Religion, Faith, and Spirituality : Fifty Shades Darker

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The representation in books, magazines, photographs, films, and other media of scenes of sexual behavior that are erotic or lewd and are designed to arouse sexual interest.

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Words mean whatever the user wants them to mean.

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they wouldn't be incorrect in doing so.

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since changing definitions

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What you're describing (choosing new words for old objects) is not what happened here, so it's hardly a relevant analogy. What happened here was a deviation from common usage in order to classify an object under an old label.

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How is he changing a definition?

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Unless you think pornography is typically defined as "anything that contains nudity (or depicts sex)," then he's most certainly trying to change the definition

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However, the more general point underlying all the semantic stuff is the fact that 50 Shades is distinctly different than works everyone would label as porn like Deep Throat, and labeling 50 Shades as porn doesn't make it any more similar to those films.

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That couldn't be more of a non-answer.

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Unless you think pornography is typically defined as "anything that contains nudity (or depicts sex)," then he's most certainly trying to change the definition

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You ask how he's changing the definition, and I point out how is definition is not the usual one what would you call what he's doing?

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Simply giving another definition.

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That is pretty much what you sound like.

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I don't think his is even "a definition" as in "one you would find in any dictionary" or as in "one that's commonly used."

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I would say that dictionaries are more documents of usage rather than dictators of meaning, but even in the former sense they're good at giving an idea of what most people mean when using a word

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I agree, but do we not have a responsibility to use the common usage to make communication easier?

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We can still agree on how we should use words while at the same time recognising that if somebody were to start calling dogs hotdogs and cats chomp chomps they wouldn't be incorrect in doing so.

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From a Christian perspective there is something wrong with it and you knew that's what I meant.

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It is not enough that I succeed. Everyone else must fail.

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It is not enough that I succeed. Everyone else must fail.

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If it contains nudity then it is porn. From a Christian perspective there is something wrong with it and you knew that's what I meant.

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It is not enough that I succeed. Everyone else must fail.

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If it contains nudity then it is porn. From a Christian perspective there is something wrong with it and you knew that's what I meant.

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What an incredibly, indelibly idiotic movie, wrote Peter Travers. Its a beast of roaring stupidity that devours everything in its path, including the veteran filmmaker.

The film sees Dakota Johnson once again playing the bookish, virginal Anastasia Steele and Jamie Dornan portraying Christian the tortured multimillionaire who leads her astray, but a dispute over creative control led to the departure of Sam Taylor-Wood, who directed Fifty Shades of Grey, and Kelly Marcel who wrote the script. This time the screenplay was penned by EL Jamess husband, Niall Leonard, while James Foley, known for films such as Glengarry Glen Ross, took over as director.

According to the Guardian, it is not a change that proved successful. The only thing aroused by this headache of a movie is a desire to see Sam Taylor-Johnson back at the reins, said Catherine Shoard in her one-star review.

She also lamented the unadventurous way the film grappled with the sexual content, which is supposed to fuel the films drama and was central to the book, selling million of copies.

Shoard found the scenes steamy as a greasy spoon and almost as erotic. Fifty Shadess chief way of proving how dirty it is seems to be making its stars take endless showers which inevitably leads to more sex, and so a terrible cycle of shagging and washing.

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I hated the first one so I will probably hate this one.

Please tell me you had a date, otherwise you are probably a demographic of one in regards to this movie.

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To be clear, that's OK. I made that sound more insulting than I meant so apologies.

I tend to see movies by myself on off days and I did not see this with my wife when it was on HBO.

However, I'm not getting the movie's appeal to you.

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The appeal is that the movie is trashy fun. It is entertaining, in a guilty pleasure sort of way.

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Just FYI, I think there's far better erotic films out there, especially if you're willing to go foreign. Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses is the gold standard, but beyond that I even think stuff like Jaeckin's Emmanuelle, Story of O, and Brass's The Key are far better. I already mentioned 9 1/2 Weeks, and there's also Last Tango in Paris, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, Blue is the Warmest Color, Sex and Lucia, The Wayward Cloud, etc.

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I felt In the Realm of the Senses need more character development and a better overall storyline.

