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AU - Och,, Dana
AB - Abstract Fifty Shades of Grey (FSOG) is argued to be a female-focused mainstream cult film that deliberately fosters a simultaneity of viewing modes. This multiple address highlights how the lauded qualities of cult texts are standard in feminine narratives that need to appeal to a large cross section of women. Cult discourse still depends on misogyny and masculinized distinction even when the mainstream mode seems to break down gendered fandom. Contradictions emerge because cult was traditionally defined against the mindless consuming of women. However, the cultish consumption patterns for FSOG are deliberately fostered by merchandising strategies. Thus, the same element that shows cult tendencies is used to denigrate the film as the antithesis of cult: women as consumers. The first images released for Fifty Shades of Grey (FSOG) (Brunetti, De Luca, James, & Taylor-Johnson, 2015) set up multiple interpretive frames to hail multiple women audiences, and its viewing numbers indicate its success in this element. The official trailer, released on July 24, 2014, by Universal Pictures UK, was the most watched trailer online in 2014 until late in the year when Avengers: Age of Ultron (Feige & Whedon, 2015) trailer was released; trailer views reached 113 million while total views (trailer plus related material such as parodies or stars reading passages out loud) reached 329 million by its opening weekend (Lang, 2015a). Thus, the intense degrading and dismissing of the text pre- and post-theatrical release strike me as peculiar and loaded especially in light of its multiple reading modes, its intertextuality, and its cult-like treatment of women’s pleasure, not to mention its massive financial success. This first full-length international trailer for FSOG debuted on YouTube with a runtime of 2 minutes and 26 seconds. The music starts before the image appears; Ana is dejected and looking down. The trailer then quickly alternates between images and black as an elevator opens. She walks toward a desk, then walks behind a woman to open a door to reveal an out-of-focus long shot of the back of a man. The camera cuts closer but at the same angle. The editing functions as both a violation of continuity that signals something is wrong or “off” as well as a mysterious intimacy like the blinking of an eye. Ana sits with eyes down as the man’s lower body walks foreground, then the man (head out of frame) heads to the desk and goes out-of-focus as he sits so his face is not visible. There is a close up of a hand tapping the desk. Ana sits, asking a question, and now the man is back sitting next to Ana. A long shot of room creates dissonance because the previous shots had increasingly been bringing the characters together. Yet, the all-white and mostly glass construction of the office is just a bit too reminiscent of Patrick Bateman’s apartment in American Psycho (Solomon, Hanley, Pressman, & Harron, 2000). A medium close up of Ana’s face finally at 50 seconds into the trailer gives way to a medium close-up of Christian. With the reverse shot of Ana, though, the eerie music builds. As Ana walks onto an elevator and doors shut, the pulsating to black frames shifts now to a white flash reminiscent of a camera flash. The next 30 seconds feature intense interactions between the two main characters that function as the most direct references to Twilight (Godfrey, Mooradian, Morgan, & Hardwicke, 2008). Fans are hailed with scenes they should recognize from that franchise (Ana and Christian walk through the woods; they sit together in the restaurant). As the characters enter an elevator, an aggressive kiss is intercut with fades to black. At this point, the challenges to continuity are a little less intimate with the accompanying action and audio. When Christian’s voice warns, “You should stay away from me,” the images shift to Christian running in sweatpants and gray hoodie with his face hidden in shadow. Images of him running are intercut with images of physical confrontations where Christian attacks other men in long shot followed by tightly framed shots of physical intimacy and then Ana sitting alone in bed looking confused as she clutches her blanket to her chest. More shots of physical intimacy are quickly established before Ana suggests, “enlighten me,” prompting the ominous opening of the back-lit Red Room door and a rapid editing of bondage imagery, including a quick fade-in and -out of images of cuffs, hand caressing down, a crop on back, Ana being undressed, and then Christian carrying her motionless body down a hall. A fade to black is followed by a medium shot of Ana blindfolded and tied up before the trailer pauses on an empty black frame for a significant pause (1:55). As the trailer concludes, Beyoncé’s vocals sigh, “uh oh, oh no, oh no,” as she seems to be wearily warning us or commenting on the preceding images. The title Fifty Shades of Grey fades-in going from out-of-focus to in-focus before a fade to black and text appears: “Featuring an exclusive version of “Crazy in Love” by Beyoncé,” and finally a second title screen “Based on Novel by E.L. James, Screenplay by Kelly Marshall, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson” with each woman’s name equally large and dominant on the screen. “Valentine’s Day 2015.” Policing the definition of cult Despite the film’s opening weekend gross of $85 million (and eventually earning more than $500 million in box office revenue), articles published in the weeks after FSOG’s