What If This Were Enough? Read online

  Soon the numbing parade of luxe brands—Cartier, Cristal, Omega, iPad, iPod, Audi, Gucci—takes on the same dulled impact as endlessly tweaked nipples and repeatedly bound wrists. Curiously (but perhaps not surprisingly), our heroine’s responses to these artifacts of her ascendance are as unchangingly enthusiastic as her sexual responses: “Oh, my!” “Yes.” “Holy shit!” The superior quality and enormous cost of each item are mulled in excruciating detail.

  And just as male-centered pornography seems to feature a particularly clumsy, childish notion of sexiness, the concept of luxury on offer in Fifty Shades is remarkably callow. Like an update of the ostentatious, faux-tasteful wealth of Dynasty, Christian’s penthouse, with its abstract art and dark wood and leather, represents the modern version of enormous flower arrangements and white marble floors and a house staff trussed up in cartoon-butler regalia. No detail of the environment feels organic or specific to Christian himself; instead, it reflects a prescribed aesthetic of wealth that for some reason James approaches with reverence rather than repulsion. Anastasia is on a tour of the world’s finest corporate hotels, nothing more or less. By the time this compulsive lifestyle voyeurism starts invading our narrator’s routine visits to the bathroom (“The restrooms are the height of modern design—all dark wood, black granite, and pools of light from strategically placed halogens”), the author’s veneration of arbitrary signifiers of class has begun to feel grotesque.

  Against this backdrop of drooling consumption, Anastasia’s total life makeover takes shape. Having just graduated from college, she scales the corporate ladder from assistant to book editor in a matter of weeks, since Christian has thoughtfully purchased the publishing company where she works. When her boss bullies and sexually harasses her, Christian confronts him, has him fired, and installs Anastasia in his place. Her mild protests over this creepy show of power are just for show, of course. The underlying message is that Prince Charming swooped in and saved her from the indignities of the underclass. As if that’s not enough, in the third book, Fifty Shades Freed, Christian announces that he’s going to give the publishing company to his new wife, as a wedding present. Career success is thus achieved effortlessly, bequeathed to her by her mate.

  There’s nothing that money can’t buy in this high capitalist fairy tale, whether it’s respect, dignity, or imaginary political correctness. When Christian leads Anastasia to a palatial Mediterranean-style house with an expansive view of Puget Sound, then explains that he wants to flatten it so he can build a house for the two of them, Anastasia balks. “Why do you want to demolish it?” she asks. “I’d like to make a more sustainable home, using the latest ecological techniques,” he replies. His eco-friendliness is just another prescribed lifestyle choice, of course, a marker of good taste that somehow excuses the obscene excess of tearing a perfectly good house to the ground.

  When it comes to wasted resources, though, nothing is quite as luxurious or indulgent as real, live humans who are at your beck and call around the clock. Maybe this is why dozens of pages in the Fifty Shades trilogy are dedicated to outlining even the most minor exchanges between this privileged couple and their army of handservants:

  “This is a Bolognese sauce. It can be eaten anytime. I’ll freeze it.” She [the cook Mrs. Jones] smiles warmly and turns the heat right down.

  Once we’re airborne, Natalia serves us yet more champagne and prepares our wedding feast. And what a feast it is—smoked salmon, followed by roast partridge with a green bean salad and dauphinoise potatoes, all cooked and served by the ever-efficient Natalia.

  The waiter has returned with the champagne, which he proceeds to open with an understated flourish.

  Sawyer reenters, bearing a paper cup of hot water and a separate tea bag. He knows how I take my tea!

  Taylor opens the door and I slide out. He gives me a warm, avuncular smile that makes me feel safe. I smile back.