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The debate between art versus pornwhere they meet, where they clash, how they can be mated and how they repel each otheris probably not as ancient a concept as we might think. There was certainly a time when sex and erotica were as natural to art as birds are to trees. The ancient Greeks, for instance, had no concept of pornography; explicit sexual art is pervasive in their culture and is even commonly found on their ceramics. Theres little doubt that Ovids Amores, or even the Kama Sutra, is as powerful as literature as it is erotica. One can go much further back to the Paleolithic and Mesolithic cave drawings and Venus figurines, which show a fascinating early conception of eroticism as abstract forms.

Japan alone has a rich erotic art heritage that can be found in their earliest mythology, which was later developed into the Shinto system of spirituality. Japanese erotic art especially flourished during the Edo period and was especially prolific in Shunga, or visual erotic art usually practiced in the woodblock form. Shunga literally means picture of spring, and it reflects both the Japanese euphemism of spring for sex as well as the positive attitude towards the spiritual, life-giving aspect of sex. In the medium, artists like Kitagawa Utamaro and Suzuki Harunobu are considered master innovators, with the former even having a profound influence on the impressionists. Outside of art, prostitution was legal in Japan for many years, and Japans pleasure houses of the Shogunate and later eras were subject to an elaborate hierarchy, populated mostly by the wealthy, upper class.

After World War II things changed, and prostitution and hardcore pornography became illegal. However, this lead to the birth and proliferation of Japanese pink (erotic) films which were produced, especially, by two major studios, Nikkatsu and Shochiku. These films were similar to exploitation films in the US and were never intended for mainstream release, though dedicated theaters for Pink films prospered. Prior to all of this was the true life story of Sada Abe, a woman who was arrested and convicted for erotically asphyxiating her husband, Kichizo Ishida, severing his penis and testicles and taking them with her. Abe, however, became a minor legend in Japan, and she received a great deal of sympathy from the public.

If you combine Japans history of erotic art with its contemporary view circa-1975, Japans sociopolitical context post-35, the legend of Sada Abe and Nagisa shima, a renegade director known for being antithetical and even hostilely controversial to Japanese nationalism and mainstream views, one will have the necessary background for approaching In the Realm of the Senses. Such a thorough sociocultural historical context is rarely needed to approach most films, but for one this controversial and provocative, one that breaks taboos both within its own time and, perhaps, even more so today, its helpful to analyze it with an eye thats both wider and deeper. Its helpful because looking at In the Realm of the Senses and only seeing explicit, pornographic sex is akin to looking at Apocalypse Now and only seeing explicit, gratuitous war.

The film stars the unknown Eiko Matsuda as Sada Abe and the well-known (at the time) Tatsuya Fuji as her lover, Kichizo Kichi Ishida. Kichida owns a hotel where Sada, a former prostitute, works. Kichi is a virile man whos known for having sex with his wife every day before leaving for work, as well as flirting with the women at his hotel. Sada is taken with him from the first moment she sees him, and its not long before the two become lovers. But attraction soon turns to obsession as the two move into their own hotel and spend days, weeks and months alone with each other indulging in sex at the expense of outside life. But Sada proves to be insatiable, and even Kichi finds himself unable to keep up with her sexual appetite. Soon their relationship turns dangerous as the two begin to commingle the threat of death and pain with the pleasure of sex.

In a famous essay by shima on experimental pornography, he stated:

The concept of obscenity is tested when we dare to look at something that we desire to see but have forbidden ourselves to look at. When we feel that everything has been revealed, obscenity disappears and there is a certain liberation. When that which one had wanted to see isnt sufficiently revealed, however, the taboo remains, the feeling of obscenity stays, and an even greater obscenity comes into being. Pornographic films are thus a testing ground for obscenity, and the benefits of pornography are clear. Pornographic cinema should be authorized, immediately and completely. Only thus can obscenity be rendered essentially meaningless.

This excerpt alone reveals shimas intellectual take on a taboo subject, but his theory is put to practice in the film: from the opening moments there is no doubt that shima does not seek to hide or titillate with sex. If anything, the films explicitness desexualizes by demystifying sex, and its only once shima crashes through that barrier that he can explore the films aesthetic and intellectual themes through sex.