theatrical debut stressed not the overall profitability of the film, nor its #1 status in its first few weeks, but instead its sharp decline in box office in the second week. This type of decline is not surprising for female-focused media and has been partially attributed to the success of word-of-mouth and social media campaigns that encourage women to make a statement by showing up to a film on opening weekend (Truffaut-Wong, 2018). In fact, this drop-off is not only experienced in relation to “feminine” genres. Many superhero films and films in general also experience a 60% plus drop-off in week two, but that similarity is not stressed by reviewers in favor of painting this second-week-decline as evidence that women-targeted media is a financial risk (Abad-Santos, 2017). The denigration of FSOG shows the roles that popular and industrial discourse play in the cultural positioning of female-focused media. This negative treatment extends further to a distrust and mocking of the audience. As McCulloch (2016) argues, “the problem that some critics had with [the tonal shifts in the film] was not one of confusion or ambiguity, but that they felt that this film did not have the right to do it” (p. 14). While McCulloch never ventures into why the film is so negatively treated, I argue that it is a result of the confluence of misogyny with tensions that emerge over the mainstreaming of cult and how it potentially opens the generic designation to women fans and women-focused media. Within this negative discourse, the female audience is repeatedly imagined to think only in one dimension, a move that reifies long-standing imaginations of women as uncritical and naïve with pleasures that should be hidden, mocked, and shamed. The dismissive and glib tone adopted in popular and industry writing about the film makes assumptions not only about the text itself, but more importantly about its audience and their assumed relationship to the media property. This way of dismissing female audiences and fandoms combines with the neoliberal trends of post-feminism to indicate some of the troubling contradictory impulses around gender and sexuality. Other academic approaches to the book and the film have highlighted these, including, but not limited to, the sexual conservatism at its root especially regarding bondage, homosexuality, consent, and masculinity (see Al-Mahadin, 2013; Harrison and Holm, 2013; Tripodi, 2017). The way identity formation is encouraged through consuming operates differently for men and women. While women are promised to find identity through capitalism, they are shamed for it in order that a sense of superiority can be maintained by the men who are equally defining themselves through consumption. An area in which men’s consumption habits are centrally situated in terms of identity questions is the study of cult, in particular for the ways in which it constructs a sense of habitus, distinction, and superiority. It is crucial then to see the ways that the negative positioning of FSOG and its popularity with women audiences effectively dismiss how the film operates as cult diegetically and extradiegetically in terms of marketing and reception. This neglect is not surprising given the border policing around issues of gender and race that cult fandom enforces and critical theory historically has tended to replicate (see Hollows, 2003; Wanzo, 2015). The mocking of women extends beyond calling FSOG “mommyporn” or “ladyporn”—terms that Click (2015) explains are “flip labels [that] trivialize women’s interests in the series” (p. 16)—to various media that position or narratively depict reading or watching FSOG as embarrassing or antifeminist. These examples include news articles with sensationalized headlines (“Feral Pack of FSOG Fans Attack Man in Movie Theater” [Rife, 2015]), skits on comedy shows, or throwaway lines about “the end of literature as we know it” on Bunheads episode “Movie Truck” (Schacter, Sherman-Palladino, & Babbit, 2012). Each of these aims in different ways to shape women’s reception but fails to think about how women’s consumption may speak to issues of identity and how to navigate the impossible contradictions of post-feminist pressures. Click (2015) discusses the complexity of thinking about why women are attracted to a book like Fifty Shades which features a substantial power differential in the sexual relationship. In particular, she argues that chick-lit and contemporary romance fiction should be understood for how “the series gives readers the opportunity to make sense of the sexualized post-feminist environment in which they live” (p. 21). Her reader interviews indicate that the women often identify with Ana, but they also actively read the Red Room scenes with a critical and distanced eye that allowed them to think through how they would react differently. The invoking of multiple reading frames and generic associations reported by readers and evident in the trailer fits comfortably with existing trends in women’s media. The dismissive rhetoric toward feminine media in general and FSOG in particular ignores that simultaneity and intertextuality are deliberately evoked to invite a reading through cult. FSOG, as evidenced most clearly in the official international trailer, moves beyond the obvious touchstones of Twilight and the novel to self-consciously also invoke Mary Harron’s 2000 adaptation of American Psycho and BBC series The Fall (Neal, 2013–2016). The latter texts involve sexually perverted male serial killers filtered through a feminist perspective. The overt