50 Shades of Grey

Unless I've missed it I'm kind of surprised that feminist groups are not up in arms about this movie.

 

The final scene is definitely uncomfortable.

 

I'm surprised at how titilating women seem to find it. As I told my wife the other night: "Ninety percent of women could go the bar of their choosing seven nights a week, and seven nights a week walk out of their with the best-looking guy in the place if they so chose to do so. Why do they need a movie?"

 

My wife was a bit uncomfortable with it, too.

 

Mars/Venus

 

The wife told me there were feminists protesting outside the theater she went to. Religious nutjobs, too.

 

Because it's (no pun intended) a safe fantasy. It vicariously fulfills a desire to help/save a fantastically screwed up person with some goofy mixture of evident suffering and hard-won ecstasy.

It's like the mirror of American Psycho, a safe fantasy for men to live out their rage about fecklessness and meaninglessness in the world.

 

That seems like a bit of a reach. Women want to be tied up and men want to kill every woman they encounter.

Sure. Got it. Right.

 

Pretty much true for muslim men and women

 

You leave the president and the first lady out of this...

 

So I watched it.

It's a movie about an abusive relationship. I don't know how anyone can see it as anything more than that. Because Christian Grey is handsome? Because he's rich?

He beats. He stalks. He orders. He controls.

He's an abuser and a manipulator. Now, he's an abuser and a manipulator with a back story, vaguely referenced in the film, and he's a sympathetic character because of that. But his relationship with Anastasia is a textbook abusive relationship. That becomes abundantly clear when he realizes he might have alienated her, so he calls her his "girlfriend" and takes her up in an airplane. All better.

Then, minutes later, in the final scenes, we're right back to the abuse, and worse than ever. Anastasia gets on an elevator and walks out on him. It's kind of triumphant. Christian Grey needs saving, but not like this. It's not her job to sacrifice herself to that cause.

The movie is pretty terrible. It's poorly written and poorly acted. But I wonder if the director's heart was, slyly, actually in the right place. It's unfortunate that there will be sequels. It should end with her leaving on that elevator.

 

Boom's back?