It’s Super Bowl Sunday, the beginning of February.
I’m spending the evening with my dog. I am trying to decide whether to take a bath or keep watching Nine and a Half Weeks. The movie was released February 21, 1986. My copy I rented on Amazon prime expires midnight, February 3rd. My dog gives me a quizzical look and starts licking his bed. We’re both horny.
Let me backtrack.
Before the movie Nine and a Half Weeks was the book Nine and a Half Weeks. I received it in November as a birthday present from a friend. At first I confused it with the Hugh Grant movie Nine Months. Laughably wrong.
I didn’t open the book until this week. Four days later I finished the book, finished the movie and am now almost finished writing an essay inspired by both. “I loved it. I loved it. I loved it. I loved it. I loved it.” I’m as obsessed as Elizabeth is with the relationship this story was based on.
Oh right. The story. For those of you like me that weren’t familiar, this is a pretty intense love, erotic, ‘sexual surrender’ story of a woman who spends nine and a half weeks with a lover. This man, yes, takes care of her, bathes her, buys her nice things, makes her come (a lot). But he also does things like keep her handcuffed to the coffee table, humiliate her, cause her pain. A pain, though, she often longs for.
The movie...is...hot. Kim Basinger and (holy wtf) Mickey Rourke?!
I only knew Mickey Rourke as the actor who got his comeback in The Wrestler. I had no idea of his earlier roles and drop dead gorgeous smile. Apparently, he’s a mystery to a lot of people:
With most book to movie adaptation, there are obvious differences to be argued, but I loved both versions deeply. The book, written as a diary, puts us inside Elizabeth’s head. As her lover’s requests grow with intensity, we hear her mental responses, in the movie we watch them play out.
At times I had to step away from both. Not from the intensity (which there is a plenty) but from how ‘god-damn-why-didn’t-I-think-of-that’ perfectly both stories captured a moment I’m familiar and obsessed with. The moment of being absolutely lost in arousal. The tipping point of ‘Jesus Christ, I can go no further. Take me.’ And it’s not a moment saved only for sexual adventures. I felt it just this morning in my weekly dance class. The stimulation so above my skin and petty thoughts that built and built and built until finally I handed over my control and lost it.
It was interesting to read and watch this not too long after I finished another representation of psychologically questionable relationships, Netflix’s You.
These are very different stories but they both feature a male character playing puppeteer with someone’s life. When I read that actor Penn Badgley had to give girls fawning after his murderous, good-looking character of Joe a reality check, I was disgusted. A disgust which I’m sure many had for our Nine and a Half Weeks male protagonist.
He’s egotistical, he’s obsessive, yet here I am daydreaming about what it would be like to fulfill his requests. Crawl for him. Meet him at Hotel Chelsea.
But Joe never offers a choice. His victims are clueless to his manipulations and clueless to the control they are handing over. Elizabeth, on the other hand, is very aware.
In Nine and a Half Weeks, there’s always an option to relinquish control, to leave. And if the title isn’t obvious enough, she does. But even though their relationship is not perfect, not ‘nine and a half years’, the story has singed into my bones how much I enjoy the duplexity of control when it is mine to play with. Even if I want none, it is mine to give away. Unlike You, I made the choice to go to dance class this morning. I made the choice to crawl.