The cultural
conversation about Fifty Shades of Grey since the movie came
out seems to have two main themes: how badly-written the book is
(the movie reviews are showcases for snideness on the topic) and
how bad the movie is for women. I've also heard complaints from the
BDSM community, or friends thereof, about the book's irresponsible
depiction of such relationships – echoes of the reception of Basic
Instinct by the LGBT community. The obvious response is that,
while anyone is free to worry about misinformation and object to
whatever they want to object to, Fifty Shades is a sexual
fantasy, not a lifestyle blueprint.
Lionel Trilling
famously defended Lolita, a runaway bestseller in America when
it was finally published there in 1958, by arguing that Nabokov's
novel restored a sense of romance to romance by reintroducing the
forbidden. By the late 50s, neither adulterous longing, on which the
concept of Western love was founded (see Tristan and Isolde), nor
out-of-wedlock lapses carried a sufficient charge of societal
disapproval, or created sufficient internal and external obstacles.
In the case of Fifty Shades of Grey,
it's the love interest's fetish that creates these obstacles. Do they
represent what women's magazines would call a “dealbreaker” for
Anastasia Steele, weighed against Christian Grey's immense wealth and
the frisson that his take-charge attitude evidently gives her?
Fifty Shades of Grey
knows exactly what it owes to the Western tradition of romantic love,
particularly as it has been depicted and promoted by literature.
Anastasia is an English lit major, and on their first date, Christian
asks her whether she's an Austen girl or a Hardy girl. She surprises
him by choosing Hardy. Diffident, lip-biting Miss Steele (as
Christian likes to call her) may seem like one of those
garden-variety Austen freaks, but she's going to swerve away from
that interminable trend. Deep within her is a repressed, oppressed
Victorian maiden, a Tess of the D'Urbervilles, dying to get out.
Intertexual Romance
With its basis in fan
fiction, it's hardly surprising that Fifty Shades is
self-conscious with its movie references, too: Anastasia dubs the
woman who initiated Christian into BDSM practices when he was 16
“Mrs. Robinson.” (I guess recruiting children – Anastasia does
later point out that it was child abuse – is an example of a
behaviour that the BDSM community would rather not have associated
with it.) The Graduate is a movie with a rather different
resonance for the female audience for which it was not intended than
for its male creators, and is maybe the last time an American movie
about sexual desire and mores made such a huge cultural impact.
So Fifty Shades of
Grey is a movie about a woman who seems to be the definition of
vanilla but might have a secret dark side, and also a movie about a
sexual initiation by a person who has a clear upper hand, that ends
disastrously. In this case, the difference in power is a matter of
money and sexual experience rather than age (I don't know if there's
an age difference in the novel, but the two leads look about the same
age in the movie although Jamie Dornan is in fact seven years older
than Dakota Johnson).
E. L. James may not be
a great or even a competent prose writer, but fan fiction requires
different talents – such as the media literacy and savviness about
media tropes that she does possess. As for psychological complexity,
everyone knows that that can be a distraction in pornography.
Anastasia and Christian are, first and foremost, types in a sort of
role-playing scenario: the powerful businessman with dark appetites
and the mousy, unassuming virgin. They are locked in a battle of
wills, based in traditional gender roles, that (as Leslie Fiedler
argued in Love and Death in the American Novel) is central to
the English novel from its first great example, Richardson's
Clarissa. Lovelace, as an irresponsible seducer, must get
Clarissa to sleep with him before he agrees to marry her; Clarissa,
as the most fastidious of virgins, must get Lovelace to marry her
before she agrees to sleep with him. The Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies
of the late 50s/early 60s are a comedic updating; so, in their way,
are the Bugs Bunny-Roadrunner cartoons. We just want to keep telling the same story about appetite, over and over.
In James's updating,
Christian wants to get Anastasia to sign a contract that will make
her his “submissive,” while Anastasia wants Christian to act more
like a normal boyfriend: go on dates, sleep in the same bed with her
at night, let her touch him – stuff like that. Because Christian is
obsessed with Anastasia (obviously), he can't help but give in to her
a bit while she contemplates the offer: they have some
extra-contractual sex, although some of it involves a little light
bondage; he agrees to go on a weekly date; she meets his family (who
adore her – obviously). All of this giving in, of course, is used
as leverage by Christian to make her give in – since, after
all, he's made more concessions to her than to any other girl he's
ever known.
