Commentary

Black and white, no Grey

Fifty Shades exposes itself as a fairy tale, but only for wealthy men

College senior Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson, above) embarks on a relationship with a billionaire businessman in an erotic fantasy that is Fifty Shades of Grey.
College senior Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson, above) embarks on a relationship with a billionaire businessman in an erotic fantasy that is Fifty Shades of Grey.

Like fast-food burgers and cheap chain motels, Hollywood genre films are built on widely assumed and accepted tropes -- comfort food not in the flavor or texture, which tend toward the wildly bland, but in its familiarity and lack of challenge.

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Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) is a college student who becomes the mistress of aloof billionaire Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) in Fifty Shades of Grey.

Within each Hollywood genre, these tropes exist as signposts, alerting us as to the kind of film we are watching, and what we can expect going forward: Think of the lone, virginal woman in horror films; the wacky, unorthodox best friend in rom-coms; the fetishized weaponry in an action flick; or the brooding, silent hero in Westerns.

Because Hollywood essentially built these devices through the first few decades of the movie-making business, they share a kind of timeless quality that begins to feel like a certain sort of reality. It's no longer myth making. The ideas become so ingrained, we start to bend our culture to fit them in better (case in point: the numerous, largely female fans, who used to delight in ascribing specific Sex and the City characters to their posse as a way of making those impossible cartoons seem more real). Which, to my mind, is where the trouble can come in. If we can accept that a bunch of teens traveling around in a van solving mysteries with their giant Great Dane is a fantasy, we should also be able to equally separate, say, the Gay Best Friend character from the real people we know. But for a lot of us who watch these things incessantly, there comes a significant bleed-over point.

Which is all to say characters such as the Rich Distant Golem -- currently popularized by Jamie Dornan's turn as Christian Grey in the regrettable Fifty Shades of Grey -- can actually send a powerfully horrific message to us as a culture, and women specifically. Grey, who is met in his distance, wealth and obsessive, controlling nature just about perfectly by Richard Gere's Edward Lewis character in Pretty Woman, represents all these intrinsically male qualities that young men should want to attain: He's square-jaw handsome, dresses to the nines, works out fanatically and, most significantly to the character and trilogy of books that E.L. James saw fit to send out into the world, he's fabulously, unaccountably wealthy. Rich enough to fly his private helicopter to pick up a date in Portland, Ore., and fly her back to Seattle (and accomplished enough to fly the bird himself!); rich enough to buy her a new car as a graduation present; rich enough to ensconce himself in a stunning high-rise apartment in downtown Seattle that looks as if it were completely untouched by human hands.

His wealth, like the Edward character who "buys" the time of a Los Angeles prostitute (memorably played by a young Julia Roberts) for a week because he's so completely emotionally removed from humanity, he can't spend time with people he hasn't expressly paid to do so, acts as his ultimate social buffer. Christian doesn't need to interact with regular human beings, just his various employees, subservient to his every need and whim. Easily the most unbelievable scene in the film is when Christian takes Anastasia to his adopted family's house for dinner. So amiable and easy everyone is to read, so quick to welcome this young, naive college student into their lives, it's as if the troubled, haunted Christian -- a survivor of early childhood abuse, we are to understand, under the carelessness of his birth mother -- has sprung from whole cloth. He is alone in the universe, and rich enough to fetishize his alienation in the most elegant and well-stocked of bondage/dominance/sadomasochism chambers.

Where this becomes especially problematic is when the sweet, virginal Anastasia is brought on board. True to his nature, Christian identifies what he wants and pursues it with total disregard for common decency and the law. At one point, shortly after Anastasia has shied away from his advances and moved to Seattle with her college roommate, Christian breaks into her apartment -- though, notably, we don't see him actually pick the lock, we are just to assume, like a resourceful secret agent, his wealth allows him almost superhuman powers -- and shows up in her bedroom unannounced, holding a bottle of white wine (and a single glass for himself). Rather than recoil in horror, or call 911 to report a home invasion (either of which recourse, perfectly justified), she instead demurs and allows him to tie her up to her bed for the evening.

Throughout the film, Christian is shown to understand Anastasia better than she knows herself, which is what allows him to continually disregard her stated wishes and instead do whatever he sees fit. Later in the film, she flies home to Georgia to visit her mother for a few days, a connection she hasn't made for quite a while, but Christian can't stand to be without her for even those few days and again, suddenly shows up unexpectedly at the country club where mother and daughter are enjoying lunch.

He inserts himself forcibly into every aspect of her life until the lines have blurred between what is hers alone and what he has seen fit to take from her. And the world smilingly agrees with him: Again, it must be noted, that rather than be alarmed or at the very least, annoyed by his aggressive behavior toward her daughter -- and pretty much ruining the brief time they had to share together on this rare visit -- Anastasia's mother seems nothing but pleased that such a handsome, clearly wealthy young man has shown such predilection toward her flesh and blood, even if what he's actually after is a blood covenant whereby Anastasia signs a contract dictating the precise sexual terms of their bond and legally guaranteeing him sexual satisfaction for the duration of their time together.

About that contract: A few years ago, a story briefly made the Yahoo headlines about a man somewhere in the Midwest who tried to get his soon-to-be wife to sign a similar sounding sexual contract, one that would guarantee his continuous satisfaction in writing. He was held up, rightfully, as a complete ass, a sociopath whose desperate attempt toward sexual security was seen as a pathetic joke. The difference between the two? He was poor, lower middle class, the contract was seen as undesirable on any level and he was mocked endlessly online. Christian, however, is rich beyond reasonable measure and so his contract (actually written by his substantial legal division in order to be legally binding), while problematic for reasons of emotional connection in the narrative, is somehow perceived as dramatically different. It's not pathetic; it's alluring, an intriguing cry for help from this man who could never ask directly for empathy.

And this, finally, is what the female protagonists in these movies are set up to provide their men: an honest-to-God emotional connection to the world. Masters of the universe, richer than sin, what they really need is to regain contact with their emotional selves, presumably buried at childhood or shortly after the purchase of their first yacht, which the women all too happily provide. The male power is one of ownership, accumulation and financial domination; the female power, such as it is, is far more intangible and hard to qualify, but amounts to simple, disarming love.

We can say in the day and age of the empowered female chief executive officer, and rising equality of labor (if not yet in wage, as Patricia Arquette rightfully pointed out in her Oscar acceptance speech last Sunday), the paradigm shift is such that those once more distinct lines have been sufficiently blurred to render the trope meaningless, but this goes deeper than that. If this model of maleness -- handsome, well-groomed, unintelligibly wealthy and emotionally inert -- is to be taken as the pinnacle of the gender, the only reason they would need the company and contact with women would be recreational sex and, if necessary, procreation. The men, it would seem, are incomplete; the women, by contrast, are perfectly happy, but not rich. Their ensuing conjoining therefore seems less like a romantic love story than a dicey business merger attempting to entice shareholders: One company provides labor and manufacturing, the other, content and distribution.

By accepting their roles in this ungainly union, the female protagonists sell themselves all too short. Anyone who felt happy for Roberts' character at the end of Pretty Woman was missing the point. Her Prince Charming may have successfully dragged her out of the gutter of prostitution -- and those asinine hip-high leather boots -- but it came at the cost of her personal freedom. I am not familiar with the Fifty Shades sequels, but I can certainly foresee the eventual outcome without having to squint my eyes: They will end up together, for all eternity, and whatever else this young woman might have had in her life otherwise will be forever lost. Like the shrewd business tycoon he's portrayed as, his end of the bargain represents the only net gain; it might remain a fairy tale ending, but only for one of them.

MovieStyle on 02/27/2015

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