Large Fierce Mammal

Our review teams never tire. It’s all work work work for them.

The sudden upswing in popularity of such books as Fifty Shades of Grey is at once unsurprising and inexplicable to me. Unsurprising because the dark side of desire has always had, and always will have its allure, and only leads to a bad end when unstable personalities or Hollywood movie producers become involved. Inexplicable because I can’t see why anyone would find the concept of a relationship of sexual torture at the hands of someone who is admittedly symbolically punishing his mother to be anything appealing, let alone erotic. Anyway, this is not to judge those who may find something of value in that body of work. I’ve always had extensive interests in the genre that don’t require the introduction of mommy issues or any other form of sexual maladjustment to explain them.

In truth, not all in life, nor in art, need be explained – for what is wrong with accepting that a situation just is and telling the story from there? In short, the subject matter has been treated better, and I can send you a reading list if you’d like. Should you ask for that though, be advised that there will a time limit on completion and an examination at the end. ~ Dark Sentiments 2012 – Day 28: Force Continuum

There’s a movie scheduled for release on St. Valentine’s Day, 2015. It’s called Fifty Shades of Grey, and I expect that if you’re reading this, you have probably heard about it and/or read at least some of the books in the trilogy it’s based on. If you read the article and associated poem from DS2012 that the excerpt above was drawn from, you will know how I feel about stories that dabble in such subject matter, and how those that seek a more, dare I say “mainstream” audience, seem to inevitably come packaged with a back story explaining what psychological aberration is prompting the action. In that spirit then, let’s move on with the subject of today’s Dark Sentiment. ~ Dark Sentiments 2014 – Day 4: The Erotic Art of Yoji Muku

Those words of mine from Dark Sentiments past are placed here as a manifesto of sorts. Most particularly –

… the dark side of desire has always had, and always will have its allure, and only leads to a bad end when unstable personalities or Hollywood movie producers become involved.

also –

In truth, not all in life, nor in art, need be explained – for what is wrong with accepting that a situation just is and telling the story from there?

and lastly –

… how I feel about stories that dabble in such subject matter, and how those that seek a more, dare I say “mainstream” audience, seem to inevitably come packaged with a back story explaining what psychological aberration is prompting the action.

In short, according to popular fiction, in print or in  film, a willingness to explore the dark side of desire is a symptom, not a character trait.

Lest my introductory passages to this movie review be taken as my waxing preachy, I would answer nay, nay, THRICE nay. It’s merely stage dressing!

Mrs. LFM has read all three books in the Grey series, while I simply joined her in a private screening of the movie adaptation. I normally like to have both perspectives myself, but in this case a safe time saving measure because, wherever it matters, we have the same brain.

Just in case you’re reading this from the perspective of an old enough to fart dust Japanese soldier just rescued from a south Pacific island where you were hunkered down in the sincere belief the war was still on, here’s a quick synopsis of the story line.

Christian Grey is a darkly handsome billionaire who heads a massive empire at an age in his life that implies he’s either living off the avails of illegal enterprise or spending his daddy’s money. My use of the term “darkly handsome” is not a reference to his complexion, but rather to his exuding a certain mysterious and dangerous sexual attraction for the insipid, klutzy, virginal, eternally lip biting female lead – Anastasia Steele – who we come to learn in the end only needed a real good belt beating on her bare ass to wake her the fuck up. Well, don’t run too far with that because there are two books after Fifty Shades of Grey, and unless the franchise runs out of steam for some reason, at least another movie, so she’s really not all that awake at the end of this one.

We learn the young Mr. Grey has a thing. Yes, he has THAT thing, but I’m talking about another, albeit related, thing. About his mother, against whom he harbours a vexed and vengeful spirit that he likes to unleash on women who resemble her. Interestingly though, while he likes to tie these mommy surrogates up in his “red room of pain” and inflict a boringly repetitive series of limp wristed torments upon their naked flesh, he seems conflicted as to whether he wants to punish his mother, or fuck her.

In that throbbing vein, here’s an excerpt from a Huffington Post article titled ‘Fifty Shades Of Grey’ Isn’t A Movie About BDSM, And That’s A Problem:

Maybe the problem was all in the marketing of this material: As it turns out, “Fifty Shades of Grey” is less of a movie about BDSM and more like an average stalker-thriller. It’s easy to get hung up on Christian Grey’s Red Room of Pain with all his floggers, crops, rope and cable ties. But the movie, which only features about 20 minute of sex scenes in total, is really about the obsessive lengths Christian (Jamie Dornan) goes to convince Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson), a 21-year-old virgin, to sign a contract that enters her into a dominant-submissive relationship, not the relationship itself.

It’s only Christian’s extreme wealth and the romanticized notion of his overarching dominant persona that barely mask what’s really just completely creepy behavior. In any other movie, a man or woman who tracks down another person at their job, local bar, home and, oh, their mother’s home in Georgia, a plane ride away, would probably end up in back of a police car.

“Everyone wants to focus on the spanking, because that’s the sensational part — that’s the part that everyone is going home and masturbating to anyways,” Mistress Couple, the head mistress at La Domaine Esemar, the oldest BDSM training chateau in the world, told HuffPost Entertainment. “People aren’t masturbating to the part where they’re fighting and he’s stalking her at work.”

Christian’s self-admitted inability to leave Ana alone shouldn’t be romanticized, nor should his controlling, domineering behavior be conflated with sexual dominance.

“He suffers from what I call ‘Domitis,'” said Mistress Mona Rogers, a professional dominatrix in New York City. “He walks around acting dominant all the time and that’s not realistic.”

We agree with pretty much all of this except that the title needs some fleshing out. It’s not a problem that this movie isn’t about BDSM. The problem is that it’s marketed, and therefore generally regarded as being about BDSM, which it isn’t, notwithstanding the hype about how it has brought the practice into “the mainstream”, whatever that is. In fact, if anyone inexperienced took this as the kindling for embarking on an exploration of erotic power exchange in a sexual relationship, it wouldn’t be fun for anyone except the sex toy industry which, according to some sources, enjoyed a 400% increase in sales of BDSM related toys in the wake of the book’s release.

Poorly written and unconvincingly acted, we rank this little more than an example of how, every once in a while, fan fiction grafted to a writer’s sexual fantasies can pay off in spades. Maybe you should all get to writing. With one hand of course.