Downton Abbey jumps the shark

Downton Abbey's season 3 premiere: Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville, foreground) continues to do dopey things, his mother-in-law, Martha Levinson (Shirley MacLaine) is fizzle and a gasbag, and viewers are reminded of familiar Downton truisms: “Downton’s in peril. Wills are complicated. Servants are sickly. Canadians are trouble.”

Photograph by: Carnival Film & Television Limited 2012 for Masterpiece-PBS

Spoiler alert! Contains Downton plot twists: If you haven’t yet seen the opening episode of Season 3 (or, for that matter, Seasons 1 or 2) and plan to, you might want to hold off on reading this article. It contains some of the notable developments in the plots of the series.
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I’d been psyched for months by the promise of the newest season of Downton Abbey, which the New York Times’s Alessandra Stanley recently called the Fifty Shades of Grey of its ilk: “soft-core pornography, but fixated on breeding and heritage rather than kinky sex.”

But I was hugely disappointed by the two-hour series opener the other night, which drew the Crawley family — and voyeurs like us along for the ride — to new depths of fatuousness.

In the interregnum prior to the start of Season 3, hubby and I took the opportunity to rescreen Seasons 1 and 2. I’d been struck by writer Julian Fellowes’s apparent initial intention to make Lord Grantham, Robert Crawley (played by Hugh Bonneville), the heart of the series. The opening credits have him striding majestically through the grounds, golden lab at his side. But it wasn’t long before daughter Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), whose young Turkish lover shockingly expires in her bedchamber (in most morality plays, death is what happens to the girl seduced, not the rake) and the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith, who makes the most of the immortal line “No Englishman would dream of dying in someone else’s house — especially somebody they didn’t even know”) began to steal the show from him, and run with it. Lord Grantham becomes sadly befuddled — for example, imagining that he will see active duty in France during the First World War.

But this year’s offering is a contraption so creaky with ersatz conflict that it reminds me of Oz the Great and Terrible at the moment Dorothy discovers that behind the curtain is an ordinary little man.

Opening with the revelation of Lord Grantham’s utter and advised-against squandering of the family’s fortune in Canada — as June Thomas says on Slate, “they sure do return to the same themes over and over: Downton’s in peril. Wills are complicated. Servants are sickly. Canadians are trouble” — the episode continues at breakneck pace to the wedding of Mary and Matthew — though skipping completely what true Fifty Shades fans would prefer to have seen: the honeymoon. But first — oh, irony — it picks up their latest complication: the father of the late Lavinia, Matthew’s one-time fiancée, has died and Matthew is third in line to inherit his huge fortune.

While the issue of whether the two men before him as inheritors are alive or dead is needlessly spun out, Matthew — looking a tad overfed and unctuous, proving himself a fitting heir to the doltish current lord — announces his resolution to give away the money should it come his way, because taking it would constitute a form of theft. He arrives at this weird notion through tortured guilty logic: Lord Reginald Swire could only have intended the money to come to Matthew because he was the great love of Lavinia’s life, but Matthew betrayed that love, sending Lavinia to an early, broken-hearted death by way of the Spanish flu.

It makes Harlequin romances appear deep.

Lady Mary castigates Matthew with the deadliest of accusations. In refusing Swire’s bequest, in his willingness to allow, dare one say it, Downton to be lost, Matthew is, she charges, betraying that he is “not on our side.”

Seriously? This is the complication on which Fellowes seeks to hang the season?

It was the moment that Downton Abbey, despite its high production values and effervescent cast, finally jumped the shark.

And it was only downhill from there.

Shirley MacLaine as Martha Levinson in Downton Abbey.

Photograph by: Image courtesy , Nick Briggs

Shirley MacLaine, looking like she might have had a tad too much plastic surgery, was a total fizzle, her Martha Levinson (mother of the U.S.-born Cora, Lady Grantham) little more than a gasbag of accented clichés.

I had heard the rumours that Dan Stevens (Matthew) would not appear in future seasons of Downton, and this flop of a premiere was just the impetus I needed to root through the Internet to discover what happens to his character. All the while, I was imagining all the time I might save on Sunday evenings by not having to watch the rest of the series.