and almost excessive use of horror aesthetics throughout the trailer hail multiple audiences (including but not limited to the fan and the anti-fan), signaling not only an awareness of various controversies but also a sophisticated and playful critique of the power dynamics of Hollywood romance in general by establishing connections with other genres through stylistic references. Connecting cult to FSOG deliberately challenges dominant narratives that dismiss women as uncritical fans and as constituting uncomplicated fandoms. The lauded qualities of cult texts more generally are always part and parcel of feminine narratives that need to appeal to multiple audiences, especially important given pressures of demographics and gross. In particular, this shift to cult modes takes the additional forms of exploiting the post-feminist tendencies of sexual objectification and the centrality of consumption, in this case consuming movie tie-in products and branded experiences. Thinking about cult in this way is less about highlighting how feminine narratives complicate imaginations of cult but rather about revealing how cult, like post-feminism, is both feminizing and misogynistic in contradictory ways. An academic approach needs to combine historical awareness of this tendency with a feminist investment in challenging the well-established gendered tendencies of cult fandom and criticism. In doing so, it can offer a key to considering the various popular, academic, and industry discourses surrounding a mainstream text marketed to women. Do they denounce or claim a textual object with regard to targeting women audiences for profit? Do they try to police the boundaries of what constitutes a masculine “cult” identity? Cult texts and cult spaces Historically, feminine media has been ignored or not recognized for its own potential as cult, and thus FSOG is rarely invoked as such. The reasons for the exclusion of feminine media objects are distinct and well established, as the development of the “cult sensibility” was shaped by a sense of masculine mastery over content, space, and mass culture exactly at the moment when there was a national shift toward a ubiquity of consumption as defining America in the wake of the economic crises and closing of factories. Ross (1989/2008) argues that: (…) bad taste tends to be the preserve of urban intellectuals (professional and pre-professional) for whom the line between work and leisure time is occupationally indistinct, and is less regulated by the strict economic divide between production and consumption which governs the cultural tastes of lower middle-class and working-class groups. (p. 60) Also, the excess of cultural capital over economic success in the last few decades created the situation whereby the value of men had to be re-conceptualized and actualized in a different realm. In other words, with the shift from factory to white collar jobs, masculinity had to be redefined. Consumption and leisure (previously associated with the feminine realm) were areas for this redefinition. The development of the cult persona strived to help male consumers define themselves against that which was viewed as feminine and mindless: cult is a way to consume—and indeed be defined by consumption—but not be feminine. In her important intervention into this gendered construction of cult (which becomes a key to understanding the contradictions of mainstream cult currently), Hollows (2003) points out that in creating a sense of cult as identity, “mainstream cinema is imagined as feminized mass culture and cult as a heroic and masculinized subculture” (p. 37). She also theorized the “twilight zones” of cult consumption as deliberately cultivated to be unwelcoming to women, whether it was the midnight movies that showed in urban centers and arthouse/porn theaters or even the cineclubs of college campuses where men could outnumber women (pp. 41–42). This misogynist milieu intensifies once we consider the types of films embraced by cult fandom and how often their stories concentrate on violence against women or frank depictions of fetish. Cult films have long had an interest in looking at the unruly and sexualized bodies of women, whether as strippers in burlesque films, or the range of women in nudie cuties, Women in Prison films, STD films, sexploitation, or lesbian vampire films. Though these films allow for women’s bodies to be depicted in ways outside of the dominant socio-moral code of mainstream cinema, the women are still often gazed upon and sexualized. Cult films historically often embrace and promote non-normative male sexuality but imagine women within a secondary, objectified, and submissive role. These types of narratives coupled with the twilight zones of cult consumption can intensify how historically unwelcoming cult spaces have been to women audiences on multiple fronts, including a larger disregard and disdain for female-focused media. The double impulse—or the open nature of a text that allows audiences to insert themselves and control the meaning—has often been associated both with traditional cult definitions as well as the more modern takes on mainstream cult, such as Eco’s ([1986] 2008) discussions of the multi-genre nature of Casablanca (Wallis, Warner, & Curtiz, 1942). Recognizing mainstream texts as cult can offer the chance to move past the masculine gatekeeping that defines “traditional” notions of cult, such as that theorized by Sconce (1995) around notions of paracinema. A contradiction emerges here, though, around the conception of cult if it is not