I didn't find the sex
scenes in Fifty Shades especially sexy, although that may be
the point, in a way. It often happens in erotic fan fiction that the
sex scenes become obligatory and perfunctory because the writer has
become engrossed by the characters' relationship. And definitely that
has happened here: the characters may not be either believable or
especially individualized, but their psychological struggle is what
interests James, not the sex. I don't mean to spread the myth that
female creators and consumers of erotica are not interested in sex
scenes. There's a sub-genre of erotic fan fiction called “PWP,”
which stands for “porn without plot,” when you just want a shot
of graphically-described, barely-characterized sex. But the truth is
that, pretty often, the writer gets more interested in the
characters' relationships and the sex scenes become about as much the
point as the scene where Buffy fights the monster-of-the-week.
Furthermore, the
climactic BDSM scene of Fifty Shades is not meant to be sexy at all. The movie heads
toward the signing of the contract as the climax, but instead of that
consummation, Anastasia demands that Christian show her the worst he
has to offer so that she'll know what she's getting into, and we get
a raw emotional scene in which, as she's beaten, we see her take in
the realization of the depth of Christian's need to see her broken,
vulnerable, and physically and emotionally suffering. This also
parallels Clarissa, whose climactic act is the drugging and
raping of Clarissa by Lovelace; the mind-bending post-feminist twist
of Fifty Shades is that Anastasia is “in control” of the
situation because she asks to be physically and emotionally
brutalized.
After that, they're
reduced to a couple of people at their most emotionally naked and
have a kind of primal exchange that made me understand why the
director, Sam Taylor-Johnson, has referred to Persona in
discussions of the movie. (You read that right, cinephiles: go ahead and have a conniption fit.) Having braved the heart of darkness of her
sadist boyfriend, little Anastasia Steele has finally discovered
something about boundaries, and her boundaries in particular, and
learned how to say “No” in such a way that a man, however
powerful, persistent, and persuasive he may be, knows that she means
it. Of course she'll be back for more in future installments –
though I don't think I'll be.
The Genealogy of Tropes
In From Reverence to
Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, possibly the funniest
book ever to feature “rape” in the title, feminist film critic
Molly Haskell described the favourite women's fiction trope of the
Gothic hero: flattering in his controlling behaviour (you definitely
know he's into you), exciting in his abusiveness (he's no pansy), and
yet with a secret from his past that's left him secretly wounded and
vulnerable. He is the perfect hero for the puritan (or just
pubescent) heroine, Haskell explains, because despite his impressive
displays of “masculine” power, his “feminine” woundedness
means that he's unlikely to make real sexual demands on you; instead,
he ultimately appeals to one's maternal instinct.
My favourite example of
Haskell's is James Mason in the unbelievably silly 1945 British film
The Seventh Veil. Mason is a
bachelor who becomes the guardian of the heroine when she's a young
adolescent. (He seems like an uncle – V. C. Andrews's Dark
Angel, from which I'm sure James
stole the piano-playing scene in Fifty Shades,
is in this same mode – but the movie calls him a second cousin.) He
uses a cane – a symbol of his mysterious woundedness and unsubtle
indication of the impotence that keeps him sexually non-threatening despite his aggressive temperament.
Mason
doesn't only hate women because he's at a physical disadvantage in
the romance market, though, but also because of his relationship with
his mother, who hurt him when he was just a helpless little boy.
(Aw!) He can only express his attraction to the heroine by being
nasty to her, controlling every aspect of her life, and flipping out
when she tries to use other men to break free. And yet he has a
certain hold over her, not only because she's become obsessed,
Stockholm-style, with pleasing him, but because they develop a
professional bond as he trains her, Whiplash-style,
to become a concert pianist. That can be one of the perks of a
relationship with a wounded Gothic hero: sometimes instead of making
sexual demands on you, he spurs you to great heights of professional
achievement by demanding sublimation. And there's nothing a puritan –
which is to say, Anglo-American – woman finds sexier than
sublimation.