As if. Like Fifty Shades of Grey, Downton Abbey has become, most assuredly, one more in a long line of life’s guilty pleasures.

        Published January 10th, 2013 in The Montreal Gazette (with fewer spoilers!)

Of book clubs and Fifty Shades of Grey: readers are horses and EL James holds the reins

It happened again the other night, this time at book club meeting. The book was pretty wonderful, but I was there as much to see my friends as to discuss the book (the way I imagine most book clubs function), and we were also celebrating the hostess’s having been given the green light to go back to work after a year off to deal with round two of breast cancer. So a lovely prosecco was the preferred initial libation, and it lubricated our group in a most satisfactory way.

The book under discussion that evening was Half of a yellow sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and everyone enjoyed it immensely. Here are some review snippets from http://www.halfofayellowsun.com:

"We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie knows what is at stake, and what to do about it. She is fearless, or she would not have taken on the intimidating horror of Nigeria's civil war. Adichie came almost fully made."
— Chinua Achebe

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"Vividly written, thrumming with life, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun is a remarkable novel. In its compassionate intelligence, as in its capacity for intimate portraiture, this novel is a worthy successor to such twentieth-century classics as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River."
— Joyce Carol Oates

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Author Chimamanda Adichie. Watch her TED talk here

“At once historical and eerily current, Half of a Yellow Sun takes place in the forests of southeastern Nigeria 40 years ago, and honors the memory of a war largely forgotten. Adichie’s prose thrums with life. Like Nadine Gordimer, Adichie position[s] her characters at crossroads where public and private allegiances threaten to collide. Half of a Yellow Sun [has] an empathetic tone that never succumbs to simplifying impulses, heroic or demonic . . . . Reaching deep, [it] speaks through history to our war-racked age not through abstract analogy but through the energy of vibrant detail, [and] a mastery of small things.”

—Rob Nixon, The New York Times Book Review

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“Instantly enthralling . . . Vivid . . . Adichie weaves [her] characters into a finely wrought, inescapable web. The book sustains an intimate focus and an epic backdrop. Half of a Yellow Sun is not a conventional war story any more than is A Farewell to Arms or For Whom the Bell Tolls . . . . Powerful.”
—Janet Maslin, The New York Times

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Meanwhile, back at the book club...

I’d have to say that my "women of the book club" are well-educated, professionals (mostly), well-read, and appreciate historical fiction as an easier-to-digest entree into politics, war, and social events that we know, sadly, that we haven’t heard enough about. We were into Indian work a few years back; now it’s more about Africa (we read Little Bee last year). The warm writing, the way that the author immerses us in worlds so different from our own and yet populates them with characters we can relate to…those are the gifts we seek in the fiction we read.

But somehow, as often happens when women meet to talk about books these days, the subject of Fifty Shades of Grey came up. I think it was when we moved to considering what we might like to read next, what we’d been reading recently…and one of our number (also recently treated for breast cancer—it’s a function of age, I know, but at some point, who can help not starting to view her own body as a traitorous walking time bomb?) segued into a book she tried but absolutely could NOT stand…and it was Fifty Shades of Grey.

Let’s see: it was poorly written, poorly plotted, the sex scenes weren’t in the least a turn on…and on and on it went. And so, off I went, once again defending it. It’s a fairy tale, a classic romance, I began. “The heroine is graduating university, she’s 23, and a virgin. Not only is she a virgin, she’s never even kissed a man.”

There was some general squawking: “Twenty-three and never even kissed anyone? In this day and age? Gimme a break…”

Yes, it’s a fairy tale. But, frankly, did anyone ever promise it was anything else?

So what makes Fifty Shades of Grey a compelling story, so much that 10 million American women bought it over six weeks earlier this year?

Well, here’s the way I tried, once again, to explain it:

--obviously, it’s partly the sex. But I don’t think it’s the BDSM as much as it is, to me, the notion of the forbidden, the envelope-pushing. How far from your personal comfort zone would you be willing to go to please your beloved? That, to me, is one of the essential hooks of the story, and EL James plays it like a pro.