defined “against” something to make it elite. Even when critiquing Sconce’s claims that cult is progressive regarding the deconstruction of taste cultures, Jancovich (2002) also notes how paracinema needs to “assert its superiority over those whom it conceived of as the degraded victims of mainstream commercial culture” (p. 312). On one hand, the shift to mainstream cult opens the chance to really re-think and redefine cult to include other taste cultures and audiences; on the other hand, however, the attempts to keep mainstream cult masculine are overtly evident through backlashes of gender-flipped remakes of nostalgic texts or female-focused new entries into long-standing franchises such as Ghostbusters (Pascal, Reitman, & Feig, 2016) or Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens (Abrams, Burk, & Kennedy, 2015). These popular arguments are vitriolic, and they make clear that “not feminine” is the defining trait still important to some fans even when cult in no longer defined with obscurity as a main trait. The ownership principle seems to rely very overtly on denying ownership to someone else for the idea to be meaningful. While the terminology of cult may remain contentious in terms of audience, the marketing often deliberately invokes it, which brings focus to how there are multiple ideologies of cult operating and competing between production and reception culture. While older theoretical models of cult texts and fandoms excluded mainstream texts from consideration as cult, this changed with the increased mainstreaming of cult into a distinct market approach of “niche” consumers paired with the shifted situation where most media texts are now much more easily available on the Internet. The mainstreaming of cult is also evident when large and medium-sized multiplexes such as AMC Loew’s and iPiC Theaters are just as likely as one-screen independent theaters or Alamo Drafthouse to show cult texts both “daring” and “mainstream nostalgic.” It is, for example, common to see large corporate multiplexes encourage cosplay and theme nights, too. This now consistent move to imagine mainstream texts as cult is evident in the theatrical programming and promotion techniques around Disney sing-alongs, anime weeks, Jim Henson Christmas special double features, one-night-only themed events, midnight premieres as well as, of course, the occasional (now mainstream and safe) exhibition of a “midnight movie.” Within this mainstreaming, space finally opened up for women’s media to be overtly moved toward “cult” designations. At the same time, there has been intensifying pressures around identity formation and border policing by subcultures around masculine domains of culture. Thus, the contradictions of cult emerge here between how it is being imagined by multiple forces: the corporate commodifying of women audiences is impeded by misogynistic discourse. While mainstream theaters can try to signal that they are welcoming, they have to do so within a larger milieu where women are verbally harassed and physically threatened in online spaces for feminizing culture. For example, the Alama Drafthouse all-woman screenings of Wonder Woman (Roven & Jenkins, 2017), held the week after theatrical release to sell-out audiences in Austin, Brooklyn, Norther Virginia, and Denver, garnered a lot of attention in 2017, including media coverage and lawsuits. The question of creating a female-friendly exhibition was very much in the forefront: “the screenings and the negative responses prompted discussions of safe spaces for women and why women-only screenings of Wonder Woman especially received criticism when the theater chain’s similar events for romantic comedies hadn’t received the same kind of attention” (Freeman, 2017).The images of female-dominated locations within the female-focused texts themselves can be understood in this context, such as is evident with the various spaces highlighted in Magic Mike (Carolin, Jacobs, Tatum, Wechsler, & Soderbergh, 2012) and Magic Mike XXL (Carolin, Jacobs, Tatum, & Wechsler, 2015) or the woman-dominated performance spaces on stage in the promos for the deliberately cultivated cult space of Lifetime’s lesbian vampire remake (Torres & Aitkenhead, 2016) of their own cult staple Mother, May I Sleep With Danger (Fischer & Montesi, 1996). Likewise, the feminist-oriented calls for women to show up in large numbers for opening weekends of films like Twilight or FSOG or Ghostbusters can be understood as trying to make women audiences visible but also to deliberately cultivate the theatrical space as a welcoming space for women. Fostering a welcoming space via marketing is not a unique or new approach, given its success with premiering or reviving films. For example, this approach was used with the theatrical Sex and the City (SATC) (King, Melfi, & Star, 2008, 2010) films where cocktails were served or themed nights could be arranged. such as happened with “Ladies Night Out—Cosmos, Couture and Sex and the City,” which promised make-up tutorials and curated shopping on-site (Chilcoat, 2013). While the idea of a chain theater functioning as cult space obviously works in favor of corporate capitalism, the idea itself of consuming as activism sits comfortably within post-feminism and contemporary capitalism in general. Regardless of the contradictory impulses here, there is something of note happening. If Wonder Woman screenings are regarded as very “threatening” to masculine cult identity because the object in question exists too close to male mainstream cult of Marvel and comic book