Got a chance to look over an excerpt from "50 Shades of Grey." Thank god it was only a few paragraphs; had it been any more I honestly think my brain would have melted. Not from the heat generated by the book but rather by excruciatingly awful prose. It is my understanding that "50 Shades of Grey" began life as a piece of fan fiction based around Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight."
That makes sense. Only Meyer's dreck could possibly have inspired such horrifically inferior writing and an utter lack of understanding of how to use the BD/SM concept to actually say something. Do yourself a major solid and just immediately toss your plans to see the movie version of "50 Shades of Grey" into the same trash bin into which ever copy of the book belongs. If you absolutely must go see a movie in which the punishment and humiliation of a woman is the driving force, then at least have the decency to pick a movie in which the punishment and humiliation has something deeper to say about society.
A mature, strong-willed and dominant woman who owns and runs her own business is forced to strut naked on the street outside that business in the middle of the night and comes to love the submissive side of life. On the surface, that scene from "Scandalo" (which you might find under the title "Submission") might sound as devoid of any deeper meaning as anything that probably exists in "50 Shades of Grey." Now place that woman in occupied France during World War II and layer it with the patina of nationalistic surrender and submission to the Nazi overlords and you suddenly turn this story into 50 shades of symbolism. This is how you tell a story about sadomasochism. You are inspired by the horrors of the atrocity exhibition, not by a Z-grade vampire story.
For more from Timothy Sexton on "Scandalo", check out:
"Scandalo": Soft Core Porn or Profound Psychological and Political Drama?
