Secretary, and a Yes Given Where She Could Say No

Lee Holloway comes home to a small town in Florida after a stay in a psychiatric hospital. A serious act of self-harm put her there; she had been hurting herself in secret for years. Home is a house where her father drinks, and rages when he drinks, and her mother fights him about it. Her sister has just married and moved, with her new husband, into the pool house out the back. And Lee, as the film draws her, cannot refuse anyone. She cannot even hang up on a telemarketer.

She learns to type, and she takes a job as secretary to a lawyer called E. Edward Grey, who warns her that the work is dull. She tells him she likes dull work. What happens in his office is what Steven Shainberg’s Secretary is remembered for: the typing errors and their correction, the spanking at his desk, a relationship of dominance and submission between a lawyer and the woman who types his letters. The film has been argued over since 2002, and most of the argument comes down to one question. Did she choose it?

This essay argues that the film asks the same question, and answers it better than its reputation suggests, though not in the office. A yes can only be believed where a no is possible. The office is the one place in Lee’s life where she cannot say no without losing her job, and for most of the film she and her employer speak there in a code of mistakes and corrections that has no word for stop. The film seems to know it. Before it ends, it takes the job out of the room and lets her refuse.

What she does then is real, and this essay will claim it for her, exactly as far as the film shows it and no further. It is also not a model for anything. A love story can prove a woman’s yes in ways that no workplace and no relationship ever can, and the proof this one asks of her costs more than any proof should.

Secretary is an American film of 2002, directed by Steven Shainberg from a screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson and based on a short story of the same name by Mary Gaitskill, first collected in her book Bad Behavior in 1988. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Lee and James Spader plays Grey; Jeremy Davies is Peter, a family friend, and Lesley Ann Warren and Stephen McHattie are Lee’s mother and father. It had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2002, where the dramatic jury gave it a Special Jury Prize for originality, and it opened in American cinemas that September. Gyllenhaal was nominated for a Golden Globe for the part. In Japan it opened in July 2003, under its English title written in katakana, and a Japanese film database still introduces it as an offbeat love story about the strange bond of master and servant between a lawyer and his secretary.

It was later compared with Fifty Shades of Grey, whose hero shares Grey’s surname, and it has been criticised, with reason, for idealising a relationship between a boss and his employee that begins without anyone asking. Both arguments come up below. So does the film’s own answer to the second.

Two notes before going further. The film was not screened for this essay; its scenes are described as published synopses, reviews and interviews describe them, and what its characters say is paraphrased, never quoted as exact. And the essay discusses the whole film, including how it ends, because the ending is where its argument about choosing is made. It will say so again where the ending begins.

One more. Lee has hurt herself, and the film is partly about that. This essay says so plainly, and describes nothing of how.

Before the office, the family house. It is worth staying there a moment, because what Lee wants from a job makes more sense once you have seen what she leaves each morning.

Her father’s drinking is there from the start, and this essay will give it neither an explanation nor an excuse. What matters here is the weather it makes. In a house like that, the people who live there can learn to read a mood before it arrives, to keep their own needs small, and to agree. The film does not say that this is why Lee is as she is, and it offers no single cause for her hurting herself; neither will this essay. It simply shows a young woman, home from the hospital, who cannot say no to anyone, down to a stranger selling something on the phone.

Then she learns to type, and goes to work. Grey’s office is quiet, exacting and odd. He has everything typed on typewriters, he grows orchids there, and he keeps to himself. He warns her that the work is dull; she tells him she likes dull work. It sounds like a small joke. It may also be the most honest thing she says in the first half of the film. A job with rules is a kind of shelter. Its demands are written down. Its hours end. Nobody in it is going to come home drunk.

Hold on to that, because the rest of the film turns on it. The office begins as the safest room in Lee’s life. It becomes the room where she finds out what she wants. And it is, from her first day to her last, the one room where she cannot say no without losing it.

