Secretary
“Secretary,” which won the "Jury Special Award" in the ‘Original Screenplay’ category at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, is a film that young director Steven Shainberg has been chasing since his student years. Lee Holloway, a beautiful woman in her twenties, returns home to Florida after receiving treatment in a mental hospital. To escape her troubled family, she begins dating a high school friend and, in the meantime, finds a job as a secretary at a law firm. Everything seems very normal; however, over time, an interesting attraction develops between Lee and her boss, Mr. Grey. Lee, who has masochistic tendencies rooted in the intense pressure of her childhood from her family, and Mr. Grey, who has sadistic tendencies, enter into a relationship where, free from societal pressures, they use each other as they wish.
In the film “Secretary,” the sadomasochistic relationship between the ‘boss’ Mr. Grey, played by James Spader, and the ‘secretary’ Lee Holloway, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, portrayed in a different way, reminds us of many films that have addressed the theme of sadomasochism, from “Blue Velvet” to “Crash,” from “The Lord of the Dreams” to “Sitcom.” Lee is a young woman with an ordinary relationship with her boyfriend Peter and a monotonous sex life. When Lee starts working with successful lawyer E. Edward Grey, her entire life will change and gain meaning.
When the lawyer’s sadistic tendencies meet the young woman’s masochistic pleasures, both of them seem to find the playmate they have been searching for years.
Before moving on to the interpretation of the film, let’s clarify a few points in the film.
Lee’s father is an alcoholic, and her mother is a controlling and interventionist woman who has an addictive relationship with her daughter. In other words, a masochistic woman married to a sadistic man. When Lee learns that her father has started drinking again, she is deeply disappointed. This disappointment leads her to resort to self-harm as a way to cope. She opens a bag with razors, cutting tools, and bandage materials and intervenes in this emotional crisis using her primitive method—by cutting her own body and harming herself.
Then, quite meaningfully, she bandages the wound she has cut herself, meaning she takes care of the injury she caused under her control. This point is quite important. She is causing harm to herself and treating the resulting wound under her own control. It’s often heard from self-harming (self-mutilating) individuals: ‘I am the only one who gives myself pain and then end it myself. The pain is under my control; pain under my control doesn’t hurt me, but it relieves and calms me.’ In the other scenes where she harms and injures herself, we see that Lee’s emotional state before and after cutting is generally the same.
After hearing her parents fight, she burns her leg with an iron, and this self-harm behavior might suggest that such environments have always been present in her family rather than being a response to the situation. It is clear that there is a continuous presence of verbal violence in her home. Lee uses self-harm behaviors as a way to calm herself because she cannot cope with the intense emotional bombardment from both internal and external sources, and this is due to her inability to verbalize or even conceptualize the emotional and mental phenomena causing it. Considering her family situation, especially her father’s alcohol use, it is not hard to suggest that resorting to these actions is the only known method for Lee, which she has modeled from her parental relationships. Favazza and colleagues have simply explained these individuals’ behaviors in one sentence: ‘There is only violence at home, and these people have learned it.’ Another striking point in the film is that after every self-harm act, in an almost inexplicable way, Lee is shown to relax, lying on her back in the water, completely relaxed. The film’s protagonist, Lee, states that she discovered this method of coping with stress in the seventh grade and has been using it since the early years of adolescence. The messages conveyed in this part of the film are consistent with what we see in clinical practice and the literature. Behaviors that start in the early stages of adolescence continue into later years. And this is exactly what happened to Lee. This behavior has been so internalized and dependent that Lee has obtained cutting tools and later a stitching set to bandage the cuts. In fact, this stitching set has become a kind of ‘emergency kit’ for her. She self-harms to calm herself, and the cuts are later ‘healed’ in a ritualistic behavior. The individual has become so dependent on this method that even if she wants to throw the ‘emergency kit’ away, she returns to retrieve it. This situation can be likened to a drug addict’s intense dilemma when trying to separate from their drug addiction. The addict says they want to quit and throws the drug in the trash, but later, unable to resist the withdrawal, retrieves it. These individuals are so dependent on this method of relief, numbing, and calming that, like a drug addict’s withdrawal crisis, they seek cutting tools and create unrest when they cannot find them. In fact, we also witness Lee, a normally submissive character, experiencing sudden outbursts of anger. This anger, sadness, frustration, and other intense emotions cause a short-circuit in her thought process. At that moment, she cannot think, and an action is taken immediately. In the film, Lee does not go through the thinking, evaluating, or finding alternative solutions process. Instead, the connection between cutting and calming, relaxing is established.
