Well, I’ve finally seen all three of the FIFTY SHADES movies (FIFTY SHADES OF GREY, FIFTY SHADES DARKER, and, just a short while ago, FIFTY SHADES FREED). They’re fun, guilty pleasure froth I’m glad to have viewed for free on TV over almost a three year period.
Supposedly, Henry Cavill was slated to play the leading male role of kinky billionaire Christian Grey. Instead, the comparably light weight and insincere (but cute) Jamie Dornan got the part. Had the far more interesting, mysterious, sultry, and seemingly fiercer Mr. Cavill starred in this trashy trilogy, I’m sure all of the sex scenes between Mr. Grey and Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) would have been genuinely steamier than they actually are. Ah, well, I don’t blame dear Henry for passing up being in such junk. I’ll just have to patiently wait for him to show up in some other movie where he’s frequently naked and sexual.
The Practical, Fanciful Pagan 
Well, you’ve got my curiosity peaked. I’ll have to check these out and leave my religious Catholic parts to squirm in discomfort and fear that they will go straight to hell. The last time I tried to watch one, I felt like the whole world knew and I had to shut the TV off. Your casualness about sexuality really cracks me up. Perhaps, one day I will grow up. Nah, I love being a kid too much, albeit in this case an adolescent one.
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I think my California upbringing and coming of age there in the circles I was a part of resulted— for better and for worse— in this casualness about sexuality that you notice.
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If the books (and films) did any service at all to much of our culture’s deep-rooted issues with sexuality and sexual expression, it was to popularize and de-shame (to some extent) aspects of sexual expression that had been relegated to dark corners. That said, I still giggle about how many people I knew admitted that they read the books with deceiving covers placed over the actual books’ covers! Our puritanical and Catholic roots have so repressed our freedom of exploration of sexual expression, even in the once-removed experience of reading or watching a movie! Turn on the movies if you wish, dear one, and let your uptight ancestors cover their eyes and ears and know that their god created these crazy creatures we call human beings to enjoy ours and each others’ bodies!
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Well-said. Hear hear!
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Your review gave me a great laugh! 🙂 A long while back after years of listening to people twitter (not the app) about the series, I borrowed the first book from the library. It is one of only a few novels I have put aside without finishing because it felt too poorly written, surface-y/shallow, and appalling to what appeals to me about people in relationship that I felt it to be an utter waste of time (Twilight was one of the other books). I would have hoped, I guess, that in a film, decent actors might have managed to give the story some of the depth or complexity the novel lacked.
In an interesting spin about how even abysmal storytelling can have some kernel of inspiration, a good friend of mine felt the same as I did (though she actually read all the books) and wrote her own novel that took up similar themes but sought to deepen and complexify the characters and relationships! And having read what little I did of James’s novel and been so intrigued by the conversations about it, I was inspired to write some pretty intense scenes into the novel I’d been working on in which the main characters were locked in a relationship of power and control on many levels. Perhaps in some ways, James wrote a brave book. She certainly threw a conversation starter into the center of WASP-y social circles.
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I’m glad you laughed. These movies are not to be taken seriously, though the first one in particular is pretty misogynistic in places. I’m not surprised to hear that the books the screenplays are based on are poorly written. The TWILIGHT series are in the same vein of trashiness as FIFTY SHADES, as far as I can tell, and trash is fun and fine with me to enjoy sometimes, like junk food treats.
That book by your friend and the scenes you wrote for it have certainly piqued my curiosity.
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I’m glad your curiosity was piqued :). If I could clone myself, perhaps I’d finish my novel; until then, it lives in a plastic file box under the desk in my bedroom, reminding me daily that it awaits! And if the publishing industry weren’t so competitive, insider clique-y, and stacked deeply against unpublished writers of “literary fiction” (as opposed to “pop fiction”–hate those terms), perhaps my novelist friend could get her brilliant work out there (she has yet to cave to self-publication because she actually hopes she might earn some income from her work).
One of the things that ALWAYS frustrates me about stories that seem on the surface to be about equalizing the balance to uphold and celebrate “feminine” or even female power (however that manifests)–even the ones written by females–is the underlying mysogyny that seeps in anyway. (And sometimes even a total reversal, where misandry ends up being an overt or underlying theme). I see it over and over again, and it just serves to extend the binary battles.
The lens through which so many understand their human experience has been crafted through eons of ontology that reifies the primariness of sexual binaries in the experience of being a human being, and that weaves so subtly into this lens the culturally constructed understanding of binary gender. Third/fourth wave feminism, and Queer theory, though they have driven experience in the right direction by drawing attention to the construction of the lens and inviting people to see in new ways, has yet to bring about the paradigm shift I believe is necessary if we as humans are EVER able to take the physical appearance of the body out of its role of dominance in defining human experience and allow it to occupy its rightful “spoke” within the wheel of being.
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Yes, yes, and yes! I see an essay of your own coming forth from out of this thoughtful, thought-provoking comment.
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