At the end of a recent New York sneak preview of “Fifty Shades of Grey” — in the blackout between the final lines of dialogue (“Anastasia!” “Christian!”) and the first breathy notes of the last Beyoncé song — a lot of the audience burst out laughing. The source of that laughter continues to puzzle and intrigue me, perhaps more than the actual movie did. Was it delight? Derision? Embarrassment? Surprise? All of the above?
In the book, this hardly matters. In fact, it’s something of an asset. Anastasia’s inner life exists to fill the space between sex scenes, and her zigzagging responses to Christian’s proposals make the fantasy more inclusive while also providing an escape clause. “Fifty Shades” is both daring and conventional, falling back into traditional gender roles even as it plays with transgressive desires. Christian’s sexual tastes are intriguing to Anastasia, but they are also the result of emotional wounds that she sets herself the task of healing. He wants to take charge of her, and she wants to take care of him. She tolerates the kind of sex he wants, and even enjoys some of it, but what she really wants is something more, and she wants to make him want that, too. She loves him, but love in these tales functions less as an emotional ideal than as a literary safe word, a return ticket to the land of romance.
0 commentaires:
Enregistrer un commentaire