“Starting To Feel Like A Chick”

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between Campion's In the Cut (2003) and the HBO television series Sex and the City (1998–2004), and in particular, the series' concluding two episodes, “An American Girl in Paris (Parts Une and Deux).” It argues that In the Cut, despite its visual and narrative references to film noir, is most usefully seen, as Felperin observed in Sight and Sound, as a film for and about “the Sex and the City generation.” In its representation of contemporary New York, and of female friendship, in its exploration of the relationship between femininity, feminism and fantasy, and in its account of the problems of female authorship, it both evokes and interrogates the dominant themes of the hugely successful HBO series. In doing so, it also exposes the losses, repudiations, and violence which form the repressed shadow to the fantasised resolution which Sex and the City offers: that of a feminised New York as the place in which romance can be re-authored by women to serve a post-feminist female narcissism.