Like a lot of people, I was hot with anticipation ahead of Fifty Shades of Grey. Or, rather, at the prospect of having an appalled, outraged reaction.Yet I exited the press screening in Berlin feeling just, well, flat. Nothing, nada. Like the Charlotte Gainsbourg character at the end of the first part of Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, who suddenly loses the ability to climax, I just can’t get there. I can’t work up even the merest frisson of outrage over this movie.
By now, you probably already know the basics: virginal student Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) meets dashing billionaire Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) and in a matter of days he’s deflowered her and introduced her to heavy BDSM. More importantly, he’s proving his commitment to their nascent relationship by giving her cars and computers, and following her uninvited across the country, urging her to sign a contract that says she agrees to be his sexual submissive, eat only foods he approves of, and wear only clothes he buys, and so on. This is supposed to make him a dream date, although Dornan is singularly charmless and delivers every line, be it a command to Anastasia to get her kit off or a request to depart to an air-traffic controller, in the same flat monotone.
It’s a numbing bore of a movie, and I can’t even work up much righteous indignation over its retrograde view of relationships. When it comes to BDSM, like many others I’ve adopted a laissez-faire attitude, and indeed have friends who are fans of a bit of sub-dom role play and genital abrasion of a Saturday night. Nevertheless, I felt a pang of shame upon reading that some women’s rights groups are urging people to donate the cost of seeing Fifty Shades at the cinema to women’s refuges instead.
They have a point because the story is not really about a BDSM relationship; it’s about a woman getting mixed up with a controlling stalker. But it’s hard to generate ire about a film so blandly multiplex friendly when there are so many far more glaring illustrations around of what a lousy deal many women get from the hands of sadistic men.
I watched the film with two very good male friends. One, the father of a twentysomething girl, was angry that the film “reduces feminism to a woman’s attempt to win the love of a guy who just wants to tie her up, whip her and spank her”. The other, a gay New Yorker, was so flat-out bored he could barely muster the energy to snark .
They are certainly not representative of the film’s target audience, and nor am I for that matter. There’s a nice woman in my village who probably is, who told me the other day with a big wicked grin about how much she loved the book and was looking forward to the film. No doubt she and the other fans of the novel will be very satisfied customers. For the constituency, it delivers precisely what they want. Fifty Shades is a masochistic fantasy without the mess, a chance to playact at powerlessness, with very little actual pain.
