SENA KAYASÜ (ARCH/III)
sena.kayasu@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
I’m scared. At least, I was scared of writing this article, mainly because I’m not going to insult the popular franchise outright. Surely I’ve already lost a number of people through the title. I was pretty nervous about losing my editor. But I haven’t lost her, so what the hell!
Nobody can miss the immediate and omnipotent presence of “Fifty Shades of Grey.” In its various forms, we see it in magazines and newspapers, on bookshelves, posters and those cardboard, life-sized ads in movie theaters. You may remember that I mentioned being in the US over the break and, believe me, it’s much more present there. The book was originally “Twilight” (already a sensitive subject) fanfiction. For whoever is unaware of fanfiction, it’s defined as being “when someone takes either the story or characters (or both) of a certain piece of work, whether it be a novel, TV show, movie, etc. and creates their own story based on it.” There are varying ambitions behind writing fanfiction, but generally, it is a lesser version of the original work and is not published.
Not in the case of E. L. James: a middle-aged, married mother of two who herself described the books as her “midlife crisis.” Despite her low expectations of her interpretation (quite an explicit one) of a teenage romance, the books raised the financial worth of this mother of a middle-income family to 80 million dollars. Whether you like it or not, or whether you admit to liking it or not, the name keeps coming up and the buzz isn’t going to die down soon (even after we get through the first movie, there are two more to come). So we may as well go over it in a mature manner. There’s just one thing I need to tell you.
I have a “rule”: I don’t immediately write things off, especially literature (here, I’m simply ignoring the question of whether this book counts as such). Obviously this rule is often broken, but I try my best, because I’m an avid defender of the idea that we can never know how things will play out. Taken out of its immediate context, anything can become successful or unsuccessful in ways or for reasons that we can’t possibly predict. Would you guess that my example for this is “The Lord of the Rings”? Well, it is. When the books first came out, Middle Earth lore was known only to a very limited audience. It was a member of this audience, director Peter Jackson, who made it explode into, possibly, the most prominent and well-known piece of fiction in the world.
Another reason for my rule is the book “Wide Sargasso Sea.” This book, written in the 60s by Jean Rhys, was a pivotal point in the ongoing progress of my entire literary perspective. Guess what? It’s fanfiction. It’s a reinterpretive prequel to the famous 19th-century romantic novel “Jane Eyre.”
“Jane Eyre” is the story of a neglected little girl who grows up to be a stoic young governess, becoming a passionate Mrs. Rochester after she meets Mr. Rochester, her student’s father. I liked reading Jane Eyre: it was romantic, well-written and, for its time, pretty original. Great.
When Rhys read the same book, her reaction must have been, “Bronte must be joking.” Instead of accepting Mr. Rochester as being the losing party in an unfairly arranged marriage, she gave an alternative history for him, which was entirely possible when you think about it. I’ll reveal nothing more about either book; but reading “fanfiction” shifted my perspective of everything concerning this very popular, romantic novel.
A final fact that led me to my rule is that not only do we not know what a particular book or movie may come to mean in time, we also don’t know what it will spawn. This way, any work can be justified, as it should be. The novels of H. G. Wells, also known as “the father of science fiction,” may be tedious for some today (they’re a little old), and he may have been considered ridiculous back in his day, but nobody can deny that his works basically began the science fiction genre. The attack on Charlie Hebdo, the French magazine, stimulated a lot of argument about freedom to write and to publish, mostly because anything can lead to something revolutionary.
Last week, though, I read an opinion about “Fifty Shades of Grey” that actually proved this. One of the countless magazine articles floating around pointed out that the success of the work enabled women to talk freely about their sexuality. Considered by some to be “mommy porn,” the book was being read in public by all kinds of people. As it became more of a sensation, everyone began to talk about it and its content—whether to condemn or to praise it.
I realize that being a student, I may be in a more liberal environment than most. However, for years now, I’ve heard talk (in both real life and movies) about how men watch porn. In fact, it’s normalized, by saying that “every man watches porn.” I doubt the truth of this statement, but nevertheless, if we can talk openly about porn that appeals to men, we should also be able to discuss “porn” that appeals to women.
This leads to another question: whether or not we should be talking about porn at all. I’m a big believer in the maxim, “If you’re not afraid to think it, don’t be afraid to say it.” This question is much bigger, however, so I’m not going delve too deeply into it. I’m just saying that if “Don Jon” is a viable movie, about a man’s so-called addiction to porn, to see at the theater, then we can talk about “Fifty Shades of Grey.”
All of that being said, I’m not too big a fan of the franchise. I read the books (I read everything, indiscriminately), but I probably won’t see the movie. It’s just that my admiration (or lack thereof) doesn’t mean that I have to attack the book to hide my feelings or to protect some imaginary idea of morality that’s already been beaten to a pulp in the past 40 years. In fact, anyone who enjoyed the “Fifty Shades” series should probably watch the 2002 movie “Secretary,” featuring Maggie Gyllenhaal in a similarly “freed” work.