9 1/2 Weeks

9 1/2 weeks was on tonight. Good movie. I say that because I LOVE Mickey Rourke. Young, beautiful Mickey Rourke, older, damaged Mickey Rourke, any Mickey Rourke. And the movie is very sophisticated. At least that's how I remember it from when I was a teenager. It just seemed like such a sexy movie.
Then I read the book. WOW!!!!! You want to talk about diverting from the original source! In the movie, I guess Mickey is supposed to be "dangerous". We know this because he blindfolds Kim Bassinger. That's about it. He buys a riding crop and while he's in the store he bring it down on her thigh 1 time. In 1 scene, he tells her to remove her underwear and stand against the wall and prepare to be spanked. FINALLY SOME ACTION!) and then she goes ballistic and starts hitting him and then they end up having sex on his table, but he never actually spanks her. Then he gets a hooker to touch her a little and they watch a live sex show. That's really about it. It's supposed to be this sexual, psychological thing and as those go, I guess it's okay. It's fun to watch in that Kim and Mickey were both so young and so beautiful and Adrian Lyne is a good director for a sort of highly stylized movie and his fingerprints are all over this. The biggest draw back though is Mickey Rourke's smile. He is always smiling in this movie. Is he supposed to be dangerous? Is he supposed to be controlling her? He just never seems to be taking it seriously. It's very distracting. Plus side, Kim Bassinger does a really good masturbation scene. Much more enjoyable than the strip tease scene, which seems kind of pointless.
By comparison, the book seems so hardcore. From the beginning, this guy is in charge. One of the first times they are together, he slaps her and then they examine the mark together in the mirror. He feeds her dinner and gives her a bath and puts her to bed and she is in handcuffs the entire time. (I LOVE that!) He dominates her in just about every conceivable way and she can't stop. And there is a scene with a hooker but it's actually a scene in much greater detail, because this hooker actually makes up and dresses the protagonist to look just like the hooker. The thing that I remember most vividly was the fact that the man inserted and removed the woman's tampons. That just horrified and fascinated me and aroused me all at the same time. To this day, it is just the coolest and weirdest thing for some reason. The book is going along fine until the woman has a breakdown and the guy basically dumps her at a hospital and she never sees him again and then it's like she's sort of damaged forever. Not crazy about the ending but everything unit then tapped into this part of me that at 16 had no name and no outlet. I was so turned on by what this woman wrote. She was a complete submissive and I had never encountered those ideas or that way of living. It felt like it opened up a whole new world for me. A world I sometimes feel like I am still trying integrate into my own. A world that still amazes and fascinates me.