--then, there’s the motherhood angle. Christian Grey is a damaged child. His backstory is ladled out in dribs and drabs. That is the other humungous hook: the damaged little boy that our heroine (us, in proxy) must connect with, and heal. Will she do it? Well, just in case we hadn’t noticed, it’s a friggin' romance (not to mention a romance about friggin')—which means HEA (happily ever after) is de rigueur.

--but here's the rub: everyone who hasn't read the book thinks it's Kate who is tasked with deciding how far she's willing to go to please her beloved. But those of us who actually READ the book(s) know that it's really Christian, after a decade of his depraved Dominant existence, who must decide if he's willing to give up his addiction to BDSM sex for the love of a good woman (who loves Austen novels, let us not forget, ergo a woman of quality…just like us. Women who wouldn’t be caught dead reading such laughably written smut…say what?). Again, the classic swoon-worthy love conquering all.

And that, perhaps, is the pleasure of reading something that, as a writer, I can recognize as derivative on so many levels. The dialogue, holy cow, is ludicrous. Ditto the star struck descriptions of Porsches and luxury villas, not to mention billionaire twenty-eight-year-olds. And the third act is so hokily ludicrous even I can't believe I read it (not to mention paid for it!).

Still and all, I enjoyed them.

In the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, readers are horses, and EL James rides us bareback, with sex and motherhood as the reigns. She pulls us this way and that as we gallop wildly along the bridlepath (bridalpath?). The thing is, the rider is really at the mercy of the horse, who is blind to this truth, or simply accepts it, deriving pleasure in serving her master.

Assuming the master, like EL James, knows just what she’s doing. And exactly where she’s taking us.

What women want or 'Fifty Shades' to please your lover (Part One)

After a few action-packed high-culture days in Toronto at the Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs biannual conference, I arrived back in Montreal to familiar familial bedlam, co-starring my favourite swisster-in-law and the youngest of her brood, twin two-year-olds, gorgeous and--oh so luckily for all concerned, not mine--at a Mother’s Day barbeque.

Perhaps that’s why I felt no guilt on choosing Fifty Shades of Grey as my next great gulp of prose for ingestion, selected for its “tastes good” rather than “good for you” value.

I was choosing for fun,

I was choosing for play,

I was rationalizing that, to stay in touch with readerland,

I simply must read Fifty Shades of Grey.

Also, I’d given it to the hubster 10 days or so earlier; far as I was concerned, I’d already gotten my money’s worth, even before cracking its spine.

The book’s, I mean.

A couple of weeks back, the New York Times reported that over 10 million copies of the Fifty Shades trilogy had been sold in the USA in the preceding month and a half.

YIKES!

There’s something in these books, like the Twilight series that seeded them, that touches that WWW sweet spot.

Not the World Wide Web, but What Women Want. And if we have any respect for women at all—and we do!—aren’t we are obligated, honour-bound, in fact--to try to figure out what, exactly, is going on here?

At least, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Am I embarrassed or ashamed to admit I enjoyed the first two novels, number one especially? Would I be telling the world if I was?

Let me put it this way: does it make sense to arbitrarily restrict one’s dietary consumption to caviar, watercress sandwiches, and champagne? Wouldn’t that be a bit…limiting? Some days, I might hanker for filet mignon, other times a greasy hamburger. Doesn’t mean I don’t know that meat isn’t—necessarily—good for me, or that a steady diet of it alone might make me ill.

Well, filet mignon it’s not: Fifty Shades of Grey is the literary equivalent of the popcorn and cotton candy diet, this year’s Thelma & Louise and Twilight, all rolled up and…er, bound together. Another chance for the moralizers among us to throw up their hands in horror at The Turn Today’s Woman has taken, for the gatekeepers of Serious Fiction to turn up their noses at our lousy choices. Another chance for the snooterati to patronize us, the women who make their livings for them. Because the vast majority of books are purchased and read by women. And yet many of our fictional tastes are considered slightly…malodorous.

