Romance versus enjoyment in Fifty Shades of Grey
I know I’m about 9 years late with my review of Fifty Shades of Grey, but in my defense, nobody told me how good this movie is. If reviews are to be believed, it’s cheap commercial trash. My initial impression was that it’s just a depiction of a girly fantasy: satisfying to watch for women but nothing for me. After watching it, I can confirm that in fact it is a girl’s fantasy: there’s a handsome, mysterious, billionaire CEO who falls head over heels with a mousy, virgin brunette. Exactly the same ingredients as you can find on the cover of those supermarket novels. But, as it turns out, fantasy is never just a fantasy: the more we try to put our finger on what it is, exactly, we dream of, the more we run into contradictions and impossibilities.
In Fifty Shades of Grey this conflict revolves around romance versus enjoyment. But wait, how are those two opposed? Surely we can enjoy romance?
Definitely not Christian Grey. As he explains to main character Anastasia in the beginning of the movie: “I don’t make love. I fuck. Hard.” Anastasia is taken aback, but also intrigued. Throughout the movie, she enjoys having BDSM-flavored sex with Christian, but is frustrated that he doesn’t want to spend the night with her; that he doesn’t want to be her boyfriend in the conventional sense.
Why would a woman want to fantasize about a man who gives her great pleasure, but is unavailable romantically? Unfortunately there is no way to create a character that is both a sweet and adoring boyfriend and also a dark brooding dominant.
Romance and enjoyment are incompatible in the sense that romance is an ideal. For psychoanalysis, an ideal is anything that creates prohibitions: law, morality, common decency, etc. Ideals are made to regulate excesses of enjoyment, and enjoyment works by exploring the boundaries of these prohibitions, and transgressing them in a safe way.
Roughly speaking, the ideal of romance regulates the enjoyment of sex. This is nicely rendered in the typical Hollywood romance, where sex is strictly put in the service of the creation of the couple. Fifty Shades of Grey breaks this rule, and shows enjoyment for its own sake, without forgoing romance and thus drifting into porn.
This is what makes Fifty Shades exciting and still relevant today: because it tackles this question of enjoyment and romance head on. How is it possible to have both? The movie cannot answer this question, and simply ends abruptly without giving us a resolution to the story.