In
that movie's climactic act of displaced consummation, Mason attacks
her hands with his cane while she's playing after she informs him
that she's going to leave him to get married. But despite having an
array of suitors to choose from (a woman's picture trope with a
structural similarity to the “whodunnit,” as Haskell points out),
the heroine ultimately returns to Mason, whose violent outburst seems
to have cleared the air and left him more capable of expressing
tender emotions.
Mason gets ready to strike while Mommy looks on |
Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer, often held to be the paradigm of feminist TV, features an updating of the Gothic hero in Angel, who pretty starkly represents the gynocentric view of Good (non-sexual) and Bad (sexual) Men. And in case you thought that was an accident, the show reinforces that view when Buffy later develops a sexual relationship with a Bad (sexual) Man, Spike, which she has to break off because the puritan heroine ultimately cannot have a purely sexual relationship (Spike, no matter how much he may reform through his own effort, is still only a body, no soul) without compromising the virtue that's the source of her power.
Virtue,
as Nietzsche, I think it was, pointed out, originally meant
“strength,” and Buffy is the direct descendent of Spenser's
warrior women in The Faerie Queene,
Britomart and Belphoebe, who (according to Fiedler, again) turn into
Clarissa when the tropes of romance meet the bourgeois realism of the
English novel. In other words, the (usually blonde) woman who fights
the monsters/rapist is the exact same archetype as the (usually
blonde) woman who succumbs to the monster/rapist: Buffy and Laura
Palmer are two sides of the same coin. Spenser is illustrating female
chastity, or virtue, by embodying it in action heroines; while
Richardson's emphasis on pathos rather than action means that he can
best represent virtue by showing the fate it meets in a fallen world.
As
secular writers from the decades after second-wave feminism, I'm not
sure if Joss Whedon or David Lynch are aware that they're
representing virtue or chastity; I assume Lynch is thinking in terms
of “innocence,” with which his work has a deeply complicated
relationship, and Whedon probably in fully secularized, vague terms
like “strength of character.” Nevertheless, you can never
completely escape the genealogy of tropes, which is why Buffy –
strong, liberated, independent modern woman though she may be –
can't just sleep with whomever she pleases, whenever she pleases,
however she pleases. It's not just that we still have double
standards regarding female sexuality; of course we do. But when
representing female (or male) sexuality – whether on our screens
(including computer screens) or in our fantasies – we also have
tropes to contend with, and their embodiment of historical norms that
may still hover in our present-day “sexual unconscious.”
A Troubled Relationship to Female Agency
In
Fifty Shades of Grey,
we may contemplate not only with the genealogy of tropes but also
with a literal genealogy that is also a cinematic one: Dakota
Johnson's descent from Melanie Griffith, who is in turn the daughter
of Tippi Hedren. It is a legacy of portraying iconic characters with
a troubled relationship to female agency, and specific moments of
Fifty Shades become
rich with resonance for that reason, whether it was intentional on
the filmmaker's part or not. There's the especially on-the-nose
detail of the room that Christian designates for his “submissives”
having a caged bird among the wallpaper designs (“Back you go in
your gilded cage, Melanie Daniels!”), but there are also echoes of
Griffith's humiliating first encounter with Harrison Ford in Working
Girl in the scene where
Christian comes to the rescue of a blackout drunk Johnson.
Mitch and Melanie have a smug-off |
In Working Girl, one of many ambivalent 80s depictions of working women inspired by women's mass entrance into the workforce after second-wave feminism, the creepily baby-voiced Griffith was a throwback to a Marilyn Monroe/Judy Holliday dumb blonde archetype, her full figure and gauzy manner positing an inextricable link between female sexuality and female diffidence even as her character struggled to be taken seriously in the workplace while remaining “feminine.” The movie's linkage between women's professional success, WASP hyper-rationalism and suppression of sensuality, and anorexia through Sigourney Weaver's character and her “bony ass” (as Griffith memorably calls it) is right up Camille Paglia's alley: a traditional woman, and a working-class woman, Griffith has to learn how to “perform” Weaver's WASP style.
There's
even biographical resonance in the final beating scene, given what we
now know about the circumstances surrounding the filming of Melanie
Daniels's traumatic attack by the birds in the attic in the climactic
scene of The Birds.
