Taming the Tittering Tourists: 50 SHADES OF GREY, 9 1/2 WEEKS, EXIT TO EDEN, SECRETARY + SHE DEMONS, Franco, Bunuel, Josef von Sternberg, Alain Robbe-Grillet

Most fans of 50 Shades of Grey--the kinky BDSM bestseller by E.L. James--were wincing (and not in a good way) at last week's debut of the forthcoming film adaptation's conventional, fashion mag-slick trailer - "I didn't like it the the sixth time, when it was called 9 1/2 Weeks!" But no one asked the big question: What's wrong with cinema that it can't seem to capture the sickly turn-ons of a good bondage book? When I saw and heard the conventional sounding Edward of the piece, Mr. Grey (Jamie Dornan), the "masterful" captain of industry and 'wealthy, spontaneous, travel-minded' gentleman (the kind of man every girl with an online personal ad pines for --take it from me, who's lazy, poor, hates travel, and is too cheap to shop anywhere but H&M and Kohl's). I was glad to see he had one of those freaky reptilian-bird-alien-CGI-hybrid faces like old Bob Pattinson's, but his hair, suits, and voice, not to mention age, are as ROTM as a lawyer-cum-porn star in a 90s direct-to-cable office thriller.

There, there. There's always Wild Orchids 2.

Maybe no one now working today could have filled the Mr. Grey part with any degree of affect, except Harvey Keitel (the latter a prospect too odious for the producers to consider seriously, which is exactly why it would have been awesome). It also may have worked if Dornan kept his Irish accent, or wore his hair in a crazed Irish tousle to give himself the air of a coked-up Caligula, but there are just too many  young male models with nothing but gym muscles and hair gel by way of 'gravitas' pretending to be high-powered executives on network TV.  Dornan is beautiful but would he ever make it as a dom outside of a Westworld-style robo-fantasy? I know some girls who are or were dominatrixes for a living. They are terrifying.

And that's the problem with adaptations of bondage books in a nutshell. Shit's Freudian, it runs deep. Anger over one actor playing a character already cast in the mind of every turned-on broad in America is normal but sadomasochistic stuff is doubly difficult because what's so very erotic on the page becomes either too goofy, i.e. tame (Secretary) or too genuinely violent and disturbing (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).  Too much visual information (facial cues) lead us right out of the sadomasochistic spectator pleasure position, which short-circuits our higher mammalian complexes, recapturing the the age when we tattled constantly on our fellow children in hopes of witnessing their humiliation via their mom's wooden spoon or dad's belt (1). Ideally we evolve past this stage by around third or fourth grade. But on the printed page we can easily override the empathic response (as long as we know it's fiction and not some true crime novel) whereas onscreen our mammalian higher functioning kicks in --presuming we're not sociopaths or high on cocaine (2). Masochism may survive onto the big screen without much damage (as in the films of Josef von Sternberg or Luis Bunuel), but not in the form of traditional leather and lace scenes as books might describe.

According to Gaylyn Studlar, true masochism can only exist in dreams, conjured more out of a need to safely experience the abyss, or to trick out the satisfactory endorphin rush that surges to accommodate sudden pain (or the heroic measure of wasabi or hot sauce); it must be done person or in the mind where we can imagine a transformational ecstasy that ordinary movie watching doesn't accommodate. That's why for example the shocking Times Square marquee or the film capsule review might get our desire fired up but the actual film will never measure up; it's the difference between remembering your own crazy, erotic dream and hearing about someone else's.

There was a small, velvet-lined restaurant in NYC called La Nouvelle Justine (in the late 1990s) that offered a menu that included spanking hot young slaves or being spanked, and an overpriced chocolate mousse cake in shape of a spike heeled boot for parties of five or more. While tourists and bachelorettes snapped pictures and laughed in embarrassment, tame bondage rituals were enacted and pretty slaves marched back and forth, pretending to be thrilled at the prospect of their future lucrative punishments by the diners. We were there for my roommate's orgymongering sister's birthday, so we bought her a hot boy of her choosing to spank, knowing she was no slouch in this department. One light (for her) slap and he jumped up and ran away with a yelp; the bouncers came over to warn her to be gentle. Fuckin' midtown, man.

