PIYUSH ROY
It might come a surprise to find someone unaware of Fifty Shades of Grey (the book or film) these days. British author, EL James’ erotic romance trilogy, starting with Fifty Shades of Grey, and followed by Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed is perhaps the biggest literary blockbuster out of the United Kingdom and the ‘writing-in-English’ literary world since JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Rowling’s series was engaging children’s fiction that an adult could savour too, James’ trilogy is steamy adult fiction with a supposed skew towards catering to a distinctly female readership.
The trilogy’s combined novel sales, stand at a staggering 70 million copies worldwide, with 35 million copies sold in the United States alone, and a UK record of being the fastest selling paperback of all time. In the year of the book’s release, 2012, the Times magazine had celebrated James as one of the ‘World’s 100 Most Influential People.’ Fair enough for anyone managing to touch so many lives in our era of immense distractions and ‘anyone/anytime’ icons; so what if the books’ literary merit ranges from the puerile to the perverse!
In brief, the novel’s tale describes a growing – now on, now off, intimate psycho-emotional – relationship between a college graduate, Anastasia Steele, and a young business magnate, Christian Grey. It’s developed through bouts of mutual attraction and rejection, discovery and disenchantment leading to an eventual happy ending, like any of the romantic Mills & Boon novellas. But what makes Fifty Shades of Grey different are its explicit erotic scenes featuring ‘uncommon’ sexual practices that frequently test participant limits in their exploration of perverse pleasures bordering on sadism, masochism, bondage, and the like. The trigger is a dominant-submissive sexual partnership ‘contract’ entered into by two young people – a bright, but nerdy college girl and a handsome and intense, young businessman achiever with a ‘dark’ past.
Now, the trilogy’s recently released first onscreen adaptation, Fifty Shades of Grey (the film), too has been repeating the book’s spectacular success at the box-office. Hollywood’s biggest success of 2015 so far, the film opened to a pre-selling of 4.5 million tickets in 39 global film markets, has broken box-office records in France, Russia, Ireland and the UK, and has already crossed the $400 million earnings mark within a fortnight of its Valentine Day release.
Globally, it also is the fourth film directed by a woman, Samantha Taylor-Johnson, to cross the $400 million blockbuster earner mark. So should we celebrate that a woman filmmaker has now made a mark in the predominantly males’ made genre of the ‘erotic film’?
The film’s reviews though kind of argue to the contrary, and I am not just referring to the extremely damning critic reviews. Popular people-led IMDB ratings too give the film a 40 merit rating out of 100 (Rotten Tomatoes even less at 25). And yet its ticket sales continue to zoom…
My contention is that it’s one of those cultural events in life that peer pressure pushes you to be a part of because you don’t want to look ‘uncool’ by missing out on something that’s been convincingly manufactured and marketed as the new ‘cool’! In the theatre, where I saw the film running to 10 plus fairly packed showings a day, there were about five other men, and 100 plus women in the audience. Watching Fifty Shades of Grey is definitely the latest ‘inthing’ to do for a ‘girls only’ night out, chill out or movie party experience. The theatre was populated by an eclectic age range of female viewers ranging from 18 plus (since it’s an adult film) to perhaps early 50s. It was like a ladies’ coming out to celebrate the latest film in their ‘preferred’ genre of the romantic film, just as a Sci-fi or gore adventurescreening would be predominantly populated by a male audience. Not to discount that guarantee of enjoying few guilty pleasures,often disapproved or disallowed for women audiences in public. In India too, where the book has been a success, it is quite interesting to note how most of its ‘intellectual and educated’ lady readers, who would normally frown at anything bordering on the verge of porn, actually found the book sexy and okay enough to be seen reading or talking about on social media, twitter, Facebook etc.
However, in the nature of engagement (or the lack thereof) in those comments, is revealed the emptiness of Fifty Shades of Grey. Most discussions around the book largely have been limited to basic engagements like – did one read it or not read it? Just like the buzz around the film is all about – did one see it or not seen it yet? None rarely engage or discuss its merits, characterisation, drama build-up or even the much highlighted sexual encounters in the book… Why? Because the trilogy is primarily time pass, passing fad fare, not the next Jane Austen or Emily Bronte to add to your shelves.
There isn’t really much to excite one either in the book or the film on basic storytelling attributes like character build-up, action motivations or a reasonably gripping or revelatory dramatic hook. The book’s film adaptation is further disadvantaged by superficial acting, lousy screenplay and cheesy dialogues.As regards its erotic promise, by the time of the third sex experiment of its lead protagonists, I heard a few yawns, and a decidedly disenchanted outcry – ‘Oh not again! Could they just get over with it and get on with some story…’
Yes, a woman writer writing erotica and another woman interpreting it onscreen is a good feminist empowerment moment – but I did rather go closer home and read the iconoclast Kerala writer Kamala Das or watch the Bhubaneswar-bred Mira Nair’s Kama Sutra – to also savour some creativity in interpretationand celebrate the finesse that differentiates class from crass!