Some thoughts on Fifty Shades of Grey

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Another weekend, another smash-hit movie that various guardians of culture have decided that no one should like because it’s “bad” — that is, wrong.

Last Tuesday, the reviews for Fifty Shades of Grey were at 76% “Fresh” at Rotten Tomatoes. It’s now Sunday and that percentage has dropped an astonishing 50 percentage points. What happened between Tuesday and Sunday? I have no idea, besides “more critics saw the movie,” but I get the feeling that the early reviews saw the movie for what it is, and the later ones felt a need to conform to a critical “consensus.” The consensus, in this case, is that a movie like Fifty Shades of Grey is “bad for us.” Most of the bad reviews I’ve read tell me nothing about the movie and everything about the reviewer. They worry that the movie is bad for women, bad for romance, bad for sex. They say that the movie doesn’t represent sex as they understand it, doesn’t represent their ideal of love, doesn’t represent their high-minded notions of what culture should represent. They sniff in disdain about the gutter origins of the project (it began as Twilight fan fiction), as though that had anything to do with its quality as a movie.

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