Hearing is believing (from top): Weekend, Persona

I was into bondage myself, off and on, for years, always more in theory than practice (losing my virginity to "Venus in Furs" helped), and generally turned off by any evidence of it onscreen (see above uncanny valley illus.) why, for example, so many Nerve profiles cite as their favorite sex scene Persona (1966), which has no sex scene at all. What it has a monologue, delivered in a flat, slightly ashamed voice.

As our French correspondent Severine notes: "Most French people would tell you that the image neutralizes the imagination in this field and suggest you to read, or ask someone to read you erotic literature." But then the book sells, gets passed around at private working mom book clubs, and boom, best-seller, so then someone has to make a movie of it. The problem should have already been apparent to us back in the era of 9 1/2 Weeks (see top image), a 1986 film that had a lot of buzz, a bit like 50 Shades has now, and fooled people who saw it into forgetting they hated it. Part of a post-American Gigolo cocaine-modernist penthouse spandex-and wool socks aerobics sexual aesthetic that has not aged well except as camp (see also: The Hunger, Flashdance, Shiver, Last Seduction, Disclosure, Basic Instinct), 9 1/2 Weeks with hot young Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke (back when he was still pretty) engaged in all sorts of kinky shit with ice cubes and candle wax; it never drew much of a response other than titters at the college Quad when I saw it. Sure I was drunk at the time, and drunk college students in a large group are apt to jeer a terrible film like 9 1/2 Weeks, especially since there's always one or two girls (and Roger Ebert) who loooove it.

mens in black, blondes to the right: 9 1/2 Weeks (1986); Dangerous Game (1993)

Similarly, all that 'R' erotica stuff in the back row of Netflix and Amazon Prime, like Emmanuelle, Justine, or The Story of O is never sexy except in rare instances of almost incidental hotness and of worth only for their non-'erotic' elements --the zooms, the terrible fashions, the hilariously stilted artsy blocking; and sometimes we 'remember' them as hot, since remembering brings eventually us into the same zone as literature, or the dream. We live in an age of STDs like no one in the ancient 60s and 70s could have e'er envisioned; free love has been hidden away so that the jovial bacchanal of 70s XXX is replaced by condoms on gym-muscled dudes pumped with Viagara so a girl doesn't get a break; and stuff that moves off the lip of the familiar and seems genuinely dangerous-- such as the borderline misogynistic mental pummeling of Madonna in Abel Ferrara's Dangerous Game (1993)--stirs our preliminary superegoic shock troops into inner-censorial unsexy PC knee-jerking.

While the trailer reminded me of Adran Lynne's 9 1/2 Weeks and its subsequent deluge of big budget late 80s-early 90s sex thrillers, the uproar reminded me of the last big author of sexy bondage and vampire love stories, Anne Rice, had a surprise S/M novel breakthrough akin to that of 50 Shades with her kinky 1985 novel, Exit to Eden. It was of course picked up by Hollywood, but for some reason they balked at its original conception and cast Dan Akroyd and Rosie O'Donnell in the leads as buddy cops, which made the book's fans feel like Jimmy Stewart when Midge shows him her self-portrait in Vertigo (1958)

Another entry in the mainstream bondage category on the camp side of the valley, Secretary (2002), fails in ways not quite as extreme: seeing Maggie Gyllenhaal walk around an office doing paperwork clamped into a black leather stock is funny, not sexy, but at least she herself is cute and her masochism properly recognized as preferable to self-cutting; her getting spanked for the first time by boss James Spader during office hours is the film's only sexy moment because it's unplanned (could easily win her a harassment lawsuit), dangerous (no safe word), and functional (he's correcting her typo); there is no safe word. But soon the typos are framed along the office corridors, and quirky paint schemes turn the legal office into some madcap Urban Outfitters showroom.