Grey’s irritation at her typing errors turns into something more: he finds her obedience arousing. One day, after another mistake, he spanks her at his desk. The film does not treat what she feels as fear. She is excited, and what follows is a sexual relationship of dominance and submission, carried on almost entirely in the office’s own language.

Look at what that language is. Lee makes mistakes; Grey corrects them. As things deepen she starts to make the mistakes on purpose, to provoke him. His instructions spread past the letters on her desk. The critic Cynthia Fuchs, reviewing the film when it opened, noted that he tells her what to eat for dinner, down to a spoonful of potatoes and four peas; Emily Kenway, writing twenty years later, set what to wear beside what to eat and what to do. Every request Lee makes arrives as an error. Every desire Grey acts on arrives as a correction. Neither of them ever has to say what they want.

That is the code’s gift, and it is a real one. Two shy people who could not have found words for this have found a grammar that says it for them. A typing error can always be only a typing error, and a punishment only a reprimand. Nobody has to risk the sentence. For a woman who cannot refuse a salesman and a man ashamed of what he wants, the code may be the only way this could ever have begun.

It is also the code’s danger, and the danger is the same fact seen from the other side. A grammar in which nothing has to be said is a grammar in which nothing can be refused. If a request is only ever a mistake, there is no way to decline it without declining the work; if a desire is only ever a correction, there is no way to question it without questioning the boss. What goes unsaid is left for the other person to interpret, and Grey’s office has that built into the furniture. Each of Lee’s errors is a question she never has to ask, and each of Grey’s corrections an answer he never has to own.

None of this is a sneer at the desire. Lee’s wish to be told what to do, and to be punished for getting it wrong, is a desire, and the film’s best instinct is to treat it as one: not as damage, not as a symptom, not as a joke. People want this, and live it well, when it is theirs. The essay “Nobody Knows What They Want by Thinking About It” read this film as a rare one that shows a preference being arrived at rather than uncovered, through small trials and noticed reactions, with its heroine often unsure. That is right, and it is worth adding where the trials take place. Every experiment in Lee’s discovery is conducted in the one room where the other person pays her wages.

The film makes a claim about Lee’s self-harm, and it should be called by its name. When Grey learns that she hurts herself, he talks with her, and then he gives her an order: she is never to do it again. In the line as one critic quoted it, he adds that it is over now, in the past. She stops. From then on, in the film’s telling, the pain she inflicted alone and in secret has been replaced by pain that is shared and chosen and part of her awakening.

Shainberg put the claim in his own words when the film came out. On Fresh Air, talking to Terry Gross, he called the difference one of the keys to the film: her self-harm happens in total isolation, hidden, while what happens with Grey is intimate with somebody else, as if she were admitting somebody into that private world.

As a description of a story, there is something true in that. A secret kept alone and a thing shared with another person are not the same, and the film is right to feel the difference. As a claim about what helps a person, it leaves out almost everything, and it is worth seeing what.

It leaves out the hospital. Whatever happened there, whoever helped her and whatever it took to come home, the story is not about any of it, and it hands the credit to an office. It leaves out the difference between care and command. Lee stops because her employer tells her to, so her stopping rests on his order, and an order can be withdrawn. What becomes of a stopping like that when the man who gave the order goes away, as he does when he fires her, is not a question a love story is built to answer. It leaves out how far the order reaches: the man who pays her is instructing her about her own body, in her own time, and the film asks us to see tenderness in it. And it leaves out the plainest fact of all, which is that pain, submission and love are not treatments for anything.

Adele Melander-Dayton, writing for PopMatters in 2010, put the objection squarely: the film simply replaces Lee’s self-harm with her relationship with Grey, and equating the two is “misleading and unrealistic.” As far as life goes, this essay agrees. What the film shows is a story about one invented woman. It is not evidence that a relationship, a desire or anyone’s pain can stand in for help, and nothing here suggests it.

If any of this is close to you, or to someone near you, it is a matter for a person rather than an essay. In Japan, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s page “Mamorouyo Kokoro” lists places to talk, by telephone or by social media and chat, for anyone troubled by worries or anxiety.

