The City That Never Sleeps

“You can’t leave New York. You’re like the Chrysler building, the Chrysler building would be all wrong in a vineyard.” These are the words of Carrie in the episode when she finds out that Big is moving to Napa. Carrie could not picture Big leaving New York City and going to live on a vineyard because it was completely different from the city. Gidden argues, “understanding the manner in which human’s activity is distributed in the space is fundamental to analysis of social and cultural life” (Barker, 374). In the episodes of Sex and the City, New York is meant to represent a place of fashion, sex, and love. The fact that New York was meant to represent this in the episodes can explain the characters and their behaviors.

When Carrie is talking to Big saying “you owe it to us,” meaning her and New York Carrie refers to New York as a thing as opposed to a place. In Barker, Rob Shields says “while we may happily speak of the ‘reality’ of the city as a thing or form, they are the result of a cultural act of classification. We classify an environment as a city, and then ‘reify’ that city as a thing” (Barker, 403). There are many different versions of places it all depends on who is describing the place; Carrie and her friends all see New York in slightly different light.

Throughout the episodes Carrie compares New York to many things, makes clever remarks, and is even a bit poetic at times. According to Barker, “representing the city involves the techniques of writing – metaphors, metonym, and other rhetorical devices – rather than a simple transparency from the ‘real’ city to the ‘represented’ city” (Barker, 402). New York is portrayed as being fast paced the city that never sleeps. The show mainly showed New York as a place where people go out for drinks, dinner, dancing, parties, and fashion shows on a regular basis. In the video Samantha asks “where people go when they leave New York”, Miranda responds “the real world,” suggesting that the New York they are living in and portraying is not the “real” New York we would see if we went to the actual urban setting.