FSoG is only marginally about BDSM. In essence, it’s an old-fashioned love story, with a few licks of the switch thrown in. The hero—Christian Grey--is brilliant, handsome, young, and rich beyond the dreams of avarice. He flies helicopters, sails, owns multiple homes, cars, and businesses. But he is also hugely flawed—abused and neglected as a child—and he re-enacts this damage in the boudoir. He meets Anastasia Steele, the girl-of-the-dreams-he-hardly-knew-he-had, by accident: Ana’s roommate, Kate, is scheduled to interview Grey for the university paper, but Kate comes down with the flu and Ana steps up to the plate for her friend.

Vintage romance. Almost, dare I say it, Shakespearian.

Grey is mesmerized (shades of Twilight) and hopes to entice Ana into becoming his BDSM submissive. Ana, quickly (but luckily, not too quickly!) seduced, is ready to sign up for a three month contract as a submissive to Grey’s Dominant.

Until she faces the fact that, delightful as all this sex is, she wants…More.

Of course, Grey also falls for Ana, and much of the first two books are about establishing their relationship, and working out the…er, kinks.

But eventually, Grey is ready to abandon all his “kinky fuckery,” as they take to calling it. Until Ana tells him, essentially, not so fast, buster.

Having read the first two books of the trilogy, let me break it down for you: Fifty Shades of Grey is all about erotic tension, the threat of discipline and punishment more than the actual acts themselves. Like all romance, it’s most potently about the yearning, with the usual massive dollops of needless complication thrown in.

It is also clearly based on Twilight, the residue of which remains in repeated corny references to blood—throbbing, pulsing, singing through veins, heating up, etc. Not to mention the endless self-analysis, which can get old pretty quick. At least in James’ version, the reader is frequently distracted from the “whatever shall I dos?” by sex, much of it “vanilla,” in the characters’ words.

FSoG is a sometimes hilarious melange, an homage to the work of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum¹, Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight series ², and Helen Fields’ Bridget Jones Diary³.

It’s also often incredibly shallow and occasionally dumbfounding to this long-married middle-aged woman (what is she on about with all this talk of the way Grey’s jeans hang from his hips?? If anyone out there has half a clue, would they please enlighten me? Please send pictures!)

As well as Twilight, I kept thinking Taming of the Shrew, though it’s a good long while since I’ve seen or read the Shakespeare. There is a Katherine in FSoG, but she isn’t the heroine. Besides, Ana isn’t a shrew. A beautiful twenty-two year old virgin, in this day and age, who not only has never had sex, but has never even held hands with a man before? Most surprising of all perhaps, in this Apple-heavy escapade, is her lack of a laptop. But perhaps even the oft-repeated Apple references are symbolic rather than product placement.

 

Or maybe not. (Maybe they're just symbolic of Twilight, come to think of it!)

If I had to pick a fairy tale that FSoG most resembles, I’d choose Beauty and the Beast. And what a mouth-wateringly lovely Beast he is, if you’re into the young, drop dead gorgeous, self-made millionaire type, trying simultaneously to feed Darfur and wrestle a Tragic Secret Past to the ground. Is it any wonder complications ensue? Fifty Shades is nothing if not formulaic romance, albeit with a riding crop and a couple of pairs of lined handcuffs thrown in for frissons.

Oh and clambering. Lots and LOTS of clambering. I start tracking the word after it appears twice on p. 177 in book one, underlining recurrences on pages 353, 355, 361, 368, 444, 455, 469, 476, and 491.

Note to fledgling authors: avoid this and similar marquee words—“clattering” is another that comes to mind--like the plague.

Also, train yourself to avoid clichés such as “like the plague” like the plague.

E.L. James employs numerous literary references, perhaps to trick us into imagining this is higher-brow fiction than it is. Sort of like giving the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the names of Renaissance painters. Or maybe this is just more of the Twilight fan fiction motif, with Tess of the d'Urbervilles subbing for Romeo and Juliet.

It is often guffawingly funny, sometimes unintentionally, as with Briticisms like “rucksack” and “sidelight” (which I think might mean night table lamp), which are corrected in the second volume in the series, as is the clambering, unfortunately. But there are many times when, I am convinced, James is intentionally hilarious.

“Grey—you’re on my shit list and I’m watching you,” BFF Kate at one point hisses at our gorgeous but sadly warped stud muffin.

