So Christian ties Ana up with a necktie, with leather shackles, with rope. Theoretically, it is portrayed as “kinky” sex though, as noted, the kinkier bits of the book have mostly been cut, and none of them were all that kinky to begin with. They have between 10 and 20 variations on the following conversation:Īna: Why do you want to spank/whip/tie me up? Why can’t we be an ordinary couple?Īnd of course they have sex. His chauffeur buys her some vomit-free clothing. He buys her a three-volume first edition of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. He plays Chopin on the piano in order to convey the sensitive soul beneath his cool, cruel veneer. While she dithers on this attractive offer, he meets her parents and she meets his, and none of these four presumptive adults suggest even the possibility that there might be something untoward about a hard-charging global CEO romancing a virginal college student. (Sexy!) He whisks her away to his apartment, shows her his Red Room of Pain, and asks her to sign a lengthy contract to become his sexual “submissive.” And for their third, she drunk-dials him from the bathroom of a club and he shows up just in time to have her vomit on his shoes and then pass out altogether. On their next meeting, he saves her from the tragic fate of being run over by a bicycle. There's the excruciating meet-cute in which Ana (Dakota Johnson) stumbles her way through a school-paper interview with Christian (Jamie Dornan)- literally stumbles, his first sight being of her falling in through the doorway. This is a two-hour film containing maybe half an hour’s worth of anything actually happening. While Taylor-Johnson’s adaptation may not be as unpleasant or offensive as it could have been, it is stunningly, mind-glazingly dull. The Ben Wa balls do not make an appearance, and the beneath-the-dinner-table groping of Ana that Christian undertakes at his parents’ house is presented as decidedly tame.
Ana’s performance of oral sex on Christian is gone as well, though memory of the phrase “my very own Christian Grey-flavored Popsicle” will, I fear, remain with us forever. That’s not the only transgressive (or would-be transgressive) material that’s been cut. By cutting out Ana’s internal monologue, Taylor-Johnson removes many of the moments in which her unhappiness with Christian's sexual mistreatment is made most explicit. He makes clear that it’s his way or the highway. Christian makes clear that he wants to explore new sexual territory. But her consent is frequently coerced, as my colleague Emma Green has noted at length. In it, the sexual encounters between college student Ana and her paramour, the 27-year-old billionaire tycoon and S&M enthusiast Christian Grey, are never nonconsensual in the most literal sense. Taylor-Johnson also tones down, to some degree, the most troubling element of the novel. Billie Eilish’s Music Revealed What Her SNL Sketches Couldn’t Amanda Wicks
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