One great thing about taking my baby to a parent and baby screening of Fifty Shades of Grey will be that it will save so much time in therapy 30 years down the line. I will be able to show her, not just the place her sexuality was formed, but the day, and the aisle, and that it happened before lunchtime, too.
Already, in her short damp life, she has enjoyed Julianne Moore fantasising about her dead mother during a drug-fuelled threesome. The auditorium vibrated with a neighbouring baby’s vivid farts. She has cried along with me as Jack O’Connell returned bloodied from the Troubles. She has walked out during one of Joaquin Phoenix’s endless car journeys, slept through the bleeding drum solos of Whiplash, and premiered a new giggle during Nightcrawler’s many and varied deaths.
Another great thing about taking my baby to a parent and baby screening of Fifty Shades is that I will get to see it with someone who can’t go: “Seriously are you joking mate.” The best date for a film like this is someone incapable of judgement, incapable of much at all, actually, apart from almost sitting up on her own. Almost.
Baby screenings are absolutely the best thing about having a baby. Every film feels like a fabulous treat even when it’s an endless nightmare, like Inherent Vice, because you’re out of the flat, with other grown-up people and even though you’re enjoying yourself the baby continues to be alive. Plus, there are cake deals. But when the Barbican announced plans for its upcoming Fifty Shades baby screening, there was “uproar”. “Obviously the decision rests with each parent,” said the spokesperson for a parenting charity after detailing the ways you will damage your baby by torturing them with two hours of “mummy porn”, “but overall we feel that to put a very young child through this experience just isn’t necessary”. Of course it’s not necessary – nobody’s arguing it’s necessary to sit your squealing spawn on your knee and walk them carefully through the mysteries of the Red Room of Pain, but come on. It’s funny.
What makes it even funnier is that this film appears to be specifically designed for babies, or at least an audience without critical faculties. I’ve been following the Fifty Shades press tour with mounting delight, because every single person involved seems to hate it. The author hates the director. The romantic leads hate each other. All of them hate the original fans. And in a variety of increasingly creative ways, they have independently and politely requested we don’t see the film, ever. A Vanity Fair profile focused exclusively on the infighting between Sam Taylor-Johnson and EL James. Most interviews with Jamie Dornan have included a quote about how uncomfortable he was with the sex scenes. Most interviews with Dakota Johnson have included a quote about how fans of the book are probably going to hate it. “I don’t want my family to see the movie, because it’s inappropriate. Or my brothers’ friends… Also there’s part of me that’s like: I don’t want anyone to see this movie,” she told Glamour. “Just kidding.”
So I can’t wait to go. There is no way it can’t be bad, if only for the fact that the success of erotic fiction lies in the ability of the reader to picture their own heroes and fill in the gaps, so to speak, themselves. If only because it’s the dullest of all stories, a romance about finding “the one”. If only because it’s one of the most tedious books I’ve ever taken on holiday. It contains an entire chapter of legalese – in order to be aroused by it, it’d be helpful to contract one of those orgasm illnesses they detail in the Daily Star. But this looks like it will be gloriously, air-punchingly, live-tweetingly awful. The best kind of awful. And if I don’t share this kind of critical delight with my baby, well, what kind of mother would I be?
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk. Follow Eva on Twitter @EvaWiseman
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