Sex and the City and the Society of the Spectacle

We live in Debord's world

I remember once about five years ago walking with a friend down Perry Street in Greenwich Village on a clear spring day and taking notice of a riled man across the street standing at the top of his brownstone stoop.

He was in the middle of what looked to be a rather dramatic act of shooing. Below and in front of him was a gaggle of tourists holding smartphones crowding around the steps. His arms moved back and forth, motioning up and down the street, like he was trying to herd reluctant sheep away from his porch.

“Oh look,” my friend said, “it’s Carrie Bradshaw’s building.”

I should disclaim right here and now that I was never the biggest fan of Sex and the City (I believe I’ve seen only three episodes in their entirety), so I appreciated being in the company of someone who could provide context to the scene. I would have never been able to guess whose brownstone it was, for my ability to conjure any memory whatsoever of what Ms. Bradshaw’s house or apartment or cottage—or wherever the hell she lived—was basically null.

After my friend’s explanation, what had initially appeared as a puzzling scene started to progressively gather resonance.

“I’m sorry, I really am, but you’re just going to have to keep moving,” exclaimed the angry man on Ms. Bradshaw’s stoop.

“But can’t we just take one picture?” I heard one of the tourists on the verge of tears.

“I’m sorry,” continued the man, his voice now competing with boos, humphs and grunts, “I understand that this place has meaning for you, but no. This isn’t a museum. I live here. Please go.”

Wait a minute, guy? You live here? What about Ms. Bradshaw?

As I put two and two together, that I had happened to walk past this famous building just at the right moment, during a standoff between two competing owners of 66 Perry Street—one, the man whose name was on the physical deed to the home and the other, the collective known as “Sex and the City fandom”—I couldn’t believe my luck. I was witnessing a rare exposure, a key moment in the development of the society of spectacle, a postmodern condition that continues to unfold into the 21st Century.

It appears that the gentleman’s frustration, along with that of whoever else lives in the three story home, has only gotten worse over the years. Yesterday, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, a regulatory board whose jurisdiction includes the famous brownstone, held a public hearing in order to decide its fate. The owner, one Barbara Lorber who has lived in the brownstone since ‘78, had filed a request with the commission to gain approval for a gate construction project she has been ready to execute. She had even gone out of her way to hire an architect to specifically design the (iron!) gate so as to blend in with the mid-nineteenth century aesthetic of the neighborhood’s brown and burgundy stone layout.

Theoretically, this gate would bring peace to Barbara’s life, along with her husband’s (let’s just call him that for argument’s sake), the man I saw five years ago in the throes of his battle against contemporary culture. The new gate is expected to protect their home from the graffiti, gawking, noise and whatever other random pother Barbara and this poor guy have likely endured on a daily basis, as fans of the show (really, now, a franchise), fueled by Instagram, come from all over the world to extract proximity to one little sliver of the culture industry.

Carrie Bradshaw’s iconic front stoop seems poised indeed to receive that dramatic makeover, and very soon, as the commission has approved the request.

Close to my apartment in upstate New York, there is another noteworthy three-story structure, another townhouse built in stone, though of a decidedly different design and with a less dramatic provenance. It has been included as an official landmark, the cast iron New York State Historic Marker is highly visible in front of the building, as it served as the inspiration for one of Norman Rockwell’s paintings, "The Street Was Never the Same Again."

Apparently someone lives there, and you can tell they’re aware they live in a famous building. A nicely designed sign in front directs all packages to be left inside the foyer. Perhaps the resident is concerned about preserving the look. Indeed, the paint job still retains the color scheme visible in Rockwell’s painting.

But I don’t think the same thing can rightly be said of one immortalized home as the other. When Guy Debord wrote his seminal analysis of postmodern life, The Society of the Spectacle, he was writing about a specific way of thinking about spectacle, one whose definition is met by 66 Perry Street, but not Rockwell’s townhouse.

As Debord saw it, “the Spectacle” was not an actual image, but a way of relating around images. Surely, with all of the hullabaloo Barbara Lorber’s brownstone attracts from around the world, we might say that we are here witnessing the Spectacle, as Debord defined it, when we contemplate the dynamics involved in her particular case.

This cannot be said of the townhouse upstate: there are no flocks, no commotion, no physical threats, no drama, to be had when thinking of the case of the painter’s inspiration and its perseverance into postmodernity. The neighbors all live in peace, free to bask in the American notoriety of living next to a house immortalized by “merely” a great painter.

Sorry, Norman, apparently, you are no Candace Bushnell.