  Like the most loyal and dedicated refugees from Downton Abbey, every one of the series’ cooks and chauffeurs and security guards and assistants demonstrates polite restraint and obedient discretion in Christian and Anastasia’s presence. Each careful movement and gesture, each bland remark and well-timed retreat into the background, evokes the ultimate service-economy fantasy. These interchangeable, faceless humans, whose ubiquity and professionalism we’re meant to marvel over repeatedly, are themselves luxury possessions. They are warm but impassive, friendly but reserved, omnipresent but invisible. They register no disputes, no grudges, no rolled eyes, no missed days of work. Nothing seems to bring these shadowy figures more satisfaction than serving Lord Grey and his Lady. Like the growing pile of high-end watches and cars and bracelets that this couple accumulates, their humans start to melt into an idealized mass of blindly loyal subservience, bestowing upon their masters an oversized sense of power.

  All of which points to the dark, unspoken moral of the series: Fifty Shades offers not just the eroticization of extreme excess, but the commodification of love itself. Christian and Anastasia encounter each other as the most precious of high-end possessions. “You’re mine,” they tell each other over and over. Like a manicured update to Gollum from The Lord of the Rings, Anastasia imagines a world inhabited primarily by covetous rivals. Likewise, Christian panics at Anastasia’s smallest exchanges with her boss and male friends, even the coat-check guy at a club. In case we can’t grasp that his woman is his most cherished commodity, jealously safeguarded with the mien of a bouncer, he spells it out for us: “You’re so precious to me,” he tells her in Fifty Shades Freed. “Like a priceless asset, like a child.”

  To Christian, every man alive wants Anastasia. To Anastasia, every woman alive wants Christian. In the logic of the market, each of them must thus be in demand, rare, and highly coveted.

  In the real world, such severe possessiveness would create big problems for both parties. But in the fantasy world of Fifty Shades, their pathology is recast as its own special kind of indulgence, a way of heightening the sensation of two superior humans looming over the mortal realm like demigods. The slow seduction that culminates in total possession and total power, which the first book sometimes depicts as a dark force to be escaped, is portrayed with accelerating breathlessness and adoration in the second and third volumes. Echoing the lawless privilege of girlie magazines, the so-called control freak within Christian (and, subsequently, Anastasia) demonstrates not just that members of the moneyed class are above the law, but that they exist beyond ordinary ethical guidelines, too. (This, by the way, is also the moral of the higher-brow forerunner of Fifty Shades: Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho—which is a much more self-aware if also somewhat numbing exploration of the nexus between high consumer capitalism and soulless bondage sex, with the significant and oddly more realistic difference that Ellis’s alpha-male protagonist is also a serial killer.)

  Having complete and total control over every single aspect of your experience, including everyone around you, is the textbook definition of alienation—precisely how human beings are severed from each other and from their own humanity. Perversely, in Fifty Shades, this radical isolation is portrayed as a moment of transcendence rather than one of debasement. Armed with an apparently limitless will-to-commodification, our narrator recognizes that anything and everything in the world—objects, people, qualities one would like to appear to have—can be bought for a price. And the qualities of each owned thing reflect more glory back on the owner. “Six stallions, say, I can afford, / Is not their strength my property?” offers Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust. “I tear along, a sporting lord, / As if their legs belonged to me.”

  But Shakespeare may have captured this spirit of heedless overconsumption best in Julius Caesar, when Brutus says of his friend and rival, “The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.” Anastasia, who’s been showered with priceless goods until she shares her paramour’s reckless sense of entitlement, puts it a l
ittle differently: “Maybe I need to be restrained.”

  * * *

  —

  As tedious as Fifty Shades becomes, it presents the libidinal titillation and insatiable consumption of Mad Men without any of the looming dissatisfaction. Even though both tales offer up a handsome, Gatsby-like embodiment of the American dream, a man who has control issues and a dark past, even though it’s at first an open question whether either Christian or Don is capable of real intimacy, vulnerability, or love, Fifty Shades answers every haunting question with a shiny, neat, Happily-Ever-After reply. As with Draper, we’re at once frustrated and intrigued by Grey’s reticence and inability to show up or grow up. Crucially, though, while Draper will most likely cheat, become obsessive about his work, and drink himself into oblivion, Grey remains utterly devoted to Anastasia. He’s a mean daddy, a supervillain, a lothario and Gordon Gekko, all rolled into one. Who could ask for anything more?

