The target audience’s reaction to the Sex and the City trailer

Posted by Chris

May 6, 2008

Karina, in a post that you need to click through to so you can read the whole thing, says this about being in attendance at a Sex and the City-promoting press event with Sarah Jessica Parker:

About half-way through the show, the lights go down so we can watch the Sex and the City trailer. I’ve seen this before, of course, but the reaction of the audience suggest that most people in the room haven’t. I suddenly become aware that there’s not much of an overlap in demographics between the type of person who consumes media like Sex and the City, and the type of person who reads about movies on the internet. Perhaps this is why just being in this room makes me uncomfortable. Maybe there are some girls who are not a Carrie, a Samantha, a Miranda or a Charlotte––maybe there are some girls who are just nerdy.

In any case, the pubic hair jokes in the trailer get the biggest laughs, and this gets me thinking about the split between what we might as well call Sex and the City fangirls, and the kind of person we usually refer to as a fanboy. I imagine a 22 year-old boy who’s really into comic books, who, as I was sitting next to the pink martini ladies, was maybe lining up to see Iron Man, maybe for the second time. When I think of that boy, I imagine that he understands that a billionaire industrialist is not really going to build his own indestructible suit and rescue the innocent people of Afghanistan.

But Sex and the City exists on just as deep of a fantasy plane as any comic book world, and when I think of a Sex and the City fan, I imagine a 22 year-old girl who really believes that she’ll someday be rescued by a billionaire (industrialist or no).

It’s that disconnect in media audiences she mentions that really hits me sometimes. I’ve mentioned before my story about seeing a commercial for 300 during the 2007 football playoffs and having everyone else in the room react to it like this was the first they’d seen of it, where I had been following production journals and such for upwards of a year.

The audience’s reaction to the trailer also is telling in that it seems to be this is the kind of conversation that group of women think they SHOULD be living, if only they were able to find the right friends and lifestyle. So in that respect the movie is presenting the full breadth of aspirational points, both in terms of brand and lifestyle as well as friendships.

Interesting to say the least.