Secretary (the movie) - C/D

I had high hopes with James Spader as the male lead. The story was filmed boringly. And why does she cut herself in plain sight? Couldn't get that. And the scenes in her house, living with her parents: horrible.

The first spanking scene was mildly arousing. And then the closing scene is ok, kind of interesting. A little bit.

Gaitskill's story should have made a great movie. But in this morally heinous film, Shainberg removes the details and the psychic distress that Gaitskill's characters projected onto them. Shainberg means to hide the soul stress of patriarchy that Gaitskill's story reveals to its readers. John M Demetry

And this is the book http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679723277/ref%3Dnosim/metasoul

OK, first of all the quip that this film is Shainberg's mysoginistic vision is ridiculous. The screenplay was penned by Erin Cressida Wilson, a sex columnist, erotic playwright and professor at Duke. In an interview, she says, "what excited me most about the story was to make it not a victim tale, but a love story--to not create yet another story of a woman "overcoming" her problems, but a woman embracing her masochism. Steven and I wondered, what would it be like if masochism was not a deviance, but was just a different type of sexuality. Then the thought became, what if this is a "coming out film" for a masochist. What if she stops fighting her masochism, embraces it, defines it, and then is empowered?"

She also claims that Spader was cast largely because he is seen as an object rather than a subject. Shainberg says despite Spader's character being 'sadistic' he is more scared than scary.

John Demetry completely missed the motivations for this film adaptation. Whether or not the film actually succeeds in doing what it is trying to do is another story...

It sounds like the movie was a declawed version of the short story in a lot of ways. Still, this is not Hollywood's fault, as Hollywood refused to put money behind this film for many years. Shainberg only secured funding in New York, where investors are willing to take a few more risks. OK, so maybe if he went to
Paris he would have been able to make the film as a more direct adaptation of Gaitskill's story...but I think it is an interesting and enjoyable interpretation, none the less.

Hell even Gaitskill has likened her portrayal of S/M in Bad Behavior as "playful," and that "A lot of my characters are actually too incompetent to be properly called S/M practitioners..."

While I can't call her up and ask her, previous interviews suggest that she would be happy with a variety of interpretations of her work, including the film version of "Secretary."

"they saw the book in totally different ways than I meant it. Not in a bad way. For example, some people saw the story "Secretary" as a social statement about the
evil of jobs and the horror of sexual harassment. Other people thought it as a story about a young girl being liberated from her tightness by a beneficent old guy." -- source

While the film has its faults (Shainberg admits that most of the characters and events outside of the office were hacked to bits during editing as they just weren't as interesting as what was going on inside the office), Demetry's assessment seems really off-base.

I could have done without the voice over, though. I think the whole story could have been told visually instead of erm told directly by MG.

"A lot of my characters are actually too incompetent to be properly called S/M practitioners..."

But in this morally heinous film

does anyone remember the scene where james spader's character asks maggie's character to put her hands on the desk, pull down her skirt and undergarment and he proceeded to, as the "lads" say,

play tug o war