On the aesthetic front, shima is undoubtedly drawing on Japans history of erotic art. His frames employ colors and shapes abstractly, frequently taking on the geometric qualities of an Ozu film. Like an Ozu film, Senses is also deceptively simple; shima frequently employs spare frames in which its few subjects stand out against backgrounds of vivid colors and decorative shapes like candles. Senses also has a distinct, almost Hitchcockian, element to its art design that utilizes unnatural light sources and color for dramatic effect. The spaces themselves seem to emphasize the cloistered fantasy-reality which the characters inhabit. The characters frequently freeze as if caught in an Utamaro woodblock. The films lack of movement, overall, is a testament to its eschewal of pornography; in pornography bodies connect and move to a mechanical rhythm, while in In the Realm of the Senses they writhe to a psychological and physical obsession.

That sense of movement can be related to the films sociological themes, perhaps most potently in the scene where Kichi encounters a group of Japanese military marching proudly down the road being cheered by onlookers as he symbolically marches in the opposite direction. It could be said that shima gets a bit too heavy-handed with the sociopolitical message here, but the subtlety of its expression elsewhere saves him. Even in that scene, the mechanical marching of the rhythm seems to echo the mechanical movement of pornography, and, indeed, shima does seem to stress a certain ironic similarity. If sex and eroticism is cut-off from mainstream Japan, which itself is taking pride in militaristic nationalism, then that separation may prove destructive for both the state and its individuals.

This last point is echoed both on the personal and the sociological level; as Japan is notorious for being an island cut off both literally (geographically) and metaphorically (socially/culturally) from the rest of the world, so Sada and Kichi are sequestered from reality themselves. Their artificially confining physical spaces not only echo their psychological severance from reality into a world of personal fantasy and pleasure, but echo Japans self-imposed isolation from the world. But Japan, especially during this period, was also a land of group-think, collectivist nationalism, and the same collectivism that has expelled pornography and sex from the mainstream has expelled shima himself, who is seeking to violently mesh them back together in a work of art that potently portrays their separation.

All of this may be nothing but an empty exercise in art-for-arts sake or form, but even on a narrative level, there is a haunting darkness to shimas depiction of Abe and Kichis sexual relationship paralleled by Abes dream fantasies, which become more abstract, but perhaps more telling, as the film wears on. shimas depiction of the fantasies takes on an almost Bunuelian surrealist quality, rarely using symbols to signify the shift in realities, likely because there is little separation between Abes disturbed psyche and the reality which the film has conjured for her and Kichi. Likewise, the sex becomes more fetishistic, more perverse, more experimental, but equally more dangerous. But unlike in pornography or sexploitation, shima knits these acts with a palpable undercurrent of unease; an almost nightmarish journey into depravity and indulgence.

shima also inventively employs the senses of the films title, metamorphosing sight, sound, smell, taste and touch through the distorted lens of sexual obsession. Eyes see luminous skin but also dismemberment; ears capture a lovers moan but also inexplicable noises; nostrils inspire perfume but also the stench of death and sexual saturation; mouths will taste food dipped in love juices, but also the cold edge of a knife while the flesh reaches not only orgasmic climaxes, but deathly ones in which the two are joined.

In a sense, shimas intent to meld mainstream Japanese art and pornography together clashes with Japans separation of the two, as well as the films depiction of that separation. The result is a film thats as much about the impossibility of a co-existing marriage between pornography and art, pornographic art and society, and the individual and society as it is an attempt to marry these things in the context of the film. But its also a fascinating artistic experiment precisely because it will separate those who cant separate form and context from content. If the sex blinds one to the films deeper underpinnings and broader significance then it reveals the type of obdurate censorship that insists that sex and art cant co-exist. For those who are able (and willing) to look deeper it reveals a willingness to find an almost spiritual, Buddhist oneness with all things in nature, and in art.

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Eyes Wide Shut is better than people give it credit for.

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Isn't it a movie for chicks?


I wouldn't watch this rubbish if you paid me.

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