Over at Slate, Timothy Noah, who’s been writing about pop culture and the election, suggests that the success of the SATC movie is the result of disappointed Hillary voters drowning their sorrows.
No, seriously. He wrote that. I guess somebody had to draw this connection; I just can’t believe it wasn’t Maureen Dowd.
A while back I praised Noah for his provocative theory that HDTV could be to McCain/Obama as the televised debate was to Nixon/Kennedy. But this new hypothesis is, shall we say, a reach:
The Clinton campaign has gotten a lot of white women jazzed up at the prospect of electing the first female president, and a good number stayed jazzed up even after it become apparent that Clinton almost certainly wouldn’t get the nomination. By this past weekend, however, it was becoming clear to all but the most delusional Hillary supporters that the game was up. Sisterhood was powerful, but in this case it wouldn’t prevail. That realization left a lot of white women all dolled up with nowhere to go. And so … they went to the movies. The connection, I’ll grant you, is somewhat glib…
Ya think? To Noah’s credit, it seems even he can’t sustain belief in his own thesis until the end of his column. And he does offer up the more-credible (but less sensationalistic) backup theory that the Clinton campaign and SATC are not directly connected, but instead are different expressions of contemporary women’s beliefs about traditional feminism.
Of course, you could also say that SATC draws part of its appeal from female fans who are used to being condescended to in other media. Say, by the suggestion that when their candidate loses, they cheer themselves up by metaphorically shoe-shopping with Carrie Bradshaw.
But that’s just a theory.