And Just Like Everything Else on Earth Right Now...

 

And Just Like That is a zeitgeist shit-show:  a 2022 streaming sequel to a couple of truly over-the-top movies based on a pay-cable breakthrough series based on a sex-centric column in the New York Observer in the mid 1990s.  The focus of all these versions and revisions and remakes is (usually) a quartet of sex-positive lady sophisticates walking around Manhattan in uncomfortable shoes and stopping off for brunch somewhere so they can kvetch about their lives.

That brief archeology might help a little in explaining how much I want to love this current iteration.  The Sex and the City brand is seismic in its weird connection to all kinds of cultural totems and mores that have morphed into the cluster-fuck we are living in now.  And Just Like That tries to negotiate all these topics and torrents with a  keen, digital sense of both irony and sentimentality, satire and sincerity.  It really doesn't work, but that's not the point.  You love it anyway for what it is, what it purports to be, what it never can do.  A glam shit-show, a cancatenation of all kinds of cross-currents and notions of privilege and victimhood, sex and family, finger-banging and hip-surgery.  In short, this is a show of its times, so on-the-money horrible you smile in admiration and sometimes look away in gleeful disgust. 

I read Susan Sontag's "Notes on 'Camp'" 32 years ago in college.  It's a short, concise, intensely funny essay that sums up all kinds of notions about the camp (or "Camp with a Capital C" the way Sontag presents it) sensibility, and so I picked it up again because watching And Just Like That made me flashback to reading it.  There's something so pivotal and essential about the sad/happy/creepy/sweet moves each episode has made around the concepts of white privilege and cultural appropriation and gender norms and so on so forth that in the scramble to be serious and considerate the show creates its own sort of neo-Camp.  

Susan Sontag on page 2 of "Notes on 'Camp'" defines Campiness as a "sensibility... that, among other things, converts the serious into the frivolous."  What And Just Like That is doing (now in 6 episodes) is the exact opposite:  the direction, writing, and acting all take the frivolous and convert it into dire seriousness.  Big dying, the ladies aging, Samantha disappearing, each of the main characters constantly confronting the Multi-cultural, Me-Too, (hopefully but probably not) Post-Trump 21st Century that has sprouted since Sex and the City first ruled the cultural universe -- all that precious content is given to us in strangely glossy fever-dream interludes and awkward asides and apologies.  And all the new characters, brown and black folks dressed in gorgeous clothes and living gorgeous lives, are in service to the Ladies Learning Lessons about themselves and this brave new world.  It's kitsch but also beyond kitsch:  you feel everyone involved trying to figure out this really fucked up world we're living in and just coming up with Concepts, Jokes, Deep Thoughts.

This is why I love what they are doing.  It's obvious and horribly self-serving, but completely stupid and a failure, or as Sontag names it, And Just Like That is the perfect example of "a seriousness that fails."  Which is Camp, Capital C, exemplified.  

I'm sure everyone involved in the show knows and has a strong relationship with what Camp is and does.  And in fact in the 2010 sequel to the 2008 movie, there's a penultimate Camp moment when Liza Minnelli facilitates a supremely over-the-top and blissfully idiotic gay wedding.  But And Just Like That jumps the snark here by trying really hard to be real, to be sorrowful, to be corrective to its own made-up, free-for-all past, and in doing so everything feels off-kilter and wrong, and yet I love all those erratic, false moves because we are living in an era of wrong moves and correctives that aren't taking.  

So almost accidentally the show becomes emblematic, freighted with meaning it creates but doesn't know what to do with.

On page 32 of her beautiful Camp treatise, Sontag summarizes her argument:

Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation -- not judgment.  Camp is generous.  It wants to enjoy.  It only seems like malice, cynicism...  Camp taste doesn't propose that it is in bad taste to be serious; it doesn't sneer at someone who succeeds in being seriously dramatic.  What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures.

That's what And Just Like That seems to be to me:  full of feeling and beautifully acted and shot, but also kind of ham-handed and a slave to its own version of hyperbolic political correctness.  Which makes it somehow great and necessary viewing.

Go figure.