...yes, this is the part, where the seventeen-year-old (though technically eighteen years old in a few weeks) breaks down Steven Shainberg and Erin Cressida Wilson’s Secretary, and if all you can think is “GOD HELP THE CHILDREN FROM SEEING SUCH DESPICABLE CONTENT,” I kindly invite you to leave this essay. Anyone else mature enough to keep reading, I welcome it, and I hope you enjoy the things that I have to say. Secretary is a bit of a hard sell of a movie. It’s the story of a woman simultaneously giving up all the power that she has in the world to a man and yet at the same time, taking control of the life that she wants to have. That entire sentence seems entirely oxymoronic, but it’s true, mainly in that Secretary is about the development of a dominant and submissive relationship. Most people going to see a movie called Secretary, unless of course, they had done their research, would not be expecting a movie about a troubled young woman who meets a man who helps her “embrace her pain”, but also has his own paralyzing insecurities. So, how do you sell an audience said relationship? How do you keep an audience glued to their seats, even as an awkward and erotic film plays out in front of them? This isn’t the cool eroticism of 50 Shades of Grey. This is the messy, uncomfortable, and cringe-inducing type of just about the best kind. The answer as it almost always is the concept of audience engagement. Secretary is the type of movie where while the story finds itself very simple, each frame gives the audience something to look at and consider behind what is a straightforward love story. Take, for example, an early cut in the film, that while acting as a punchline also acts as a terrifying expansion of our understanding of the main character, Lee Holloway. Lee (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) finds herself in a house dominated by a drunk father and a subservient mother and after seeing her father hurt her mother, Lee takes a boiling tea kettle and does the one thing that she knows she can do. She hurts herself with it. The cut fades to Lee lying in a swimming pool, buoyed by eight floaties, two on each of her arms and two on each of her legs. The fade in lets us assume a lot of things. First, Lee drifts in the water, accentuating that Lee herself is simply drifting through life, not really sure what is real or not. This corresponds to a later line from her lover Mr. E. Edward Grey (James Spader) about how she hurts herself because “when [she] sees evidence of the pain inside, [she] finally knows that [she] is really there.” Lee doesn’t really seem to exist in the world, she just drifts through it. This fade in also prompts the audience to actively take part in watching the details of what Lee might be doing to herself. The previous scene depicted her burning her leg with a tea kettle, so when we see the buoys around her legs and arms, we assume that they are covering up something. We, however, only saw her burn one part of her leg, which then has us actively thinking about whether or not any of the other buoys are covering up other parts of her. There’s also the aspect of her hiding herself from the audience, not showing a true self, until, near that ending of the movie, she displays her true self to Mr. Grey, scars and all. That’s only one scene though and it lacks any of the great dialogue that peppers the movie. Let’s take a look at a scene later in the movie, where the dialogue itself becomes a vessel for audience engagement. Lee wants Mr. Grey to dominate her, but Mr. Grey is self-conscious about his want to dominate another person. This leads to a confrontation, at the end of which Mr. Grey fires Lee. The interesting thing about said scene is that Mr. Grey repeats the questionnaire that he offered Lee when he was interviewing her for a job, almost leading us to assume that he is attempting to reassure himself that this is the right decision. That he needs to run over the criteria one last time before he makes a decision. The audience in hearing these questions being rattled off, and watching the fearful demeanor that Spader lends to the character, as well as the slow zooming towards the face of Lee, is forced to read the subtext of the scene. This is great writing and direction because it forces the audience to actively engage in the scene, which is punctuated almost halfway through by Mr. Grey asking, “Do you want to be my secretary?” meaning, “Do you want to submit to me?” and Lee responding in the silence of the room, with a warm smile on her face, “yes.” The greatness of Secretary lies in what is offscreen, the subtext. We so obviously know what each character really wants out of the other that every single word doesn’t mean said word, it means “Will you submit to me or will you dominate me?” The same goes for the scenes of eroticism. As Mr. Grey spanks or does some sexual thing to Lee, while there is a very present surface eroticism, there’s also an implied eroticism. With each hit, we see the idea of the characters making love, we see a passion of the purest kind. There’s a stillness to the scenes where this happens. The sound drowns out and it is just the two of them experiencing the moment. The hypnotic loss of sound forces the audience to focus on the intensity of the relationship. To visualize the eroticism in its full force as only a little comes out on screen. The audience is actively taking part in the moment rather than just watching it. So, how do you sell any type of content to any type of audience? Well, I’d probably say that some types you couldn’t sell to any audience, especially when it is of such an erotic nature, but that being said, I think that keeping the audience actively engaged and thinking throughout is the best way to keep them from being offended by said content. Audiences want to be interested I think, even shown something of the pure spectacle, anything that can get them to feel that catharsis and even with “inappropriate content,” I think they’ll still watch the movie if it is interesting to them. Secretary, for as simple as its story is, has plenty to break down and is one of the most interesting movies out there. Bibliography 1. Secretary. Dir. Steven Shainberg. Eagle Pictures, 2002.
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AuthorStephen Tronicek. Archives
July 2017
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