Turning Grey Ash Into Silver Dust

The Bechtloff wrote a short review of the upcoming film 50 Shades of Grey, noting that the usual cast of characters is self-righteously offended by the piece.  Myself, I’m merely offended by the terrible writing in these ‘bestsellers’, something that Matt Forney did a good job eviscerating two years ago:

Oh wow, how stimulating! It really feels like I’m in the mind of a 21-year old girl and not a 45-year old English hausfrau trapped in a failing marriage! If you tried to play a drinking game with this book (every time you spot a routine writing screwup, take a shot), you’d be dead of alcohol poisoning before the first chapter was up. Let’s run down the reasons why this passage is horrible:

1. Run-on sentences. Every line packs an obnoxious, unwieldy amount of detail, making them feel clunkier than a car with square wheels. “[D]amn Katherine Kavanagh for being ill”? Who recites their best friends’ full names while thinking? And the line about Ana’s exams should be written “I should be studying for next week’s final exams”. Conveys the same amount of information in fewer words.

2. Uninspired adjective use. “[P]ale, brown-haired girl with blue eyes” has got to be the blandest description I’ve ever read in a work of fiction. Has E.L. James never used a thesaurus? Has she ever read any book above a fourth-grade level? Here, let me take a stab at an improved description of Ana: “Alabaster-skinned brunette with saucer-like eyes the color of the ocean.” A bit purplish, but it’s damn better than the original.

3. Inappropriate voice. Does this sound like a college girl to you? Even if James is removed from the experience of being an undergrad, she could have at least done a little research to make the character believable.

In addition to the overall incompetence on display, the book itself lacks verisimilitude:  Grey is an orphan boy who became a millionaire steel magnate in the 21st century, and who has a list of Manly Accomplishments which border on the absurd… but complaining about Grey’s cartoonish Alphaness is no different than having an undersexed woman whine about the unreality of having a woman order a pizza, when all she really wants is Italian sausage.  While both scripts speak to a certain creative bankruptcy, at the end of the day they’re nothing but porn; the correct measuring stick for their quality is the one you apply to the reader’s clitorius.

Granted, I’d like to live in a world where even porn writers took the effort to write compelling prose, but at the end of the day my time would be better spent tilting at windmills than complaining about illiteracy in this largely non-literate field… but then I watched the trailer for the film, and something jumped out at me:

That… actually looks pretty good.  While the book’s prose is bad enough to grind against my finer sensibilities, the above trailer seems to capture the essence of the chick-porn: in-control, adventurous man seduces a naive, young college student.   Game recognize game, Mr Grey.

I suppose it’s still pretty stupid, but it’s good stupid.

This is an effect I’ve seen happen elsewhere – the Silver Screen granting some of its cinematic magic onto lesser writing, and bolstering it into something truly wonderful.  The most recent example that comes to mind is Game of Thrones.

If you’ve read the books, and you’re familiar with Anonymous Conservative’s work on the Amygdala & Politics, it is immediately obvious that George R. Martin is a card-carrying, r-Type Leftist.  His books are brilliantly plotted, but the writing itself makes all the characters come across as cold and cruel.  Reality is being filtered through the mind of a rabbit writing about wolves; all of our good-natured punches-to-the-shoulder are mistaken for bullying, and he thinks that it’s sadism which drives us, rather than the honest joy of competition.

The best example of this is the relationship between Arya and the Hound.

In the book, Arya’s arc is to become progressively more psychopathic, embracing violence and wanton cruelty.  At the close of her relationship with the Hound – a man whom she justifiably hates for a past crime, and yet also a man who’s protected and mentored her (purely for self-serving reasons in the book) – she condemns him to a slow and painful death.  In the TV show, however, something magical happens.

Her and the Hound become fully fleshed-out K-Types.