The people who made Secretary knew what they were risking. Maggie Gyllenhaal told an interviewer in 2004 that what frightened her when she first read the script was less the sex, or the things she would be doing in it, than what the film might end up saying in the wrong hands. It was walking a fine line, and if it fell off, she said, it would become “a reactionary, anti-feminist sex movie.” She asked Shainberg what he wanted its message to be. He told her he could not know until he had made it.

She trusted her co-star at once, she said, and on set Spader kept a really clear boundary up, so that anything could happen between them there without spilling over into her life. It is a small remark and a telling one. The people who made the film worked inside a boundary. The two people in it have nothing of the kind.

Spader, promoting the film in 2002, defended the pair against everyone else’s morality. The only demand on consensual sexual relations between two people, he told the Globe and Mail, is that they be eloquent and healthy and constructive for them; other people’s morality has no business being projected into the bedroom. On the bedroom he was right, and this essay has no quarrel with him there. The trouble in Secretary is not the bedroom. It is the office.

Then he reached for an image. Lee, he said, was a beautiful, graceful, bright-coloured flower that would be brilliant if it were allowed to blossom in the right garden, and Grey the most gentle, delicate, caring and thoughtful gardener. It is a generous picture, and the film shares it: Grey grows orchids in his office, and what happens to Lee looks like a flowering. But notice what the picture does. A flower asks for nothing, and refuses nothing. Every choice in it belongs to the gardener. It is the film’s blind spot in a single sentence, offered with real affection by the man who played the gardener.

Shainberg, on Fresh Air, described what grows between them as what is generally looked upon as a sadomasochistic relationship becoming a beautiful, gentle love affair, to his surprise and to hers. When you make a film about sex, he said, you have to make it about character, about what the sex means to these people. Fifteen years later, asked about the film, he called it a movie you could not get made today.

Grey is ashamed of what he wants. He pulls away, again and again, and Lee, who by now knows exactly what she wants, makes her mistakes on purpose to bring him back. Then there is an encounter at his desk that goes further than any before it. This essay will not describe it. Afterwards Grey writes her a note calling it disgusting, shreds the note, and fires her.

Look at the order of those three acts, because the whole problem of the office is in it. He writes a sentence. He destroys the sentence. And what reaches her instead is a dismissal. The plainest thing he writes about what has happened between them never leaves the room; the word he actually uses is the one his position gives him. In a relationship carried on entirely in the language of work, there was only ever one way for either of them to say stop. For her, it was to quit. For him, it was to fire her. He used it.

This is the power in the relationship, and it should be named without softening. Grey is Lee’s employer. He pays her, he decides whether she keeps her job, and when he wanted what was happening to end, he ended it by ending her job. Her wishes were no more consulted in the stopping than in the starting. It was his shame, not her refusal, that closed the office.

That is why this essay will not treat Grey’s office as a picture of consensual power exchange, whatever it shows of Lee’s pleasure. The trouble is not the desire in the room. It is that every word in the room already belongs to someone. The essay “Wanting to Surrender Control Does Not Mean Giving Up Choice” argued that what separates chosen surrender from resignation is its edges, drawn in advance by the person who hands control over, and its return, a planned moment when the plan comes back into her hands. Grey’s office had edges, but they were the job’s: its desk, its hours, its wage. And its return was the loss of the job.

Between Grey’s withdrawals, Lee tries the ordinary thing. Peter, a family friend, courts her in the usual way. Their sex is lukewarm, and when she asks him to spank her he is bewildered. It would be easy to make Peter the film’s joke, and he should not be. He cannot make sense of what she is asking for, and that is not a crime.

But notice what she does with him. Outside the office, with a man who does not pay her, Lee asks for what she wants in words. The code was the office’s, not hers. Given a room without an employer in it, she can say the sentence.