geek culture, FSOG and SATC remain positioned as outside a traditional notion of cult because they occupy a space that men are not interested in owning. Yet, it is this positioning of cult-like theatrical exhibition being marked as welcoming, safe, and hailing to women that can function to challenge the border-policing discourse as well as to highlight the practices that make women feel shut out. Indeed, many multiplexes very overtly aimed to appeal to the women fans of FSOG. Variety reported days before the film’s theatrical release that many theaters were offering “experiences” for its guests, including chocolate handcuffs, trips to Seattle, S&M photo booths, partnerships with restaurants, and the chance to eat new menu items. Leitersberg Cinemas in Maryland sold out its wine and dinner experience five weeks in advance: “Fans snapped up tickets to a night that includes live music; samples and products from cheese shops, bakeries and jewelers; and drinks from five area wineries, in addition to the a [sic] screening of the film itself” (Lang, 2015b). Similarly, the iPiC Theaters, which has 14 locations in the US, featured the Red Room of Pain cocktail for a month, a move that indicates an expectation for patronage beyond an opening night performance of visible fandom: “For the month of February, iPiC Theaters is offering a specialty cocktail and dessert that patrons can order directly to their seats. Named for “50 Shades of Grey,” the “Red Room of Pain” cocktail is created with red rum, red jalapenos, blood orange, homemade ginger beer and red rose petals” (Craig, 2015). A clickable image of a heterosexual white couple reclining on chaise lounges dressed in fancy clothing accompanies the drink description. The couple is isolated in the theater with their high-end food and alcohol. No other patrons are present, even in the few other seats barely visible within the frame. By depicting the theater to be a private upscale living room, the space of iPiC Theaters is depicted as a safe and isolated experience for women fans. With themed experiences, upscale catering, more “refined” cocktails, and safe—perhaps even home-like—spaces, these theaters seem to imagine their consumer as being more in line with an educated, most likely white, and—at the very least—middle-class adult woman. If we put her gender aside, her profile fits quite comfortably with the typical cult aficionado. Corporations, at least, seem to recognize that extending cult consumerism to women is quite profitable. In particular, for FSOG, these products and experiences invite the woman to define herself as sexually curious and adventurous. For example, various products offer the ownership principle and the chance to “become” the characters through consumer purchases that promise personal transformation though branded products and branded experiences, including sex toys, board games, and teddy bears (see Heljakka, 2016). While there is a very large fan-made goods market that thrives in un-official spaces such as Etsy, the flourishing of official merchandise across many types of products attests to the mainstreaming of cult being embraced by producers and the culture industry in general. Some of the branded lines are very closely associated with the film due to Universal’s aggressive merchandising and marketing that aimed to “make a private experience (reading a sexually explicit book) feel comfortable as a communal one” by playing up mainstream acceptance (Barnes, 2015). Thus, consumer products’ potential to transform the consumer is presented as legitimate and effective. For example, the head of FSOG’s makeup department, Victoria Down, designed Sephora’s FSOG line with products ranging in price from $32–$79. Her explanation for Ana’s character development through style implicitly promises the same chance to become sophisticated by purchasing “better” products: “[Ana] starts as an innocent girl, not interested in makeup or clothes, and later becomes a manicured, sophisticated beauty. So the makeup transformed with her” (Keaney, 2015). The elite element of cult consumption has seemingly shifted from its former form of education as taste to the purchasing of higher price point products that are not overtly emblazoned with a logo. The refined purchase is now the marker of authenticity and distinction. What becomes clear here is that cult has become marketable in a mainstream way. The border policing of cult fandom is challenged by niche capitalism where selling identity, transformation, and a sense of self can combine with the older cult notions of distinction and authenticity. Cult’s ownership principle combines with its ideas of identity formation through consuming in ways that are desirable for corporations. The mainstreaming of cult will keep expanding, even though a tension intensifies around cult community. Mainstream cult as strategy While the consumption patterns for FSOG fit easily within cult practices, it is important to remember that one of the ways that paracinema/cult has traditionally defined itself is against the mindless consuming of women. To counter this, FSOG needed to actively foster a space, especially through its marketing, to signal its stance of respect to its audiences. This message is not to just one audience though, as it needs to simultaneously hail multiple audiences at the same time. Any film associated with a non-dominant or non-“universal” appeal will need to hail multiple audiences within its smaller target demographics, which can lead to multi-genre moments and multiplicity. The mass popularity of the