I watched Secretary last week, and thought it was one of the few movies I’ve seen that made a sincere, intelligent effort to be honest about sex and desire.
There was one bit that rang false, though, and it really annoyed me.
It’s the part where Maggie Gyllenhaal’s submissive-vigil (she refuses to leave her dominant lawyer-lover’s desk for days until he returns) becomes this story around town. News cameras show up, her family and friends start camping on the law office’s front lawn, and people file in to talk at Maggie, who won’t say anything back. You half expect Adam Gopnik to show up and make little notes in preparation for an 800-word articlette.
The sexual revolution defined itself in opposition to oppression, and thus made the expression of previously hidden desires one of its core strategies. But this impulse—“the only way to fight on behalf of sexual equality and tolerance is to make it public!—is knee-jerk now, and I wish people would think more before went through the motions again out of habit. Is the publicizing of sex really what we need more of? Have you seen a TV lately, or a movie, or the internet? (If you think that means I must be arguing for repression, you’re wrong. It’s just the vocabulary has become so limited that other terms have been pretty much shut out.)
For about ninety minutes you watch Gyllenhaal and James Spader construct a relationship that makes it possible not just to tolerate their weird desires (there’s always a bit of condescension that hangs onto the word), but to identify with them, and to find them plausible and potentially fulfilling. And then it has to become a news story, like, oh yeah otherwise this movie won’t be a social good.
What’s true in their romance is what’s true in the movie: fuck the bigots, but fuck, too, the ones who approve and really think they know what it’s all about. They have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s called respecting people’s privacy.
