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Supervert Picks
Usually the book is better than the movie. There are obvious exceptions, such as when Stanley Kubrick amputated the last chapter of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange so that the film, unlike the book, did not culminate in an easy moral. But more often than not when a text is translated to screen and readers become viewers, the result is a letdown. (Actually, the reverse is true too. What "book of the movie" ever attained literary status in its own right?) Secretary, however, is also an exception, a brilliant film based on a mediocre short story. In fact, the disparity between the two is so great that you almost shudder to say the one is "based on" the other, since it seems absurd to think a midget of a short story could balance a giant of a film on its shoulders. The story "Secretary" is to be found in the collection Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill. It is about a frumpy wallflower who gets a job as a secretary and ends up in a strange sadomasochistic relationship with her employer, a lawyer. It's a great premise for a story, especially in its absurd moments, as when the lawyer begins to spank his new hire for every typo she commits. Gaitskill is a competent, credible, and occasionally insightful author — precisely the type finetuned by graduate writing programs — and yet in the end that is precisely the problem with the story. It's flat, affectless, a bit too serious for itself. When you finish reading it, you think to yourself, "Well, so what? Why should I care for this character?" In the film, directed by Steven Shainberg, you can't help but care for her. In part this is due to the tremendous acting of Maggie Gyllenhaal, who plays the secretary with a unique combination of gusto and pathos, and James Spader, who brings his trademark awkward sensuality to the role of the lawyer. But it is also due in large part precisely to the manner in which the story has been amplified — or rescued, perhaps, from its author (no doubt kudos are due to screenwriters Shainberg and Erin Cressida Wilson). In Gaitskill's story, the secretary begins and remains a human mouse. She is the kind of person who suffers from such low self-esteem that she invites and, even worse, accepts abuse. You can't blame the lawyer for maltreating her and, as a reader, you find yourself wishing that he'd managed to knock some sense into her. It's hard to feel for anyone so stubbornly resigned to her spinelessness. In the film, however, the secretary begins as a mouse and ends as a woman. That is what distinguishes the film as truly perverse: it envisions S&M not as a stereotypical session with whips and chains, but rather as a force capable of transforming a contemptible person into a heroic one. Whereas the protagonist of Gaitskill's story seems to accept the sadistic behavior of her boss as a reinforcement of her own patheticness, the protagonist of the movie attains a kind of self-liberation through it. When she submits to the lawyer's demand that she sit at his desk until he returns in order to prove her love, she undergoes a veritable endurance test — waiting there with her hands flat on his desk as day recedes into night and back again to day, eating and drinking nothing, peeing her pants, enduring a confrontation with her fiance (not the lawyer) and family members and a priest and tv crews... The effect of this incredible act of submission (which is found in the film but not the story) is not to reinforce the secretary's low self-esteem but, to the contrary, to demonstrate that she finds within herself a power to endure. She approaches the act not as though it were a psychodrama but as though it were an athletic contest, a battle of wills, and through determined self-restraint she clearly emerges the victor. Her ability to suffer surpasses the lawyer's ability to enjoy the spectacle of suffering, her masochism exceeds his sadism, and with this realization they enter into a strange new territory, a loving relationship in which the usual imbalance of power between sadist and masochist is offset by what you can only call the strength of her masochism. If, in the conventional view, sadism is active and masochism passive, Secretary reverses the terms: her masochism is the active force, his sadism is the passive one, and thanks to this inverted psychology the two characters seem destined for each other. It's a happy ending, walking hand in hand into the sunset, and perhaps nothing is more indicative of the film's perversity than its demonstration that S&M can culminate in true love. Email this page to a friendTell someone about Supervert Picks - Secretary at supervert.com. (Email addresses are not recorded or used in any way.) Your name
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