(To wit: according to Hedren, and as dramatized in the 2012 TV movie The Girl, Hitchcock became sexually obsessed with
her, and in return for rejecting him, he arranged for the scene's
filming to be almost as harrowing for Hedren as the attack was for
Melanie.) Like the shower scene in Psycho,
the attic scene in The Birds
was a substitute for rape, but by 1964, American mores had relaxed
enough for Hitchcock to finally be able to put a real rape on the
screen for the first (but not only) time, in Marnie,
also starring Hedren.
Marnie
bears a much closer relationship to Fifty Shades of Grey
than The Birds. In it,
a young Sean Connery plays a
wealthy and powerful businessman, Mark Rutland (yep), who becomes
obsessed with a compulsive thief who takes jobs as a secretary in
order to steal from men like him (except older and less hot). When he
catches her, he threatens to turn her over to the police if she
doesn't marry him, even after he finds out that she's frigid –
unless that's part of the appeal. When patience doesn't make her come
around, he rapes her on their honeymoon, and realizes that she was
serious when she said no one million times when he has to rescue her
from her suicide attempt the following morning. The rest of the plot
concerns his attempts to cure her neuroses by playing amateur
psychotherapist while keeping his businessmen friends from
discovering his new wife's identity and turning her over to the
police.
The
resemblance between the movies is in the couples' combative
relationship and the way they're forced to present a facade of
normalcy while hiding problems that no one could understand, but in
Fifty Shades it's the
man who's suffering from a mysterious childhood trauma that's
affected his sex life, and the woman who's forced to play amateur
psychotherapist if she has any hope of making this relationship
function. And notably, if anyone's a masochist in the Mark-Marnie
relationship, it's Mark – who, as Marnie points out, is obsessed
with a woman who can't stand for him to touch her.
Hitchcock
gives us plenty of scenes from Marnie's point of view, both with and
without Mark present, but James and Taylor-Johnson don't bother to
allow us inside Christian's head, either because that would make him
less enigmatic or because they don't give a crap about him except
insofar as he affects Anastasia. This presents Jamie Dornan with a
notably tough task, as does what seems to be some pretty striking
miscasting. I can see Christian Gray as a Sean Connery type or, if
they were going to go with small and effete (however buff), maybe a Dirk Bogarde
type. To deliver all of those Smut 101 dirty-talk lines about fucking
and wanting to fuck, he's got to have an air of either authority or
depravity, while Dornan has less of either than your average boy band
member. If they wanted to go boy band, why didn't they get Justin
Timberlake? That would have made the movie into some
kind of work of genius.
Meh |
Better |
Dornan doesn't project an air of much of anything, except discomfort. And it's a shame because in addition to her resonances, Johnson brings everything to the part of Anastasia that it needs, and more (from the perspective of someone who hasn't read the books, anyway): brunette Everywoman prettiness (big nose, wonky teeth, breasts untouched by plastic surgeon, under-eye smudges suggestive of neurosis), charisma, and “go there” guts seldom seen outside of a David Lynch movie.
Source
material be damned: there's no reason at all why Fifty
Shades of Grey couldn't have
been a great movie. The casting is one reason why it's not, but the
more important reason is that it doesn't seem to be the director's
sexual fantasy. Taylor-Johnson has a feel for the characters' battle
of wills and emotional clashes, but unlike a Bunuel, Hitchcock,
Polanski, or Lynch, she doesn't have a lascivious eye; one never
feels that her own psychosexual fears or desires are on the line.
Ultimately,
the movie's about two things: a woman's attempt to find out the
sources of the trauma that keeps her boyfriend from being sexually
normal and prevents them from being together; and a man's attempt to
stain an innocent woman with his dirty male sexuality. Make no
mistake, in this movie's conception of sexuality, men represent sex
as its most essential, which, in this movie's conception, means its
dirtiest. The heroine's progress from innocence to experience
involves finding out what goes on inside the male brain – and
bedroom. But that's exactly what makes Anastasia such a courageous
heroine, within this movie's terms. She doesn't want to remain naive,
and she knows that to get out of that state she has to have such kind
of decisive encounter with maleness – with maleness as absolute
otherness. In this stark two-hander (as it basically is), the encounter with the man is the encounter with the
world.
But What Does It All Mean?
