Based On, If Any: Secretary (2002)
Work vs. (Role)play from Mary Gaitskill to Maggie Gyllenhaal & James Spader
Brittany Menjivar is watching adaptations for her monthly column, Based On, If Any. Today, it’s a Mary Gaitskill story made for the big screen in 2002’s Secretary. If you missed it, Britt’s first entry was on Rave Macbeth (2001).
Work vs. (Role)play: On Secretary (2002)
A woman in a high-waisted pencil skirt and white satin button-up struts down the runway, eyes fixed ahead in concentration. The look, featured in Enfants Riches Deprimes’ SS25 show, is a classic take on business chic—except for the fact that the model’s wrists are in handcuffs, attached to a horizontal steel bar by the choker around her neck. This isn’t an original fantasy conjured up by the label (although, one might argue, is any fantasy original?), it’s a callback to a scene in Secretary where Maggie Gyllenhaal runs errands around James Spader’s office in a similar fit, a pawn in his convoluted BDSM games.
Letteboxd assigns Secretary the following categories: “Moving Relationship Stories,” “Erotic Relationships and Desire,” “Quirky and Endearing Relationships,” “Captivating Relationships and Charming Romance.” Taking on an almost clinical tone, Wikipedia labels it a film about “the intense relationship between a dominant lawyer and his submissive secretary, who indulge in various types of BDSM activities such as erotic spanking and petplay.” Judging by these descriptors, one might not guess that the 2002 flick, directed by Steven Shainberg and written by Erin Cressida Wilson, was based upon a significantly less melodramatic short story by Mary Gaitskill.
While Gaitskill’s story does center a young woman who begins working for an uncommonly, sometimes inappropriately, demanding lawyer, it boasts no unwieldy bondage contraptions, no “petplay”-inspired visual gags. There’s certainly an erotic undercurrent to our narrator’s experience as well as her boss’s, but “charming” and “quirky” could hardly be applied to it—and romance, alas, is nowhere to be found between the lines.
The distance between Gaitskill’s story and its adaptation reveals the versatility of BDSM imagery. There are about as many ways to use cuffs and paddles (narratively, I’m talking narratively) as there are sexual positions—but that’s not because all writers (or directors, or fashion designers) are perverts. Rather, these symbols externalize a secret we all know deep down—power play is just as much of a day-to-day reality in the streets as it is in the sheets. “It’s a lot like life,” Dave Gahan crooned in Depeche Mode’s “Master and Servant.” I’d wager that Gaitskill, Shainberg, and Wilson would all agree.
Gaitskill’s “Secretary” is included in a collection titled Bad Behavior—but Gaitskill doesn’t judge. The characters contained within might engage in activities considered transgressive, even improper; yet moral ambiguity abounds.
Gaitskill’s narrator Debby is a recent high school graduate living at home with her parents. After completing a typing course, she begins her job at the law office—and that’s where the trouble starts. The lawyer—that’s the only name he gets, turning him into a sort of specter— spanks her to punish her for spelling errors before subjecting her to a series of subsequent humiliations, all of which require her to bend over his desk. The two never discuss these incidents; once Debby’s upright, it’s time to get back to work.
The lawyer’s actions excite Debby, who loses herself in flights of fancy after each episode. Yet she begins to withdraw into herself, a change that’s most notable in her increased distance from her family. When her mother asks her if she’s all right, she snaps back at her: “I’m as all right as I ever am.” Her mother replies skeptically: “That doesn’t sound good, honey.” She stays home sick the next day… and the next, and the next, and the next. When the lawyer doesn’t call, she tells her family that she quit the job. “That lawyer was an asshole,” Gaitskill writes. To everyone’s discomfort, I began to cry. I left the room, and they all watched me stomp up the stairs.
The lawyer eventually admits to his wrongdoing with a letter that’s more self-protective than mea culpa: “I am so sorry for what happened between us. I have realized what a terrible mistake I made with you. I can only hope that you will understand, and that you will understand, and that you will not worsen an already unfortunate situation by discussing it with others. All the best.”
Debby remains in a haze, alternately wallowing and fantasizing about her strange encounter, until she learns that the lawyer is running for mayor of her Detroit suburb. Hot on the heels of his campaign announcement, she gets a call from a reporter who believes he has no business running for office—and suggests that she may be able to reveal information that would damage his campaign. Uncomfortable, Debby hangs up.
