A Requiem For Smut: FIFTY SHADES OF GREY And The Death Of Erotic Cinema
***Warning: Spoilers for 50 Shades of Grey to Follow***
We used to watch pornography in this country. Now we just line the pockets of Twilight slash-fic peddlers.
This is obviously a crass re-appropriation of Frank Sobotka’s thematic summation of the stellar second season of The Wire*. Yet the point also stands tall. On one hand, the rip-roaring success of 50 Shades of Grey is, regardless of its (overly conflated) shittiness, something to truly be celebrated. A woman wrote a novel in her spare time that was aimed squarely at creating a power fantasy for bored housewives and girlfriends across the globe. It became a huge hit, sold millions of copies, landed scribe EL James atop the USA Today best-seller list, and practically helped revolutionize how we consume modern literature (via the enabling inconspicuous nature of e-reading devices like the Amazon Kindle). The sequels that followed in their forebear's footsteps helped strengthen the series’ reputation as a modern phenomenon. Universal Pictures and Focus Features purchased the rights to the film adaptation in March 2012, granting James a near-unprecedented level of control in the process. The production required her blessing on nearly every creative decision; right down to the pre-torn jeans Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) wears in his Amityville-ready BDSM dungeon. The movie is now not only a record-breaking box office smash, raking in over $266 million dollars worldwide during its opening weekend, but is also the highest-grossing motion picture to ever be directed by a female filmmaker. In short, women won.
On the other hand – erotic cinema may have put a revolver in its own mouth.
But let’s back up a bit. Erotica has been a staple of the movies since the turn of the twentieth century, when Louise Willy first performed a bathroom striptease in Eugène Pirou and Albert Kirchner’s seven-minute smut show, Le Coucher de la Mariee. Shortly thereafter, adult film loops spread throughout the brothels in Central and South America during the early 1900s, giving customers a tease of the flesh in which they were about to indulge. The art of single-reel obscenity climaxed in 1910 with Am Abend, a ten-minute movie in which a woman masturbates alone in her room and is then penetrated in her vagina, mouth and anus. While impossible to absolutely prove due to the destruction of nearly every existing print of these films, none of them catered to the female gaze. Almost all featured heterosexual sex between a dominant man and his submissive partner, the camera focusing exclusively on the woman’s nude form.
In America, puritanical law (as it is prone to do) rendered it impossible to legally view pornographic material. Much how Austrian producer/photographer Johann Schwarzer’s landmark adult production company, Saturn-Film, was dissolved by his country’s censorship hounds in 1911, zealots kept stag (or “blue”) films banned in the United States straight through the 1940s. These underground works of filth were often developed in bathtubs by amateur photographers, as processing the film in proper facilities was a prosecutable offense. Meanwhile, the Hays Code fought to keep skin off of mainstream silver screens up until 1968, despite provocative challenges from the likes of Billy Wilder and Otto Preminger. Across town, art house titans like Andy Warhol took advantage of trust-toppling competition laws, resulting in avant-garde works of titillation. Unfortunately, repression still ruled with an iron fist for decades, relegating erotica to a pleasure enjoyed in solitary spaces, free from the persecution of pearl-clutching prudes.
The 1970s are often heralded as being something of a “Golden Age” for erotic films. Bill Osco and Howard Ziehm’s Mona the Virgin Nymph became the first explicitly pornographic movie to receive a wide theatrical release. Deep Throat and Beyond the Green Door became massive successes, crossing over with conventional audiences as single men and women flocked to the theater alongside couples to see Linda Lovelace, Marilyn Chambers and John Holmes work the magic they were born with. Sex also found its way into the era’s critical darlings, with Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider becoming erotically entangled in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris. Fellow Italian Tinto Brass smuggled smut into cult pictures, creating nightmarish blends of horror and sexuality with infamous slices of insanity like Salon Kitty and the bloody Roman orgy, Caligula**. The decade became a defining period, in which freedom of expression confronted the country’s conservative values head-on – a product of post-Vietnam free love that stained art with its weed-smelling semen.
