Spoiler Alert!

In case you haven’t noticed, the campaign for the movie of Fifty Shades of Grey has already begun, in anticipation of a Valentine’s Day release.  Many of those who go to the movie will have read the book. But will the movie version have A HAPPY ENDING? Everyone has their own kink. In the Freudian model, human behavior is driven by subliminal motivations that the plucky protagonists of most romance novels would have little access to. Indeed in Plato’s allegory of the cave, reality is only a shadow. So what if it turns out that in the movie version of Fifty Shades, the prospect of a totally submissive woman, naked, blindfolded and bound—however tantalizing that sounds—turns out to be far from what Grey is after. It only causes early onset ED or even PE (premature ejaculation). Let’s say that Grey’s real desire is to be yelled at in a non-sexual way that leads to the kind of humiliation that's not exciting for him or his lover. What if Grey has an unconscious urge to be nagged to death by a harridan? Now this type of scenario would create some problems in terms of the script. A movie is a different kettle of fish than a book and you're not going to have your HAPPY ENDING, you must find something uplifting in its place. Those filmgoers who read the book are going to be disappointed if there isn’t some kind of pay off. Romance is romance, love is love and sex is sex. If your going to film Fifty Shades of Grey like an episode of The Honeymooners with Grey as a blustering loud mouth who is always walking away with his tail between his legs, then you still have to figure out a way to give the popcorn crunching, soda slurping sex crazed audience what it wants--whatever that is.

Obama vs. Romney III: The Honeymooners

Rachel Maddow made the point on MSNBC that contrary to what Romney had said, Syria is not Iran’s "route to the sea." Her comment was followed by graphic illustrations which showed that both Iran and Syria had coasts. Al Sharpton, on the same MSNBC show, offered the fight metaphor in his scoring of the debate, saying that at every moment Obama was about to deliver a knockout punch (one example was the president’s counter that sure America had a smaller navy than in l917 and we also don’t have bayonets and horses), Romney clinched. Of course the breaking news story was Romney’s turn around on Afghanistan.  “Romnesia” is the diagnosis President Obama has offered for his rival’s condition. Now Romney agrees with Obama that US troops should come out of Afghanistan by the end of 2012. “People can accept changing your mind,” Sharpton said, “but not at the cost of my behind.” If Obama vs. Romney II was a dramatic comeback for the president, the third and final debate was characterized by a growing feeling of almost effortless humor--not only in the commentary, but particularly in the antics of the challenger. In comedy the clown has a straight man. On The Honeymooners, you had the stolid Norton and the outrageous Ralph. Romney tried to be the straight man, not challenging, but agreeing, trying to calm down his adversary, but he turned out to be the clown. One can’t help wondering if Romney hadn’t gotten taken away by buffoonery of the Al Smith dinner. SNL's campaign send up where interviews with a series of voters reveal an electorate that neither knows who is president, who is running or how long they are running for may have also set the tone. Debates can somehow bring out moments of brilliance in one or another candidate, but this final debate, centering on issues of foreign policy, was notable for its intermittent, though comical effusions of ignorance on the part of the Republican candidate for president.

L'Age d'Or

Even the stage sets of the famous ‘50s Lone Ranger TV series were primitive. The Lone Ranger and Tonto always seemed to arrive at the same mountain pass, with the same pair of boulders that looked a little worse for the wear. In essence, neither the Lone Ranger nor Tonto were going anywhere. They were not what today would be called socially mobile, either as fictional characters or as beneficiaries of the myth of the Wild West.

   

Let’s turn to another classic, The Life of Riley, with the all-but-forgotten William Bendix in the title role. The protagonist works in an aeronautics factory and carries one of those lunch boxes that look like a miniature airplane hanger. Looming in the background is the post-war prosperity of Imperial America. Riley works on an assembly line, but lives in a cheery split-level house with flower boxes on the window-sills. There is something value-free about his occupation. Though the series was made in the post-war period, plants that made aircraft consumed the war economy of the previous decade. The Life of Riley is the lighter side of the project. Riley bears no responsibility for the finished product or the murder that his productivity wreaks. He is merely a cog, taking orders from his superiors. He exemplifies the early Marx papers of 1848, with their emphasis on the alienation of the worker caused by two premises of capitalist production—division of labor and economies of scale. Yet he is as happy as a bird.

   

Exhibit three: The Honeymooners. Ralph Kramden is a New York City bus driver who lives in a tenement where the fire escape is as constant a part of the set as the boulders in The Lone Ranger. He has argumentative relationships with his wife Alice, his best friend Norton, and Norton’s wife Trixy. In the lingo of our current culture, Ralph and Alice would be described as a dysfunctional family, in which the wife parries an ever-increasing crescendo of insults from her sadistic husband. If Ralph’s rage were to cross the line from verbal to physical, he could easily be placed in the Joel Steinberg category, as his insults and character assassination are remorseless, unrelenting, and fundamentally aimed at extinguishing the will and identities of those closest to him.

   

The Golden Age of Television unwittingly echoed the Theater of the Absurd—epitomized by Beckett, Ionesco and Pinter—and it’s not hard to imagine scripts for The Lone Ranger, The Life of Riley, or The Honeymooners being performed in the tiny Théâtre de la Huchette, where Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano and The Lesson have played in repertory since 1957. The spare, unchanging sets, the opaque humor of the dialogue, with its barely repressed violence, and the droning sense of time could easily turn the scripts for these popular ‘50s television series into the basis for a new avant-garde theater movement, which could be named after Buñuel’s famed surrealist masterpiece, L’Age d’Or.