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Friday, February 13, 2015

MOVIE REVIEW Fifty Shades Of Grey
Power. Possession. Permission. Pleasure. Persecution.


No body double. Objectification. Power. Agency. Domination. Submission. Oppression. A shot from "Fifty Shades Of Grey", directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson.  Universal/Focus
       
by Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com        FOLLOW                                            TWEET
Friday, February 13, 2015

You want *him*.  You want him inside you.  You're curious.  The marketing of Sam Taylor-Johnson's drama "Fifty Shades Of Grey" uses this train of thought.  E.L. James's mega best-selling book is the cherry on top of all that action.  Women bought Ms. James's book more than 100 million times over.  The societal culture surrounding Ms. Taylor-Johnson's film, not a bad film actually, is the very ingredient its advertising strategy taps into.  But this ambivalent, alluring film of push-and-pull power dynamics between a seemingly powerless poor woman and a powerful rich man doesn't go there or truly explore the Grey areas.  It's the I-know-you-want-it "Blurred Lines" refrain without the blurred lines.  You want it, but you really don't, America.

Decorous, cool and ornate -- all initiation without ingratiation, "Fifty Shades Of Grey" is about control, empowerment, possession and the fantasy of submission.  The truth of abuse lurks around the edges, which are often absent from this shiny surface just north of titillation.  The fantasy indulged is one of experience without real exploration.  Just a taste will do, says Reel America (aka Ms. Taylor-Johnson and "Shades" screenwriter Kelly Marcel), while Real America historically says otherwise.  The purchases of Ms. James's reputedly much harsher book (and Robin Thicke's 2013 rape-culture cheerleading smash-mega hit "Blurred Lines" (unrated video) indicates something far more deeply truthful and troubling about America, "Fifty Shade's" constituents and both men's and women's tacit or explicit approval of women's submission to male domination.

The shades of Grey are the blank-slated, self-assured Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan), a multi-millionaire businessman powerbroker who owns a tall building in Seattle.  The cheeky metaphors abound early on as the bland, overawed journalist Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) looks up at a towering erect structure in the sky.  She's already melted into wetness by the time she reaches its top floor, tripping over (why?) at the sight of Christian.  (Every woman in a Hollywood romantic comedy seems to trip on a banana peel or a variant thereof.  Yet this is no comedy, though the raucously-amped audience I was with laughed nervously throughout.)

Anastasia asks Christian several questions, including whether Ms. Grey is gay.  Perhaps she mispronounced his last name.  Before long, the mysterious Mr. Grey, and men often don't ask many questions of women, is at least curious about Anastasia, who can't pronounce anything except orgasmic rain by the time she's left the phallic-shaped building.  On cue, the rain falls from Seattle's Emerald skies.  Anastasia has surrendered.  Game, set and (fucking) match.

Not quite.  Anastasia plays the mind game and physical maneuvers of captor and captive reasonably well, acquiring a sense of self and agency but not before Grey has his way, with her consent.  But how does Anastasia really give consent in a male-dominated world in which she as a woman has unequal bargaining power to begin with?  In this respect Ana, as she likes to be called, is dominated twice: once by the male world around her, and throughout, singularly by Christian, who has drawn up the terms upon which the sex and domination contract bind her (no pun intended.)  No lawyer has apparently prepared it.  It's all Christian's architecture, he, a big bad and abused wolf looking to eat and beat. 

Ana is little Red Riding Hood, and she's ridden.  Like a racehorse.  Christian is sheltered, petulant, possessive.  He wants his female toy but can't always have her.  It's farcically dishonest that he doesn't even so much as raise a hand to her.  The young boys of Steubenville and college campuses full of men and do-nothing university officials and trustees would even blush at this blatant gloss over. 

Their contract of engagement by the way, includes such things as allowing the male dominant to choose the female submissive's contraception at (a type and a place of) his choosing.  You can't help but think of male society's larger reordering and policing of a woman's reproductive rights.  When I saw and heard Christian's contract I immediately thought of Hobby Lobby, the privately-held American non-profit company owned by Christians.  Hobby Lobby is a company the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2014 ruled (by a 5-4 majority, all men in that majority too) couldn't be forced to cover contraception costs for its employees over its own "religious objections".


Who has the power here?  Jamie Dornan as Christian and Dakota Johnson as Anastasia in "Fifty Shades Of Grey", directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson.  Universal/Focus

Ana and Christian are, for all intents and purposes, employee and employer.  Which would make their engagements, even if consensual, a form of sexual harassment.  His employees all women, know of his propensities ("I trust my coworkers with only what I choose to tell them"), which could constitute hostile work environment sex harassment.  Christian is decidedly the boss.  It's his company.  His office.  His building.  His bedroom.  Heck, he owns the whips, handcuffs and chains.  Slavery.  Enslavement.  Ana is the lowly subordinate.  Her only union delegate is the audience, which is likely too busy indulging in and projecting its own prurience and vicarious fantasies upon Ana and/or Christian. 

