What I found alarming about Fifty Shades of Grey was the overlap between my experience as an abuse victim and the specific way the audience was being conditioned to accept Christian as a romantic lead.įifty Shades of Grey does to its audience what Christian does to Ana and what my rapist did to me: it completely resets our expectations and what we believe to be acceptable. When she (perhaps jokingly? The narrative wasn’t clear to me) rejects his offer to be his submissive, it’s not disturbing that he breaks into her apartment, it only shows how much he desires her-after all, he brought wine. When she wakes up in a virtual stranger’s bed in clothes she didn’t dress herself in, it’s not a blatant violation of boundaries, he’s just being attentive. When he shows up at her workplace after meeting her once and knowing nothing about her except her name and the school she attends, it’s not creepy that he stalked her, it’s sweet that he seems that interested in her. What’s replaced it is possibly even more dangerous, because it’s easier to argue that what we’re being presented isn’t abusive-it’s romantic. In some ways, the film is an improvement over the books in that it removes the rape scenes, but in a way, those improvements make it all so much worse because the obviousness of the abuse has disappeared.
0 kommentar(er)