We
have lately become entranced with stories about how the genders
perceive each other, or how we perceive each other through the lens
of gender, and how narratives about gender, sex, and love are
entangled with narratives about violence; but Fifty Shades
of Grey is actually far less
about female masochism than Gone Girl,
the second-biggest publishing phenomenon of 2012 (after the Fifty
Shades series). The heroine of Gone Girl,
Amy Dunne, isn't a sexual masochist, but her roundabout method of
getting revenge on men for slights big and small – physically
injuring herself to make it look like she has been stabbed, beaten,
or raped, and staging her disappearance – suggest internalized
misogyny in combination with the cultural training that tells women
to take their frustrations out of themselves. This kind of masochism
is inseparable from narcissism, since the narcissist is always
manipulating her image and altering her body (through exercise or
surgery – which of course applies to men too, especially in the
media saturated, metrosexual 21st
century) in order to change the way others react to her. In the end,
concerned only with how others perceive her, she has no “real,”
“inner” self.
Anastasia
Steele isn't a masochist at all, which is exactly the problem. The
movie isn't about a woman who enjoys being beaten or punished. The
relationship is emotionally masochistic insofar as Anastasia can't
get what she wants out of it: she's not as concerned about the whips
as she is about the fact that Christian can't easily show her
affection or accept it from her. He does not, in the parlance of
women's magazines, “treat her right.”
In her thinkpiece on
the series, Katie Roiphe pissed off feminists, as she does, by
suggesting that its popularity is the result of professional women
secretly desiring submission in the sexual arena – a thesis stolen
from Paglia, who suggested back in the 90s that the burdens of
boardroom power might lead to a compensatory desire for someone else
to take charge in the bedroom. (Sounds reasonable. I mean, there's that scene in Wolf of Wall Street.)
Roiphe found lots of
other pop culture fodder for her thesis – including Girls,
which was then in its first season. It's true that first-season Adam
is some kind of Bizarro-universe, internet-porn-era version of the
Gothic hero; perpetually shirtless and inarticulate except on the
subject of porn-derived role-playing fantasies, Adam is Stanley
Kowalski with mild Asperger's. What I see as parallel to Fifty
Shades in first-season Adam and Hannah is not Hannah's curiosity
about BDSM, but her debate within herself and with her friends over
whether it's “okay” for Adam to just use her for sex rather than
acting as a full boyfriend – as well as the fact that Adam seems,
to her, excitingly, and a little dauntingly, in touch with his sexual
desires, whereas she hasn't got a clue about her own. Hannah,
however, unlike Anastasia, also doesn't know, initially, whether she
wants Adam to be her boyfriend or not. Her concern is, rather, about
whether it's degrading, from a feminist perspective, for Adam to use
her for sex (is feminism about sexual liberation, or about getting
men to treat you right?), and whether, from a feminist perspective,
it's okay to be degraded (is feminism about the freedom to have all
kinds of experiences, even unpleasant ones... or about not letting
men treat you badly?).
Maya Dusenbery's
pro-Fifty Shades response to Roiphe's piece on Feministing is way
more interesting than Roiphe's pseudo-daring thinkpiece. (That's what
you get for using a thesis that was part of a conversation going on
in feminism over a decade ago.) Dusenbery suggests that the
popularity of the books has to do not with any desire for submission
on the part of female readers, since the sub-dom relationship that
Christian wants never actually happens. Instead, Dunsenbery
emphasizes the “negotiating that happens in their relationship”
and the “classic damaged-boy-saved-by-a-good-woman narrative that
everyone loves.” In which case the tastes of female readers in
romantic fiction haven't changed much since Clarissa –
except that Richardson was hellbent on ruining everyone's fun by
rejecting any version of the “saved by a good woman” narrative,
even though, according to what I've read, his female fans pleaded for
him to get Clarissa and Lovelace together even after the rape. I'm
sure they took care of that in the privately-circulated,
quill-written fanfic, though.
I agree with Dusenbery
that whatever the massive popularity of the Fifty Shades
series means, it's not, contra Roiphe's insinuations, that “women
don't actually want power/equality/liberation.” The fact that women
have made an erotica series into an international phenomenon in a
world that still does not cater equally to the (heterosexual) female
libidinous fantasies, because women still aren't creating 50 per cent of the media we consume, has got to be something for feminism to
celebrate. And it didn't happen in a day: it happened because of
women on the internet – of all ages, gay and straight – writing
erotic fan fiction in a gift economy for over a decade, until a
tipping point was reached.