As such, Ana is left on her own, hung out to dry by all of us, in full-blown "Compliance"-style.  This time the audience doesn't leave the theater at the quasi-violations of a woman.  The audience cheerleads, silently assents to or welcomes them.  We inevitably luxuriate on Ana's nakedness, vulnerability, pleasure (and our) fantasy or (her peril.)  From a legal standpoint the contract, drawn up at Christian Grey's office, inherently connotes coercion.  If Ana tripped over in Christian's office near the film's start, how tripped up is she now? 

The film's red lighting (by cinematographer Seamus McGarvey) during the contract negotiations, which are played for laughs at times, could connote either a huge throbbing red light telling Ana to stop and strongly recommend that Christian cease and desist, or big red light district.  Guess which it ends up being?  The contract isn't so much signed as it is implied, as is the audience's voyeurism, indelibly begged for in the camera's lavish movements and objectifying gaze on Anastasia.  Anything Christian is just that -- Christian, quick and nothing-to-see-here.  (Not that I wanted to.  But I'm sure many women and some men did.)

Still, Ms. Taylor-Johnson's film is not truly about sex but rather the parameters of how power is policed and circumscribed between men and women in a man's world.  The film on a baseline level raises unspoken truths, dilemmas and the problematic patriarchy of contractual engagements of women and men, dating and sexual roles.  Courts in America have ruled on these matters, notably on companionship (see Lee Marvin's case) and living arrangements, the kind Christian is furiously rigid about.  "I don't sleep with anyone", he curtly insists to Ana, who wants to help Christian out of his barren power shell.  Ana, who only wants love -- "let me touch you" -- wants to help a damaged man.  There's a semblance of deference "Fifty Shades" gives Ana, and it's often for the express purpose of reviving and saving a tortured man.

Ana stays true to the damaged Mini she drives.  She doesn't want new materials, she only wants an old reliable soul.  She seeks that in this man.  Ana cannot see past him.  Christian cannot see past her.  Ms. Johnson is very good here as a coy, sophisticated woman who assents but when the time comes she does the audience's and Ms. James's bidding.  Mr. Dornan has little to do except pull down his pants, whip a poor Seattle girl's behind and enter his submissive.  Christian's day job becomes his night job.  Mr. Dornan's face is often transfixed in placidity, either because Christian is suffering internal pain or because he's an unloving slate with barely risible emotion.  Something is eviscerated in him.

"Fifty Shades", in an act of profound cowardice, stops short of delving deeper, into issues of rape, domestic violence and property.  The continuum and line between fantasies, pleasures, BDSM and abuse, violence and rape is cut short.  We're merely teased, not tormented.  We should have been both.  Christian is indicted but not convicted.  He still has his Escala Penthouse.  The 16 women including Ana that Christian has introduced his tastes to will become 17, then 1700 (how many of them will be Ms. James's book buyers and Ms. Taylor-Johnson's filmgoers?)  Christian will ride again.  And again.  And again.  Is Super Bowl rape around the corner?  The societal culture of violence gets fetishized in "Fifty Shades" and let off the hook.


Blurred Girl, Obliterated, Interrupted: Emily Ratajkowski and Robin Thicke in the 2013 hit video "Blurred Lines".  RobinThickeVEVO

The way "12 Years A Slave" dealt unblinkingly with torture, physical possession, rape and violence against the Black body is the way "Fifty Shades Of Grey" should have approached male dominance of and physical, sexual abuse of women.  If it had, Ms. Taylor-Johnson's film would be daring.  That film would probe and unsettle.  But sadly, and not surprisingly, that doesn't happen here.  America cannot be trusted to handle that film.  At least not Hollywood's America.  There's a thin line between the behavior in Steve McQueen's film and Sam Taylor-Johnson's.  That behavior -- of violence and subjugation is a theme -- but without the auctions, families ripped apart and excessive death and murder.  The time periods are the only difference.  The country is the same as are the oppressors.

The default to any further exploration of Christian stops at his two most-oft-stated refrains: "this is the way I am" (the only real allusions to abuse, and the cigarette burns on his toned physique, which he explains) and "I want you.  I want this," which he tells Ana.  "Open your mind," Christian implores Ana, who has severe reservations about some of the more extreme tie-me-up-tie-me-down elements of his peccadilloes.  What's interesting is that Christian's refrain is ironic, as his mind is narrowly set on one thing: dominating and controlling Ana.  "This is what I want," this lonely troubled soul says, with desperation in his voice.

The film narrows and reduces the dictates of a woman's sexuality by pretending or orchestrating that Ana somehow doesn't have limitless sexual desires or a sexual imagination of her own.  Ms. Taylor-Johnson and Ms. Marcel take the cop-out route, making Ana a virgin, a Puritanical template (old America), one that will eventually repudiate Christian with one word and no fingers tied or crossed behind the back.  BDSM isn't necessarily indicted though, and the audience is surely aware of the "appropriate" sites where it can be found online. 

