Love & Passion in Secretary
Banner by Liam Horgan.
Words by Luke Dunne.
(Content Warning – Self-harm)
For an industry that has embraced the philosophy that sex sells like no other, the Hollywood movie business has always had a relatively puritan view on the subject. It’s to be glimpsed through faux-closed fingers, eyebrows raised way above the fingertips, if it’s seen at all, and anything that deviates from the heteronormative, monogamous, monotonous and missionary, does so in many filmmakers’ eyes because it is in fact, deviant.
It’s always worth considering what exactly is being sold when we say that sex sells, and for many films that explore the matter, the offer is a transgressive thrill. In some ways it’s baked into how the medium tells stories, where tension is built up and released, the ‘riskier’ the thrill, the further you pull in the audience. There’s something about the lens of film too that, in some many (often male) hands, becomes an inherent voyeur, a distant eye. So often when we see an expression of something that can be as personal or primal as sexuality, we are shown not love and passion, a connective bond between both sides of the screen, but an intrusion, something lurid, something that makes us feel like we’re leering. Sex, as told on screen, is dangerous.
We see this in the heyday of the erotic thriller in the 1980s and 90s. Many of the big hitters – Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Cruel Intentions – achieved word-of-mouth among the public because of a viewing public talking in hushed tones about that scene that you weren’t meant to see – stoking the o.g. ‘down with this sort of thing’ curiosity. Movies like Cruising – where Al Pacino plays a detective tracking down a killer in the queer S&M scene of New York City, or Dressed to Kill – Brian De Palma’s awfully dated trans panic, set the tone for the erotic thriller at the start of the 80s; sex that doesn’t fit the standard is unloving and unsafe.
It’s under this umbrella that Secretary starts. Steven Shainberg’s film begins in the middle, a classic noir hook, as Maggie Gyllenhaal swaggers her workplace, attending to duties for her boss. She’s poised, balanced – possibly because of the bar around her neck to which she’s handcuffed. Mags stamps forms with her chin and caries letters between her teeth, marching into an office, the camera parked back down the hallway, while she slams the door shut for we can only imagine what. It’s a provocative opening, but it’s bold, assured. Gyllenhaal moves a lot but is never out of the dead-centre of the frame, and the message is clear – this is a character in her element.
Not so 6 months earlier. Gyllenhaal plays Lee Holloway, an awkward and unconfident young woman with a history of self-harm, stifled and sagging under a messy family life. Looking for direction, she finds herself working as a secretary under the employ of an intense and eccentric lawyer, E. Edward Grey. And yes, really, he is Mr Grey, 9 years before the first Fifty Shades. And it’s not long before Mr Grey reveals his same very singular tastes to Lee. A vulnerable woman, entranced by an intimidating man in a position of power; on the surface it’s a classic thriller set up, no more so in the casting of James Spader as the romantic lead.
Spader’s presence sends a message to the viewer, not just in his breathless, unblinking performance, but through his own filmography. You can’t get a much more Big Bad Wolf looking performer than Spader, hungry eyes and snapping limbs. He’s not just Mr Grey, he’s that actor from Sex, Lies and Videotape and Crash, movies where he plays men who get their kicks in very particular, unconventional fashions. But movies as well that use these ideas to explore, in one way or another, intimacy. When Secretary shows us Grey ordering Lee around, pushing her boundaries and bringing her into a BDSM relationship that specifically plays with their boss/secretary dynamic, it’s relying and playing with our assumptions of this type of eroticism on film. He’s a threat, she’s at risk, entering into a world she doesn’t understand. Right?
When Grey first calls Lee into his office to spank her, the camera follows her through the hallway from above, a visual crossing of the threshold which could signify an unwitting entry into danger, but here shows a willing entry into something new. If we take the visual literally, Lee is invited into something, and chooses herself to go there, the camera’s position above showing her doing so on her own back, regardless of what the viewer, or anyone else, might perceive. It’s cinematic consent. The visual that centres the scene doesn’t focus on Spader’s strong hand or Gyllenhaal’s exposed backside, it’s a close-up, both their hands on the desk and Lee’s finger – just a finger, but a confident finger – wrapping around Grey’s hand. In Fifty Shades when Ana walks into Christian Grey’s world, it’s because she’s compelled to understand him. Lee follows E. Edward Grey down the roleplay rabbit hole for the opposite reason, the better to understand herself.
