No, I don’t mean deliberate promotion. I mean the inadvertent kind that results from our raucous railing against the latest slickly marketed pornographic product. By our moralizing and browbeating, our stern warnings and our tsk tsking, we unwittingly become a wing of studio marketing departments — and they don’t have to pay us a dime!
Take for example the 50 Shades of Grey books by British author E.L. James. The free advertising began with the first installment of the series, and then returned with the appearance of the movie version (which was dismissed by most secular critics and review sites like Rotton Tomatoes as dull and unwatchable). Now the next 50 Shades book is coming out — from “the hero’s point of view,” the ads trumpet — and we are sure to see the same effort by the same well-meaning protesters (sincere people all) to rail, moralize, and browbeat.
I understand the impulse at play here, but why help the dreck?
Think about it. Let’s use round numbers and say 20% of the population will read (or watch) 50 Shades of Grey no matter what some unamused Christians are saying, and 20% wouldn’t waste their precious time on such “entertainment” and don’t need our protesting. That leaves 60% who are either unaware of the books or are undecided about whether to read them.
That’s where our “cautionary warnings” about prurient content come in. They generally do the same thing Christian boycotts of films like Martin Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Ron Howard’s The Da Vinci Code (2007), and Chris Weitz’s The Golden Compass (2007) did: they goose ticket sales.
Nothing like publically outraged Church Ladies (and Gentlemen) to deliver a jolt of interest toward very average material.
As Catholics, we are told time and again to “engage and impact the culture for Christ.” And I obviously agree. That’s one reason I co-founded Immaculata Pictures (www.immaculatapictures.com), to help push out the gunk by introducing the gold. Gunk can be spray-painted gold. But gold is gold.
In the case of the 50 Shades series, no one seems interested in asking questions like, What is the story really about? Why are millions of (chiefly) women so smitten by it? Are the masses of housewives in this niche market all just rank lovers of S&M porn, or do the books tap into some deep loneliness or deeper pathology? What do the books’ popularity say about our collective marital happiness levels?
The hero (sic) is Christian Grey, the eponymous sexual deviant who inflicts sexualized pain upon the vulnerable young Anastasia Steele (can these names get any more cliche sounding?), who comes to love his inflictions, but then leaves him at the end. Ta da!
I mentioned the books’ critics. Here is a small sample:
“I’ve never read anything so badly written that got published. It made Twilight look like War and Peace,” remarked Sir Salman Rushdie. The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd described it as being written “like a Bronte devoid of talent,” and “dull and poorly written.” Jesse Kornbluth of The Huffington Post opined: “As a reading experience, Fifty Shades…is a sad joke, puny of plot.” Metro News Canada wrote that “suffering through 500 pages of this heroine’s inner dialogue was torturous, and not in the intended, sexy kind of way.” Jessica Reaves wrote in the Chicago Tribune that the “book’s source material isn’t great literature,” and is, “sprinkled liberally and repeatedly with asinine phrases,” and “depressing.”
These are all leftist sources. None are friendly to the Christian faith, yet all agree that 50 Shades is “pop lit” at its treacly worst. Sometimes engaging the culture for Christ means ignoring dumb movies, plain and simple, as opposed to throwing attention at them through noisy boycotts. How about othercotting instead? That’d be spending your money on good movies and telling your friends and family why you think they’re good.
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The 50 Shades version I’d like to see would be told from Ana’s father’s perspective — the one where the sadist Grey gets the stuffing beaten out of him.
This article is reprinted with permission from our friends at Catholic Answers.