A mutual love and respect develops between these two supposed enemies, forced into becoming allies due to circumstance.  Despite the harsh words they exchange with one another, they slowly develop a bond; Arya begins to see that the Hound is a man doing the best that he can to pursue honour, in a world that only cares for appearances, and the Hound realizes that this slight girl is made of sterner stuff than her frame would suggest.  In the book, she leaves him to die a slow and agonizing death because she is cruel… in the show, she can’t bring herself to mercy-kill the man who’s become like a second father to her, and uses the agonizing death as a justification for her actions.  On the surface she wants to take revenge upon him, but deep down she’s feeling a conflicted love for the man.

For Martin to write a story that so accurately portrays the external actions of the characters speaks to his skills as a writer, but his utter inability to understand their internal psychology is an endemic flaw to the r-Type mind.  In adapting his books for wide screen, Hollywood has corrected this flaw, and fully fleshed out these characters into real human beings, rather than the marionette monsters he wrote about.  With 50 Shades of Grey they have taken a ridiculous story and turned it into an accurate depiction of the human condition.

Call it the Hollywood Effect: that it’s easier to make good movies than bad ones.  While there are plenty of bad movies out there – Star Trek: Nemesis, Star Wars Episode 1, Transformers – these are inevitably the product of a monomaniacal director who suppresses the creative abilities of his actors, or who is so focused on spectacle that he doesn’t make room for anything else.  When Hollywood embraces the ethos of “Art Through Adversity” and encourages the creative disagreements between all of the talent involved, what you get is something magical: the creative explosion which the free market encourages, something which becomes more than the sum of its parts.

Leo M.J. Aurini

Trained as a Historian at McMaster University, and as an Infantry soldier in the Canadian Forces, I'm a Scholar, Author, Film Maker, and a God fearing Catholic, who loves women for their illogical nature.

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12 Responses

  1. Darius says:

    I didn’t stay subscribed to HBO long enough to get through more than a little GoT. That said, I made it through the first book, and stopped. Monsters indeed. Every character that was admirable, embodied honor, was innocent, suffered horrible and cruel fates. The Stark boy, and his dad, in particular.

    It was a cruel, dark world, but unlike ours, there was little to find of true joy or beauty.

  2. Greg says:

    I suspect that “Holywood Effect” has something to do with the additional perspectives that you get in a collaborative project. George R Martin might be incapable of wrapping his head around the psychology of such a relationship but that does not mean that Rory McCann or Maisie Williams, the actors playing those two characters, will be equally clueless.

    PS:
    This interview in Scientific American reminded me of some of your musings on Godel and the Philosophical basis of science and I thought I would share it on the off chance that you hadn’t seen it already.

    http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2014/07/22/physicist-george-ellis-knocks-physicists-for-knocking-philosophy-free-will/

  3. Yankee Sean says:

    I’ll address “Fifty Shades” and my thoughts on power in sex here. I’ll respond to ASoIaF elsewhere.

    The commotion over “Fifty Shades” reveals an interesting reciprocity between the Left and Right. The Left sees nothing wrong with a woman being tied up or struck by a man if she agrees to it, but it declares vaginal sex to be rape. The Right declares vaginal sex to be perfectly ordinary- indeed, they declare it the only acceptable sex, at least in public- and declare an act that is agreed to by both participants to be abuse.

    At its core, the ultimate mystery of sex is that it forces both people to lose control. Both partners are stripped to their essential core- man, woman; top, bottom; dom, sub: power dynamics and imbalances are erased in the supernova of orgasm. Both exert control through lust and love, and submits to the other through their wish to sate the desires of the other. Both submit to their own desires. Both submit to instincts whose power the Right guesses at but sterilizes, and the Left woefully underestimates.

    On the surface, bondage seems to defy this by keeping power dynamics intact. But from what I’ve read, bondage still pulls the “dom/domme” into the scene as much as the “sub.” So, to put it in Christian terms, bondage is a Catholic High Mass- pomp, circumstance, ritual, and props that may not be entirely necessary. Vanilla sex is a Protestant service- not necessarily flashy or exciting, but if done right, it has a majesty and beauty all its own.

    I can understand traditionalists who object to people wanting to experience and inflict physical pain for sexual gratification- there are some unresolved problems there. But are a blindfold and fur-lined handcuffs used to add a little naughty fun to your nightly rituals really degrading?