Porn became a more solitary activity again in the 1980s, as videotape technology made it much easier to mass-produce. Any façade of “art” was callously shed in the name of business. But the democratic injection of traditionalist values into the nation’s power structure doesn’t feel like coincidental timing. After all, videotape rose to production prominence in 1982, one year after Ronald Reagan took the White House and led a Republican charge that modern Tea Party zealots look back on with the same nostalgia a fanboy has for The Empire Strikes Back. Conservative “Masters of the Universe” ran the country, and sex was again poo-pooed in our filmic forums. The act even became a portent of doom for camping teenagers in slasher pictures like Friday the 13th, as Jason Voorhees and Freddy Kreuger (arguably two of the decade’s biggest cinematic icons) preyed upon those foolish enough to fornicate on their hallowed grounds.
The early '90s saw a resurgence of the “erotic thriller,” a sub-genre perfected by Brian De Palma in the '80s with Dressed to Kill and Body Double, and then dulled by the subsequent decade’s feeble attempts to recreate such lurid magic with flat, ugly thuds like Single White Female and Color of Night. There were exceptions to this rule, of course (Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct is an absolute trash masterpiece), but the majority of the output produced by screenwriters like Joe Eszterhas were colossal bores, cloyingly obvious in their attempts to arouse. Simultaneously, pornography found its way onto the home computer, as “interactive” CD-ROMs allowed perverts to ruin many a keyboard, and the Internet brought everything from transvestite three-ways to granny sex into home offices via frustratingly slow 56K modems. Any hope for the form (even in softcore “Skinemax” romps made for cable) to find its way back onto an artful path was lost completely, as it was reduced to nothing more than a guilty pleasure, relished in complete isolation, a much smaller glowing screen the viewer’s only company.
The 2000s have experienced a dearth of engaging sex on screen. While there are certainly examples of directors like Steven Soderbergh and Lars Von Trier attempting to push the erotic envelope with works like Magic Mike and Nymphomaniac, it’s readily apparent that the genre margins are where true exploration of carnal acts is destined to stay. The adult industry still thrives, but only in the basest, most guileless way possible. Fetishes are exploited on niche websites, but the majority of pornography plays to the dreaded male gaze. Misogyny is often king in these twenty-six minute pounding fantasies, as anyone who spends a solid amount of time browsing Brazzers or Bangbus can predict the choreography of said male-controlled synchronized flesh-swimming. To find any kind of soulful searching in modern porn, a viewer has to absorb gay auteurs like Travis Mathews, whose In Their Room series of documentaries taps into intimacy in a very raw, unflinching fashion.
In a weird way, 50 Shades of Grey feels like a culmination of this cultural slaying of erotic cinema. While EL James’ Beauty and the Beast fairy tale - revolving around young journalism student, Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson), being inducted into the BDSM lifestyle - taps into the too-seldom exploited journey of a woman discovering her “inner goddess,” it also philosophically sets on-screen eroticism back nearly sixty years. Its horror-show gawking at non-traditional proclivities is downright ghastly. In fact, the very origin of Christian Grey’s fetish marks the movie as having an ugly attitude about how lascivious appetites are born. If James’ story is to be bought wholesale, the audience must accept Christian’s kink as being unnatural -- a byproduct of childhood abuse (he was essentially a statutory rape victim, secretly playing sub to one of his mother’s domme friends growing up). This victimization suddenly renders his defining characteristic (as there really is nothing else to the character outside of wealth and power) as being something horrific instead of titillating. He’s a monster made of rough sex.
None of this is the fault of director Sam Taylor-Johnson, who is unfortunately relegated to being nothing more than a sharp shooter of James’ warped, conservative take on kink. 50 Shades of Grey is often a lovely film, lit and filmed with an eye for iconography that’s already been cemented via a torrent of Internet memes. She captures Dakota Johnson biting her lip in a way that acknowledges James’ textual oral fixation while still retaining a sexy campiness. Later, a BDSM contract negotiation (which really is as silly as it sounds) is backlit in a way that renders the characters as being nothing more than shadows against a blazing sun. Taylor-Johnson recognizes so much of James’ writing is the opposite of “cinematic” that she turns long stretches of the two lovers delivering groan-worthy dialogue into impressionistic tableaus, each representing the ways adults communicate the ins and outs of the most private aspects of their consensual relationships.
