Fifty Shades of Grey, an adaptation of E. L. James’ book of the same name, grossed over $100 million in North America on its opening weekend and has become the centre of hype for many moviegoers. The film has promised audiences socially acceptable soft-core porn, despite the fact that the material on which the titillating images are based is radically unnerving and intensely disgusting.
Anastasia Steele is a broke university student that gets the opportunity to interview a young self-made billionaire, Christian Grey, when her roommate that works for the school paper falls ill. A spark ignites between the unlikely pairing. Anastasia is obviously enchanted and intimidated by Christian, but still she refuses to sign Christian’s sexual contract.
The businessman is flawless on the outside — rich, caring, and charismatic — but in reality he’s a psychopathic sadist. Despite the abusive sexual relationship, Anastasia stays with Christian because she sees glimpses of kindness and, more importantly, a wallet full of cash.
This movie wants to have its cake and eat it too; the cake being sexual abuse. The narrative is opposed to the disturbing nonconsensual sex in the film, but the aesthetics glamorize the act. There are two opposing elements fighting to dominate the film: one is uninteresting, and the other is immoral.
The story wants to be about how sexual abuse affects a person’s sexual relationships. We are told that Christian was molested as a child, which is supposed to explain his BDSM fetish. For him, Anastasia is merely an object to be used for his sexual gratification. She is clearly opposed to being flogged and beaten in the bedroom; her arc as a character is that she learns to stand up against her abuser and leave the relationship.
By contrast, Christian’s development throughout the rest of this series (beware, there are two more coming) appears to be that he learns to overcome his childhood trauma and to treat his sexual partners as people, not objects. Taken on this level, the film is feeble and stiff. The characters’ psyches remain relatively unknown to the audience, while the two leads, Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan, fail to hint at any deeper hurt through their interactions.
For all its ineptness as an examination of the effects of sexual abuse, the narrative, taken on its own, is not immoral. Films that depict immorality need not be immoral themselves. The film’s immorality lies in its voyeuristic tendencies meant to titillate the audience, and its aesthetic approval of nonconsensual sex.
The graphic sequences are backed by a risqué score (notably a slowed-down remix of Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love”) and shot with vibrant colours that directly contrast the lifeless decor of Christian’s office or Anastasia’s apartment. Additionally, Dakota Johnson’s performance has a duality that can be interpreted as having intense pleasure or aching pain; however, the film’s form leads you to believe the former, despite the story implying it to be the latter.
It amazes me how sophisticated audiences have become at processing and piecing together fragmented images to understand stories, yet they are still lacking in understanding how or why a scene is constructed. Well-intentioned viewers may watch this film but fail to see the immorality.