Succubus (1967)

In other words, mainstream directors can't do this stuff with a straight face, so they either have to sink into the softcore sanctimony or look farther, across the pond and back in time, and onto the Blue Underground and Severin DVD labels. and maverick auteurs like Jean Rollin, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Jess Franco. The latter's Succubus (1967) is a fine example, for here the whole twice removed 'someone else's dream' nonstarter vibe is made active again through a triple reversal - an S/M performance in a film is tepid by nature but if she's killing them for real and no one in the audience knows, then a kind of mecha-medusa-mirroring occurs and the whole Antonioni signifier collapse thing leads us out of the Platonic cave altogether, like the jolt when Samara crawls out of the TV in The Ring.

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BUNUEL, VON STERNBERG

From top: She Demons; Bunuel directing La Belle du Jour

There are rare directors who manage to understand the 'someone else's dream' dilution and reverse it yet again, to take us all the way out of the dream within the movie and out of even our dream of reality and back into their 'privatized' space, like falling asleep and waking up as your own mother and finally knowing what she really thinks about us. Bunuel and von Sternberg bring us into our own psyches as viewers via recreations of the Freudian primal scene, and a grasp of the longing to return to the pre-Oedipal total reunion with the mother, with total and complete annihilation of self and free will, a submission and surrender that overloads the superego with feedback loops until it shatters, freeing our recessive psychic blocks, opening the cellar doors on our subconscious basement prisons and letting all the long-repressed memories and desires escape into the open air. Where of course, they vanish, over credits. But no one ever called them sexy.

This is where French theory comes into play, ala the concepts of masquerade and Deleuze's 'Becoming-Animal' - as in She Demons (1957, above), where castaways wander into a scene of beautiful blonde savages being whipped by Nazis. Our natural desire to help is tempered by the gun (phallic authority of the father) of the Nazi whipper and our possible misunderstanding of what's behind it all (as a child would misunderstand the primal scene as 'mother being hurt by father, the slap of body on thrusting body as spanking etc). In sum, when it is not 'supposed' to be erotic, not built up by smutty directors with kinky sex toys, the woman moaning in dubbed in pleasure or laughter or infantile squeals of pleasure, then and only then is it arousing --because it is so very wrong to be aroused. Because soon after the punishment, the woman reveals herself to have devolved into a gibbering devil, ala the Island of Lost Souls animal men.

Venus in furs 

It's to Von Sternberg and his Dietrich collaborations in the final analysis, though, to be seductive as well as masochistic. Bunuel is great but I never really feel the need to see most of his movies more than once whereas the JvS-Dietrichs improve and beguile more and more with each successive viewing. If the collective 'we' are to understand why the Grey book is so popular yet the film will suck so hard, it might be wise to join me IN THE REALMS OF PLEASURE: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic by Garylyn Studlar (Columbia Press, 1988):

"The fatalism of Von Sternberg's films is not simply an acceptance of death as an externally imposed inevitability but the expression of the masochistic urge toward death as a self-willed liberation. In choosing death, an illusionary triumph is created: the illusion of choice,"(48)

...masochisms obsession with death may be interpreted either as the expression of a universal instinctual urge or as the result of the masochistic wish for complete symbiosis with the mother and a return to nothingness,.... Eros is desexualized and resexualized; death becomes the ultimate fetish that fascinates with the promise of a mystical unity." (p. 123)

Only Bunuel and Von Sternberg every seemed to grasp this concept, and it's not for nothing for example that both adapted the same masochistic text, Pierre Louÿs "La femme et le pantin," or that two different actresses play the same character in Bunuel's version, That Obscure Object of Desire, the cocktease girl who continually manipulates the lead and denies him any form of sexual release, a bond she instinctively understands he needs and appreciates. As the rapper Scarface once said, "I'm done as soon as I bust me a nut," - well, some characters never want to be 'done' - it spoils the game, turns a long elaborate twisted ritual into a disappointingly short-lived gratification followed by shame and emptiness. The whole trick to getting what you want is to deliberately want to want rather than have and still want for wanting. Most tricks are part sleight-of-hand and part misdirection, but here misdirection is the whole trick. The slighted hands of the clock are frozen at bedtime, right before mom comes in to kiss you goodnight and turn out the lights. Maybe you never get the kiss, but the lights stay on forever. 

From top: Blonde Venus, That Obscure Object of Desire

FINALE:

 Don Pasquale hits closest to home...