  Draper and Grey present litmus tests of the soul, inversions of the Cinderella story that place the moral burden on the girl in rags clutching the glass slipper. The tension of Mad Men lies in the question of whether our heroine (and Draper, in turn) will fall prey to the allure of limitless money, power, and looks, or dig for something deeper and more substantive to sustain her instead. The Fifty Shades series, in contrast, begins with a similar question, but it ends in a realm of fantasy where an insatiable desire for more somehow brings an infinite cavalcade of thrills and deep, abiding happiness. “He is mine,” Anastasia says over and over again. This is her religion, our religion. We are meant to believe that her possession of this high-end man and this high-end world—and her status as a high-end possession—will be an endless source of deep satisfaction.

  Echoes of this belief system are found in the self-mythologizing compulsions around us. Pictured next to his stricken-looking but undeniably gorgeous, expensive import of a wife, with the tacky, gold-plated opulence of Trump Tower in the background, Trump repeatedly reminds us that he represents the ultimate American dream. Everything our imperial patriarch surveys is tremendous. He surrounds himself with people he describes as “high-quality.” According to his first-person myth, no matter what he does, he can’t help but win, and the only people who disagree with that assessment are losers. But his face tells a different story. Embedded in the orange-spray-tanned folds of his brow, we discover the hidden moral of this tale of luxurious excess and limitless power: There is no satisfaction in reckless, excessive accumulation. The more you have, the more you want. There is never enough.

  “Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could more accurately be read as a record of emotional trauma,” writes Alain de Botton in his book Status Anxiety, efficiently summing up Draper, Grey, and Trump in one blow. “It is the legacy of those who have felt pressured by the disdain of others to add an extraordinary amount to their bare selves in order to signal that they too may lay a claim to love.” Anything secured through such means—whether it’s love or lust or safety or a $3,000 Italian watch or a gorgeous wife who grimaces every time you look away—promises limited returns of joy. Thus our insatiable protagonists are forced to forge on in search of a new fix. The beauty and the ultimate value of a story like Mad Men lies in its repeated insistence that unless we stop searching for more, we’ll never truly find happiness or peace. Likewise, the danger of Fifty Shades—and the danger of the self-serving myth at the center of the Trump brand—lies in its inability to recognize the pathology at the heart of the fantasy it presents.

  As the philosopher Alan Watts puts it in The Book, “When the outcome of a game is certain, we call it quits and begin another.” Don Draper sums up this process when he tells some Dow executives: “You’re happy because you’re successful, for now. But what is happiness? It’s a moment before you need more happiness.” This sentiment echoes the darkness at the center of The Great Gatsby, in which Fitzgerald makes it clear that most ambition is driven by a mirage, a focus on “the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.”

  When the most prominent love stories of our times also serve as cautionary tales about wealth and ego-driven restlessness, you have to wonder if there’s not some essential sickness encoded in our cultural DNA. As your stature grows to that of an oligarch or a demigod, you require bigger prizes and distractions. This is why Gatsby sets his sights on Daisy Buchanan: a goal worthwhile precisely for its impossibility. Eventually, though, Gatsby is subsumed by his own talent for self-invention. Like Draper, he becomes a cipher, a shadow of someone else’s idea of happiness.

  This is the shared fantasy in our bloodstream: An ideal life is one spent in a state of constant titillation, a never-ending foreplay session, an eternal flirtation with “more,” a superhero cliffhanger, the luxury goods that make you crave even more luxury. Our ghosts—and our villains, which are the same as our heroes, which are the same as our leaders—are those who have a knack for perpetuating this titillation. They loom forever in a state of near-erotic agitation without ever arriving at their destination.