Post-2017, it might be tempting to read Gaitskill’s story in light of the MeToo movement, from one perspective or another. One could argue that the lawyer’s pronouncement and the journalist’s phone call help Debby realize that her tumultuous state is the result of grooming, and that the story’s conclusion shows her recognizing the extent of his impropriety for the first time. Alternatively, one might claim that the lawyer and journalist’s handwringing are the product of unnecessary moralizing, and perhaps Lee hanging up is her way of rejecting their narrative, of refusing to identify as a victim. I subscribe to a different reading altogether. Debby’s hesitance to engage with the reporter, it seems to me, points the reader toward the true focus of the story: it’s less concerned with punishing the lawyer (or letting him off the hook) than it is unpacking Debby’s emotional response. Just because the lawyer’s behavior is “bad” doesn’t mean that Debby’s reaction is. In the popular parlance, it’s complicated.
Debby is a teenager with little sexual history. In her current phase of life, being on the receiving end of any sexual advances—let alone sexual advances from an older man in a position of power—would feel intense and confusing, to say the least. The reader is challenged to ask: What would it mean for this to be Debby’s first sexual experience? While such a scenario might seem absurd, girls and women must sometimes explore their sexuality under less-than-ideal circumstances, indeed (as I wrote earlier this year for A Personal Anthology). Formative sexual experiences are rarely the tame stuff of coming-of-age movies, especially considering the fetishization that teen girls are often subjected to. An adolescent may respond to vulnerable situations or power imbalances as she pleases, but a period of reckoning must always take place.
In keeping with the story’s emphasis on Debby, we never learn what becomes of the lawyer. He remains off the page, although Debby has her memories of him—and those are hers alone to decide what to do with.
Secretary the film is distinct from “Secretary” the short story. In any universe, this would be true—while Gaitskill’s storytelling style is blunt yet discretionary, the medium of cinema itself celebrates spectacle, and with Maggie Gyllenhaal (in her breakout role) and James Spader (a bona fide movie star) putting faces to Gaitskill’s nameless characters, we can’t help but gawk.
There are surface-level changes: Debby’s name is changed to Lee; Lee is depicted as clinically depressed rather than generically listless. The greatest difference between the story and the film is the length and depth of the relationship between the two. Although certain early sequences follow the book closely, Lee doesn’t cower from her boss, Mr. Grey (prophesying the 50 Shades franchise?); it is he who ultimately fires her, but only after they’ve spent a considerable amount of time together. An off-kilter montage during which Lee eats from Mr. Grey’s hand and sports a horse’s saddle on all fours suggests that Lee is surer of herself than Debby—she’s eagerly accepting Mr. Grey’s challenges, despite his sudden and brusque manner of initiating.
While Debby must reckon with confusion, Lee must reckon with the desperate and sometimes debasing nature of attraction. Debby’s crisis is discerning what her wants and needs are; Lee’s is dealing with how humiliating it can be to embody those wants and needs. This theme is particularly notable in the film’s conclusion, which extends beyond the short story’s purview. Lee perfunctorily accepts a vanilla boyfriend’s marriage proposal, only to ditch the wedding and run to Mr. Grey’s office. He commands her to sit in his chair without moving until he returns; she does so even though he’s gone for three days. When he returns to the office, he bathes her and feeds her—and it is these two that eventually marry and live happily ever after.
This christening of the transgressive relationship is best described as a wish-fulfillment fantasy. Watching it for the first time, I thought of Buffalo 66, in which writer-director-lead Vincent Gallo finds romance with Christina Ricci—a young woman he kidnapped in order to bring a “girlfriend” home to his parents. Both films are dark contemporary fairytales in which intense displays of emotion and passion are rewarded by romance. If you look past the inappropriateness of the pairings, you’ll find a prayer that our most perverted desires may someday be purified, made holy. There is a bizarre sense of hope in these anecdotes—the promise that no matter how sick and twisted the world is, no matter how sick and twisted you are, you may find redemption in the arms of someone who loves you unconditionally.
Does Mr. Grey deserve such a reception? To fans of the film, that’s not the point—it’s, Does Lee?
In Gaitskill’s “Secretary,” the protagonist’s BDSM trappings signify one thing; in Shainberg and Wilson’s Secretary, they signify another. In neither work do symbols of punishment and humiliation exist purely for titillation—as in real life, they serve as set pieces for psychic confrontations. What exactly the roleplay reveals depends on who’s playing the roles.
BRITTANY MENJIVAR studied creative writing and film at Yale University. Now, she works and plays in the City of Angels. Britt’s a columnist for the Los Angeles Review of Books, the author of poetry and prose collection Parasocialite, the screenwriter behind award-winning thriller short “Fragile.com,” and the co-founder of literary reading series Car Crash Collective.
