Most fans of 50 Shades of Grey--the kinky BDSM bestseller by E.L. James--were wincing (and not in a good way) at last week's debut of the forthcoming film adaptation's conventional, fashion mag-slick trailer - "I didn't like it the the sixth time, when it was called 9 1/2 Weeks!" But no one asked the big question: What's wrong with cinema that it can't seem to capture the sickly turn-ons of a good bondage book? When I saw and heard the conventional sounding Edward of the piece, Mr. Grey (Jamie Dornan), the "masterful" captain of industry and 'wealthy, spontaneous, travel-minded' gentleman (the kind of man every girl with an online personal ad pines for --take it from me, who's lazy, poor, hates travel, and is too cheap to shop anywhere but H&M and Kohl's). I was glad to see he had one of those freaky reptilian-bird-alien-CGI-hybrid faces like old Bob Pattinson's, but his hair, suits, and voice, not to mention age, are as ROTM as a lawyer-cum-porn star in a 90s direct-to-cable office thriller.
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| There, there. There's always Wild Orchids 2. |
Maybe no one now working today could have filled the Mr. Grey part with any degree of affect, except Harvey Keitel (the latter a prospect too odious for the producers to consider seriously, which is exactly why it would have been awesome). It also may have worked if Dornan kept his Irish accent, or wore his hair in a crazed Irish tousle to give himself the air of a coked-up Caligula, but there are just too many young male models with nothing but gym muscles and hair gel by way of 'gravitas' pretending to be high-powered executives on network TV. Dornan is beautiful but would he ever make it as a dom outside of a Westworld-style robo-fantasy? I know some girls who are or were dominatrixes for a living. They are terrifying.
And that's the problem with adaptations of bondage books in a nutshell. Shit's Freudian, it runs deep. Anger over one actor playing a character already cast in the mind of every turned-on broad in America is normal but sadomasochistic stuff is doubly difficult because what's so very erotic on the page becomes either too goofy, i.e. tame (Secretary) or too genuinely violent and disturbing (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). Too much visual information (facial cues) lead us right out of the sadomasochistic spectator pleasure position, which short-circuits our higher mammalian complexes, recapturing the the age when we tattled constantly on our fellow children in hopes of witnessing their humiliation via their mom's wooden spoon or dad's belt (1). Ideally we evolve past this stage by around third or fourth grade. But on the printed page we can easily override the empathic response (as long as we know it's fiction and not some true crime novel) whereas onscreen our mammalian higher functioning kicks in --presuming we're not sociopaths or high on cocaine (2). Masochism may survive onto the big screen without much damage (as in the films of Josef von Sternberg or Luis Bunuel), but not in the form of traditional leather and lace scenes as books might describe.
According to Gaylyn Studlar, true masochism can only exist in dreams, conjured more out of a need to safely experience the abyss, or to trick out the satisfactory endorphin rush that surges to accommodate sudden pain (or the heroic measure of wasabi or hot sauce); it must be done person or in the mind where we can imagine a transformational ecstasy that ordinary movie watching doesn't accommodate. That's why for example the shocking Times Square marquee or the film capsule review might get our desire fired up but the actual film will never measure up; it's the difference between remembering your own crazy, erotic dream and hearing about someone else's.
There was a small, velvet-lined restaurant in NYC called La Nouvelle Justine (in the late 1990s) that offered a menu that included spanking hot young slaves or being spanked, and an overpriced chocolate mousse cake in shape of a spike heeled boot for parties of five or more. While tourists and bachelorettes snapped pictures and laughed in embarrassment, tame bondage rituals were enacted and pretty slaves marched back and forth, pretending to be thrilled at the prospect of their future lucrative punishments by the diners. We were there for my roommate's orgymongering sister's birthday, so we bought her a hot boy of her choosing to spank, knowing she was no slouch in this department. One light (for her) slap and he jumped up and ran away with a yelp; the bouncers came over to warn her to be gentle. Fuckin' midtown, man.
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| Hearing is believing (from top): Weekend, Persona |
As our French correspondent Severine notes: "Most French people would tell you that the image neutralizes the imagination in this field and suggest you to read, or ask someone to read you erotic literature." But then the book sells, gets passed around at private working mom book clubs, and boom, best-seller, so then someone has to make a movie of it. The problem should have already been apparent to us back in the era of 9 1/2 Weeks (see top image), a 1986 film that had a lot of buzz, a bit like 50 Shades has now, and fooled people who saw it into forgetting they hated it. Part of a post-American Gigolo cocaine-modernist penthouse spandex-and wool socks aerobics sexual aesthetic that has not aged well except as camp (see also: The Hunger, Flashdance, Shiver, Last Seduction, Disclosure, Basic Instinct), 9 1/2 Weeks with hot young Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke (back when he was still pretty) engaged in all sorts of kinky shit with ice cubes and candle wax; it never drew much of a response other than titters at the college Quad when I saw it. Sure I was drunk at the time, and drunk college students in a large group are apt to jeer a terrible film like 9 1/2 Weeks, especially since there's always one or two girls (and Roger Ebert) who loooove it.