Red Room memes signals the success in fostering intertextuality as well as showing evidence of intense participation. They indicate as well how the cross-pollinating fandoms or mocking of FSOG can raise one’s own fandom higher as legitimate. The anti-fans are often just as passionate and participatory as the fans. As Harman and Jones (2013) have argued, the anti-fandom of the Fifty Shades novels that is evident across social media platforms exhibits not only a rejection of the text, but “a close reading of and critical engagement with it” (p. 952). Attempts at gate-keeping and enforcing of taste hierarchies that Harman and Jones identify as being found in both fandom and anti-fandom are performed very publicly and result in anti-fans equally finding their identity through a relationship to a text, even though it happens in an oppositional way. Anti-fandom then can be seen as identity-constituting in the same ways as cult texts more generally. While FSOG does have traditional anti-fans that personally refuse to read or watch the text and actively try to censor the film by pressuring people to not discuss it on various social media platforms, Harman and Jones’ reading of the situation surrounding Fifty Shades asserted that the anti-fan actually finds a range of pleasures in hate-reading (or for my purposes here hate-watching) and actively negotiating the meaning found in Fifty Shades (p. 963). The oppositional model then can actually look very similar to participatory fandom with vidding, macros and memes, and other activities. Indeed, new media allows us to see not only the very public acts of negotiation and pressures exerted by these multiple audiences around mainstream texts, but how this awareness by the industry itself has extended beyond the typical diversifying of audience potential through narrative elements toward the courting of the multiple women audiences, including fans and anti-fans throughout the digital realm. If fan studies have already strongly established the lack of authority of the actual text in terms of its singular nature and genre studies have shown the way that marketing deliberately tries to diversify audience through promotional materials, it should not be a surprise that promotional materials are now deliberately inviting the polysemy, especially when we consider a text like Fifty Shades where the fan and anti-fan positions were already incredibly visible, recognized, and legitimated. The industrial discourse around the release of the film from the director and stars actually repeatedly stressed the complexity of the film, as is evident especially in numerous pre-release interviews and sound-bites. Taylor-Johnson overtly positions her role as offering interventions: her job as director required her to figure out how the film needed to be simultaneously “mainstream but dark, romantic but fucked up” (Walker, 2015). Elsewhere, she speaks of the deliberate decision to “empower” Ana’s character resulting in the film “delivering a very different message” (Denhem, 2015). Universal’s marketing and merchandising decisions to appeal to multiple women audiences were then further supported by interviews that encouraged audiences to see the film through complexity and the competing visions of the material by the women creatives. Horror and intertextuality In addition to the appeals to the fans and anti-fans, more reading frames exist, including and extending beyond its relationship to Twilight (and its chain of intertextuality) due to its original status was online fan fiction.. The negotiating of positions and fan creations or media interpretations are indeed a layer of the pleasures of the text, and the simultaneity in the trailer invites it. The promoting of competing visions for the film in interviews and in industry gossip set up good potential for the audience to recognize intertextuality in the marketing materials. The trailer made deliberate gestures not only to Twilight and the James novel but also to Harron’s American Psycho and RTE/BBC series The Fall with their feminist takes on misogyny and violence. The trailer’s move to violence, horror, and women in danger is signaled aurally with Beyoncé’s rerecorded “Crazy in Love” as a slower and more eerie version. The genre of the trailer is comfortably situated within the realm of horror generally or even the woman in danger subgenre in particular, a subgenre that has a well-documented relationship to horror film advertising from the 1980s, especially for the ways that it represented a false advertising aimed specifically at women audiences at a time when the slasher was faltering at the box office (Nowell, 2013). The trailer signals not only an awareness of various controversies about the film as glamorizing abusive behavior but also a sophisticated and playful critique of the power dynamics of Hollywood romance in general by establishing how easily love turns into dangerous obsession and physical danger. The progression and juxtaposition of images of innocence to those of threat and injury position Ana as being trapped in a house and/or unsure if her husband/lover is trying to kill her, a plot that is typical of the Gothic. The slowed-down music creates an ominous tone that is only intensified by the rhythmic fades to black that are associated more with horror film trailers than dramas or romances. Once the horror motif is recognized, the delay in revealing Christian’s face in the trailer becomes compelling in the way that it parallels the treatment of the monster in horror. Continuing in this horror film