One woman in the audience -- she was a complete stranger -- mentioned this BDSM kink website to me without any prompting.  The audience in San Francisco was sexually charged up, which is what the "Fifty Shades" marketers at Universal Pictures are counting on everywhere.  Submitting to sexual pleasures and expectations.  Yet if you are expecting or going in order to see lots of sex you will have a long, hard two hours.

"Fifty Shades Of Grey" suggests that a village of abuse and dysfunction must be burned in order to save it.  Ana is both the match and the salvation.  She must save herself.  "Show me the very worst," she demands of the friendless Christian, who jets off to orgasmic orbit at the chance.  It's the one moment his facial expression breaks.  He has barely blinked his eyes throughout.  By this time Kate (Eloise Mumford), Ana's roommate, has already been enjoying a fulfilling and ordinarily loving relationship with Taylor (Max Martini), a bodyguard for Christian who is one strange companion. 

There are true notes, to the film's credit, and numerous false ones, including the dismissive look at one type of sexuality and identity (gay) while cheerleading another type (white hetero).  "Fifty Shades" champions heterosexuality while trampling gay identity in one small line of dialogue that hit my straight gut: "I heard that he was gay," Ana says, when two fawning fellow graduates drool over Christian, whom, hey presto! is the commencement speaker at Ana's college. 


Opulence, loneliness and fantasy: Jamie Dornan as Christian and Dakota Johnson as Anastasia in "Fifty Shades Of Grey".  Universal/Focus

Ana uses a "gay" passport, for lack of a better word, to selfishly dampen the two other women's desires for Christian while expediently and shamefully trampling gays, who are the film's blind spot of invisibility.  The effect is denigration.  A disarming and displacement of the straight male marauder and his would-be suitors or potential admirers.  Earlier, Ana has apologized for asking if Christian is gay.  It's at best puzzling, though in line with the American rearguard Puritanical order -- and indicative of whose sexuality is cherished, cheer-led and celebrated most in the American pecking order.  It isn't Ana's. 

Ana's sexuality is trampled by Christian.  She literally bends to his will.  And is spanked for it.  Either that is sexy to you, unfazing or off-putting.  (Strangely it felt neutral and detached for my purposes.)  In the throes of Ana's sexual pleasure and release she is still constricted, even if liberated from virginity and innocence, delivered in a quickie.  Freedom from being tied down by Christian's dictates however, is Ana's true passport.

For example, in "Fifty Shades" there's no Black man to be seen (aside from a blurred image of a professor half out of the frame early on.)  Black male sexuality (absent from most all Hollywood films to this day) would have surely threatened and/or enticed many of the hyper-sexed audience that I attended the screening with.  When Jose (Victor Rasuk), a Latino student who's known Ana for years, has in a drunken state confessed his wanting Ana, who is also drunk, the brooding, angry stranger Christian becomes bystander defender of Ana's honor, only to dominate her a few scenes later. 

The above scenario is precisely the fantasy many in the (mainly women's) audience wants.  The flawed, cold, rich stranger, whose dangerous undercurrents rage within.  The one man whom the audience wants to be taken and dominated by six ways to Sunday.  Not exactly like the suave, cavalier Robert Redford in "Indecent Proposal".

Does "Fifty Shades Of Grey" showcase domination of a woman?  Yes.  Of course it does, and lingers in close-ups of Ms. Johnson's impeccable body.  Her full-frontal nudeness is on full display for your bulging eyeballs: a body you can bounce cherries and slither ice-cubes off, close-ups of her breasts, showings of pubic hair, the whole 69 yards, while the double-standard of Christian's nether-regions are, surprise, surprise, nowhere to be seen.  (That "other" contract, presumably Mr. Dornan's contract as an actor, likely kept it from happening.)  There's no "male gaze" in Ms. Taylor-Johnson's film but at the end of the day "Fifty Shades Of Grey" operates in the ambit of a male-dominated "Blurred Lines" I-know-you-want-it-good-girl rape fantasy culture.  Here, Anastasia is that good girl.

Often shallow -- and more so via a sometimes playfully naive Anastasia -- "Fifty Shades" operates from an inherently unequal proposition towards its female protagonist, and the balance isn't so much reached as it is whispered.  Yet Anastasia is tasted, sampled and enjoyed like a full-course five-star meal and serving platter, even as the film's duplicitous default is to retreat and condemn its glassy, faux-nice guy hero.  It's a double-sided, somewhat backhanded repudiation: Ana gets to assert, and refreshingly so, her autonomy and agency against a dominating man, which in itself has a power and control that frustrates Christian, but by then the damage to Anastasia, and perhaps the entertained and satisfied audience, has already been done.

Also with: Jennifer Ehle, Marcia Gay Harden, Luke Grimes, Dylan Neal, Rita Ora, Callum Keith Rennie.

"Fifty Shades Of Grey" is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for strong sexual content including dialogue, some unusual behavior and graphic nudity, and for language.  Its running time is two hours and five minutes.


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