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tal is astonishing and apparently entirely expressed through an invented iconography of high-heeled shoes. There are occasional anxieties around the sheer amount of capital invested in clothes and shoes, 'after weathering all the ups and downs you could one day find yourself with nothing,' and the time Carrie discovers that she cannot get a bank loan to buy her apartment and that she has, over the course of a decade, spent $40,000 on shoes. 'There's your down payment,' Miranda tells her. 'I will literally become the old woman who lived in her shoes,' Carrie laments. Yet despite this Carrie remains constantly upbeat about her material situation: after all it is her job to wear style, to be style, and as long as there is consumerism she will be happy in her identity.

The constant celebration of the material in Sex and the City is only hollow and exhausting if it is set against any anticipation of the women as three-dimensional characters. To the extent that show is a commentary, and surely this facet is emphatically underlined by Carrie's literal, post-modern “commentaries” of each episode, (including details of her friends' lives she couldn't possibly really know)- the show is a commentary on the abstractions of modern living and modern loving.

The message is that the privilege of capitalism is choice. We can choose which woman to be, which shoes we want, which words we write, which man we want to spend the night with. Every episode turns on an over-agonised choice around some consumable or other: most memorably in the case of the dress from the pages of Vogue, which “The Russian” buys for Carrie. Marxist academic Tim Fiskin has contrasted Carrie's function with that of Girls' Aloud, the pop group chosen “by the people” and successful against the odds. Their appeal, for him, is their apparent stubborn refusal to choose, refusal to participate in the choices which will only fatten capitalist coffers and delay the revolution,

“Girls Aloud are unimpressed, which carries the pretty strong corollary that anything you do might fail to impress them (which would lead not to ridicule or punishment, of course, but simply more unfeeling boredom)…their apathy is not in principle limited to any particular circumstances. In this sense, the Girls are the anti-Carrie Bradshaws. Carrie is obsessed with choosing, carefully organising her life so that no choice is completed. She inhabits the perfect late-capitalist world where the moment of choice is literally endless (that is, lasts forever). And note that this is not simply despite her choice being of no significance whatsoever, but precisely because of that: the more indiscernable the alternatives then the more the choice is a pure exercise of will; that is, the more it is, ideologically, a free choice. Girls Aloud have no truck with any of that. Their aporia is a quite different one, not an endless deferral but a tactical refusal (sometimes to not choose is not a 'choice', it's something much better)”

According to Tim, the refusal to choose will bring about freedom- and Carrie's insistence on frolicking delightedly in her capitalist playground only reinforces the fact that she exists in a perpetual state of choice, with infinite options. The human moments in Sex and the City, undoubtedly the best moments, arise when choices are denied the characters. When Miranda has a baby, for example, or Samantha is diagnosed with cancer. In fact it is only Carrie,本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。