Girl, haunted
On death, sex and the city
In the Sex and the City episode “My Motherboard, Myself,” Carrie’s computer breaks and Miranda’s mother dies.
Each of the women respond to Miranda’s mother’s death differently: Carrie lashes out, Charlotte sends flowers and Samantha shuts down. When Carrie tearfully breaks the news over breakfast, we see Samantha go someplace else. She dissociates, her eyes become unfocused. Later, during sex, she loses her orgasm (“in the cab?” Carrie chides), and in Samantha’s distress we see something deeper: her fear of death, under her sex-fuelled zest for life.
After her computer dies, Carrie loses her shit on her granola, furniture designer boyfriend Aidan.
“I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time,” she yells after rejecting the MacBook he buys for her, holding onto hope that her old computer will start working again. She never backed her laptop up — losing it means that all of her writing is gone. “No one ever talks about backing up,” she says to Miranda on the phone. “Apparently everyone is just running home and backing up at the end of the day.” In this, I hear Carrie’s girl-like insecurity, and a familiar thought: I didn’t want to have to deal with this.
Carrie’s “daddy issues” (her father left when she was five, and never came back) are reflected in her restlessness, and in the way that she wants to be rescued. Her dating patterns involve chasing emotionally unavailable men and sabotaging healthy relationships. She cheats on Aidan with her married ex, “Mr. Big,” a charming asshole dreamboat who she has secret sex with; smoking in bed, eating orange slices under the covers.
Carrie has an archival designer closet and a rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan, but she’s also a mess: she obsesses over her emotional problems to her friends, constantly maxes out her credit card and completely freaks out every time a guy starts to pull away. I relate to her compulsions, to the way that she runs around the city feeling restless. But the facts of life never catch up with her, and in the real world, they do.
Through Carrie’s neurotic personality, I see a baby woman who’s searching for a magical concept of love in a princess dreamworld. This is why, when her sense of reality is shattered — by a broken computer, a broken heart — she wants time to stand still for her sadness.
Five more minutes, something I’ve always said. I just want five more minutes.
Rewatching Sex and the City, I’ve been thinking about the work that it takes to become the person you want to be. Throughout the show, Samantha occasionally shares details about her life before moving to New York: serving dilly bars at Dairy Queen when she was fifteen, getting an abortion alone in college, how her mother was saddled with “three kids and a drunk husband” by the time she was her age. Samantha’s past is buried underneath her glamorous and professional exterior, whereas Carrie seems like she’s still living as the younger version of herself who dreamed of being in the city. She parties till dawn and loses track of time, romanticizing New York and Mr. Big, coffee & cigarettes. Time and time again, Carrie is rescued from her mess — break ups and financial issues and fights with friends — by magical thinking and impossible HBO luck. “In real life, the city would eat her up,” my friend said as we sat outside a coffeeshop in sweats on a Sunday, drinking matcha, dreading the work week.
I feel embarrassed when I act like Carrie, giving my inner teenager access to my bank account and body, letting her drive the car towards shiny lights and buzzy thrills. Waking up hungover, at twenty-three, from tequila and the recollection of what she drove me to, the mortification that comes the morning after crying in the back of an Uber for reasons she knows, I don’t, (ughgod), holding onto the side door seeing stars, stumbling up the stairs home in a tangle of jangling keys and earbuds and heel straps and text messages, laying on my back on the cold linoleum floor, eyes closed breathing. I never really find the feeling that I’m looking for on a restless night out. I’m just seeking to soothe pent up frustrations, to exorcise the banal demons: nobody talks about backing up, my computer died. To distract from the fact that being a writer with a column is an unreal dream, that it takes two jobs and weekly therapy and expensive chemical face wash to “keep it together.”
The stable life that Samantha has built for herself allows her to live comfortably, and she works hard to take care of herself. She knows how to play the game to get what she wants. She owns an eponymous PR agency and a loft in the Meatpacking district (“see New York? We have it all,” she toasts over a bottle of champagne upon moving in). When Carrie needs $40,000 to buy her apartment because her building goes co-op, Samantha offers to loan her the money.
