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.