perform once it is relocated to the cultural and industrial arena of the cinematic chick-flick? I argue that as a chick-flick, the film is obliged to tread a taxing line; that is, to service the desirability of the wedding spectacle proffered to women across culture, while also championing the woman protagonist’s “authentic” self. In doing so, however, the film points to the tensions that inhabit the wedding industrial complex (Ingraham 2008), and dislocates rather than simply celebrates the values underpinning the wedding spectacle.