tradition, Christian’s face was often not included in the promotional materials for this film given that the early posters had his back to the camera. In the trailer, it is only at the fifty second mark that Dornan’s face is clearly visible. The focus blurs at the other times that his face is in the frame previous to this mark. When he is visible, finally, he warns, “you should stay away from me.” The music slows to a single piano chord before ratcheting into higher vibrating and more rapid tones associated with horror, threat, and terror. Even before the trailer came out, a portion of the audience was primed to see connections to American Psycho. Bret Easton Ellis very actively tweeted his thoughts on Twitter during the build-up to choosing the director and screenwriter. He publicly made appeals and observations to throw his hat into the ring for consideration on FSOG, whilst at the same time promoting the discourse that he could never be hired because women had to be employed across the board to handle accusations of sexism as well as claims to authenticity. Furthermore, FSOG’s references to American Psycho signal an even larger reading frame for audiences in that Harron similarly took a book that was widely thought to be controversial or unfilmable and then directed a subtle satire that transformed the material. Putting aside a discussion of what Ellis was actually trying to accomplish with the novel, its reception positioned it as highly misogynistic and sexist, and Harron’s film was expected to replicate these traits and therefore be unfilmable. However, Harron removed direct representation of many of the murders from the book. Audiences familiar with the novel recognize oblique references (such as stroking a lock of hair or a fleeting glimpse of a head in a fridge), but the only direct visual representations of the multitude of gruesome and misogynistic murders from the book are included at the very end when the secretary (Chloë Sevigny) finds a notebook filled with drawings of the mutilated bodies of women. Numerous fan-created and corporate-created content made the connections invited by the FSOG trailer regarding the film’s relationship to American Psycho and The Fall (see Vice’s “Christian Grey is the Basic Bitch Version of Patrick Bateman” [Kiberd, 2015], Yahoo’s “Fifty Shades Trailer Takeaways: Like, Does Christian Grey Remind You of Patrick Bateman” [2014], and Thrill and Kill’s “FSOG VS American Psycho” [Mick, 2015]). Numerous users on YouTube vidded trailers where the two texts are intercut to create a new hybrid trailer, including 50 Shades of Psycho (Holguin, 2014), Fifty Shades of Grey—American Psycho TRAILER MASH-UP! Together at Last! (smackinthemouth, 2014), and Fifty Shades of Bateman (Bateman, 2015). While the lower popularity of The Fall resulted in fewer vidding examples, just days after the international trailer dropped, Vulture released Fifty Shades of the Fall (McDougal, 2015) where they intercut images from Dornan as a peeping tom and murderer into the existing international trailer. The fact that this approach to re-cutting the trailer happens so quickly on multiple fronts reinforces that the reading frame of horror and sexual threat were assumed to be understood by audiences. With, for example, Vice and Vulture getting in on the fun, it is indeed also evident that the alternate reading frames were not even that oppositional, but rather routine and obvious. The mainstreaming of this intertextuality indicates its relative accessibility and legibility to a wide audience, even as the “more complex” reading is at some level being positioned conceptually as the less available, more refined audience position in the popular journalist takes. If the American Psycho reading frame builds upon director Sam Taylor-Johnson’s role, another touchstone text happens though actor Jamie Dornan who plays Christian Grey. At the point when the trailer was released, information, rumors, and memes about Dornan’s displeasure with being in the film and he and Dakota Johnson’s dislike for one another had not yet began to circulate in a highly visible way. However, the teasing of his presence in the film worked in multiple ways regarding terms of the fan involvement in casting rumors (and the departure of Charlie Hunnam), a large lack of familiarity with this Irish actor for American audiences, and most specifically his role on the television show The Fall on which he plays a serial killer hiding in plain site as a dedicated husband and father in Belfast. In particular, the trailer triggers an audience recognition of his character Paul Spector with a few shots of Christian running in a gray hoodie; the inclusion of these shots in the trailer are basically meaningless in terms of the novel or even in terms of Twilight, so it only becomes legible only in relation to The Fall. Paul Spector is frequently shown running in a hoodie, and this activity is part and parcel of his menace and misogyny because he can find victims while traversing public spaces anonymously. He is a quite attractive white man in a hoodie, and this image is both not-threatening and perhaps enticing, which enables unsuspecting women to trust him. His identity markers can at worst make him invisible or, at best, as with Christian, make him quite desirable and the object of fantasy. FSOG directly references The Fall with an intertextual joke about Christian being a serial killer in a longer scene in the film. When Ana is working at the hardware store, she is called out to help a customer. She jumps and gasps in surprise (or fear) as