With Fifty Shades of Grey already available on VOD and just released on DVD and Blu-Ray today, I can’t help but be reminded of another salacious film based off a bestselling book: Nine 1/2 Weeks. Released in 1986, it also tells the story of a BDSM relationship between a rich, dominant man and a vulnerable woman. Unlike Fifty, however, Nine 1/2 didn’t make over $160 million (and counting) at the domestic box office. After being panned by critics and having its release delayed two years, it recouped only $7 million of its $17 million production costs. Though it did very well overseas, it had to wait until home video release to become a success in the States.
Its origins are also a little different from Fifty. It isn’t based off a novel, but a memoir written by novelist Ingeborg Day under the pseudonym Elizabeth McNeill. Likely taking place while Day worked as an editor at the feminism-focused Ms. magazine, the book documents her relationship with a man she only identifies by masculine pronouns, but whom the movie calls John Grey, oddly enough. The relationship is far more abusive and dangerous than anything Fifty’s Christian and Anastasia (Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson, respectively) experience. It’s also a hell of a lot sexier.
While Fifty Shades of Grey is heavy on plot with occasional, sterile shots of the leads’ beautiful bodies, Nine 1/2 Weeks is smutty. Elizabeth and John (Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke, respectively) have sex whenever and wherever possible. They screw in his apartment, in hers, in a clocktower, in a scummy alley during a torrential downpour, etc. They have sex because they want to and they enjoy it. Take the scene set in front of the shining light of an open refrigerator where Liz closes her eyes as John feeds her random food items. As The Newbeats’ “Bread and Butter” plays in the background, they laugh and eat until the whole thing devolves into a honey fight and sex. Anastasia and Christian never have so much fun.
For Christian, sex doesn’t seem to be about enjoyment. He is compelled by the painful past he vaguely references to engage in BDSM. Anastasia is the only one who ever seems to have any fun (though not the same kind Elizabeth indulges in, if you catch my drift). There’s none of the boundary pushing that drives Nine 1/2. Christian would never convince Anastasia to dress as a man or steal a necklace. Instead, Fifty is just one mind-blowingly perfect sexual experience after another. It’s nothing more than a revisionist fairytale.
What’s that you say? You don’t think this story that started as Twilight fan fiction is a fairytale? Think again. For all its faux BDSM trappings and The Weeknd-heavy soundtrack, Fifty is nothing more than a twisted Beauty and the Beast fantasy.
See if this sounds familiar: a virginal young girl who loves to read meets a rich man with a dangerous side. Despite some initial conflict, they slowly fall in love and the girl turns him into a decent man along the way. In the usual fairytale, the man is literally a beast, the outward manifestation of his dark mind. In Fifty, he’s a devastatingly handsome businessman with a BDSM kink. Everything else is pretty much the same.
Admittedly, the sex is a pretty big difference. Yet for all the attention it’s gotten, in the movie, it’s shockingly tame. Christian blindfolds Anastasia, ties her to the bed and spanks her once or twice. The most creative thing he does is handcuff her to the ceiling so they can have sex standing up. For all his threats and the implements that line the red walls of his “playroom” (his word, embarrassingly enough), the sex is pretty passionless. Director Sam Taylor-Johnson films the scenes so tastefully that they’re almost neutered. On the rare occasions that the sex scenes manage to arouse, the heat comes not from what the actors are doing, but the fact that they’re doing it while Beyoncé sings in the background. More often than not, whenever Christian and Anastasia start to get steamy, the camera cuts away so we can get more uninteresting plot—that is until the end.
Christian is never more aroused or, strangely, more interesting than in the film’s final “playroom” scene, in which he finally gets to hit Anastasia as hard as he wants. Removed from its proper, controlled Dom/sub context and functioning purely as a way for Anastasia to understand how violent Christian can get, the scene is upsetting. It’s the most openly abusive moment in the whole movie and it’s no wonder it scares her off. Some have read her decision to leave as Anastasia finally turning the tables on Christian–the submissive becoming the Dominant and taking control–but that view is unsophisticated, even ignorant. There is plenty of literature out there positing that the submissive is really the partner with the power (there’s even an episode of original flavor CSI:Crime Scene Investigation saying as much) and that author E.L. James thinks she’s saying something revolutionary betrays how little she understands her subject. After all, it’s the submissive who sets the boundaries and has ultimate control over how far the Dominant can go. Admittedly, the film seems to understand that better than the author.