Then Peter proposes, and Lee accepts, without enthusiasm. Keep that yes in mind, because it is the most useful thing the film does for its own argument. Here is Lee agreeing to a marriage she does not want. The film has shown us, inside its own story, that a yes from her proves nothing by itself; in this, she is still the woman who could not hang up the phone. So when the film wants us to believe a yes of hers, it does not rely on a yes at all.

From here, this essay describes how the film ends.

Lee is trying on her wedding dress when she runs. She goes, in the dress, to Grey’s office, and tells him she loves him. Whatever else that is, it is not code. The words are plain, and she says them to a man who no longer pays her.

Grey does not know what to do with them. Unsure, he sets her a test: she is to sit at his desk, her hands and feet still, until he comes back. She does.

The test is his, and it matters that it is. He chooses its terms, and he decides what will count as passing. It is also, unmistakably, one more command, from the same man, at the same desk. A reader could stop here and say that nothing has changed. Something has, and it is everything the film does next.

Peter arrives and pulls her out of the chair. She goes back to it. Grey watches, unseen. Then, one by one, the people of her life come to the desk, family and friends, some to talk her out of it and some to cheer her on. Reporters gather, taking her for a hunger striker. She stays for three days.

Set this beside the telephone. At the start of the film Lee could not hang up on a stranger selling something. Here she refuses the fiancé who has come to take her home. She refuses the people who love her and ask her to stop. She lets the reporters take her for a protester, and does not move. Every visitor is a way out, offered. Every hour she stays is a choice made again, in full view, by a woman who could stand up at any moment.

The room has not changed. It is the same office, the same desk, the same chair. What has left it is the job. No wage stands behind the chair now, and no dismissal hangs over a refusal, so a no to Grey would cost her nothing but Grey, and some of the people who come to the desk are asking her for it.

This is the film’s consent scene, and it is a good one. It happens after the job is gone. It happens in public, so that her choice is not a secret between two people but something anyone who walks in can see. And it is made of refusals. This Library’s essay “Babygirl, and the Difference Between Surrender and Leverage” said of Secretary that an employee’s yes to her employer is never simply a yes. In the office that is exactly right, and no scene set there could get past it. The vigil is what the film adds once the job is gone: it proves Lee’s yes in the way a story best can, by showing, over and over, the no she could say, and does say, to everyone else. For most of its length the film kept her in a room where a no was not possible. Now it takes the job out of the room and lets her stay.

The reporters are the film’s joke, and the joke has a point. From outside, Lee’s stillness looks like a protest, and it is reported as one. A woman sitting motionless at a desk could mean almost anything, and the people who cannot see her face read her wrongly. We read her rightly for one reason only: the film shows us her face. It lets us inside her, as no office, no court and no partner can ever be let inside anyone.

So this essay claims for Lee what the film shows, and no more: that she chose Grey, again and again, in a place where she could have left. It is worth being as careful about what the vigil does not show.

It does not show terms. No word passes between them about what either wants from what they are beginning, about limits, or about how anything would stop. The vigil proves that she wants him. It does not show what they will agree to. The essay “What Fifty Shades of Grey Can Teach Us About Fantasy — and What It Cannot” observed that negotiation that works makes no story, because a calm conversation in which two people decide and confirm has nothing in it to watch. Secretary bears that out. Where a conversation would be, it has a test, because a test makes a scene.

It does not show a question asked. Grey watches from a distance rather than asking her anything, and three days is how long his doubt takes to be satisfied. The proof is required by the man who was ashamed, and it is paid by the woman who was not.

It does not show a proof anyone should be asked for. Three days in a chair, hands and feet still, taken by strangers for a hunger strike, is an ordeal, and the film frames it as devotion. A friend in the doorway might call it something else, and would not be wrong. It is possible to be moved by the vigil and still say plainly that nobody should have to prove a desire with her body.

And it cannot reach back. A yes at the end of a film does not make its first spanking something that was asked for. Emily Kenway, writing about the film for Literary Hub twenty years on, pointed out that Lee is never asked for her consent at any point. The vigil does not change that. It shows what her choosing looks like once the job is gone. It does not tell us what she would have said in the office, if anyone had thought to ask.

