Secretary (the movie) - C/D

I had high hopes with James Spader as the male lead. The story was filmed boringly. And why does she cut herself in plain sight? Couldn't get that. And the scenes in her house, living with her parents: horrible.

The first spanking scene was mildly arousing. And then the closing scene is ok, kind of interesting. A little bit.

Gaitskill's story should have made a great movie. But in this morally heinous film, Shainberg removes the details and the psychic distress that Gaitskill's characters projected onto them. Shainberg means to hide the soul stress of patriarchy that Gaitskill's story reveals to its readers. John M Demetry

And this is the book http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679723277/ref%3Dnosim/metasoul

OK, first of all the quip that this film is Shainberg's mysoginistic vision is ridiculous. The screenplay was penned by Erin Cressida Wilson, a sex columnist, erotic playwright and professor at Duke. In an interview, she says, "what excited me most about the story was to make it not a victim tale, but a love story--to not create yet another story of a woman "overcoming" her problems, but a woman embracing her masochism. Steven and I wondered, what would it be like if masochism was not a deviance, but was just a different type of sexuality. Then the thought became, what if this is a "coming out film" for a masochist. What if she stops fighting her masochism, embraces it, defines it, and then is empowered?"

She also claims that Spader was cast largely because he is seen as an object rather than a subject. Shainberg says despite Spader's character being 'sadistic' he is more scared than scary.

John Demetry completely missed the motivations for this film adaptation. Whether or not the film actually succeeds in doing what it is trying to do is another story...

It sounds like the movie was a declawed version of the short story in a lot of ways. Still, this is not Hollywood's fault, as Hollywood refused to put money behind this film for many years. Shainberg only secured funding in New York, where investors are willing to take a few more risks. OK, so maybe if he went to
Paris he would have been able to make the film as a more direct adaptation of Gaitskill's story...but I think it is an interesting and enjoyable interpretation, none the less.

Hell even Gaitskill has likened her portrayal of S/M in Bad Behavior as "playful," and that "A lot of my characters are actually too incompetent to be properly called S/M practitioners..."

While I can't call her up and ask her, previous interviews suggest that she would be happy with a variety of interpretations of her work, including the film version of "Secretary."

"they saw the book in totally different ways than I meant it. Not in a bad way. For example, some people saw the story "Secretary" as a social statement about the
evil of jobs and the horror of sexual harassment. Other people thought it as a story about a young girl being liberated from her tightness by a beneficent old guy." -- source

While the film has its faults (Shainberg admits that most of the characters and events outside of the office were hacked to bits during editing as they just weren't as interesting as what was going on inside the office), Demetry's assessment seems really off-base.

I could have done without the voice over, though. I think the whole story could have been told visually instead of erm told directly by MG.

"A lot of my characters are actually too incompetent to be properly called S/M practitioners..."

But in this morally heinous film

does anyone remember the scene where james spader's character asks maggie's character to put her hands on the desk, pull down her skirt and undergarment and he proceeded to, as the "lads" say,

play tug o war

Gaitskill's story should have made a great movie. But in this morally heinous film, Shainberg removes the details and the psychic distress that Gaitskill's characters projected onto them. Shainberg means to hide the soul stress of patriarchy that Gaitskill's story reveals to its readers. John M Demetry

― Jan Geerinck (jahsonic), Tuesday, February 25, 2003 4:25 PM (twenty-three years ago)

I rewatched the movie and it interested me enough that I read the story. It's funny to see it described as "morally heinous". Part of me wants to call the film an "anti-adaptation" but really when I read the story I think of the film as being an adaptation in a _legal_ sense, in that it uses certain words and phrases from the story. I guess it's a "good" story in that Gaitskill is a good literary writer, and, I mean... it's a story about a boss sexually abusing his employees. There are a million stories like it, in fiction and, unfortunately, in the real world. This is just how powerful men behave. This is what men are rewarded for doing. Watching a cinematic version of the story Gaitskill wrote would be like watching a film of "Cat Person". Women keep saying the same things and the people in power don't listen or care.

That's what makes the movie interesting. BDSM is not abuse, but Shainberg takes a story that is about abuse, not BDSM, and turns it into a BDSM romance. I guess a lot of "BDSM" fiction is really about abuse. I haven't read or seen _50 Shades of Gray_, because every single person I know says that it is awful and bad. I saw _Secretary_ because the people I know in the BDSM community said it was very good. I watched in 2003, I guess, and said "This is awful, this is abuse".

Well, it is, and in this it has a lot in common with a lot of typical Hollywood romance movies. People regularly behave in those movies in ways that would be completely awful if people did them in person. Mr. Grey (I can only assume Christian Grey's name in _50 Shades of Grey_ is a mere coincidence) sexually abuses his employee. Lee stalks her former boss. As real people they would both be awful, morally repugnant people, but in the film it's OK because we, the audience, know that these people actually want each other and are just too ashamed and afraid to tell each other. Each of them is awkward and insecure and each does Bad Things (which in the real world are _not_ morally equivalent, but this isn't the real world) and each of them desperately wants to stop doing Bad Things.

This I think is maybe why so many of the kink people I knew loved it so much when it came out, because Kink Is Not Abuse and a lot of people who do kink are traumatized and are abuse victims and are trying to figure out how to not do Bad Things after having learned from a very young age that doing Bad Things is normal, that abuse is love. I loved it because all of those million men who do Bad Things could learn to NOT do them just as easily as I learned to stop cutting myself, which is to say not easily at all but they COULD DO IT. I don't think of myself as a submissive, I don't call myself a submissive, and I have wants, and I have needs, and a lot of the things people are ashamed of are things I _enthusiastically consent_ to, things I _want_ them to do to me, which makes them not Bad Things, not for them, not for me. And I struggle to communicate that in a way that gets my wants and needs met.

Revive, I guess, in that I finally saw this tonight. I think this quote from Gaitskill above:

"A lot of my characters are actually too incompetent to be properly called S/M practitioners..."

...kinda sums up how the movie felt, acknowledging Douglas's note about how movie != short story. It added to the absurd/satirical humor of the film as a whole. In sum: great!

― Ned Raggett, Friday, March 30, 2007 11:20 PM (eighteen years ago)

Speaking as an occasional BDSM practitioner, Gaitskill _significantly_ overestimates our competence. This is important because the most fucked up stuff in kink happens when we don't want to admit that we have no idea what we're doing sometimes and that we fucked up, actually, and that we're sorry about that.

Each of them is awkward and insecure and each does Bad Things (which in the real world are _not_ morally equivalent, but this isn't the real world) and each of them desperately wants to stop doing Bad Things.

Spader's character's wincing at his own behavior and awkwardness was so funny and human upon rewatching. (It didn't work for me in 2003 either.) I could almost imagine Nicholas Braun doing this role onstage.

watched this recently for the first time since 2002, one thing hadnt registered back then but i was chuckling at now was how, for a guy who is supposed to be extremely repressed and boring, his office is super mod and kooky, like somewhere the B52s would take meetings

i completely forgot this was based on an Gaitskill short story