Then there’s this moment near the end of the first book, as Christian prepares Ana for her sophomore sexploits in the Red Room of Pain (p.487, James’ emphasis):

“I am going to tie you to that bed, Anastasia. But I’m going to blindfold you first and,” he reveals his iPod in his hand, “you will not be able to hear me. All you will hear is the music I am going to play for you.”

Okay. A musical interlude. Not what I was expecting. Does he ever do what I expect? Jeez, I hope it’s not rap.

It is to laugh out loud.

There’s even a character introduced as Mr. J. Hyde near the end of book one.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” snaps my inner cynic. “Mr. Jekyll N. Hyde, I presume??”

Mercifully, though, the character’s name is Jack, sans N. I know immediately we’ll be hearing more of him in book two (he’s Ana’s new boss, an editor at the small literary publisher where she’ll be a paid intern. Another joke, methinks). And I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something tells me he may be a bit of a villain.

Bottom line: it may lead to a smidge more sex in suburbia—and who could really be against that?—but I’ll wager Fifty Shades of Grey isn’t nearly the threat to the morals of America some are suggesting. Given the mainstreaming of porn the past couple of decades and that our kids witness tens of thousands of violent fictional murders before attaining the age of majority—Brad Pitt recently saying he’d have a harder time with his kids seeing him portray a cinematic racist, “than someone who would shoot a guy in the face”--it seems a little weird to be “oh my-ing” about a smattering of soft core sex.

E.L. James clearly had fun putting it together, so why can’t we simply just lie back and think of England? Why can’t we just swallow it all down in the spirit in which it is offered: as a bit of a lark, Ana in chains having a wee bit of a romp with her Sir Galahad, aka the King of Pain?

If my own experience is anything to go by, what these millions and millions of mostly married North American women may want is the opportunity to read, talk about, and experiment with the more than fifty shades to please your lover.

Notes

¹Joe vs. José, Taylor vs. Tank, the feistiness and clutziness (but no cars are destroyed in the commission of this novel), the many cars in the condo garage (visions of Rangeman enterprises), all that body wash talk--Ranger uses Bulgari

²All the talk of alabaster skin, the references to blood e.g. singing in the veins, the deep dark secret, the hero’s father’s name: Carrick vs. Carlyle. The fact that one of his parents is a doctor.

³That email really boosts the page count, doesn’t it?

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Want more Bev? Watch this interview about her book, The Meaning of Children, now available on Amazon.com:

Rebutting (sorry!) Edward Shorter's piece (sorry again!!) on gender roles and "Fifty Shades of Grey"

[We interrupt the regularly scheduled, shameless, and utterly unrelenting promotion of the blog author's book, The Meaning Of Children, for something completely different...and altogether serious, so far as it is possible for her to be serious, of course.]

Okay, I know I must have better things to do--and probably, so do you!!--but I must tell you I practically blew a gasket over today's Glob & Pail article by Edward Shorter, "Who's on top? You'd be surprised."

Edward Shorter (give him enough rope &...)

He starts off ostensibly considering the massive interest of women in the E.L. James’s novel of sadomasochism, Fifty Shades of Grey, "about how much women like subordinating themselves to men in bed...Who knew women had such a longing to be bottoms," he writes.

To quote Rose Castorini, Olympia Dukakis' character in Moonstruck, Dr. Shorter, "what you don't know about women is a lot."

Of course, the article has little to do with the novel; the novel is just a jumping off point for a man who comes across as one of those artful mixers of pop cult & "research," someone impressed with the sound of his own voice. Shorter is, apparement, a professor of the history of medicine and a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. Among his books is Written in the Flesh: A History of Desire, which is probably the real reason he wrote this article.

A writer myself--a feminist one to boot--I recognize a promotional opportunity when I see one. And I recognize an ahistorical diatribe when it's thrust down my throat, too.

Still, one hardly expects to read sexploitation like this on the oped page of The Globe, Canada's newspaper of record, so cadaverously thin this week I fear the end must be nigh. 