In the best scene, Anastasia comes to Christian’s office to negotiate the terms of their sexual relationship. In the book, it’s just a normal conversation with Christian in control. In the film, Anastasia is playing his game but setting the rules. She has a confidence that never works on the page thanks largely to Dakota Johnson’s surprisingly funny performance. Her Ana is unwilling to play and even dismissive of Christian’s need for control rather than enthralled by his wealth and beauty. Like the audience, she’s aware of how ridiculous this all is. Unfortunately, Johnson can only do so much because the film has to follow the book’s poorly-written trajectory.
In the series, simply by loving Christian, Anastasia heals his wounds and convinces him to abandon all his rules (the very notion that a desire to engage in BDSM means someone is psychologically damaged is problematic, but that’s a separate issue). James paints this as romantic, but it’s actually a toxic message. It doesn’t matter how emotionally abusive or stalker-like Christian is. Ana loves him and therefore has to try to fix him. But that approach to relationships isn’t just unrealistic, it’s unhealthy at best and dangerous at worst. Fifty is too focused on the fairytale ending to explore the idea that just because Christian and Ana love each other, that doesn’t mean their relationship is healthy or worth saving. Nine 1/2 does.
Liz and John are Christian and Ana without the fairytale sheen. They fight, play and speak in dialogue that actually sounds like human speech. They’re supposed to be realistic and interesting. While Liz is a recent divorcée constantly deciding to forfeit her sexual agency, Ana is a virgin who never had it anyway and doesn’t understand what she’s giving up. Once Christian discovers the truth, he abandons the BDSM and settles for what he calls “vanilla sex” so Anastasia can have a “normal” first time. He’s gentle, loving and completely focused on her pleasure—it’s an idealized experience that fulfills a romantic fantasy, not a sexual one. Christian and Anastasia are about the fantasy of love solving all problems and Liz and John are how that doesn’t really happen in real life. That’s why Anastasia is far more successful at pushing against Christian’s demands than Liz is with John.
When Liz objects to something John proposes, he insists she can leave at any time. For him, it’s pure manipulation. By contrast, Christian means it when he encourages Anastasia to leave because he genuinely thinks he’s bad for her. When Liz tries to get John to meet her friends, he literally slams his head on the table and feeds her a line about protecting their relationship. Anastasia gets invited to dinner with Christian’s family. John wears his emotional distance on his sleeve. He deliberately doesn’t share anything about his life except as a last ditch attempt to make Liz stay. Christian hides behind his interest in BDSM and avoids self-reflection. The only time he willingly reveals anything about his past, Anastasia is fast asleep, unable to hear him. The moment is about his self-loathing, not how much he wants to keep her around.
Even so, after enduring (varying degrees of) emotional abuse, both Anastasia and Liz decide to leave. The difference is, that when it happens in Nine 1/2, it means something. The end of Liz and John’s weird, passionate love is tragic even if it is the best thing for them. In Fifty, it’s Ana at her most empowered, but it’s empty because we know it won’t last. Maybe that would be considered a spoiler, but the story is the first in a trilogy and if you don’t think they figure things out and live happily ever after down the line, then you haven’t been paying attention to your fairytales.
The fact is, by any other standard, Christian’s emotionally abusive stalking would be highly creepy. He’s allowed to get away with it because he’s filthy rich and looks like Jamie Dornan. If Christian Grey were unattractive and poor, or hell, a woman, Fifty would be a horror movie. There’s a scene early in the film where Christian magically appears at Anastasia’s job (at a hardware store, which is only a thing so that this scene can happen) and asks her to help him find cable ties, rope and tape—things the audience knows he would love to use on her. Take out the playful tone and BDSM context and the scene could easily be a perverse moment from a serial killer thriller (much like the character Dornan plays on the TV series, The Fall, for instance). Instead, Christian is portrayed as Prince Charming with a twisted streak.
Problematic as it is, Fifty Shades of Grey will probably do very well on what passes for home video these days (though perhaps not quite so well as it would have done without pirating). But to anyone out there planning to watch it for the first time in the privacy of their own home, I suggest spending your money on Nine 1/2 Weeks instead. I promise you’ll have a hell of a lot more fun.
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By day, Marisa Carpico stresses over every detail of America’s election system. By night, she becomes a pop culture and celebrity obsessive. Whether it’s movies, TV or music, she watches and listens to it all so you don’t have to. You can find her risking her life by reading comic books while walking down the crowded streets of New York City, having inappropriate emotional reactions at her iPad screen while riding the subway or occasionally letting her love of a band convince her to stand for hours on end in one of the city’s many purgatorial concert spaces. You can follow her on Twitter to read her insightful social commentary or more likely complain about how cold it is at @MarisaCarpico.
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