** CONTAINS SPOILERS **

This is, without a doubt, one of my all-time favourite films. If you haven’t seen it you should. If you have seen it, you should probably watch it again. By no means highly-polished it does have a consistent and powerful voice and style. The staccato, emotional push-pull feel of the story is accentuated by still camera on obsessively symmetrical mise-en-scene alternated with smooth, intimate tracking shots of a woman finding her strength and sexuality, with the celebration of her imperfect naked body…

The colour palette is strange but right, somehow, and boasting virtually pitch-perfect performances from Maggie Gyllenhaal, James Spader, Jeremy Davies, Lesley Ann Warren and Stephen McHattie (the latter two being truly great, underrated character actors) the film comes together extremely well. It never stands outside in judgment on itself, it never breaks its own character. It really is a great film with what is probably the best delivery of the words, “Why not?” maybe ever.

Ultimately though, Secretary is amongst my favourites because it has one of the strongest female lead characters I’ve seen in narrative feature filmmaking. That she is a sexual “submissive” just makes it all the more compelling to watch her fight passionately, assertively, unbendingly for her right not to settle, for her right to find love in whatever form best suits her regardless of how strange and “wrong” it might seem to others.

That some of the more poignant, beautiful – if surreal – moments of the film occur as her family and friends rally to her cause is particularly moving. The unconditional and exquisitely articulated support of her recovering drunk father especially so.

I’ve heard the film criticized for romanticizing sub-dom behaviours. I’ve heard the film criticized for romanticizing “cutting”. I’ve heard the film criticized for making the “alt-lifetstyle happy ending” too tidy given how broken and damaged are the two leads and how basically intolerant people usually are when faced with behaviour that challenges what they perceive as the status quo. These grievances, it should be noted, were not all levelled by uber-conservatives. They were levelled by some otherwise very open-minded and tolerant people.

But, personally, I just can’t go there. I mean, all happy endings are deeply suspect aren’t they? And, though I am not so naive as to believe that there aren’t very profound differences in the levels, textures and intensity of “broken & damaged” in the world – aren’t we all at least a little broken and damaged?

In Secretary, she is a “submissive” but she is a very particular kind of submissive. This means that some dominant types could take advantage of her, even hurt her and others might not hurt her enough (so-to-speak). The match of her character with James Spader’s character is the fit of two puzzle pieces from a complicated jigsaw puzzle. A puzzle where there are no easy corners to navigate, just twisting roundness and protrusions meant to bind the two together and the removal of shame from the equation seems to be a crucial component of that connection. Shame is, it often seems to me, what makes us either shrink from, or brashly fight, the world at large and the only cure for shame is acceptance (by self, by others) but that is a sticky business in our culture.

Our culture has its own very push-pull relationship to self-improvement versus self-acceptance. We run around telling ourselves and each other to love ourselves just as we are, to not even want to be friends with people who don’t also accept us for who we are but we also spend a lot of time practicing religion, seeing therapists, exercising, soul-searching, meditating, “paring down”/”embracing diversity”, taking pilgrimages of one kind or another, reading self-help books etc. so that we can change and – theoretically – improve ourselves. There is, it would seem, far more money to be made in perpetuating shame and a lack of self-acceptance and that irritates me but to shun all self-improvement as playing into the hands of “the man” is pretty dumb as well.  Self-defeating at best, and destructive to those counting on us to grow at worst.

We are not islands unto ourselves but we aren’t ever perfect either.

There are some behavioural habits that we must and should change. Things we do which are more destructive to ourselves and others than they are ever positive. But, I can’t help thinking, there are also behavioural habits which need not be changed so much as they need be adequately matched and protected. How much easier is it, I wonder, to present a stronger, more competent, more shining version of ourselves to the world at large if – at home and with close friends – we have people who accept and support us for our weaknesses, oddities, quirks? So, home and friends become safe places to be more – if not most – of who we really are and the rest of the world no longer has to be a place where we struggle and fight for a right to be that way, it no longer has to be something we hide from.

We can be who we really are at home, we can just be in the world.

The danger of the “Hollywood” happy ending, I think, is not in the idea that being accepted for who we are, loved as much for our particular broken & damaged as we are in spite of it – it’s that somehow all that love and acceptance is only supposed to come from one person.

This, I think, is the message of the film Secretary. It’s about romantic love and finding a good “fit” with a lover, partner, friend. But it is also, as I mentioned above, about the acceptance of nearest and dearest. It’s about self-acceptance and the acceptance of community and how we can hold on to things we might otherwise define as undesirable habits or, at worst – and as James Spader’s character feels of his sexual needs – as shameful and be the stronger for it. We don’t have to scrub ourselves clean of all our oddities and weaknesses, and the strength we find in being accepted even with those oddities and weaknesses will help us to work through other levels of our broken & damaged because everything is easier when there is strength around you as well as inside you.

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character stops “cutting” herself because she is finally seen and understood without judgement. Because she is finally seen and understood she loves and understands herself. Because she loves and understands herself she grows strong enough to fight for what she wants and in fighting for what she wants she provides love and understanding – acceptance – to another human being and frees him as he freed her.  They just fit and the rightness of that fit flows out into their community.  It’s beautiful and, in my opinion, it is honestly irrelevant that she gets spanked or wears a saddle with a carrot in her mouth to achieve it.

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Image borrowed from HERE