I've never been a fan of The Devil is a Woman or the Bunuel version, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) but I respect them and I question my own hostile reaction, for the main character, an exploited masochist named Don Pasquale hits closest to home, reminding me of how a girl I loved as a ten year-old exploited my devotion by cheating at Monopoly, borrowing quarters, batting first in wiffle ball and then quitting when it was my turn, over and over. I learned my frickin' lesson, man. And I've always shied away from movies where everyone is money-grubbing like a third world tourist trapper, such as in von Sternberg's version. All the money and gifts are what Atwill stresses in his re-telling of his relationship with Concha (Marlene Dietrich), but plays down any sexual contact (this being the only post-code Dietrich/von Sternberg collaboration) that might or been not made, leaving us with a series of bilking, check-writing, cataloguing of goods, birds, food, baskets of goodies for the mother, and Dietrich with her hair up in baroque headdresses, even singing a merry peasant song about sons of bakers, and florists, 'and other things that aren't so sweet,' as if all attraction was measured in men lavishing gifts on her, and nothing else. It's dispiriting, and gradually we must question whether Atwill is emphasizing these things to Romero to ward him off because the Severin slot is taken and he'd rather not have his friend play 'The Greek' (or in this case, 'the cousin').

For the masochist in the end, the velvet cage is not reminiscent of prison but of infancy, the crib bars past which one cannot crawl in vain search for the mother. In both versions, Don Pasquale watches Carmela make love to the younger bullfighter through a cage which Studlar makes the point is a ground zero witness to a recreated primal scene, the bars ala the bars of the crib that prevents unobstructed maternal access and so triggers the primal scene's return in all its superego smashing, Thanatos-resurrecting glory. This obstruction is duplicated in the filmgoing experience, the frustration of the masochistic (as opposed to the sadistic male gaze described by Laura Mulvey)

oral phase cinema (boys to the left): from top: Blonde Venus, Obscure Object of Desire, Persona

Devil is a Woman

True masochism pre-dates the Oedipal complex, it moves towards total reunion or separation, peek-a-boo, as it were, of delayed polymorphous orgasm of the oral phase, the return to a total reunification with the mother and the annihilation of the self, Eros and Thanatos conjoined. Even without ruining a BDSM fantasy with comedians there's already something faintly ridiculous and sad about it onscreen, ala that night at La Nouvelle Justine, just bondage gear onscreen is kind of a joke. Play bondage in film is like fiction within fiction, a double negative, which may have some value as metatextual abstraction or intellectual discourse, which is why it's so beloved of French intellectuals like novelist/theorist Georges Bataille (Story of the Eye) and filmmaker/novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet (or Lacan and Deleuze), but no matter how arty the lighting and fractured the text, the bondage and discipline stuff in Robbe-Grillet's films always looks a little sex shop goofy.

Gradiva (2006)

When we get similar themes in the films of Alain Robbe-Grillet, many of which are now on DVD, wherein rustic barns, thrift store period costumes, and brand spanking new spankers mix uneasily together to no real affect. Robbe's is an intellectual, take his word for it, and gets the whole Georges Bataille-Deleuze-Lacan thing, but in the end, it boils down to the same goofy handcuffs, provoking little more than boredom and vague feminist ire. Read a book, Alain! And ideally make that book Gaylyn Studlar's In the Realm of Pleasure. You're probably smart enough to understand it. That's called flattery, you craven dog!

NOTES:

1. Though I hear that's not done these days by parents, kids certainly can imagine being abducted thanks to nonstop media hysteria. And I'd add that when the 'child is being beaten' frisson is taken out of the parental sphere, dad loses 90% of his authority (a good dad shouldn't need to punish, but without the threat what power does he have? Now the power is reversed, rather than the kid scared of the dad spanking, the dad is scared of the kid saying he was spanked, leading to arrests and child services). This accounts, in my mind, for the at least part of the shift of the father's role in the house from authoritarian top dog to low dog whipping boy. 
2. When I was studying to be a drug counselor I learned it's common for cocaine abusers to order S/M porn and bondage gear online in the middle of the night during a coke binge, forget all about, then be appalled when it comes in the mail. It's often a factor in what compels them to seek treatment.