Prisoners of sex, prisoners of the state

In "Sex and the City" and "Oz," environment trumps nature and nurture.

By Carina Chocano

Jan 10, 2002 | In the new season of "Sex and the City," which was written and produced last summer as insurance against a writer's strike that never happened, New York is the same dreamy playground it was before; a place where disappointment is buffered by brunch and loss mitigated by an endless selection of excellent shoes. This untroubled vision might have been more jarring if it had ever existed as much more than a projection of the main characters' fondest fantasies about themselves; but the city in "Sex and the City" has always been far more intimate and personal than the sex.

And yet in these strangely extemporal new episodes, the city of the title seems to define each of the characters more than ever; and after four seasons of careful reinforcement, the girls' carefully constructed personas are starting to crumble. After wedging themselves, like Cinderella's stepsisters, into relationships that pinch, Charlotte (the prim one) and Carrie (the writer) find themselves alone again. Meanwhile, the independent-on-principle Miranda (the tense one) and Samantha (the slut) become reluctantly attached. Samantha finds herself falling in love with her new boss despite herself, and, as Miranda finally experiences her maternal instincts starting to kick in, she may be drawn back into a relationship with the baby's father, her ex-boyfriend Steve.

From this perspective, Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha don't even live in the same town. Carrie and Charlotte's New York is a fairy tale. For Carrie, it's a fashionable Neverland where she will never have to grow up; for Charlotte, it's a place where fairy-tale dreams come true. These visions of New York are so germane to their identities that when they start to change, each of the characters finds herself adrift. Despite their little-girl dreams, some girls grow up to be Samantha or, more typically, Miranda. And this comes as a surprise, one that little girls are not particularly equipped to understand. There's nothing like taking away a girl's delusions to make her feel not quite herself.

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So what determines a character's true character? The question -- at least on television -- is usually reserved for impatient arguments between basset-browed cops and feisty D.A.s. On "Oz," HBO's similarly hormone-imbalanced prison drama, Augustus, the show's Virgil, ruminates on what makes a criminal a criminal. ("Oz is filled with murderers, rapists, racists, the most common of criminals. But what is it that makes a man uncommon? Winning wars? Winning awards? No, what lifts a man out of the ordinary is who he loves and who loves him.") For the "Sex and the City" girls, what lifts a woman out of the ordinary is the accessories.

When I received tapes of the new episodes of "Oz" and "Sex and the City," I had just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's essay on Bernie Goetz and the rise and fall of crime in New York. Goetz became infamous in the early '80s for shooting four young black men who were hassling him on the subway. Goetz was acquitted, and the eventual cleanup of the transit system was credited with helping curb the rise of violent crime in New York. "The Power of Context," Gladwell writes, "is an environmental argument. It says that behavior is a function of social context ... The Power of Context says that the showdown on the subway between Bernie Goetz and those four youths had very little to do, in the end, with the tangled psychological pathology of Goetz, and very little as well to do with the background and poverty of the four youths who accosted him, and everything to do with the message sent by the graffiti on the walls and the disorder at the turnstiles." On "Sex and the City," as on "Oz," social context is king.

Next Page: In prison and in New York, it's hard to stay out of trouble

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