The fact that the series depicts, in part,
female masochism, or at least plays with the idea, makes that
feminist triumph imperfect, or at least complicated – bringing an
awareness, as it does, that traditional gender roles and our sexual
fantasies remain inextricably tangled up. And our reactions to such
fantasies are complicated by real events and the narratives about
gender, gender roles, and abuse and violence that affect our
perception of them and are, in turn, shaped by them: just like the
Gone Girl movie, whose release was shadowed by the appearance
and discrediting of an account of campus gang rape in the Rolling
Stone, the Fifty Shades movie and the criticisms of it
coming from the BDSM community, follow on the heels of the fall from grace of popular Canadian radio host Jian Ghomeshi for having,
it seems, practiced BDSM without properly gaining consent in all
cases, and for sexually harassing female co-workers.
Eros, Masochism, Genre, and Gender
Eros, Masochism, Genre, and Gender
A “healthy
relationship” is the kind of thing most people aspire to have; it
is not necessarily the stuff of romantic or erotic fantasies. As I
can recall from the soap operas I watched as a child and young
teenager, in the late 80s and early 90s, often women's romantic
fantasies revolve around a man who is unreliable and in some ways
unavailable, so that she has to chase him. (I'm thinking of Jack and
Jennifer of Days of Our Lives, the ultimate good
girl-redeems-damaged/bad boy story, in which the virginal
girl-next-door rehabilitates a rapist.) This may be because it makes
him less threatening sexually, but it's also, surely, because, just
like men, women are – again, in fantasy – more interested in what
they can't get. They may be so interested in it, in fact, that
they're willing to withstand a lot of disappointment and heartache in
order to keep pursuing it.
There's no real
counterpart to this for men, since men do not have romantic fiction
explicitly marketed to them. If men are consuming romantic fiction,
it's “women's fiction.” In fiction marketed to men, men don't
seek romantic love, they seek trophies: in one comedy after
another, hot chicks who are way out of the schlubby hero's league but
who are so good-natured that he eventually wins them over anyway, and
who have no characteristics other than “hot” and “nice.”
Dramas marketed to men tend to have women in them as little as
possible.
At one time, there was
a Hollywood genre that dealt with men's romantic and erotic fears and
desires, which was retrospectively termed “film noir,” and if we
were viewing it from the perspective of whether or not the fantasies
it contains are “good for men,” we'd have to conclude that men
are, as a group, perilously masochistic. We do not view narratives
from that perspective, however, but – if we're feminists – from
one in which if a female character is cruel to a male character, it means the work is misogynous, and if a male character is cruel to a female
character, it's because the work is misogynous. This suggests that, for all the
valuable insights of feminist analysis of narratives, it has its
limitations.
Occasionally in satire, a male gets to totally abase himself before a gorgeous woman in a way that would be unthinkable in a gender-reversed scenario, as in Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid, or every movie that Josef von Sternberg made with Marlene Dietrich. It's important to think about how our narratives socialize us, particularly if we are part of a group whose rights are often at risk, and it's understandable that representations of violence toward women by men will have more real-world associations than representations of violence toward men by women to complicate our reactions (although we might want to ask ourselves: why are we not upset by representations of violence toward men by men, which is very much a real-world problem?). But we shouldn't let the narratives that we form out of these facts make us forget that eros makes masochists of us all – at least in our imaginations.
Occasionally in satire, a male gets to totally abase himself before a gorgeous woman in a way that would be unthinkable in a gender-reversed scenario, as in Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid, or every movie that Josef von Sternberg made with Marlene Dietrich. It's important to think about how our narratives socialize us, particularly if we are part of a group whose rights are often at risk, and it's understandable that representations of violence toward women by men will have more real-world associations than representations of violence toward men by women to complicate our reactions (although we might want to ask ourselves: why are we not upset by representations of violence toward men by men, which is very much a real-world problem?). But we shouldn't let the narratives that we form out of these facts make us forget that eros makes masochists of us all – at least in our imaginations.
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