What a time it is to be alive! For this week of all weeks is when anyone who has anything at all to promote, from duct tape to their own good selves, can attain international attention without recourse even to reality TV. All they need to do is somehow claim their self-promotion has something to do with Fifty Shades of Grey.
As even Trappist monks in South Korea know, this is the week that the film of EL James’s hilariously successful book is released. Truly, this would be the perfect Valentine’s Day date for couples who prefer to watch actors pretend to have sex rather than have actual sex themselves. Some of you, perhaps, have denied yourselves the pleasure of reading this delightful tale about what happened when a virginal college graduate, Anastasia Steele, met Christian Grey, a weirdo stalker with a fondness for Bruce Springsteen (“‘Gotta love Bruce,’ he grinned at me”) and fisting (“He smirked at me: ‘Your ass will need training.’”) Move over, Heathcliff – there’s a new romantic hero in town!
But honestly, I cannot recommend it more highly. Not enough sex scenes in literature include lines like “Pulling off his boxer shorts, his erection springs free. Holy cow!” And: “My medulla oblongata has neglected to fire any synapses to make me breathe.” Like you, I have not been able to see the film yet, but I already feel sad at the inevitable loss in translation from novel to movie of Anastasia’s endearingly imitable first-person narration. Holy cow!
But our business today is not, sadly, the book. The book, in fact, is beside the point, or as beside the point as a book series that has sold 100m copies can be. Now we have the film, and it is impossible to think of another movie that has proved itself so amenable to lazy PRs and others desperate to hitch their wagons to this attention-sucking vortex, and I have lived through the release of (most of) the original Star Wars franchise and 1989’s Batman. I honestly don’t think there’s been a day in the past three months when I haven’t received at least five emails from PRs flogging everything from manicures to men’s ties, that haven’t made some grasping reference to Fifty Shades of Desperation. Condom brands and bedding companies have cannily claimed some sort of alliance with the film, replete with mini films and competitions, with one even offering a prize of “a Sealy Ultimate Support Mattress (in grey!)”. Because what could be sexier than coming home and finding your partner has won you a free grey mattress?
Fashion labels ranging from the high-end Marc New York to Tesco’s Florence & Fred have launched ranges allegedly inspired by the book (and, to be fair, nothing says kinky quite like buying your knickers from the supermarket). B&Q sent a memo to its staff this week that mysteriously found its way to the national press, which warned that there would almost certainly be “increased demand of certain products and queries from customers [recreating] their own Fifty Shades experiences. We need to be prepared.”
Yes, batten down the hatches, B&Q, as your doors will doubtless be trampled down by sex-crazed hordes who will go directly from seeing the movie to their local hardware shops, stringing each other up in the shelving section and spanking one another senseless with a Vileda mop. It is true that in the book, Christian does indeed buy cable ties, masking tape and rope from the hardware store where Anastasia conveniently works. But both EL James and B&Q seem sweetly ignorant of the fact that fetish fans generally buy their sexual apparatus from actual sex stores and not, sadly, high-street hardware shops for patently obvious reasons.
I am not, I fully concede, a BDSM expert, but it doesn’t take enormous imagination to grasp that, when tied tightly around limbs, normal rope would cause chafing (never a good sex look) so specially adapted soft rope just might be preferable. Sorry, B&Q.
But of course, newspapers (including this one) happily reprint this piece of absolute nonsense, because it has a Fifty Shades reference, you see, and Fifty Shades gets the readers – 100m of them and counting! Similarly reprinted without much investigation have been the complaints from various heads of groups who already object to everything about the movie from its “corrosive effect on cultural views of what normative sexuality ought to be” to the male lead’s stalking tendencies, portrayed as romantic, to its (nonexistent) “pornographic content”. I have no doubt that these people are genuine in their outrage, but have they never, perhaps, encountered any other films? Because these accusations could be lobbed at plenty of other movies – but, alas, those films don’t attract the same kind of media attention so, really, what’s the point in raising a fuss?
It is absolutely right that this book should have provided a platform for such blatant self-promotion and shameless advertising, because the book itself is really about the erotics of capitalism. Anastasia endlessly obsesses over Christian’s wealth – “seriously, over-the-top Bill Gates-style wealthy” – and label names are listed with the deadening dedication of Patrick Bateman: Calvin Klein, Apple, Audi, Converse, Blackberry, Moët, Gucci, Cartier. This, it often feels, is what’s really supposed to turn the readers on, not the sex. Vague references to Christian’s conference calls about “futures markets” are given more space than the emotional lives of the main characters friends and family. “It’s all about the money,” Anastasia smirks to her flatmate when explaining Christian’s appeal.
The corporate multimillionaire has been the new Prince Charming for several decades now in American movies, from Working Girl to Pretty Woman to Iron Man. As Lynn Stuart Parramore pointed out in a recent article on alternet.org, movies set in the corporate world often have S&M references in them, from Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda stringing up their boss in 1980’s 9 to 5 to the more recent Horrible Bosses. Fifty Shades’ unwitting cleverness came from literalising this: the awareness that capitalism screws us all, and that a lot of people get off on that.
So to see the furore around the film, with products selling themselves on the back of Fifty Shades, is like watching the capitalist world pleasure itself. At one point in the book, Christian orders Anastasia to masturbate. “I don’t know how,” she replies with a whimper. Don’t worry, Ana: you’re living in a wholly masturbatory franchise now.