she turns a corner because Christian is already standing centered in frame. Christian enters and asks for help in finding cable ties, masking tape, rope, which prompts Ana to observe, “You’re the complete serial killer.” His knowing smile and response, “Not today,” functions as a clear wink to the audience. In fact, The Fall’s second season, which premiered separately in Ireland and the United Kingdom in the second week of November 2014 (after the release of the FSOG trailer but before the release of the film), is strikingly similar with its inclusion of the sexual obsession of a teen virgin with the older Paul Spector, a relationship that also included bondage but with a full awareness on the part of the audience and the young female character of the danger involved in this serial killer’s need to objectify and dismember independent women. Even though Paul Spector does not harm the teenager that he engages in S&M with, the show establishes her naïve trust in him as well as his violence in all of his other relationships with women. The direct correlation here invites consideration of Christian Grey’s violence to women other than Ana. The chain of intertextuality extends both ways, then, with the idea that The Fall is acknowledging too that FSOG both built on Paul Spector but also that the audience should recognize that there is something dangerous and concerning going on within the film. Gossip, female knowledge, and reading frames The audience's manifold pleasures were encouraged to develop and become refined in various spaces online. In the time after the trailer dropped, many websites hailed audiences to watch the film in ways that encouraged hate watching and humor. While a straightforward enjoyment of the film may still have been treated with disdain, mockery, and shame, the other reading modes were embraced, especially in terms of gossip. A popular genre of this type of online article breaks down whether Dornan and Johnson despise each other by using circulating pictures and interview clips or Behind the Scenes footage to make the claim that the inscribed and “obvious” meaning of the text is nowhere near telling the true story. While at times quotations are used, more frequently images are studied and embedded to appeal to a question of emotional intelligence on the part of the female viewer, the fans, and the anti-fans. The “stars hate each other” articles diminished around the time of the second film’s release because both sequels in the trilogy were filmed simultaneously, so there was no longer a threat of the actors leaving the franchise. That space instead filled initially with increased gossip surrounding tensions between James and Taylor-Johnson until the time when director Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Marshall were removed from the sequels. The attention on the stars of the film not liking one another appeals to a sense of emotional intelligence and interest in gossip as feminine circulating knowledge, but this can equally be understood as a type of the deep “intermedia” knowledge of production culture that is so often cited in cult criticism (Eco, 2008, p. 75). The fights, however, between the writer and director functioned differently, and in fact signaled the closing of the open text qualities that I have been addressing throughout. When James enforced her boundaries back upon the text, she did so through invoking a question of authority and authenticity by insisting that she herself and her husband were the only people who could translate the novel to the screen. Authorial intent is reasserted here, and the industry articles address this very much through the question of control. The frequent reporting of the acrimony on-set and the anger, backlash, and disappointment experienced by Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Marcel in the weeks before and after theatrical release should, in fact, solidify FSOG as a “stone-cold cult classic” given how it includes the typical cult requirement of “a chaotic production process” (McCulloch, 2016, p. 13). Yet, it doesn’t. The openness of this text serves to highlight the various possibilities and competing ideologies of mainstream cult that happen in a gendered media object. Even when the media acknowledges the multiple pleasures of audiences of a text, those audiences are hierarchized with the anti-fan receiving the accolades that the fan does not. Transforming a text and imbuing texts with political meaning are aligned to intellect and distinction, but this move still depends on the uncritical fan to define itself against. If the first film in the franchise is a great example of how the new cult object can be mainstream and feminine in focus, this tendency still promotes certain types of engagement that reject feminine pleasure. Thus, the move to engaging fully with feminine pleasure that we can start to see with an embrace of simultaneity and multiple points of view still operates on a legitimating discourse that relies on misogynistic hierarchy and the uncritical feminine consumption as the bad object even if or when we can carve out a space within the cult canon for feminine objects. 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TI - The Mainstream Cult of Fifty Shades of Grey: Hailing Multiple Women Audiences
JO - Communication, Culture & Critique
DO - 10.1093/ccc/tcz017
DA - 2019-06-02
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-mainstream-cult-of-fifty-shades-of-grey-hailing-multiple-women-JjmD0FQDGk
SP - 213
VL - 12
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -