50 Shades vs European Cinema

Since everyone seems to be having a cow about this stupid new movie; I thought that I might as well put their worries into perspective a little bit. I won't actually talk all that much about the movie or book "50 Shades of Grey" as everyone knows it for what it is. I will, of course, take a look at my experience with European cinema.

I will begin with the obvious, nudity is far more common but, for some reason, sex isn't. Of the recent few European movies that I have seen (Ivan's Childhood, 1612, C.K. Dezerterzy, With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, and Solaris) all of them have had nudity in one form or another, but only one of them had sex (but no nudity during). In complete contrast, most American films have plenty of sex but no nudity to speak of. In order to fully examine the difference, I will recount the use from a few of these movies and then look at 50 Shades among some other movies.

I'll begin with Solaris: This film, by Anderi Tarkovsky, is the most emotionally distressing movie that I have ever seen. The purpose of the film was to explore the concept of 'living loss'. The protagonist, who was a psychologist, traveled to a space station to investigate anomalous activity. He was shocked to find that the inhabitants have all had loved ones, who had died, come back. The scientists believed that they were diplomats from the planet Solaris (the planet that the station was orbiting). The protagonist himself found his wife, who had killed herself, alive. The 'diplomats' assumed the personality traits of their images. The protagonist's 'diplomat,' aware of the distress that she caused him, tried to kill herself. This is where the nudity comes in. She tried to drink liquid nitrogen and was flopping about on the metal floor. The nudity was purely used as shock factor. My own gut was wrenching at the sight of this event. So was that of the protagonist. To add to this horror, they discover that these 'diplomats' are immortal. The entire event was shown as needless suffering while the nudity amplified the shocking reality of what the characters faced. The use of nudity added, in a constructive way, a gut-wrenching sense of shock to the movie.                                    

In both Ivan's Childhood and With Fire and Sword, the nudity was simply bathing. This brings about another point unto itself. The Europeans are less prudish than we are. In these scenes, the characters were bathing, there was nothing sexual about it. Often times, I hear complaints about characters not reloading their weapons, sleeping, using the bathroom, eating, etc. Bathing, as it should be to us, is a normal activity and is used by these directors to convey realism. In the case of both of these movies: Ivan's Childhood being a dirty, grimy story of dirt and mud on the eastern front of WW2 and With Fire and Sword being a historically accurate tale of cossack rebellion in similar conditions, bathing is important. Nudity is a part of bathing. Again, in European cinema, nudity is used to convey a sense of realism. It is not used to coax teenagers and immature adults to flood into theaters. Nor is it used for mass-pornorgraphy, which 50 Shades is often being compared to.

Despite my wishes, not all European films use nudity for significant reasons. C.K. Dezerterzy (Deserters), for example, was a war comedy that poked fun at the rabble once known as the Austro-Hungarian Army. This movie was utterly hilarious. It did, however, use nudity as a tool of comedy. I did not think it was funny, but it tried. The group of disgruntled, multi-ethnic deserters, in their desperate search for money, comes upon a bathhouse. You can probably guess where this is going. It turned out that both halves of the bathhouse were guilty of taking pictures of one another, and these guys just had to get in on it. I won't elaborate further, but I can say that this was sexual in nature. It wasn't, however, to the point of mass-marketed pornography. This movie is about the equivalent of 21-Jump Street but with far less language. In addition, it contains less sexual references in general. I would call this movie more clean than a good share of american comedies, if you can get past one scene, of course.

Having examined a few of these movies, there is something to say about American cinema in constrast. Sex is everywhere. Specifically, sex is in trailers. Sex is a part of marketing. Sex is, in one way, shape, or form, in almost every American movie. 50 Shades, being an entire movie about what are, otherwise, two minute scenes should be unsurprising. There, of course, is the argument about the nature of the relationship between the characters.This, too, should be unsurprising given that relationships between partners in other movies are equally non-existent. It is always there for no reason. Sex has lost its status as taboo. Nudity, by contrast, has not. I find it a shame that these European masterminds can use the human body as an effective, compelling addition that makes their movies better, and we can't use sex for anything other than mass marketing. At the same time, our society and filmmakers ignore what can be used to create brilliant scenes. The outrage over 50 Shades, to me, is incredibly artificial. This is because it is only the tangible, long-term result of what filmmakers have been doing for fifteen years. As for the book, we are only angry because it has broken into the mainstream. Books like 50 Shades have existed since books became widely-available. I, for one, can only hope that our filmmakers can learn from their European counterparts and make nudity and sex something significant that adds to the film. As it stands in American film, sex might as well not happen because the movie would end the same way. Nothing changes. Sex, as used in Game of Thrones, for instance, is a leap in the correct direction, simply because sex actually matters. As far as 50 Shades goes, quit whining, we know its porn. Our society asked for it, after all.