Over martinis and chocolate cake with the girls, Samantha declares that she’s never cried at work. Carrie says that she cried to her editor when she missed a deadline, saying that she was having problems at home, but really, she was sunning in the Hamptons.
“That makes the rest of us look bad,” Miranda scoffs.
“Oh boo hoo, it was eighty degrees and sunny,” Carrie says, shovelling cake.
Carrie’s life is still my fantasy dream. It’s easier, in that it takes less effort, to let yourself be driven by your emotions, without doing the work to resist your impulses (sending a stream of texts in an anxious moment, staying out too late). But indulging in this way of moving through life doesn’t feel cute or fun anymore — letting myself live like Carrie, in the real world, creates a vicious cycle of regret. Chaos and drama, forgetting bill payments and birthdays. “And here I was,” Carrie writes when she can’t afford to buy her apartment, “a thirty-five year old single woman with no financial security, but many life experiences behind me. Did that all mean nothing? Heartbreak . . . is the hardest kind of work. What’s it all worth?”
Carrie obsessively labours over her relationships, feelings and memories. She sits splayed out on her bed, writing about her experiences, reliving moments alone in her room.
Carrie’s constant rumination contrasts Samantha’s fear of slowing down. Samantha lies about her age; she gets plastic surgery. She loves work and sex and parties and being present in the moment. She seems to have a pervasive awareness of time passing, and a deep fear of looking in the rearview mirror, of pulling over. When Charlotte says that she wants to quit her job to have a baby and volunteer at her husband’s hospital, Samantha tells her to be “damn sure before you get off the ferris wheel, because the women waiting to get on are twenty-two, perky and ruthless.” Imparting this perspective is Samantha’s way of mothering her friends: and underneath her advice is her fear of powerlessness, of getting stuck in a mediocre life.
“You have to grab life by the balls,” she says to Carrie on her birthday.
Miranda’s mother’s death comes unexpectedly and suddenly, with lots of realistic practicalities attached. In the episode, the women take the train to Philadelphia to attend the funeral. The day of, while Miranda is shopping for a “shitty black dress,” a matronly saleswoman informs her that she’s been buying the wrong bra size, stepping into the dressing room to adjust her bra straps.
“I think I know! What’s best, for me!” Miranda snaps. In the same breath, she blurts out “I’m sorry. My mother just died, and —”
The saleswoman’s face knowingly folds and she wordlessly embraces Miranda, who melts into her shoulder. Through the screen: the stillness of a moment that feels good and heavy and long, like a warm nap. Close your eyes, stay forever (five more minutes).
At the funeral, while Charlotte and Carrie say all of the right things, Samantha can’t summon the words to acknowledge the death at all, awkwardly complimenting Miranda and looking around uncomfortably in her seat. During the service, she breaks, locking eyes with Miranda across the pews, mouthing “I’m sorry” as she begins to inconsolably sob.
Samantha’s emotional turmoil in “My Motherboard, Myself” reminds me of a previous episode, when she gets the flu and has Carrie come over to make her her mother’s “cure all” childhood concoction of Fanta and cough syrup blended over ice. In her feverish state, Samantha cries because she doesn’t have a boyfriend to fix her curtain rod (“we’re all alone, Carrie.”). She’s crying for “things that she didn’t know she felt;” for what her mother wasn’t able to give her, a stable home and a solid foundation, and the particular sadness that comes from craving a deep comfort that you never had, as an adult in your own apartment.
Later, when she’s feeling better, Samantha brushes her crying jag off with a joke about how sick she was, her voice as taut as an old movie star’s. I “couldn’t help but wonder” if that’s what it takes for her to be the woman she wants to be every day. To not be like her mother.
After her emotional exorcism in church, Samantha comes during sex.
“You have to acknowledge the ghost, then release it,” she says earlier in the season, when Miranda thinks that her apartment is haunted. “Everyone knows that.”