Jamie is peddling a dangerous delusion
On a scale of one to 10, Helena, your fish-tail dress is a big winner
NOW we know why Jamie Dornan has been looking so sheepish. It’s not because he knows that as the critics have noted, his performance is a little ho-hum in the ultrahyped Fifty Shades Of Grey. Nor is it because he has massive hang ups about his physical appearance because, again, as the critics have told us, he’s not prevailed upon to flaunt his rippling torso and genitalia quite as much as his female co-star.
No, perhaps the reason Jamie is looking uncomfortable is that he knows he has participated in another elaborate Hollywood con.
He has lent his name to a juggernaut franchise that glamourises an aspect of life that can be both seedy and dangerous while celebrating it as tasteful and laced with high-end gloss.
Fifty Shades Of Grey does for sadomasochism what Pretty Woman did for prostitution and Lolita for paedophilia.
It wraps a collection of kinky sexual practices and perversions that are, for good reason often taboo, in a glittering package, metaphorically sticks a big bow over it and presents it to the audience as something alluring and a bona fide lifestyle choice.
In the process, the movie also rows back on the advances it took a generation of women to achieve in areas of gender equality and violence against women.
Hollywood’s get-out clause is that it’s all a harmless fantasy – that a movie like Fifty Shades and its sleek brand of erotic escapism is just catering to female desire.
To be sure, the movie taps into all the clichés of mainstream romance.
Our hero, Christian Grey, is not a paid-up member of the dirty raincoat brigade but a dashing sophisticate, a bondage-loving billionaire.
AFTER his seductions, he plays his piano – just as Richard Gere did in Pretty Woman. He is a connoisseur of wine and fine art. He has his own monogrammed helicopter and a fleet of fancy cars. A latter-day Jay Gatsby, he is the answer to every girl’s prayers.
The girl in question is Anastasia Steele, a naïve young student of romantic literature.
The twist is that while most romances end with the damsel swooning into her lover’s arms, our trembling heroine ends up in the red room of pain, persuaded ‘willingly’ to sign a sexual contract by her control-freak boyfriend but becoming increasingly dubious about the Faustian bargain she has struck, of trading whipping for a whiff of romance.
Many women might go to see Fifty Shades in the same funloving spirit that they’d attend the raunchy Chippendales. But some may be taken in by it.
Of course, we can’t assume that everyone who partakes in sado- WHaT is it about our celebrity class that has them whipping off their clothes and posing naked at the mere mention of animal rights? first we had PeTa’s anti-fur campaign in which lovelies like naomi Campbell and Pink stripped off to highlight the cause. now we have a naked Helena Bonham Carter snuggling up to a tuna for fishlove, the campaign for protecting endangered species. Who knows how effective the photograph will be in saving tuna stocks but it might prod Helena into a complete wardrobe clearout. Say what you like about the tuna but it’s a definite improvement on her usual offbeat outfits. masochism conforms in real life to her sex-play role. The sex scandal that Formula One boss Max Mosley was embroiled in showed that his inclination was to be whipped until he bled by a dominatrix. In real life, Mosley is an influential businessman who needs noone to fight his corner.
But what of the many vulnerable people who may be drawn to the sort of activity so glossily portrayed in 50 Shades for more complex psycho-sexual reasons and who, as a result leave themselves open to exploitation?
They are like the prostitutes who flocked to Hollywood in the months after Pretty Woman was released, believing that like Julia Roberts, they might find their own fairytale romance.
The squalid reality of prostitution must have gradually dawned on these young women as they hustled along the screeching thoroughfares of Sunset Boulevard, waiting in vain for Richard Gere to pull up and offer to ‘buy’ them for a few days.
The Dominique Strauss Kahn trial gives us a glimpse into the dehumanising existence of even high-class prostitutes. Strauss Kahn may be a shameless libertine but there is no evidence of him showing kindness towards the women who he thought shared his appetites.
He was no Richard Gere, allowing the ladies the run of his luxury pad while he was out, as he put it, ‘trying to save the world from economic catastrophe’.
HE claims he thought his companions were swingers and goodtime girls, not prostitutes, but he still showed them callous indifference. And what of the nauseating Lolita, which presents young girls as nymphomaniacs, the ultimate male fantasy?
Jeremy Irons showed Humbert Humbert battling with his conscience while systematically manipulating young Dolores and destroying her innocence.
At least we know now what a lie that was, that children cannot be wanton or lustful and that the law gives them protection.
But the perverted mindset that is depicted in Lolita also had its echoes in several generations of clerics and priests who felt that children were there to be defiled and in a host of oddball celebrities like Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris and Dave Lee Travis who groomed young teenagers for their pleasure.
It would a bit crass to blame Hollywood for misrepresenting the demimonde, for the entertainment business does not thrive on honesty or realistic portrayals of life.
But we would be foolish not to be wary of its dubious influence in legitimising extreme behaviour and a twisted view of life.