Director Steven Shainberg's "Secretary" comes to theaters with Sundance acclamations as notches on its belt. Sound like patriarchy? U bet.
Feminism once provided a method of identifying and dismantling the ways that the culture enforces male dominance - "patriarchy" - in politics, education, media, business, home, and bedroom. The cultural hegemony - white, hetero-male patriarchy - distorted the feminist legacy into the pseudo-sexual liberation it now promotes. Today, we have the egalitarian objectification of men and women alike - the intellectual orgy of the privileged.
Sustaining hegemony, Shainberg adapts Mary Gaitskill's harrowing short story about a female secretary's sexual exploitation by her male boss - serious in tone and vibrating with dread imminence - and turns it into a "quirky" indie film comedy. In the movie, it's now a romance about a secretary (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and her boss (James Spader) finding fulfillment in a sub-dom relationship after grappling with suburban social norms. Shainberg takes a hipster's approach - "shocking!" but easy to swallow.
Written in the first person perspective of the secretary and constructed out of accumulated observations rather than inner thoughts, 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.
Gyllenhaal plays the secretary as a vaguely retarded girl, constantly sticking her tongue out while she types. The movie suggests that her masochistic urges come from her family life: a grotesquely shallow mother and sister, a drunk and abusive father. Similarly, Spader plays the sadistic boss as a simpering nerd with a castrating monster of an ex-wife. They're easy to dismiss.
Shainberg's agenda is to ignore political reality. He changes - perverts - the original context, as when he retains the dialogue and the situation of the final abuse to the secretary in the short story, but makes it now the impetus for the romance in the film. Shainberg comes up with the perfect visual to express his misogyny. He composes the shot of Spader masturbating on Gyllenhaal's exposed behind to transform Gyllenhaal into a phallic symbol. That shot is a Freudian slip more revealing than Gyllenhaal's (too) pointed misspelling: "genderr."
"Secretary," the movie, signifies Shainberg's containment of Gaitskill's
short story. It is only the latest impotent victory of the cultural assault on feminism - and on freedom. Gaitskill's profoundly moving and insightful short story already broke down the trend, as its characters displace the psychological ramifications of exploitation onto sex, and, ultimately, onto politics (a bid for mayoral election) and pop culture (a Barbie doll).
Shainberg intends to displace all the secrets about patriarchy in the day-to-day world of working and living that Gaitskill's short story dredges up. What's up on the screen only serves as proof of Gaitskill's revelations. The inevitable positive reviews will support the continued bondage of men and women. To find out how and why, read Gaitskill's short story - and skip the movie.
Rated R -- strong sexuality, some nudity, depiction of behavioral disorders, and language.
Soundtrack