Fifty shades of vanilla

This is what I see, lining up to buy a ticket for Fifty Shades of Grey: a lot of couples, and the occasional lone dude, such as myself. It’s an afternoon showing, so you’d think more lone dudes would be in offices, instead of awkwardly lining up to mutter: “(Cough)... One for... (cough)... Fifty Shades...” Then having the ticket seller “X” your seat (somewhere as far back as possible, on the aisle), perkily confirming your purchase as she hands over change: “One for Fifty Shades of Grey! Enjoy the show!”

Why would so many guys be watching this movie, based upon a mainstream mommy porn novel that sold about 100 million copies? I was actually watching it with my wife, though she was hanging out with her girl friends a few rows ahead of me, giggling as though I wasn’t there. I didn’t want to spoil her fun, so I was hanging back, head sunk low in shame. ‘Cuz I had to write this article. (I think I also saw the first Twilight under similarly painful deadline conditions.)

As much as I ignored the literary phenomenon, there was no avoiding the cinema onslaught; I had to see what the fuss was all about.

Turns out not much, beyond a standard Hollywood fable of courtship, à la Pretty Woman, or Cinderella with chains and whips, in which the guy is more than just Sugar Daddy, he’s Dominant Daddy.

Actually, he’s 27-year-old billionaire Christian Grey, played by former male model Jamie Dornan, with a particular line of kinky obsessions that he deploys to ensnare young college girl Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson). At least that’s the plan.

Christian is the type who will rebuff an invitation to make love by saying stuff like, “I don’t make love. I f**k. Hard.” With a straight face. And this blunt honesty apparently gets through to Anastasia, who is — OMG! — still a virgin when she and Mr. Grey hook up.

Each has particular physical tics. Grey has bad posture, the kind that shows itself in slouching poses struck in doorways, one shoulder drooped lower than the other, possibly to resemble a predatory animal. Anastasia bites her lower lip. A lot. Like too many times.

Christian reveals his intentions in stages that are supposed to be seductive, like dropping by the hardware store where she works… to buy rope and masking tape. “You’re the complete serial killer,” Ana remarks, handing over the items. Or a complete stalker.

Ana is beguiled enough to hop in his helicopter and visit his home in Seattle, where the reveal continues: a “playroom” of whips, chains, handcuffs, suspension harnesses… your standard bachelor pad. He has Ana peruse a prenup contract before they initiate a relationship — but he’s prematurely sent over the edge by her lip-biting, and attacks her in an office elevator, saying, “To hell with paperwork!”

The movie, as you might expect, packs in a lot of guffaws, but it’s actually too tame to qualify as anything more than erotica lite. And there’s the rub (pun intended): Fifty Shades of Grey tries very hard to tamp down the messiness and unpredictability of sexuality into a Hollywood romcom formula, much like trying to squish Melissa McCarthy into a dominatrix corset. (Sorry for that image.) It doesn’t really fit.

As a Hollywood romcom, it proceeds like most others, though the two leads don’t have a great deal of chemistry. They try to make Mr. Grey seem human by having him ironically say things like “Laters, babe,” and putting things like the Rolling Stones’ Beast of Burden and Frank Sinatra on his sound system. But he still seems an awful lot like an android.

Which brings me back to the question: why are guys watching this movie? Do they relate to Christian, something about the fantasy of being the guy in charge, saying all the right things, commanding your own space? Or do they just want to see Dakota Johnson naked and whipped?

And why are woman watching? It starts out as much a fantasy as any princess fairy tale, and I wondered what drew so many women to avidly flip through the pages of the book (books, actually; there are three). The key lies, perhaps, in the term “mommy porn.” While the book was aimed at the Twilight market, it snagged instead an overlooked demographic: put-upon moms who wanted to fantasize about forgetting the kids for a while and letting someone else take charge and make decisions.

But Anastasia is a young lass, something that the millennials have a hard time squaring with their newfound Emma Watson-endorsed feminism. You do see moments where Anastasia resists a little, delaying Christian’s prenup requests, seducing him without giving in, suddenly becoming the “Rules Girl” (for those from this millennium: that was a popular ‘90s bestseller proposing that girls could hook guys by just saying “no” a lot). But, ah, the two are irresistibly drawn together, like bland on bland, and Ana starts to get into the early stages of kink.

Christian’s S&M menagerie looks high-priced and state of the art, but there’s really nothing out of the box here; soft porn on Cinemax in the ‘90s probably went deeper into the enchanted kinkdom.

And then there’s that damn black oval! As you may imagine, Fifty Shades of Grey was radically censored for screening here, but they chose an unintentionally hilarious way of doing it: deploying a smudgy, moving black oval onscreen to blot out any offensive body parts. The black oval shows up so much, you start thinking of it as a character in the movie. It keeps popping up during their lovemaking until it becomes almost a third person in the bedroom. Like an alien threesome.

For a movie that peddles itself as controversial, you have to say that Fifty Shades is pretty tame stuff. A few bare-assed slaps, a couple of ice cubes sliding over flesh — “You could see that in a Duran Duran video in the ‘80s,” my wife quipped. And she’s right. To get those box office bucks, Fifty Shades has to magically airbrush away the inherent possibilities of dangerous sexuality, much the way Twilight had to sugarcoat bloodsucking vampirism.

You’d have to revisit the annals of cinema to see how erotica sometimes pushes the boundaries — Marlon Brando ordering Maria Schneider to “get the butter” in Last Tango in Paris; Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger playing with various wet and slippery kitchen objects in 9 1/2 Weeks. What do we get here? Safety words. Nothing off the menu.

Watching the movie, I found myself a little bored, and started Googling my phone for Marquis de Sade’s Justine, for a taste of the real hardcore stuff:

“Foam flecked his lips as he spoke these words interspersed with revolting oaths and blasphemies. The hand, which had been prying open the shrine he seemed to want to attack, now strayed over all the adjacent parts; he scratched them, he did as much to my breast, he clawed me so badly I was not to get over the pain for a fortnight. Next, he placed me on the edge of the couch, rubbed alcohol upon that mossy tonsure with which Nature ornaments the altar wherein our species finds regeneration; he set it afire and burned it…”

Sade may have been a sickie, but he was much more in touch with the levels of control and cruelty lying at the subconscious heart of some relationships, that which eventually lent his name to sadomasochism. Fifty Shades pretends to be transgressive, but unlike the hard edge of messy erotica, it has a cold, transactional flavor: Christian’s prenup contract is reviewed in a bargaining scene that makes sexual transgression seem like a Chinese takeout list. It isn’t.

And for a guy who “doesn’t do” dates, Christian seems like a pushover. He shows up at a bar where she’s had too much to drink, and holds her hair while she pukes. They even go hang gliding together! How is this different from any other billionaire dream date scenario cooked up by Hollywood? For all its sexy talk and occasional spanking, Fifty Shades of Grey can’t risk being anything but a conventional Hollywood wooing.