50 Shades of Grey: Some Sex, and a Lot of Masturbation

"Oh my God, how could you support that movie?" Because it was funny. "You think domestic abuse is funny?" Well with the right setup... "#50ShadesIsAbuse." I've paid $11 for worse.

Now, I've only seen the movie once--as my frothing womanhood can only take so much--but as I recollect, the physical abuse is not at all the most damaging facet of this film. More on that later.

Starting with the plot: the movie's protagonist is Hollywood-average (see: accessibly attractive ingenue) Anastasia Steele (no, really) who is filling in for her non-descriptively-ill school-reporter-or-such roommate, Kate, or MacGuffin or something (1). Note well, it's very important that Ana not be hot. She is pretty, absolutely, but not hot. In movie-shorthand, this means that the girl is you. Surely, you're not as attractive, but you recognize instinctively that she isn't sexy, and this brings the character closer to you. It's no secret that in 50 Shades, Twilight, and countless others, the character is left intentionally blank, so that you can project yourself unto her. She is just proximal enough to you that you can latch on, and extrapolate your own personality further toward her; your ideal self. And so, the story is interpreted as a narcissistic fantasy. You're not watching a movie about Ana, you're watching a story about ME ME ME. Just how we like it. Funny, you look prettier on the silver screen.

So, Ana finds her way to Grey Enterprises, a towering edifice dubiously staffed exclusively by 23-year old Bebe models, on-screen only to make Ana feel self-conscious. "I can so relate." I know you can. And so does E.L. James. Stay tuned for the sequel. "Mr. Grey will see you now."

Good thing the theater seats are scotch-guarded.

After four hours of meticulously pruning his stubble, Christian Grey wanders on camera for the first time. When the collective swoons from the menopausal audience ceased, the-- wait why is she here again? How long is this movie? 130 minutes? Christ. Where's my flask? Good thing the theater seats are scotch-guarded...

He's handsome. Check. She starts the interview, fumbling, and awkward. "I only have 10 minutes". He's in-charge. Check. "Mr. Grey, to what do you--" "To what do I owe my success?". Oh, he's clever and brusque. Check, and check. Character established -- let's get to the fucking. "This isn't porn. This is a movie. What about subtlety?" Right. So she forgets her pencil. "A minor flaw to bolster her imperfection and normality?" Yes, I know. Just like you. Grey offers her one of his own. Now I'm no big fan of Freud, but--

Subtle.

"I'm good at people." He explains he understands their thoughts, actions, motives. IMPORTANT. "You know, there are intern positions open" "I don't think I'd fit in here. Look at me." "I am." Smooth. And opportunistic. This is a woman very clearly insecure, unsure of herself, trusting, and vulnerable to this exact behavior, and a man of substantial power and influence who just several sentences ago explained his aptitude for discerning these things. What people often fail to see, is that at this exact moment it's made clear that Christian is performing a long-con. The Christian you see on film isn't the true Christian, but the one that he chose for her to see. Because he was certain that it would work. The author didn't mean for this, of course -- she was writing with one hand on paper and the other trying to fumble her way through her swampy nethers -- but while the characters are fictional, the personalities they represent are very real. He sees a woman that needs validation from others (1), and chooses very carefully his lines. This is a character both written as, and meant to represent women without personality, without a sense of concrete identity; one who needs to feed off of the solid, established identity of another so that she can identify herself not as who she is, but by whom she's with, and what that must imply about her. Alone, she is blank, but with Christian, she is complete, as an accessory to his personality -- one he chose specifically for her.

Christian is a narcissist; a Don Draper-type. Don't be mistaken, although he very well may, this doesn't imply that he thinks he is perfection embodied. Narcissism =/= grandiosity. The two are mistakenly conflated. What Christian is, is obsessed with his identity and his appearance, not just physical but social. He's a classic archetype, yes, the Orphan From A Broken Home Who Must Reinvent Himself To Be Wildly Successful™, but more than that, he is representative of a certain kind of person: the perennial method actor.  He doesn't feel, he doesn't empathize, he doesn't love. He knows what those things look like, and he postures them with practiced efficiency, but he doesn't truly feel them. And so he has no real sense of self -- not that he can tell. He's an adolescent, trying on different personalities and appearances for the one he needs, but it's never truly genuine. And so, Christian feigns empathy, learns to pick up on others without natural empathy, and furthermore learns to define himself by appearance. "I'm not the kind of person you want to be with." Adolescent, indeed, he's become every girl's middle-school boyfriend, pretending to be dark, brooding, and incapable of love in place of a true identity. Trim, well-groomed, wealthy, successful, discrete, stoic, he becomes a character. And this character becomes a surrogate for his missing sense of identity. While it isn't genuine, it is complete. Maybe the decisions he makes aren't the best, and maybe they're not the right decisions, but to him they are the decisions his character would make. And so he has his identity.