Lest I be taken (dear me, one can hardly stop oneself) for one of those Real Women types, it isn't a discussion of sex or sadomasochism that has me objecting to Shorter's piece (oops). It's the way this man twists the history of feminism--probably the history of anything to do with women--that I take issue with, that offends and infuriates.

If you’ll remember, the feminist message in the ’70s was about sex and power. Sex wasn’t really supposed to be fun and joyous. It was an exercise in power relations between men and women. So the idea of bottoming* for some guy was about as appealing as gouging out an eyeball.

Feminists didn't want people to enjoy penetrative sex, is THAT what you've gleaned from your decades of probing the female psyche, Dr. Shorter**??

As a woman who came of age in the '70s, I'm distressed to say Shorter gravely misconstrues what he calls "the feminist relationship" between sex and power: it was RAPE, feminists vehemently argued, that was about power rather than sex.

What kind of sexual historian thinks of feminists as the ultimate sexual buzz kill?

Shorter sounds like the worst sort of misogynist (as if there's a good sort!!).

It is a...words fail me, but, forgive me, perversion is the only one that fits here--to posit that the feminist ideal of sex is that it be joyless.

I know there were feminists who equated heterosex with rape--there probably still are, but they aren't mainstream now, and they probably weren't then, either, though I'm sure they grabbed a lot of air time.

What Shorter posits about feminism in this article is nothing short of hateful. I suppose there's an outside chance he's trying to be funny...but hateful it is, all the same.

And when he goes on to say

...it turns out that all these independent, high-powered women out there long for this erotic frisson of briefly, and revocably if need be, surrendering control over their own bodies. This really represents the definitive burial of ’70s-style feminism.

And that

For me, as a historian, what’s so interesting is that it’s new. These are not age-old themes in the history of sexuality but recent increments to the sensuality palette. For centuries, sex was about the man-on-top missionary position and rutting in the gloom of the cottage on the straw mattress. It was behaviour that was biologically driven but not necessarily sensual.

all I can say is that I hope he IS joking...he must be joking, though for this hetero feminist, the joke is neither joyful nor fun.

Because the idea that a professor of the history of medicine and the history of psychiatry at the University of Toronto could get up on his hind legs in public and make such hateful, ignorant, and surely--SURELY!!--ahistorical remarks about women, sex, the history of feminism, the history of heterosexuality, and how wonderful it is that we are all 

expanding the sensuality palette dramatically...[coming] home from work, kick[ing] off [our] boots ...and...experimenting with fetish/S&M

BOGGLES THE FRIGGIN' MIND!

I was relieved to discover Shorter has a PhD in history and isn't--thank anything that might still be considered holy in this heartbreaking age of ours--an actual, hands-on-patients psychiatrist...

According to an online biography I found that he probably wrote himself, Shorter "has worked for many years on the history of the family (!) and the history of emotionality (!!) and although he has written widely about medicine’s past, he has remained interested in the ever-evolving social history of sexuality(!!!)"

Pity the poor medical students and residents, suffering through this man's presentations on the "history of the family," "history of emotionality" and the "ever-evolving social history of sexuality." (Like anything isn't "ever-evolving." Has evolution stopped??)

Has no one ever complained about this man? How few goddamn women do they have in the history of medicine and the history of psychiatry at the U of  T, anyway? Surely hundreds have been exposed to this drivel from a man whose ideas about feminism remind me of Philippe Rushton's thoughts on race and intellect.

All I can say is good luck, Dr. Shorter, on your trips to the bank.

You mountebank.

You perverter of scholarship and of history.

And good luck, Globe and Mail...I have read you for a decade and enjoyed it immensely, but you must surely be circling the drain to have included, under some mistaken attempt at being--I dunno, hip, is it?--such an article on the oped page.

God, I miss Edward Greenspon.

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*Note to self: pls. research whether heterosexuals generally refer to 'tops' and 'bottoms' or if this is BDSM lexicon?

**An aside: Montreal has a famous ornithologist name of Bird, and there are many whose choice of career appears somehow influenced by their name. Without wishing to attack ad hominem, Shorter, by the way, is an absolute laugher of a monicker that might provide some sort of unconscious explanation for the work he has plunged into, as it were, lo these many decades...at least it would in a novel.