Love is hard to get and brief in its purest form. Valentine’s Day brings out love in its most painful form, especially now that 50 Shades of Grey has premiered in theatres and introduced millions to a visual primer of a “grey area” of sexual and emotional turmoil. Sure there will be flowers and candy and marriage proposals and a lot of sex of various kinds going on during a Valentine weekend, but there is more to the expressionism and commercialism than whether candy means love or bondage is exploiting to women.
For people who go months or years without a relationship, holidays are a socially permitted reminder that some are losers. When we’re children, we actually tell people to their faces that they aren’t worthy of a valentine card. Now schools discourage distributing valentines for just that reason. In adulthood, we just ignore people who don’t seem eligible for the basic kindness of humanity. For people who have loved and lost–by divorce, death or anything else–as much as one likes to admire the fellow walking about with a balloon or bouquet of flowers for his intended other, the hole in the heart billows open with pain to go home with no such accolades.
So with the release of a movie adaptation of a best-selling 21st century version of “The Story of O,” the big question is whether the depiction of a relationship based on a rich man’s psychological need to restrain and dominate his partner is properly done or over/underdone. Sure it’s a love story, but a kinky kind, and viewers are rating the kink.
Some people have complained that it’s tame, while others have stood on the soapbox to protest the idea of bondage as a lifestyle choice acceptable to consenting adults (probably without having seen the movie yet). The keys here are that the adults are both agreeing to a process based upon trust and an adventurous desire to explore one’s own erotic boundaries. Nobody should confuse what is agreed to in the bedroom with any criminal activity. Nobody but the partners is involved in the sex, and it is their business.
Having seen the movie on opening night, I can tell you from my movie chronicling experience of movies in all rating categories that, compared to adult films which can go further than what was done in this R-rated film, one can see similar scenes of bondage and flogging in videos rated X or NC-17, so the writing and production crews did a good job using realistic scenarios and didn’t cross into anything appearing inaccurate or objectionable.
That might be the problem: fans of the books probably would want to see more blatant sexuality depicted, but if the producers did that, the ratings board would have designated it with the NC-17 kiss of death, and nobody would go see it. If people judge the film as too light and inaccurate, nobody will go see it. The crew was damned either way in that case.
Everybody knows what their definition of smut is, but can’t put it on paper. And everybody picks on what love is, who can and cannot have it and what it all means, but nobody wants to offer alternatives or a definitive answer.
So the losers cry every Valentine’s Day, and we still try to draw the line on smut while secretly wondering if smut lies on a smudgy grey line.
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