Perhaps more impressive is the way Taylor-Johnson embraces the female/queer gaze in a manner few pieces of modern big budget entertainment dare. Yes, the ratio of nakedness between Johnson and Dornan feels decisively one-sided***, but the way her camera lingers on his taut body is something to soak in. But beyond playing to its core audience, there’s a sly subversion of pop going on at the heart of 50 Shades as well. During the movie’s first full-blown sexual romp in the “red room,” a remix of Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love” blares on the soundtrack, the ubiquitous pop hit becoming drenched in sweat, its bass punctuated by the sounds of spanking. Taylor-Johnson isn’t afraid of the movie’s roots in fan-fiction, either, highlighting the Seattle skyline as a kind of wink-wink nudge in the ribs during one of the movie’s two bravado moments of escapism (the helicopter ride Christian takes Anastasia on is over the top romanticism a Miami Vice-era Michael Mann could admire). As the two lovers hike through a Pacific Northwest forest, one can’t help but recall that the two are merely clones of Edward and Bella from Twilight. These are fantasies a Young Adult fangirl has before waking up in a pool of sweat, visibly shaken by the dream she just had. As a society, we’re often quick to dismiss these reveries as being somewhat lesser than their male counterparts’ fawning over Marvel movies, because the art is deemed beneath even those standards of quality. To see it finally distilled on the big screen feels somewhat special.
However, none of this stops the core messages of the movie from feeling incredibly unhealthy. Aside from the picture explaining Christian’s love of BDSM in the same way Rob Zombie did Michael Myers’ unfathomable insanity****, so much of Anastasia’s arc feels like not only an empowerment play, but also a continuous tug at a rope that reels the enigmatic Mr. Grey back into the realms of conservative “normalcy.” “I don’t make love. I fuck…hard,” he says to her early on, but later Anastasia cracks his shell by revealing that she’s never had sex before. Suddenly, Christian is overcome by the urge to take her, softly and gently, between satin sheets. As their relationship progresses, Anastasia seems to want nothing more than to become a “regular couple” with her new BDSM beau, building a date night into her hilariously long contract while excising some of the more outlandish bedroom activities it outlines. In essence, his sexual penchants are nothing more than horror film armor that this princess has to strip away from the beast in order to reveal the beating heart of a soccer dad, ready to settle down in the suburbs after they sell off his swank high-rise apartment. She’s the cure to the disease his mother’s friend poisoned him with early on, no better than a de-programmer in a Christian camp meant to turn gay men straight.
The truth is, some people just enjoy rough sex. Some men are attracted to other men. Some women – to other women. Who we are sexually enticed by and how we engage in consensual activity with them is a natural part of human beings. The healthiest element of erotic cinema is the fact that it plays directly to this part of ourselves and, in some cases, helps us discover that it’s there at all. But if EL James is to be believed, that part of people is also inherently bad. You should give in to unadventurous influence and put away the sexual desires you have because, in the end, engaging in them only leads to heartache. The cliffhanger ending of 50 Shades of Grey sees Anastasia walking out on the man she loves because when he completely lets go of his inhibitions in his own dungeon, it “hurts” her. It’s the antithesis of what eroticism, in any medium, is supposed to be – a freeing expression of the appetites society often tells us should be kept hidden away and compartmentalized.
But what does this say about us, right now, as a society? Why are we ready to catapult a movie that is essentially asking us all to revert back to missionary-style sex to instant success? The movie’s triumph is no doubt a combination of previously established mainstream sensation and more than a little morbid curiosity. Yet it’s hard not to wonder if this sly conformist ethos will be smuggled into brains via a decently crafted piece of cinematic pulp. In some ways, this feels worse than the earliest days of pornography, where reels were slipped between traveling salesman who passed in the night, desperately hoping not to be stopped by the cops on the way back to their respective hotel rooms. Now the only eroticism making its way to our biggest screens feels crafted by a tourist, just passing through a smutty museum on their way to Bible study. This is the world we live in. We don’t have good sex anymore.
*"You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket.”
**Which, in fairness, is a film mostly disowned by Brass, as the Penthouse publishing magnet took the movie away from him during editing.
***Hey, if Ben Affleck can flash it, so can he.
****And, if we’re being honest, the serial killer comparisons don’t stop there. Grey is essentially the worst parts of Edward Cullen multiplied by a million. A control freak stalker psycho.
