When I tell you that, in my opinion, the three novels now known as the Fifty Shades Trilogy are the worst books I have ever read all the way through, I am not telling you anything interesting. To criticize E. L. James’s publishing version of winning the Irish Sweepstakes is to attack a cultural phenomenon entirely beyond the reach of criticism. These three books, originally published as a series of posts on a fan-fiction website, ended up earning their author $95 million in a single year. This suggests that James knows something about human nature—something very interesting.
It doesn’t matter that the books are as dreadful as they are. Actually, the fact that they’re so bad certainly played a not-inconsiderable role in advancing the phenomenon. Their artlessness clearly makes James’s fantasies about wild sex heated up with dollops of violence—and the mixed emotions all this provokes in her 21-year-old heroine—far more accessible than anything even remotely literary would be.
I’m not sure the same can be said of the movie version of the first novel, Fifty Shades of Grey, which is more artful and therefore less effective. The director, a woman named Sam Taylor-Johnson, takes the title literally: There isn’t a ray of sunshine in the skies over Seattle and Portland, where the story is set, and the monochromatic color scheme of the movie is soberly beautiful in exactly the way E. L. James’s incredibly clunky prose is not. Even the fact that the heroine is played strikingly by a 25-year-old actress named Dakota Johnson proves a hindrance in that respect. The Anastasia of the novel is almost entirely without characteristics except that she is skinny, and so she is a perfect blank slate. Johnson is anything but.
Because the books spend so much time inside Anastasia’s roiling brain, and her growing obsession with a gorgeous 27-year-old billionaire named Christian Grey, there’s a lot of heated melodrama even when there’s nothing much happening. Grey wants her to enter into a sadomasochistic relationship with him in which he is the “dominant” and she is the “submissive.” He has a special room in his penthouse apartment with whips and chains and tables and all kinds of appurtenances.
He presents her with a contract that spells it all out. She thinks about it a lot. She fantasizes about it. Meanwhile, he does nice things for her, he sends her funny texts, and she falls in love with him. Hundreds of pages pass.
In the movie, this translates into about 45 minutes before we enter the “playroom.” And even though I had less than no interest in actually seeing the novel’s S&M scenes brought to life—I was actually anticipating them with the same level of dread I feel when it seems a child is going to be put in some jeopardy in a movie— Fifty Shades of Grey had grown so exhaustingly tedious that I turned to my wife and said, “They better get to the whipping already.”
Christian Grey is played, very badly, by a Northern Irish actor named Jamie Dornan. As he shows Dakota Johnson around the playroom, they stop at a rack of hooks from which some sticks are dangling. “This . . . is . . . a flogger,” Dornan intones with an expression that suggests he would rather be anywhere at that moment but in this scene in this movie. I collapsed into giggles—and for me, the rest of the movie positively flew by in a comic haze.
The general line on Fifty Shades of Grey is that it’s a mainstreaming of porn. I don’t think this is right. The novels are very dirty, but the movie is far less so. Indeed, it struck me (sorry) as more suggestive and far less explicit than a great many R-rated films of the 1980s and early ’90s. And thematically, both the novels and the movie couldn’t be any more retrogressive on the subject of sex and sexual relations, which is how best to understand E. L. James’s idiot-savant brilliance.
For the thing is, Grey’s “playroom” is not a playroom at all. It’s a prison, even for him. He is in an endless cycle of punishment and self-punishment, owing to a Gothic early childhood with a crack-addict mother and sexual abuse at the hands of an older woman during his teenage years. He’s warped and traumatized; his hunger to control Anastasia is a torment to him. The movie ends with her commanding him to stop. She has entered his life not to be his victim but to be his savior.
That is the true fantasy fulfillment at the heart of James’s fairy tale: Anastasia is the woman who must go through a very dark wood indeed to save her prince and take up residence in his castle. In this sense, Fifty Shades of Grey is a 21st-century update of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, published in 1740 and generally considered the first modern novel. Pamela is an innocent teenager being pursued and tempted and tormented by a lecherous older man known only as Mr. B whom she resists but does not entirely turn away, even after he nearly rapes her. Pamela’s purity eventually purifies Mr. B, and they marry.
How to tell this story—which transfixed all of Europe in the 18th century and helped establish the preconditions for what we now call “Victorian morality”—after the Pill? The only real way is to raise the stakes, as they say. Pamela is guarding her sexual purity with her life; Anastasia must guard the destruction of her core being. Mr. B wanted to reduce Pamela to the level of a harlot; Grey wants to reduce Anastasia to the level of a sexual slave. Neither girl allows it to happen.
The subtitle of Pamela explains its appeal nearly 300 years ago just as it explains the appeal of Fifty Shades today: “Virtue Rewarded.” For Pamela, the reward involves rising from the working class to the gentry, just as Anastasia leaves the 99 percent for the 1 percent. And—though in Richardson this is implicit while in James it’s explicit—the reward for virtue is a satisfying sex life for both parties . . . with some kick to it.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary , is The Weekly Standard ’s movie critic.