By Misty Delembre
It seemed like a fitting Valentine’s Day choice: Secretary (2002), the offbeat, kinky romance that had once felt refreshingly different from Hollywood’s sanitized love stories. I remembered it as tender, strange, darkly funny – a film that challenged normative notions of desire and control, of what it means to be in love and be seen. But on rewatch, there is something near insidious about the way Secretary is able to seduce its audience. It masquerades as a love story. But beneath its neatly tailored surface, something far more perplexing simmers. Steven Shainberg’s film walks a fine line between empowerment and conditioning; liberation and entrapment. It is a film that titillates while making us uneasy, that plays with control while never quite relinquishing its own.
Although this time, I couldn’t ignore the details. The imbalance. The erasure. He is Grey; she is Lee. He is the boss; she is the secretary. He is older, composed, in control. She is younger, uncertain, and shamelessly desperate to please. It is not lost on me that he refers to her by her first name, while the film never allows us to know him as anything but ‘Mr. Grey’. Even in language, the hierarchy is maintained.
Yet the film romanticises their dynamic as a kind of mutual discovery. Lee, a woman who has spent her life in quiet self-destruction, finding solace in the structure of submission; Grey, a man daunted by his own desires, learning that he can allow himself to indulge. But this concise narrative arc collapses when observed too closely. The truth is in the unspoken details, the ones the film never asks us to interrogate too deeply.
Grey has done this before. Lee is not the first. She is not special. This is indeed a pattern. A hiring practice. A cycle. The film never lingers on the implications of this – the other secretaries who sat at that desk, typed those letters, ceremoniously bent over at his command. Were they discarded when they got too close? Did they leave, shaken, distraught and ultimately unsure of what had just occurred? Secretary treats their existence as a footnote, a quiet admission that Lee is merely another in a line of women funnelled through Grey’s carefully constructed world.
And yet, the film asks us to perceive this as love. It asks us to believe in the sincerity of their connection, to rally when Lee proves her devotion by sitting, hungry, exhausted, near-delirious, at his desk for days, waiting for him to decide she is worthy of his affection. Her submission, once playful, becomes obscured by undertones of abuse. And while the film frames this as an act of self-actualisation, of agency, I cannot shake the unease. Would this be as palatable if Grey were less conventionally attractive? If his office were not bathed in warm, rich mahogany? If the camera did not romanticise his touch, his control, his power?
The mise-en-scène aids in facilitating this deception. The muted tones of Lee’s home life, occluded thick with repression – soft pastels, smothered under fluorescent lighting – give way to the deep, intoxicating reds integral to her transformation. Lee’s wardrobe transforms from frumpy skirts to fitted, dark-hued dresses, the deep red of her lipstick echoing the welt of a fresh handprint. This is a film obsessed with texture, attune to the unfolding of control.
The cinematography intently mirrors this descent into submission, shifting from the sterile, detached framing of her early life to the sensual close-ups of her and Grey’s interactions – the tension built in the pause before a touch, the breathy silence that replaces dialogue, the way even diegetic sound seems to hush itself in anticipation. The camera lingers on the sensuality of small movements – the stroke of a hand against skin, the weight of Grey’s gaze. The lighting is warm and intimate, coaxing us into complicity. We are seduced alongside Lee, drawn in by the same slow unraveling of control. And perhaps this is the film’s greatest trick – it somehow makes submission feel like freedom. But whose freedom?
Lee’s submissiveness, for the most part, isn’t framed as a weakness but as a kind of self-actualisation. She does not suffer under Grey’s control; she flourishes. And yet, the film is careful about how it allows Grey to exert that control. Unlike the overt brutality of, say, The Night Porter (1974) or the performative excess of Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), Grey’s dominance is measured, almost hesitant. His punishments are not arbitrary; they are rituals of structure, discipline, imbued with intimacy. He is not cruel, but he is afraid – his desires are tinged with a hesitant edge, unsettled by the implications of his actions.
It is here that Secretary becomes its most fascinating and most troubling. For all its transgressiveness, the film is not truly radical. It does not upend traditional gender dynamics so much as repackage them in a new and palatable aesthetic. Yes, Lee initiates – she even pushes for more when Grey recoils. But in the end, it is still the man who holds the power – who dictates the terms, who punishes, who ultimately decides when and how the relationship will function. Even the film’s climax – Lee’s days-long protest of stillness, her body growing weaker with each passing hour – reads as both a declaration of agency and a disturbing surrender. And here’s the real provocation: is Secretary feminist, or does it simply disguise submission as empowerment?
It would be easy to frame this film as a story of liberation, of a woman embracing her true desires. But to do so neglects the larger context in which those desires are inherently shaped. BDSM, in its most idealised form, is about mutual exchange, about negotiation. But in Secretary, there is no conversation about limits, no safewords, no clear indication that Lee’s desire for submission is anything but an extension of her lifelong craving for structure and discipline. She moves from self-harm to being disciplined by a man in a position of authority. The film never interrogates whether this is a choice or simply another coping mechanism.
There is perhaps a version of this story where Secretary is genuinely radical, where Lee’s desires are explored with the complexity they deserve. A version that does not gloss over the troubling reality of power dynamics, where Grey is forced to reckon with the fact that he has done this before, and will likely do it again. Instead, we are given a fantasy – a love story built on omission.
Watching Secretary again, I am not sure if I find it beautiful or horrifying. Perhaps both. It is a film that complicates pleasure, that forces us to question the narratives we have been given about power and romance. It is intoxicating, yes. But so is a lie, when told well enough.
And this, I think, is Secretary’s real legacy – not as a film about love, but as a film about the stories we tell ourselves to make love feel safe. Even when it isn’t.
Image credit: MUBI