Ana, however, suffers from a similar ailment with different results. She lacks identity, just as Christian does, but doesn't feign it. Instead, she searches for a proxy. Where the narcissist has ingenuine, but concrete identity, she has loose, undefined identity that needs solidification. And so she accessorizes herself, and defines her identity by him, leeching off of his own. Christian knows this. He's spent every day learning how to spot this very thing. And he knows exactly how to handle it. "My tastes are very...singular". Oh, how vague and mysterious. It's just like 7th grade all over again.

So he meets up with her at her job selling construction appliances. Doesn't matter how he found her. He's a millionaire. I'm sure if Bruce Wayne was an amoral predator he'd figure it out too. He flirtatiously buys duct tape, cables, and rope. He's lucky she's so vulnerable, or they'd have an Amber Alert out yesterday. "I'm used to getting my way." Yes, we saw the rope, no need to be redundant. He invites her out to coffee, and the second she mentions romance, he recoils "I'll take you home". The author's fantasy, of course, is that this is a man incapable of love, the shell of which must be broken by the charming, and unique snowflake that is the audience Anastasia. But let's remember that outside of fiction, there's a real world, heavily but implicitly impacted by these movies: this is when that preteen lothario establishes his distance, not to deflect her, but for the sole purpose of convincing her to try and break through it. It's important to note that Anastasia is the 16th woman to fall victim to this, and he started when he was 15. By now, Christian knows exactly how and when to do this, and of course, knows that Ana is the very woman that will fall for it.

For the first time of many, they split up (there goes Cutest Couple in the yearbook...), until Ana calls him drunkenly from the bar. He answers, enraged, tracks her down, and swoops into the bar, assaulting her flirtatious friend, and throwing his brother's penis at her roommate to pacify her protests. Now, we all make drunken mistakes. I would know, I'm sitting here in row N wishing I had stayed home and just watched porn instead. But when a man you barely know escalates his constituency to Defcon 5 to locate you, and then burgles you from your friends by exchanging his kin for leniency, you Google Maps the nearest police station and run like he's The Thing. Leave no Mace behind.

Instead, neglecting every PSA they were ever shown, her friends allow him to take her home, undress her, and crawl into bed with her. "Did we...?" "No, necrophilia isn't my thing." Not without the proper paperwork, anyway. So he introduces to her a contract. Strike 2: "I won't kiss you until you sign this consent form" is a red light. "But she could claim it was rape! #notallmen!" Oh, go choke on an MRA article, that doesn't make it any less suspicious. The contract outlines the terms of their sexual congress -- or less formally, how much he's allowed to whip her. "Why can't we just be normal?" "I'm not normal". Well neither am I, but I don't have a business meeting to discuss the parameters of my sex life.

"Make it 6 inches and we have a deal"

They discuss the terms, and come to an agreement. "See the clause about anal fisting? Cross that out." Well, why don't you just junk the whole thing, then? Anyway, she decides to continue to peruse the contract before she signs the dotted line. That doesn't stop them from fucking. Over and fucking over. "You're not like the other women". Yes, Grey, that's exactly what she needed to hear to surrender her virginity to you. Fine manipulation.

A lot of it is, as the Internet will have me understand, ill-representative of BDSM culture. I wouldn't know -- the first time a girl asked me to tie her up I conjured up a loose shoelace and then gave up. But what I do know, and will completely concede: that play-room is fucked. At a point he stands outside a locked door, for which he has the only key. He doesn't explain what is inside, and demands confidentiality. My imagination landed on The Goonies.

Contract Page 14, Clause 8: Once a day you must feed Sloth one (1) Baby Ruth.

However, disappointingly, inside laid an Aleksandar Radijojevic wet dream: a sex dungeon complete with assorted whips, hooks, suspenders, floggers -- everything needed for a low-budget snuff film. There's a lot of flogging.