Every time I walk past Rockwell’s townhouse I take a moment to stop and take it all in. I think, in 1953, a great painter stood where I stand now and made his mark. The house he painted still stands, practically beaming in its bold orange and yellow, a proud, living testament to one artist’s particular vision at a particular moment in time. I step into history when I pass by this home.

I do not qualify as a fan of Norman Rockwell’s paintings. I like them and I appreciate what they stand for, their ennobling celebration of simple, American life, though nothing more than that passing familiarity and appreciation.

But that doesn’t really matter as a I stand here. What matters is that I’ve been given an opportunity to step into history and culture, into a matrix of meaning that, irrespective of my own interest, enriches my experience of participating in the culture at large. It’s like going into a tiny museum for free. And this a stone’s throw from my apartment.

Can the same thing be said of 66 Perry? What happens, phenomenologically speaking, as we pass by a townhouse that was likewise immortalized, not by a painter, but by the producers of a famous television show? Are we not also walking into a tiny museum, are we not also participating in the culture at large, are we not also being given an opportunity to step into a matrix of meaning?

Or are we witnessing some merely sociological phenomenon? Are we only bearing witness to “a craze,” some trend? Are we only peering, when passing the famous brownstone as it is accosted by tourists, into the bowels of the commodity form?

What is the significance of this brownstone if it can not be said that it served as the kind of intimate inspiration which a painter may experience, but only as the accidental set piece, a mere ingredient, of a much more gigantic piece of intellectual property? What is its significance if we must agree with the angry man on the stoop that, contrary to Rockwell’s townhouse, it indeed is “not a museum,” but some fetish?

It may sound like I’m weighing in on the side of the Barbara Lorbers of the world, that I am cutting the usual, and potentially snobbish, line between the highbrow and the lowbrow, that I am judging the worth of cultural property by its relationship to the marketplace.

You might be right if that’s what you’re thinking. But it’s not the most important thing to be said at this moment, even if, ultimately, it is the conclusion that at least this author is likely to draw.

In fact, there’s a part of me that actually feels for all of those tourists who’ve come from all over the globe to slice off a bit of happiness for their Instagram profiles. The guy on the stoop and the owners of the brownstone are about to essentially deface the phenomenon known as Carrie Bradshaw’s Home. Sure, the iron gate is specifically designed to blend in with the architecture, but that doesn’t change the fact that it will be a blemish for all of those who, much like Norman Rockwell’s aficionados upstate, wish to preserve the iconic character of beloved intellectual properties.

However seriously we wish to take it, 66 Perry Street has cultural significance. You can’t just disinter a famous person’s gravestone. And not out of respect for their humanity (though of course that should factor in), but out of respect for their cultural representation. Can it rightly be said that this matter is as simple as who technically owns the building and whether or not some commission approves the construction? You can’t turn back the clock. In 1998, the gods of the culture industry struck down a lightning bolt and decreed that Sex and the City would from that point forward matter, and matter in a very large way. Shouldn’t there be some appreciation for what Sex and the City means?

Like I said, here is not the place to adjudicate the value of pop culture versus culture, those properties within the marketplace versus those without it. That is a much bigger conversation and one that has been going on ever since the Coca Cola logo became a device in Andy Warhol’s hands.

However, it is important to take note that the conflict between the owners of 66 Perry, between the residents and the cultural participants, a conflict to which I bore lucky, accidental witness five years ago when I walked past the address with a friend, is an unresolved phenomenon. The iron gate that will soon put an end to fandom’s claim on the edifice does nothing to conclude the gyre we are all in, the sense of falsity and mediation which late capitalism enforces. That debate must continue. We must ask ourselves if fans of certain pop culture properties have rightful claims. This will require us to think hard about the meaning of such things as the relationship between culture and the marketplace. And it matters what the answer is. It matters because we all have to live inside this cultural matrix, whether we wish to or not. It is a grotesque affair. It is a dirty job and we all have to do it.

Being a good Marxist, Debord was in all likelihood using a dialectical lens to look at modern life in his rendering of the Spectacle. As such, there is likely no criticism of postmodernity to be gleaned from his seminal text, only an analysis of it. He died six years before Sex and the City’s first episode aired, though he likely had many other opportunities to witness how the commodity form had reached its apotheosis through his notion of the Spectacle.

Sex and the City, along with the brownstone it made famous and the owners it has sidelined, is merely one infinitesimal link in the unending chain of late capital’s appropriation of social relations. We, just as much as the Lorbers, live inside its ghastly churn.