When Grey finds out about Lee’s self-harm, he tells her, simply, not to do it anymore, a domineering red flag in a thriller that in Lee’s story is something else. The film uses the dominant–submissive relationship, not to titillate, but to playfully examine relationships. It’s not a cold command from Grey, but a conversation, he discusses with her the reasons she might do such a thing, an experience and difficulty in feeling which he can, in a way, relate to and the relationship that blossoms between them offers Lee an alternative to that outlet that she enthusiastically accepts. He tells her, “You really should feel free – exhale”, in the roles these two are sharing, Lee’s experience isn’t that she’s being ordered to stop cutting but rather that she needs permission to stop. When Grey tells her to say that she won’t hurt herself anymore, her “no sir” isn’t cowering, nor is it a cute, kinky tease for his benefit or the audience’s. It’s a change in her, a new confidence in a found passion, a glow shining through Lee as a lightbulb goes off inside her.
Secretary is dressed like an erotic thriller but structured like a romantic comedy, and one where the submissive Lee has a healthy sense of agency. Grey sticks a carrot in his lover’s mouth and a saddle on her back, an absurd visual that we would think nothing of it were Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan falling into bed together though it communicates the exact same thing. When Grey is distant and too busy to play, Lee doesn’t flinch, she rolls her eyes. Gyllenhaal’s performance is a masterclass in body language. The physicality on screen of Christopher Reeves for example is famously celebrated; hunched and shrunk as Clark Kent and strong and tall as Superman. Lee is much the same as she settles into her role as The Secretary; pre-Grey she’s all wide, sad eyes, clutched sleeves and bad posture, in his office, as his secretary, she is her own sense of superpowered and carries herself accordingly.
Lee even has the rom-com standard Other Man in the more conventional Peter, a vanilla scoop in a stale cone. Peter is another playful flipping of the genre’s script; here the Other Man is a deadbeat dipshit with a bad haircut and no ambition, and it’s the romantic lead who is the successful, put-together professional who knows what he wants. If this were a Judd Apatow movie, Peter would be the hero, here he’s the obstacle and the groom from which Lee turns runaway bride, another rom-com staple ordered to stand on its head.
Grey pushes Lee away because he’s ashamed of his own desires and can’t imagine them working in something more meaningful than a fling. But Lee, liberated, asserts differently. She flees from the standard story, runs away from the normal marriage and declares her love for Edward. She wants, she knows, to know him. She knows the genre she’s in, a silly, sexy, funny place where she can be exactly who she wants. Grey still thinks he’s in erotic thriller though, where his desires are disgusting, to be let out only in bursts and then locked away. He tests Lee, thinking he’ll break her will, ordering her to sit at his desk without moving her hands or feet until he returns. It could be dangerous – Lee wets herself in this unmoving state and becomes frantic when Peter tries to pull away – but it evolves into something out of Shakespeare, every other character in the film turning into a Greek chorus chiding or cheering on Lee. Her father, whose struggles we’ve seen as a source of trauma for Lee, tells her in certain terms “your soul and your body are your own, to do with as you wish.” Lee smiles. She knows.
Director Shainberg has described wanting to show that BDSM relationships can be normal, drawing inspiration from My Beautiful Laundrette, struck by its matter-of-fact depiction of a gay relationship through the cloud of Thatcher-era England. During a fantasy by Lee, Shainberg changed a key line in the short story on which Secretary was based, in her passionate vision of her and Edward Grey together, she doesn’t say “I’m so stupid” as in the short story, but “I’m your secretary” – an amorous declaration Shainberg felt was more celebratory.
Lee passes Edward’s test, on the face a folly that even brings in the local news, who think that she’s on hunger strike. The poor girl must be at risk, they wrongly assume. She’s exposed, all eyes on her, but in offering herself to him in this way, in fact it’s the submissive who is asking the question of her dom – is he capable of accepting what she is offering or not? Grey takes Lee to his home, away from the play of their office. Gently, carefully, he looks after her, bathes her, the camera not a gawking male gaze at her nudity, but permitted to be present in a moment as told by Lee, her voiceover stating that “for the first time in my life, I felt beautiful.”
Romantic relationships are not about what we do to each other, but what we allow each other, and ourselves, to be. In this particular relationship, with this particular person, Lee looks into the danger, and she doesn’t see thrills, she sees comfort. Lee and Edward find themselves not hiding away in the shadowy office, but together in the warm, saturated colours of suburbia, continuing their sub/dom relationship in domestic bliss. Where Secretary’s first scene followed her in fascination, on the move, swift and sultry, here in Lee’s happy ending the camera is close up on her face. Now she looks directly at us, daring us to judge, pitying us if we’re shocked. Now she is unblinking, herself: happy, passionate, and unafraid.
Dublin-based writer Luke Dunne has a love and passion for cinema in the fair city and beyond. Having founded the website Film In Dublin in 2016, he's continued to pursue his joys of writing about film, reading about film and worrying that he's not reading or writing enough about film.
