After a prolonged tease that only made you want it more, the trailer for Fifty Shades Of Grey is here, thrusting itself into your eyes and ears without even asking whether you’re ready. Argh! you cry, but you keep any further protests to yourself, because you can see it all looks very expensive—and you can forgive all manner of selfishness and forcible entries when it’s surrounded by expensive things.
So you bite down and press on, through the scenes of Dakota Johnson’s Anastasia being ashamed of how frumpy and boring she is—So brunette! So ponytailed! So unable to look up in elevators!—only to have Jamie Dornan’s Christian Grey see right through to the beautiful daughter of two movie stars who deserves to be handcuffed to a wall that she is. The sense that you, too, could be handcuffed to a wall by a rich man who also sees the potential contractually obligated sex toy in you, places itself deep inside. Oh! You’re astonished at the size of its apparent marketability.
All the while, Beyoncé sings a torturously slow version of her own hit ballad “Crazy In Love,” which she lent to the movie adaptation of a woman’s erotic Twilight fan-fiction that was originally published under the Internet handle “Snowqueen’s Icedragon.” Such are the mutually beneficial heights that can be achieved when a person allows themselves to be blindfolded to reality and focus solely on the money. Holy crap.