  But there’s a freedom in never being present enough to feel disappointment, never being connected enough to fear loss, never feeling alive enough to worry about growing old and dying. To remain titillated over the course of Mad Men or Fifty Shades or The Great Gatsby or indeed the Trump presidency, happiness and true love must never enter the picture. Instead, contempt and self-doubt and fear are kicked up repeatedly, inciting the frenzied, volatile state that we, in our immaturity, equate with youth and desire and excitement. Fear means we are on our way somewhere important. Anxiety means that greatness will be here soon. Greed is good because it keeps you restless and hungry.

  In an age of narcissism, it’s only fitting that our heroes be deeply jittery, with an unconscious wish to remain that way. Their elaborate game of make-believe can be found at the heart of every conquistador’s tale. By focusing on a receding, elusive goal, we have the luxury of remaining haunted forever.

  playing house

  A few days before I moved into my older boyfriend’s house, we were talking on the phone and then suddenly we were arguing and before I knew it, I had smashed the handset of my phone to pieces against the floor of my apartment. This man could infuriate me in a matter of seconds, but he also held the promise of exactly the kind of life I wanted. He was mature and settled. He was charismatic, grown-up, full of ideas. But nothing he said made any sense to me. He knew how to sound like an adult, worldly and omniscient, but quickly enough I found holes in his speeches. Most of the time, I pretended not to notice them.

  He was renting a nice little bungalow with a great view. All of his furniture was carefully chosen from the Pasadena flea market. His stereo had excellent speakers, and the sound was always perfectly balanced with just the right mix of treble and bass. The walls held creepy Virgin Marys and old paintings, the kinds of things that seasoned, thoughtful adults like himself had on their walls. He would buy cool old ashtrays at the flea market, for guests, he said, for guests with cigarettes and guests with blunts. But something about his home was never quite right. Everything was minimal and perfectly placed, but covered in a film of dust. He had been an actor and a dancer, and now he was studying to become a lawyer. But at heart, he was an artist (this is what I told myself) and a thinker. His life was constructed in anticipation of an audience.

  I fell in lockstep with this anticipatory energy, replacing his dying plants with living ones, buying more and more plants and rearranging them on the front porch, where they got too much sun and had to be watered constantly, and then buying more plants for the backyard. I washed off the tables, washed the glass on the creepy old paintings, washed the wood floors on my hands and knees, scrubbed the bathrooms. But somehow the house never felt clean. There wasn’t enough sunshine. I took photos of the big front window, proving to myself that it was a sunny place, but even in the photographs the sunshine looked weak, ambivalent.

  Each week his ex-wif
e would come to the house to pick up her dog, Bingo, which he called their dog, as if a dog could be split equally between two people living in different places. He would hide in the back of the house when she knocked and then let herself in the front door with her key. The whole arrangement was absurd. She had a key to our house? She could just let herself in? But I’d answered the door a few times, and that was even worse. I would shower just to answer the door. I would put on makeup. I would second-guess my tone: Too friendly? Too fake? And she seemed nervous. It felt like a show I had to rehearse for. I didn’t like having an audience of one. I couldn’t prove everything I wanted to prove: That she was bad and I was good. That she was old and I was new. That she had made a big mistake and her leftovers were being treasured by someone healthy enough to recognize the value of what she had left behind.

  I wasn’t up to the role. I didn’t understand my character’s motivation. I had lost the thread. An hour before she was supposed to arrive, I would rearrange the plants on the front porch, pruning away the brown parts, rewatering everything. The plants put on a better show than I did. They said, “This house is happy now,” in a more convincing tone than my own voice could manage. But once she left, with her neat blonde hair and her cute sweatpants and her thin frame, once she departed with Bingo (who clearly loved his mother more than he loved us) and drove home to the down-to-earth, regular, lovable younger guy she’d discovered as her marriage was falling apart, the house felt less happy. Once she left, I could see that my boyfriend was just her condescending ex-husband, and our cozy bungalow was just their old house. I could see the places where her furniture was missing. I was living in those empty spaces, sprucing up darkness that would never lift. I was haunting their failures, a bystander, asking my boyfriend for more details of their bad wedding and their bad life together, as if reworking an unworkable proof.