When Lee’s boss, Mr. Grey, sees the tape on her leg, he makes a comment about it: ‘I wonder, when the pain inside starts to surface, and you realize its existence inside you, do you finally realize you’re really here? Then you relax when you see the wound starting to heal, right?’
This comment from Mr. Grey, Lee’s boss, is quite impactful and resonates deeply within Lee. It stirs up her passion to prove how completely submissive she is to him, to show how she obeys his sadistic directives to the fullest. Perhaps no one has ever said anything as intense and meaningful as this comment to her. Of course, considering the fact that the one making this comment is also a sadist, we can say that there are also some experiences related to himself in this comment. And understanding why this relationship is so passionate becomes easier. Because every sadist is also a masochist in the face of the other’s sadism. Anna Freud’s statement ‘against a sadist, one either assumes an extremely submissive, masochistic position, or takes a counter position with sadism’ is quite meaningful. Mr. Grey’s sadistic personality will take over more, and he will suggest an alternative in which he can live his own sadism, which is physical and emotional violence instead of cutting. Lee will try to prove her submission by showing how she obeys his sadistic directives in the film.
In addition to the mental pressure from the lawyer, physical violence also enters the picture, such as spanking on the buttocks. Freud states that the body, especially the buttocks, is an erogenous zone. So here, masochistic pleasure, which perhaps replaced sexual libido, is returning to its original source. The fantasies of being beaten later may be replaced by cutting, due to the encounter with incestuous desire and its prohibition. In fact, cutting behavior is a highly sexual behavior compared to other forms of self-harm. Etymologically, the word ‘sex’ comes from ‘secare’ (cut, divide), and ‘sexus’ is the sharing of an area between male and female. In simple terms, there is an object that enters, something that penetrates and when it releases its fluids after entering, the calmness that follows is like a sadomasochistic sexual relationship. However, here it appears as a highly modified (changed) form of sexual libidinal desire.
Here, there is pleasure felt. This is described as a pleasure akin to a drug or sexual pleasure, even a higher form of pleasure. The act of Mr. Grey spanking her becomes a reason for Lee to stop self-harming and makes room for the spankings to take place instead. In masochism, the role of the buttocks is easy to understand. The buttocks, like breasts and genital organs in the oral and sexual stages, are the favored parts in the sadistic-anal stage (Freud, 1924). And when this is not reached, she applies the spanking that Mr. Grey performs on her, and later, this is replaced by masturbation. The ritual of self-harm as a way to calm down and the wounds being bandaged afterward is like a ‘ritualistic sexual act.’
In the initial fantasies of being beaten, it was impossible to determine whether the pleasure was sadistic or masochistic.
For women with a depressive-masochistic personality, masochistic love relationships are a dominant psychopathological phenomenon. Especially in the early and late stages of adolescence, falling in love with an idealized, unattainable, and ultimately disappointing man becomes an experience that influences their future love lives. To belong to ‘unattainable’ men leads either to romantic encounters that end with unrealistic disappointment or to a long-lasting romantic fantasy about what could be. Being in love with unattainable men may seem like a normal manifestation of oedipal conflicts in adolescence, but once it becomes clear that the love is unrequited, the persistence and intensification of this love becomes a characteristic of these relationships. These women never move on from unattainable men to a normal relationship. They get stuck in this difficulty. Indeed, we cannot evaluate this as a simple desire for the oedipal love object.
Women with masochistic psychopathology oscillate between sexual fears and blockages and reactive sexual relationships conducted in constraining and even dangerous conditions. They discover that their sexual relationships are particularly painful, humiliating, or submissive. This discovery generally leads them to partners with sadomasochistic tendencies in their psychological makeup.
One feature of masochism is that it is suggested that the subject is the 'thing' of the other. The masochistic person, just like in this film, says ‘I am yours, do whatever you want to me,’ meaning ‘I am nothing but your toy, controlled by your hands.’ The masochistic position of the woman suggests that in order for her to connect with the penis, which is an erogenous zone, she proposes that he apply the actions she sees fit to her body and self. This question about her submission may lead us to conclude that the guilt stemming from the sadistic-anal body's involvement with the penis could be the origin of the masochistic actions.
