Gyllenhaal is magnetic and convincing as a shy and awkward person who eventually finds a confident voice through the expression of latent desires. The gradual discovery that she likes what she likes is played as emotional liberation, and it is genuinely moving to witness her newfound determination as the lights come on in her eyes for the first time. “Every single Hollywood actress of the appropriate age passed on the role and that was the only reason that we could cast Maggie Gyllenhaal,” Shainberg tells BBC Culture from his home in Brooklyn, NYC. Established actresses were squeamish about taking on a role that involved being spanked over a desk and crawling on the floor on hands and knees, carrot in mouth. But having an unknown in the part ended up working to the film’s advantage – as Shainberg says, “Part of the audience’s response is that you just don’t have any association. They are ‘the girl’.”
By contrast, the role of Mr Grey went to everyone’s favourite sexy weirdo. By 2002 Spader had already played Graham, a man who likes to videotape women talking about sex in Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989) and James, a man who is turned on by car crashes in David Cronenberg’s Crash (1995). His preppy, delicate looks coupled with a willingness to calmly navigate kink made him a very specific type of sex symbol. “Women were drawn to him, and maybe they still are, in a cataclysmic way,” says Shainberg. Gyllenhaal told the Independent newspaper in 2003 how he emulated Grey’s ambivalence, sometimes doting on her, offering her chocolates and telling her she was his chosen ally; at other times, ignoring her and lavishing attention on the make-up artist instead. “It was re-enacting what was going on in the film. I don’t think it was conscious for me, but it was for him,” she said. I put this account to Shainberg who does not dispute it: “Everything about him understood how to play it both on screen and off screen,” he says.
How it affected people
Secretary has, over the years, divided the kink community (an incredibly diverse counterculture united only by an interest in unconventional sources of erotic pleasure), most specifically on two points: the fairy tale, rom-com ending given to Lee and Edward, in which she ditches her fiancé and they get married, and the inclusion of self-harm as something that arguably pathologised Lee’s sexuality. Furthermore, although the film scans as a fantasy, and scrutinising it through the lens of realism misses the point, post-MeToo, any depiction of a workplace abuse of power is not without a hint of sourness. The Gaitskill short story gives Debby’s lawyer boss a comeuppance of sorts, as a journalist gets wise to his abuses, while the heroine is so disturbed that she simply stops going to work, while still being turned on by the memory of them. In adapting a dark short story into a fantasy romance, while keeping the workplace setting, there is a loss of a moral anchor and, what’s more, some of Debby’s complexity, as a woman in a deeply ambivalent relationship to her abuser, is rounded off. In this original Gaitskill depiction, there are shades of Liliana Cavani’s film The Night Porter (1974), in which in 1957 Vienna a concentration camp victim, played by Charlotte Rampling, runs into her former Nazi guard, played by Dirk Bogarde, and the two rekindle a sexual relationship that began in the camp.
Nonetheless, at the time of Secretary’s release, in a cinema landscape barren of depictions of BDSM [Bondage, Discipline, Dominance, Submission, Sadism and Masochism], it was a watershed film for many with BDSM interests. Madison Young is a renaissance woman on the US queer kink scene whose work runs to writing, activism, acting in and directing pornographic films, and being a leading figure in the feminist porn movement. She has written a memoir, Daddy, exploring her personal relationship with BDSM and founded her own production company, Empress Media. She recalls watching Secretary with her partner in 2005, less than five years into her BDSM journey. “Secretary along with 9 1/2 Weeks (1986) was one of the first times that I saw kink explored in a mainstream Hollywood film. That felt huge! Now we are at a different place of consciousness surrounding kink, sex, consent, communication, gender, and sexuality than we were 20 years ago. We still have massive work to do but, at the time, Secretary felt very radical. It was radical.”