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The second installment in the “Pete’s Perverted Pix” series.
DIRECTED BY: Steven Shainberg
FEATURING: James Spader, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jeremy Davies
Plot: A tightly wound, obsessive, repressed lawyer meets a meek, neurotic typist who suffers from low self esteem and a compulsion to cut herself.
COMMENTS: Let it never be said that 366 Weird Movies turns its back on plain old love stories. We treasure lopsided romances such as Harold and Maude, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It goes to show, you can still have a weird movie even if it’s just a boy-meets-girl story. This time around we have more of a “boy beats girl” scenario, and that becomes our weird angle. The only reason not to recommend this movie for the Apocrypha is because everything weird about it is done even weirder in other movies. Secretary (2002) stands alone as a truly frank examination of the phenomenon of kink relationships, the one which even the self-identifying “leather community” points to as the movie that gets BDSM relationships closest to right. That, in itself, is an incredible rarity—but it should be less rare.
It’s not like we get into the floggers and spreader bars right away. It’s a slow-burn progress, starting with Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) being released from a mental institution. She attempts to re-adjust to normal life, hampered by a dysfunctional family including an overpowering mother and by her own neuroses that manifest in a compulsion to secretly cut and stab herself. Lee is mousy and anxious, seeming like she’d shatter at a harsh word, and usually far too intimidated to express herself. She applies for a job in the title profession, at the law office of one E. Edward Grey (James Spader, eight years before the Fifty Shades of Grey books came out). Grey is a demanding and controlling boss, so much so that he apparently needs a custom-made sign to advertise for help. Lee gets the job, since Grey assures her that it’s dull work and Lee responds that she sincerely likes dull work.
Soon their dynamic spins off-center from standard employer-employee. Grey is a stickler for detail who takes special delight in catching every typo in Lee’s work, amassing a collection of red markers for highlighting flaws and lining them up on his desk in OCD fashion. One day while rummaging around the office he discovers Lee’s secret box of self-harm toys and confronts her about it. When he paternally orders her never to engage in such behavior again, the two start to show some magnetism. She is more drawn to him with every new demand he makes and every scolding he gives her, while he is spellbound by her unquestioning obedience to his every whim. It’s obvious that neither of these people ever expected to encounter anyone quite like the other. Finally the tension breaks when Grey gambles on smacking Lee on the rear while she hunches over a desk proofreading, and Lee—instead of running off to file a sexual harassment lawsuit—is totally cool with it. Once the lid is off this boiling pot of kinky sexual tension, the two enter an awkward dance, escalating games of domination and submission, and alternately retreating in fright from their mutually acknowledged dark sides.
Some of their play is point-blank role-playing, such as when he dictates that she take her dinner in tiny portions, while more involved games have her prancing about the office in restrictive bondage gear with a spreader bar holding her arms out like a cross, still handling her secretarial work. Even sillier scenes flash by in montage, most notably Lee on a desk on her hands and knees saddled like a pony. Eventually Grey suffers a classic case of “top drop,” the point where every out-of-the-closet sadist asks themselves for the first time “what kinda sick monster enjoys this?” Even though he tries to break things off, Lee is single-minded. She is deaf to the pleas of her vanilla boyfriend on the sidelines, a sweetheart of a guy who nevertheless just can’t handle Lee with the firm hand she seeks. Will our star-crossed lovers ever be able to relax and enjoy their attraction without judging it?
The amazing thing about Secretary is the poise and balance it maintains while deconstructing a taboo relationship between two little-understood personalities. This could easily have been gross-out schlock, seedy porn, or silly camp, but the characters themselves are treated with dignity, and the relationship is presented as a positive thing for them. The humor is gentle and cherishes the human, flaws and all. As two ostracized, repressed weirdos both attracted and repelled by this energy between them, Gyllenhaal and Spader are downright cute and fun to watch. Finally, we viewers have to accept that, while this relationship wouldn’t work for most of us, it works for these two, and more power to them. As Woody Allen observed in Annie Hall, “we need the eggs.” Secretary may not be the weirdest depiction of the leather lover in the wild, but it is likely to be the most respectful and heart-warming one for many decades yet.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
Secretary
- Lee Holloway is a smart, quirky woman in her twenties who returns to her hometown in Florida after a brief stay in a mental hospital. In search of relief from herself and her oppressive childhood environment, she starts to date a nerdy friend from high school and takes a job as a secretary in a local law firm, soon developing an obsessive crush on her older boss, Mr Grey. Through their increasing
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