One scene in particular caught my eye (no, they crossed out anal fisting, remember?). It was something unmistakably intentional, yet no one else seemed to notice. I suppose that's why they're reading articles in between cat videos, and I'm writing this one in between trips to the liquor store. After their first night of fucking, they retreat to the bathroom to wash up. There's a shot that's very important, but easy to miss:

He doesn't watch her undress. He watches her reflection undress. He watches her undress with himself clearly in view. This is because the sex isn't about her, for him. It's not about the woman, or her body, or the contact -- it's about his identity. He is having her because his character would have her. This is his movie, she is his prey, and the acquisition is his reward. And so he doesn't watch her, he watches himself watch her. 

Christian Bale, pictured just being himself.

This is a very subtle, but very important detail. But here's the important part: he is not alone. He IS a fictional character, yes, and the character itself is probably not intentionally written this way, but he IS a very realistic representation of a very real kind of person. We may draw inspiration for our own lives from movies, but the movies do the same in return. This is a representation of a real person, one that E. L. James has likely encountered. However, instead of seeing through his behavior, she romanticizes it. She turns it into the interesting part of the character. She feels (and so Anastasia feels) that he is truly incapable of love, truly afraid to be close to someone, and just as the character reverts to the 7th Grade Seduction Handbook, she reverts to the 7th grade girl who fell for it. And she, too, is not alone.

This movie may very well affect peoples' understanding of BDSM culture, but I argue that it is a part of a much greater problem for society: it affects our vision of romance. The final scene of the movie shows Anastasia, after being brutally beaten with Christian's belt, refusing to continue, and leaving Grey, having never signed the contract. So at least the message is "Hey, don't stick around once the belt comes off". But at no point is the unhealthy romance addressed. The modern zeitgeist uses cinema as a template over which to place its own opinions and ideals. "I want a relationship like that", "That's my relationship goal", "Why won't my man/woman do that for me" -- yes, it's lovely and idealistic, but all of that behavior presupposes that that love can fit snugly into a 90-minute window, firstly without romantic flaws (beyond the rising action), but secondly without recognition of these kinds of tricks and sexual-romantic heuristics that are very real. Real love is nothing like you see in the movies, because real love can't be monetized. But furthermore, movie love CAN be taken advantage of. If you have ever met someone and immediately responded "He/she reminds me so much of--" STOP. Either you are trying to convince yourself that they are your [TV/Movie Crush], or they are molding their personality to convince you that they are no different than that. And if it's both, abandon ship -- once reality sets in, and you realize neither of you are who you say you are, the relationship is going to collapse faster than Gabourey Sidibe's trampoline. The longer it goes on, the more explosive the end. And if you're really so devoted to following movies, might as well make it cinematic: worst-case-scenario, one of you winds up halfway to Canada with the other at home laying on the floor with a smashed lamp and a head-wound. Does blood stain? Good thing the carpet is scotch-gaurded...

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(1). As is the case with most American media, this is a tale tacitly lined with egocentricity, and so the supporting cast is only there to act as a secondary audience. It's not enough to be successful. Other people need to witness it; appreciate it; validate it. In our minds, we are not what we do, or what we accomplish. We are who others tell us we are. We are only who we appear to be. And so, Anastasia doesn't flaunt her new boyfriend -- "I would never tell anyone about us", she emphasizes to him. But she doesn't hide him. She tiptoes around the subject, dropping hints with feigned modesty, allowing others to come to the conclusion on their own. And so he's introduced by others to her friends, her father, her mother -- never once does she even mention him, because it's not important that she brag about him. It's important that others simply see that he's there, and silently nod affirming "yes, you are good". The fantasy for the audience isn't having Christian, and it isn't being the woman that Christian wants. The fantasy is that without any attempt, others simply see you as that kind of person, and affirmed by a third-party, you are assured "yes, you're right, I AM good, aren't I?". It's freedom from the need to self-validate. You don't care if you're X, you care that others see you as X.

The reason for this is that we are intrinsically doubtful of ourselves. The common misunderstanding is that narcissism is a problem of too much confidence. It's exactly the opposite; the problem of narcissism is that to the narcissist, that confidence is worthless. Anastasia can look into a mirror and see that she is, of course, beautiful, or intelligent, but she won't feel that it is completely true. And so she outsources her confidence to others. Others see her with Christian, only a great woman would be with Christian, therefore she is a great woman. And the evidence is on the other side of the room bragging for her.