Andrew O’Hehir’s review of Sex and the City 2 is, like all the rest of them, a pan. (Undoubtedly well-deserved; the trailer made me want to scream. Not in a good way.) But check out that slightly tortured Ulysses reference at the end of the first paragraph.* Really had to work to shoehorn that one in, huh? The quotation is not itself particularly relevant, and at first glance, Ulysses isn’t, either: if I were looking for a snappy line on the tragedies of marriage, I’d hit Madame Bovary first.

But Ulysses is relevant as a symbol: it’s the critic’s assertion that he’s better than the movie he’s reviewing. Although O’Hehir showers contempt on the characters, plot, and creative team, the review makes clear that his condescension isn’t aimed at the movie’s potential audience (though it would still function as condescension towards anyone who liked the movie):

It’s offensive to an entire audience who came of age with these women and who remain breathtakingly loyal, and out of nostalgic affection may not have the heart to turn away from them. It’s offensive to King’s own creations, toward whom he now seems to feel nothing but contempt. It’s offensive because it keeps cattle-driving a franchise once based on sparkle and economy toward new heights of painful, frantic emptiness. I kept telling myself, over and over, that Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte — the real, flawed, funny, recognizably human ones, not these lobotomized zombie replacements — would never do anything so dumb.

This is kind of a party-line assessment, which just might be because it’s true, but it’s nevertheless an even-handed one: it’s not about contempt for the concept of the series, or for the kind of women whom it portrayed or to whom it was sold. But there’s something of the Frankfurt School culture-industry attitude here: “cattle-driving” and “emptiness” and “lobotomized” smack of the idea that the masses are being offered cultural pap. I do not dispute that this movie is cultural pap: again, it looks execrable. I just think that setting it up, implicitly, against Ulysses is a telling move. I like to catalog these references, and this is a particularly good one, because it uses Ulysses to shame Sex and the City 2: it sets up a contrast between the timelessly venerated and the momentarily reviled. It’s kind of like killing a fly with a machine gun.

This is the thing that fascinates me so much about contemporary uses of Ulysses. When a writer wants to pull this kind of maneuver, it is almost always Ulysses that he presses into service. We never get Ulysses on the side of trashy middlebrow entertainment, even though you could pull plenty of quotations that would support it: Tit-Bits and Ruby, Pride of the Ring and The Lamplighter. But that’s not what Ulysses means to us. It means capital-A Art. It means the difficult, the enduring, the transcendent. It means canonicity, most crucially. I think only Shakespeare takes up as much space as Joyce (and particularly Ulysses) on our collective-unconscious canonical map, gets as much referential play, carries as much weight in the textual economy. We mean something when we reach for Ulysses. Andrew O’Hehir means something—invokes something—a whole set of attitudes about art and aesthetics and culture getting bundled imperceptibly in, like Irish immigrants in steerage. But there’s no checkpoint, no—if you will—Ellis Island for this kind of socioaesthetic baggage. Especially in aesthetics, ideology doesn’t announce itself. And because it only reveals itself to the people most likely to agree that pop culture is trash, a Ulysses reference is a particularly good smuggler.

*What does it say that all but one of those search results that features the name of the narrator of the episode being quoted spell it incorrectly (”Daedalus” instead of “Dedalus”)?