"Fifty Shades of Grey" vs "Twilight"

By fanfiction we mean the continuation of a cult story by fans. Readers hungry for more material can continue the story, fill in the gaps, resurrect their favorites, create sequels or prequels. In the case of the fanfiction of “Twilight” by S. Meyer, or the infamous, inflated, “Fifty Shades of Grey” — where Grey stands for Grey but also for the surname of the icy, embalmed, stockfishic protagonist — more than a continuation it is a question of a parody by which the writer Erika James was carried away.

The introduction explains that she “dreamed of writing stories that readers would fall in love with”. Well, it seems to us that this is exactly what she did not do, while the operation was perfectly successful with Meyer. And yet, when an editorial case takes on such significance, when every person you meet, at any latitude, in any dental office or train car, holds a copy of the novel in their hands, when every bookshop, every window, every Autogrill stand is overflowing of black covers with an anodyne knot of tie, when American hotels have replaced the old Bible with the Fifty Shades, then you can’t dismiss the phenomenon without even trying to understand something.

Let’s take a step back, let’s go back to the original, to the “Twilight” saga, a modern but still fascinating reinterpretation of the myth of Beauty and the Beast, where the protagonist, precisely Bella Swan, is any girl, a Cinderella capable of conquering the prince of vampires , Edward, beautiful up to the impossible (to which the actor of the film of the same name does not do justice) not incinerated by the sun but sparkling under it like a refracted crystal, pure of heart, “vegetarian”, romantically torn between his instincts and the moral input that pushes him to sublimate desire. Bella attracts him because her blood has the sweetest appeal for him, it is nectar and delight, it is fragrance and remorse. In order to love her, in order to be close to her, he will suffocate his murderous instinct, transform it into protection, which is what every male does with his woman, keeping the sexual impulse at bay, wrapping it of tenderness. Bella Swan is real, with tangible family problems, adolescent emotions common to many girls her age and a natural propensity for loneliness, melancholy.

What remains of these two characters in Fifty Shades? Edward Cullen becomes Christian Grey, devoid of allure, as sexy as a window mannequin, a sadistic sex maniac who enjoys whipping his women, hanging them from the ceiling, flogging them, inserting lead balls into their vagina, getting them to sign pedantic contracts on the Dominant / Submissive role. Unlike Edward, Christian doesn’t smile, he grins, he’s not tormented, he’s not romantic, “I don’t make love,” he says, “I fuck hard,” and he’s only good because his complacent butler tells us he is. Christian Grey is a devourer of innocent girls, like his inspirer Alec Stoke in “Tess of the Urbeville” of which, apparently, James is a connoisseur. Christian gives his victim precious editions of Hardy’s novel, perhaps to convince her (and us too) that there is something literary in his perversions.

The indomitable, courageous, Bella Swan becomes the bad copy Anastasia Steele, a character we don’t see, who has no face, who is always a constant boil, who spends her days blushing, biting her lip and “going in pieces ”for multiple and stellar orgasms.

Almost all of the main scenes from the original “Twilight” are photocopied in the fanfiction, distorting them and stripping them of dignity. There is no plot, there is no development, just a succession of soft porn sexual acts, increasingly repetitive to the point that, already in the fourth or fifth, we feel like yawning: “Oh my God, no, they do it again.”

Bella Swan discovers, through Edward Cullen and his people, a different, magical, underground, parallel world, where vampires and werewolves are credible and consistent with our modern reality, with the reality of many American teenagers.

Bella / Anastasia’s visit to the Cullen / Grey family is an example of how Meyer’s inventiveness, imagination and irony are transformed by James into vulgarity and littleness. Even the names of the fathers of the male protagonists resemble each other, Carrick, Grey’s father, echoes Carlisle, the vampire doctor who is Edward’s father. But where is the moral tension, the fight against instinct that transforms a potentially lethal vampire into a compassionate surgeon, always ready to help those who suffer? While Bella faces the vampire family with courage and irony, hoping not to become dinner herself, trusting on the instinct that indicates those people as good and capable of protecting her from evil, Anastasia Steele shows up at the meeting without underwear, she plays underfoot to his dominant and sneaks as soon as she can in dependance to consummate yet another sexual act. The fun is absent, the game is more obscene than erotic, the plot is just a pretext. There is no real passion, only the initiation into sex of a girl whom wants more from her mentor but who, in reality, has only one thing in mind. Anastasia falls into a spiral of growing perversion, the consenting victim of a stalker, a man who enjoys strapping her and makes her feel humiliated. To reflect, she constantly converses with her subconscious and with her inner goddess, one good conscience, one bad the other, who are, paradoxically, perhaps the most vivid characters in the book, although we imagine them as little geniuses jumping with a cartoon out of the mouth.

Where the original vampire knew how to move, create atmosphere, darkness, love, and give bodies, faces and gestures to the characters of an unforgettable saga, here everything is narrated with a repetitive language, filled with a series of soporific e-mails, seasoned with the same infantile exclamations, “oh my”, of the same adjectives and expressions to describe always identical scenes and emotions.

What will be the reason for the immeasurable global success of a fanfiction, of a semi-parody born on commission? For the first book, the lion’s share is certainly due to curiosity, stimulated by word of mouth, by the overabundance of copies visible everywhere, but to get to buy the second and third, perhaps one must call into question the sexual stimulus to which the itchy readers are subjected, voyeurism, sadomasochism latent in each of us. Or the intentional indeterminacy of the protagonist — who, rather than being, is not, she is not beautiful, she is not very intelligent, she is not very brilliant — makes it possible to identify with her millions of anonymous women, eager to imagine themselves sexually irresistible and capable of to catch a handsome-rich-super cool?

We do not know the reason for so much fury and we would like those who have reached the end of the saga to explain it to us because, if to err is human, persevere until the third book we think is really diabolical.