FIFTY SHADES OF CONFUSION

When I last looked at the approval rating for Fifty Shades of Grey on the film review site Rotten Tomatoes, it was running at around 26%: astonishingly low for a new release that is pulling ‘em in at the box office.  Perhaps I should say the disapproval rating: even the horrible Hobbit managed around 58%.  Critics are queueing up to find new ways to denounce the film: as if in apology for having seen it.

     The reasons for the dislike are interesting; for prudery does not seem to be among them.  When Napoleon read Justine, he ordered the arrest of the author:  for “the most abominable book ever engendered by the most depraved imagination”.  We do not find that spirit reflected in the responses of twenty-first-century sensibilities to Fifty Shades; unless we see it in those protesting outside cinemas on behalf of the female victims of male violence.  

     But no review I read is following Napoleon’s lead and saying, “I don’t like this film because it is immoral.”  Understandably, of course, if they want to continue as film critics; and even if some of them may secretly think it, although they can’t say it.  So they complain, instead, that the sex is so boring, and only takes up twenty minutes of the film.   It must be boring, if you can look at your watch instead of what’s happening on screen.   
  Boring, of course, is relative.  It depends on what is being compared with what.  By 50’s standards the sex in there is electric.  But think what murky water has flowed under the cinematic bridge since the 50’s.  Sure, the heroine of Fifty Shades is suspended by her arms; but if you’re going to think sex while suspended then you’re in competition with something like Behind the Green Door, and Marilyn Chambers, in unfaked reality, servicing four partners at the same time.  And with the hard-core genie now well and truly out of the bottle, and when you consider what’s available by way of internet porn, then simulated sex between just two people is on a hiding to nothing.

     Probably the next most frequent complaint is the portrayal of Christian Grey for being too…  well, grey.   (Nobody, incidentally, has queried the choice of the name ‘Christian’ for a sadist.)  For those who think there’s a link between a film and its source, the portrayal is   bad because it reflects the one-dimensional character in the book; or it’s bad because it doesn’t reflect the character in the book.  He’s not creepy enough.  Certainly he’s nothing like as creepy as the leather-clad obsessive with metal teeth in Belle du Jour.  But that particular character seems pretty settled in his depravity; whereas Grey has the potential to change. 

     These criticisms seem to me to be evasions of the real issues.  For one of the real, and therefore unspoken, problems is that commentators are caught between two modern commandments.  On the one hand, courtesy of feminism, you mustn’t hurt women.  (That idea, incidentally – though you’d never know it from modern education – was around in the days of King Arthur.)  On the other hand, you must respect the sexual orientations/tastes or whatever of others.  (If that was around in King Arthur’s day, I missed finding it in the Morte D’Arthur.)  So when another’s sexual proclivity is inflicting pain on women then these two principles are in conflict, and how to resolve them is a real conundrum.  Because once you concede that sado-masochism is wrong, just think where that could lead in the equality stakes.  What else might be wrong?  People see the implication, and it makes them uneasy.  So they take it out on the film.

     The other problem, I think is exactly what view to take of sado-masochism.  If we  have committed ourselves to the principle that the primary function of the sex act is new experience – and it would seem that a lot of us have – then  why not extend the boundaries a little?  Some reviewers have complained that sado-masochism is degrading to women and reduces them to the status of sex objects.  That may be true of this particular film, but exactly the same about men could be said of Personal Services, the biopic about Cynthia Payne.  Men in bras being whipped, or walked on by women in high heels?  So SM is degrading to both men and women alike.  But why is that wrong, if we own our own bodies, or lend them to someone else to degrade?  It would take a modern Napoleon to say something like, “It’s wrong because the body is the temple of the Spirit. And to wilfully inflict pain and degradation on it is to dishonour its Creator.”  But modern people aren’t going to say anything like that if they want to hang on to their jobs. 

     Another problem with the film, from our modern perspective,  is that it’s about bonding as much as about bondage. In that it is like many others of its type.  Although the contemporary world has committed itself (assuming commitment as a possibility) to sex without commitment, bonding still crops up in the most unexpected places dedicated to its denial.  The protagonist in Last Tango in Paris, hurt beyond measure by the death of his wife, wants emotion-free sex.  He becomes involved despite himself, though the girl is stronger willed.  You wanted just sex, you got it.  She may keep to the integrity of the agreement, but the desire for commitment still sneaks into  Tango  despite itself.  The sinister gangster with the dodgy teeth becomes obsessive about Belle du Jour.  I seem to recall – it’s years since I saw the film – that he wants her for himself.  But doesn’t that rather undermine the function of a prostitute, who should be spreading her favours as well as her legs?  In Eyes Wide Shut, after an odyssey – imagined or real, who knows? – of infidelity, the protagonist  ends up back with his wife.  Hell, even the code word for the orgy is ‘Fidelio’. 

     Fifty Shades of  Grey is cut from the same cloth.  At the end of the day, this is an old-fashioned love story.  I say old-fashioned because the characters are a man and a woman, rather than the same sex, and neither is transgendered.  I say a love story because thematically it reminds me of nothing so much as the Clerk’s story of patient Griselda in The Canterbury Tales.  Griselda, too, attracts the attentions of a mean rich guy who decides to punish her (emotionally, it has to be said, rather than physically) for no crime other than existing and being sweet.  Rather than his unpleasantness changing her, her goodness finally changes him.  The couple find reconciliation.  Grey moves in the same direction as Chaucer’s Marquis: from bondage to bonding, to marriage and a baby.  True the first film of the projected trilogy doesn’t get there yet, ending as it does with a closing elevator door, but you can see (even if you haven’t read the other books in the sequence), where all this is heading.  
     The overtness of the view that commitment-free sex doesn’t work may have a bearing on the film’s unpopularity with those at the cutting edge of opinion formation.  A more valid complaint might be that it is unrealistic  that someone like Grey would actually be changed.  What is more likely is that the girl would be.  Stockholm Syndrome and all that.  That, after all, is what happens in Justine. The heroine hopes that she will change her tormentor.  Instead, she ends up liking what he’s doing to her.

     But that is even more smacking of fantasy than the Fifty Shades alternative if we look at the reality of de Sade’s life.  True, de Sade’s frozen heart was not melted, but he did not bring his victims round to his point of view.  A string of female servants resigned, complaining of ill treatment.  The one on whom he really got going  – cutting her, and pouring hot wax into the wounds –  escaped  the torture chamber, fled and reported him.  In this instance, authority and public opinion were on her side.  They arrested de Sade again, and locked him up as a lunatic. 

     They could be uncompromising about it: without agonising about whether or not he, too, was a victim, and what childhood trauma might have been the cause.  They just saw what he was, and what else he might do unless prevented.

  Maybe they knew something back in those days that we since have lost.