He's a neurotic martinet of a lawyer who goes through secretaries faster than legal pads. She's just been released from a psychiatric institution where she was sent for self-mutilating. She shows up at his phantasmagorically rococo law office with her freshly minted typing scores in hand. He hires her as the latest in a long line of assistants who invariably run out screaming, confirming his self-hatred for harboring urges he can neither repress nor face. Sexually, he's a dominant and she's a submissive. She knows they've been looking for each other all their lives. He knows, too, and it sickens him. Did I mention that this is a romantic comedy?
In Secretary, Steven Shainberg and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson liberally adapt a story by Mary Gaitskill to bust taboos and turn sadomasochistic stereotypes inside out. James Spader, discarding the typecast yuppie pretty-boy personas of Sex, Lies and Videotape and Crash, plays the reluctant master E. Edward Grey, Esq. Vibrant newcomer Maggie Gyllenhaal plays his eager would-be slave, Lee Holloway.
In the "making-of" featurette, Shainberg relates how every single person he spoke to about the film had the same reaction to Lee's masochistic infatuation with Mr. Grey. They all said, "In the end, she has to get over this problem." His reply: "But it's not a problem. That's the idea of the movie." Lee's path runs 180 degrees contrary to our expectations for this kind of material -- when she starts getting spanked, she stops cutting herself. In bondage, she blooms.
"This movie is about Lee finding herself in all ways and sexuality is an incredibly powerful path to take to do that," says costar Gyllenhaal.
Mr. Grey's behavior trashes our typical expectations of an alpha-dominant personality. He's as much a slave to his obsessive/compulsiveness as are those he imposes it on. Intrigued by Lee, he observes, "There's something about you; you're closed tight like a wall," aptly describing himself. He hides in his closet when a mysterious parody-dominatrix storms into his office, demanding that he sign the settlement and scornfully assessing Lee's character with a single label: "Submissive." He battles the office's rodent population with have-a-heart traps, gently releasing the mice in the parking lot where they're free to scurry back inside. He must have studied up on cutting to so accurately convey his empathy to Lee, to show her he understands why she does it.
Even more than its witty production design, its subversive humor, and its fearless risk-taking, what makes Secretary a must-see for all cinema fans, kinky or not, is its acting. Blessed with the perfect cast, Shainberg has elicited performances rich in nuance. Look at their faces and watch them struggling to master a welter of emotions -- reacting, repressing, analyzing, desiring, rejecting, and all in a second or two. Watch Lee's mom's (Lesley Ann Warren) vapid smile shade into apprehensive dread as she picks Lee up at the institution on the day of her sister's wedding. Watch Spader's unsuccessful attempt to martial his features into businesslike neutrality when Lee comes to apply for the job on the heels of her predecessor's tumultuous departure.
And, above all, watch Lee as she absorbs her first (fully clothed) spank from Mr. Grey after a slow, deliberate, ritualistic build-up with all the tension and thrills of the first time two people have sex with each other. Lee has deliberately provoked him, and the occasion is classically choreographed in the corporal punishment tradition: the summons, the long walk down the hall to the headmaster's office, the ominous closing of the office door, the assuming of the position. Mr. Grey directs: "Now I want you to bend over the desk so you're looking directly at it. Get your face very close to the letter and read the letter aloud."
Lee reads. The first blow falls. Close-up on her face. Like Sleeping Beauty at the prince's kiss, she awakes, jolted into the moment. Initial shock and outrage shade into acceptance and arousal. Mr. Grey waits patiently as she slowly turns her head to stare back at him. The look on Lee's face is sexier than all the naked floggings in all the cinematic versions of The Story of O. She remains in position, elbows flat on the desk. He utters one word, "Continue."
The spanking sequence is played absolutely straight, after the audience has been thoroughly disarmed by Secretary's comic veneer. Cleverly anticipating the standard "whips and chains" sniggers, using flawed characters to seemingly confirm the comforting notion that only weirdos would do something like this, Shainberg abruptly pulls the rug out -- only the jester may speak the truth. Rather than degrade the characters, their punitive ritual empowers them. We may not understand it, but we know we've witnessed an act of liberation, of sensuality, of intimacy. Lee knows this, too; now she must convince Mr. Grey, who is severely conflicted at having his dreams threaten to come true. And she must deflect her shlumpfy high school boyfriend (Jeremy Davies), who offers a conventional marriage where Lee senses she'd have to start cutting again or suffocate.
Lee precipitates the film's climax by calling "Time out!" when Mr. Grey tries to fire her, stepping out of role to confront him as an equal. He subjects her to a final ordeal, a trial to prove her endurance and devotion, during which a Greek chorus of friends and family counsel Lee about her choice. Her priest is one of the most understanding: "You know, Lee, there's a long history of this in Catholicism. You are part of a great tradition. Who's to say love needs to be soft and gentle?" Her father supports her: "Your body and your soul are your own and yours to do with as you wish."
Secretary is above all an intensely physical film, from the clatter of the old-fashioned typewriter to Lee's cutting to the startlingly frank masturbation sequences that follow that first spanking. As Charles Levin notes: "The body is both a pleasure palace and a torture chamber." Lee's body is both her solution and her absolution. Secretary teaches us that if you can't be who you are, then you are no one.