After three days Grey comes back. He takes her upstairs, bathes her and feeds her, and stammers out his own love. They marry, and go on, happily, with the relationship they have chosen.

The bath is the tenderest scene in the film, and it is worth seeing what it is. For the first time, Grey’s power is spent on what Lee’s body needs rather than on correcting it. He does not instruct; he washes. He does not test; he feeds. The man who could only write his shame and shred it now says his love aloud, badly, which is to say sincerely. After the ordeal comes care, and in any practice of power exchange that is where care belongs: at the end, when what was handed over is handed back.

Look, too, at where the film has moved them. Kenway describes where it leaves Lee: married to Grey, waving him off to work from their front porch. The film does not leave her at a desk. To give its lovers a happy ending, it had to take the wage out of their relationship altogether, and put a marriage where the job had been. A marriage has powers of its own, and the film does not examine them. For its argument it is enough that the wage, the one power Lee could not refuse, has left the room. That is no small admission, for a film so often remembered for its office.

Reference works note that Gaitskill’s story and the film have little in common, and critics who set them side by side find the biggest difference at the end: the story has no vigil and no wedding. The return to the office, the three days at the desk, the bath and the marriage belong to the film.

The scenes this essay has leaned on hardest, in other words, the ones in which Lee chooses where she could leave, were written for the film. What the adaptation added, above all, was the refusals.

In 2006 an interviewer recalled Gaitskill’s remark that the film was the Pretty Woman version of her story, “heavy on the charm (and a little too nice)”, and asked whether she worried that her new novel might go the same way. She did not dispute the remark. Between the worst case and the best, she said, “Secretary was definitely a middle ground-type situation”, and if a film is made, “you get some money and exposure, and people can make up their minds from there.”

There are two ways to hear what the film added, and this essay holds both. One is Gaitskill’s: a sweetening, a happy ending her story does not share. The other is that the additions are the film’s answer to a question its first half raises and cannot answer inside the office: what would it take for a woman like Lee to be believed when she says yes? The film’s answer is a room she could leave. It is made up. It is also right.

The synopsis a Japanese film database carries for Secretary says that Grey hurls a fierce shigoki at Lee and punishes her mistakes with spanking. Shigoki is an everyday word. A standard dictionary defines it as training someone severely, and illustrates it with being put through it by a senior. It is the word for hard training handed down from above. Where hard training stops and something else begins is a question Japanese workplaces have had to answer in writing.

The health and labour ministry’s guidance on power harassment at work, applied since June 2020, draws its line through exactly that ground. Harassment, as it defines it, is conduct at work that rests on a superior relationship, goes beyond what the work needs and can reasonably ask, and harms the working environment; appropriate instructions and shidō, guidance, given within what the work objectively needs, are not harassment. And the first example it gives of the first kind of harassment it lists is hitting or kicking someone.

No work needs a spanking for a typing error, and the film knows it; that is the whole charge of the scene. Lee knows it too, which is why she starts making the errors on purpose. The office code works by borrowing the grammar of training and correction to say something that grammar was never for. And a grammar borrowed that well has a price. From outside, it cannot tell a yes from a silence.

Japan’s Supreme Court said something close to that about a real workplace in 2015. Two men in managerial posts at an aquarium had made sexual remarks to women working there, and the court below had counted it in the men’s favour that one of the women had shown no clear refusal and that they had wrongly believed she allowed it. The Supreme Court would not. It is not unusual, it said, for people harassed at work to hold back from protesting, or from reporting it, while feeling strong discomfort and aversion inside, because they fear what it would do to their working relationships. At work, the absence of a no is not evidence of a yes. The film can tell Lee’s yes from a silence because it shows us her face. A court, a colleague and an employer never have that view.

None of this is applied here to a fictional office in Florida, and none of it makes Secretary a film about Japan. It gives a reader here words the film’s office never had: for correction that has nothing to do with the work, and for a silence that is not a yes.