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| mens in black, blondes to the right: 9 1/2 Weeks (1986); Dangerous Game (1993) |
While the trailer reminded me of Adran Lynne's 9 1/2 Weeks and its subsequent deluge of big budget late 80s-early 90s sex thrillers, the uproar reminded me of the last big author of sexy bondage and vampire love stories, Anne Rice, had a surprise S/M novel breakthrough akin to that of 50 Shades with her kinky 1985 novel, Exit to Eden. It was of course picked up by Hollywood, but for some reason they balked at its original conception and cast Dan Akroyd and Rosie O'Donnell in the leads as buddy cops, which made the book's fans feel like Jimmy Stewart when Midge shows him her self-portrait in Vertigo (1958)
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| Succubus (1967) |
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BUNUEL, VON STERNBERG
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| From top: She Demons; Bunuel directing La Belle du Jour |
This is where French theory comes into play, ala the concepts of masquerade and Deleuze's 'Becoming-Animal' - as in She Demons (1957, above), where castaways wander into a scene of beautiful blonde savages being whipped by Nazis. Our natural desire to help is tempered by the gun (phallic authority of the father) of the Nazi whipper and our possible misunderstanding of what's behind it all (as a child would misunderstand the primal scene as 'mother being hurt by father, the slap of body on thrusting body as spanking etc). In sum, when it is not 'supposed' to be erotic, not built up by smutty directors with kinky sex toys, the woman moaning in dubbed in pleasure or laughter or infantile squeals of pleasure, then and only then is it arousing --because it is so very wrong to be aroused. Because soon after the punishment, the woman reveals herself to have devolved into a gibbering devil, ala the Island of Lost Souls animal men.
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| Venus in furs |
It's to Von Sternberg and his Dietrich collaborations in the final analysis, though, to be seductive as well as masochistic. Bunuel is great but I never really feel the need to see most of his movies more than once whereas the JvS-Dietrichs improve and beguile more and more with each successive viewing. If the collective 'we' are to understand why the Grey book is so popular yet the film will suck so hard, it might be wise to join me IN THE REALMS OF PLEASURE: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic by Garylyn Studlar (Columbia Press, 1988):
"The fatalism of Von Sternberg's films is not simply an acceptance of death as an externally imposed inevitability but the expression of the masochistic urge toward death as a self-willed liberation. In choosing death, an illusionary triumph is created: the illusion of choice,"(48)Only Bunuel and Von Sternberg every seemed to grasp this concept, and it's not for nothing for example that both adapted the same masochistic text, Pierre Louÿs "La femme et le pantin," or that two different actresses play the same character in Bunuel's version, That Obscure Object of Desire, the cocktease girl who continually manipulates the lead and denies him any form of sexual release, a bond she instinctively understands he needs and appreciates. As the rapper Scarface once said, "I'm done as soon as I bust me a nut," - well, some characters never want to be 'done' - it spoils the game, turns a long elaborate twisted ritual into a disappointingly short-lived gratification followed by shame and emptiness. The whole trick to getting what you want is to deliberately want to want rather than have and still want for wanting. Most tricks are part sleight-of-hand and part misdirection, but here misdirection is the whole trick. The slighted hands of the clock are frozen at bedtime, right before mom comes in to kiss you goodnight and turn out the lights. Maybe you never get the kiss, but the lights stay on forever.
...masochisms obsession with death may be interpreted either as the expression of a universal instinctual urge or as the result of the masochistic wish for complete symbiosis with the mother and a return to nothingness,.... Eros is desexualized and resexualized; death becomes the ultimate fetish that fascinates with the promise of a mystical unity." (p. 123)
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| From top: Blonde Venus, That Obscure Object of Desire |
FINALE:
Don Pasquale hits closest to home...
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| oral phase cinema (boys to the left): from top: Blonde Venus, Obscure Object of Desire, Persona |
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| Devil is a Woman |
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| Gradiva (2006) |
When we get similar themes in the films of Alain Robbe-Grillet, many of which are now on DVD, wherein rustic barns, thrift store period costumes, and brand spanking new spankers mix uneasily together to no real affect. Robbe's is an intellectual, take his word for it, and gets the whole Georges Bataille-Deleuze-Lacan thing, but in the end, it boils down to the same goofy handcuffs, provoking little more than boredom and vague feminist ire. Read a book, Alain! And ideally make that book Gaylyn Studlar's In the Realm of Pleasure. You're probably smart enough to understand it. That's called flattery, you craven dog!
NOTES:
1. Though I hear that's not done these days by parents, kids certainly can imagine being abducted thanks to nonstop media hysteria. And I'd add that when the 'child is being beaten' frisson is taken out of the parental sphere, dad loses 90% of his authority (a good dad shouldn't need to punish, but without the threat what power does he have? Now the power is reversed, rather than the kid scared of the dad spanking, the dad is scared of the kid saying he was spanked, leading to arrests and child services). This accounts, in my mind, for the at least part of the shift of the father's role in the house from authoritarian top dog to low dog whipping boy.
2. When I was studying to be a drug counselor I learned it's common for cocaine abusers to order S/M porn and bondage gear online in the middle of the night during a coke binge, forget all about, then be appalled when it comes in the mail. It's often a factor in what compels them to seek treatment.
2. When I was studying to be a drug counselor I learned it's common for cocaine abusers to order S/M porn and bondage gear online in the middle of the night during a coke binge, forget all about, then be appalled when it comes in the mail. It's often a factor in what compels them to seek treatment.