  4. Thomas Smith says:

    This reminds me immediately of Dracula. Bram’s incredibly crappy book has spawned mountains of very good movies.

  5. Sean L says:

    Not really related to the topic of the article, but did you hear about the U.S. Senate report that revealed that progressive millionaires and billionaires are manipulating the EPA for their own benefit? I’m not surprised by that, or the rather ominous warning that the report had “only scratched the surface of the conspiracy.” Had this happened before I saw your video on psychopaths, I would probably be convinced that the Illuminati are real or something. But having seen it, I’m content that this is merely the work of greedy psychopaths- highly organized psychopaths, but psychopaths nonetheless.

    I’ve been anticipating something happening that convinced people that everybody’s in bed with each other for their own purposes. Is this the beginning of the fall of the facade? Is this our, “I told you so!” moment when neo-reaction starts to go mainstream?

  6. Ivan says:

    Just to add to the list, another example would be the novel, The Godfather. It was too poorly written to read. However, it spawned two (or three) superb movies.

  7. Alex says:

    Davis, this doesn’t look good. It looks horrid. The cheesy faces, that SMACK camera cut sound that wouldn’t end. The terrible choice of music. The two actors that you’ve never seen before/will never see again, which is a good sign of a horrible movie.

    You did this with Bioshock Infinite as well, which was a terrible game with bad mechanics, embarrassingly plot holed and phoned in storyline based on common overdone ideas, and simple, exploration discouraging gameplay that was so easy to play and basic in it’s tasks, that it was clear the game was geared towards children, and below average puzzle solvers/aimers/explorers.

    You seem to have yet to see the recycled garbage in visual medium and be disgusted by it. You recognize it in writing, but seem to not see through the special effects, camera quality, and overacting. The overused everything, the stolen shots, the typical characters. Most movies and television today are just a mashup of everything successful that has already come out in the past. It’s the ‘logic of safety’, it’s already worked, we know it can work, so let’s stick to that. Water it down so it appeals to more people and then add political correctness.

    This trailer gave me pain upon viewing. To me it sticks out as tedious, processed, disgusting product, churned out for the masses. Don’t people realize little children like this stuff? All this crap that is so praised. Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Bioshock Infinite, and even this movie which will be praised by some adults, all this stuff is easily enjoyed by masses of little girls. How can anyone think this is intelligent entertainment anywhere near truly great if it’s understood and obsessed over by loads of dumb children? Not that all kids are dumb, but there’s plenty of dumb kids who love this stuff and can totally follow and comprehend it (like we all can). I know this because I’ve seen it personally and know it to be true from others and from the internet.

    Movies by Kubrick, books by truly great authors, music like Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa, maybe Animal Collective nowadays, as well as many other great composers. This is stuff that most kids (and many adults) can’t even understand, let alone fully appreciate. It just doesn’t register, it’s bewildering stimulus. They find it boring, confusing, intimidating, strange, scary, or think it to be randomly made. Now I’m not saying something has to be extremely advanced to be good, but with the exception of The Beatles and maybe a few others, you don’t ever see art worthy of adult attention become a frequent pop culture topic amongst twelve year olds.

  8. EricH says:

    “Her and the Hound become fully fleshed-out K-Types.” SHE!!! and the Hound!

  9. Aurini says:

    @Alex

    I never said it looked good; I just said it looked to be head-and-shoulders above the semi-literate scrawlings it’s based off of.

    And Kubrick was overrated. He had one talent: cinematography. He was an incompetent in all other areas. If he’d been combined with a good writer, then his movies might have been good, but the man was too arrogant to let little things like plot and characterization ruin his ‘vision’, which primarily consisted of 3 hours of meaningless landscapes.

  10. Seamus says:

    There is something to a Classical Education, good literature should be aimed at discovering higher truths. Compare the 50 shades trilogy to the Divine Comedy. While civilization decays we all end up staring at our dicks.

  1. July 25, 2014

    […] Source: Stares at the World […]

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