There are at least four ways this reading could be wrong, and the first is the one this essay likes least.

First, the office may be a costume, and this essay may have mistaken it for a workplace. Secretary is told as a fable: a lawyer who grows orchids, a secretary who blossoms, a test that ends in a bath. Spader said the film was about the fact that “the most conventional and simple and innocent of love stories” can live in a world where you have to look further than usual to see it. The boss and the secretary are, besides, a scene that people play at by agreement, with no office anywhere near them, and wanting a scene in play is not wanting it at work. On that account, holding the film to the standards of a personnel department is simply the wrong genre. Much of that should be granted. Nothing here quarrels with the fantasy, or with anyone who plays it. The quarrel is only with reading the film’s office as a picture of how a real employer and a real employee might begin.

Second, the vigil may prove the opposite of what this essay says. Lee sits because Grey told her to. Each refusal she makes at the door is also an act of obedience to him, so the scene this essay calls her freest may be the purest picture of her submission, and the film may be no better at telling choosing from obeying than the reporters are. That is true, and it does not need to be answered away. A woman can choose to obey; that is what chosen submission is. What the film adds is a room in which obeying is no longer the price of keeping her job, so that when she obeys, it can at last be taken as a choice.

Third, the ending may launder the beginning. Kenway’s objection stands in full: nobody asks Lee anything at the start, and a film that rewards the relationship with a marriage can teach that a beginning without asking is forgiven by a happy end. Melander-Dayton called the film’s retreat into the trappings of a more traditional love story at the end “jarring and unpersuasive.” This essay has argued that the ending is the film’s best idea about consent. It may also be its most dangerous one, because the best case for the office is made by a scene that happens after the office has gone.

Fourth, this essay may be doing what it accuses the office of. It has spent its length asking how anyone could know that Lee’s yes was hers, which is close to a demand women with unusual desires hear too often: prove it. Gyllenhaal said she was surprised by how little controversy the film caused, and that she never got the chance to fight for it that she had hoped for. Perhaps audiences who took it simply as a love story read it rightly, and it is this essay that is asking for proof. The answer is that the essay does not doubt Lee’s desire. The film shows it, and the essay believes it. What it asks is what would let anyone else believe it, outside a cinema. That is the film’s own question, and the vigil is the film’s own answer.

Three things, none of them a rule.

A yes is believable where a no is possible. That is not a reason to doubt anyone’s yes. It is a reason to look, in any arrangement, for the no: whether it could be said, and what it would cost. Secretary is at its best when it shows us Lee refusing, because the refusals are what make her staying hers.

A code protects, and it takes the word for stop away with it. Mistakes and corrections let two shy people begin something neither could say, and they meant that neither could end it except in the language of the job. The sentence Grey wrote and shredded was the one that would have helped.

An office has only one word for stop, and it belongs to the employer. A desire that wants a life of its own deserves a room with a stop of its own, one that costs neither person their living.

So, once, to you, if you have ever wanted what Lee wanted: to be told, to be corrected, to hand the plan to someone else for a while. The wanting is not damage, and it needs no excuse. If you first found it somewhere you could not refuse, at work, or under someone who could take something from you, that does not make it less yours. It means the place was wrong for it, not you. The question worth carrying into any arrangement is the one the film finally puts to Lee’s chair: could you stand up, and what would standing up cost you?

This is a reading of a film. It diagnoses no one, fictional or real. It is not advice about any relationship or any workplace, and about self-harm it claims only that the film’s story is a story. The Japanese guidance and the court’s judgment are described, not applied to anyone, and nothing here is legal advice.

Where in your life is saying no free, and where would it cost you something you could not afford to lose?

When you last said yes to something that mattered, what was the no you could have said instead, and could you have said it?

Is there something you have only ever asked for in code, by a hint, a mistake or a mood? What would the sentence be?

Has anyone asked you to prove what you want? What did the proof cost you, and was it theirs to ask for?

If you were free to stand up at any moment, would you stay? What would that tell you?