Secretary (2002) is an American erotic romantic comedy-drama directed by Steven Shainberg from a screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson, adapted from Mary Gaitskill’s 1988 short story of the same name. Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader star as a submissive secretary and a dominant lawyer whose office relationship grows into negotiated-feeling D/s love built on spanking, protocol, and mutual recognition. For mainstream film, it became one of the most widely seen positive romantic frames for BDSM chemistry—kinky, funny, and sincere rather than only pathological.
Plot: Lee, Grey, and the Office as Dungeon
Lee Holloway is the socially awkward, emotionally raw youngest daughter of a dysfunctional family. After a mental-hospital stay following severe self-harm, she tries to reassemble ordinary life. She learns to type and interviews with eccentric attorney E. Edward Grey. He tells her she scored higher than anyone he has ever tested and is overqualified; the work is “very dull” on typewriters only. Lee says she likes dull work and takes the job.
Grey seems irritated by typos and clerical slips, yet the dynamic is charged: her obedience arouses him. When he discovers her self-harm habit, he confronts her and orders her never to hurt herself again—dominance redirected toward protection rather than pure sadism. After a spelling error, he makes her bend over the desk and spanks her; Lee is electrified. Employer and employee tilt into a BDSM relationship. Through sadomasochistic encounters Lee finds sexual and personal awakening and falls in love. Grey, by contrast, is flooded with shame and insecurity about his desires and begins to withdraw even as Lee deliberately mistypes to invite more punishment.
Alongside the office arc, Lee tries “normal” romance with family friend Peter. Sex with him is lukewarm; he is confused by her wish to be spanked. After Lee sends Grey an envelope containing a worm, he bends her over the desk, has her remove skirt and underwear, masturbates behind her, and ejaculates on her bare legs—then fires her. Peter proposes; Lee accepts reluctantly. Trying on her wedding dress, she bolts to Grey’s office to declare love. Still uncertain, Grey tests her: sit in his chair without moving hands or feet until he returns. Lee obeys even when she must urinate in the dress rather than break position. Hours pass; family and friends visit to argue for or against her choice while Grey watches, captivated by her compliance. Media read the vigil as a hunger strike. Three days later Grey returns, takes her upstairs, bathes and feeds her. They marry and continue a happy dominant/submissive marriage—the film’s explicit “this can be love” thesis.
From Gaitskill’s Story to Feature Script
Wilson and Shainberg expanded Gaitskill’s short fiction for feature length and altered tone and ending. Dialogue shifted: Lee’s “I’m so stupid” becomes, in a fantasy beat, the celebratory “I’m your secretary.” The literary ending was reshaped toward a more positive relationship outcome. Shainberg said he wanted to show BDSM relationships as capable of normalcy and cited Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette as inspiration for how a film can normalize a stigmatized love for wider audiences. That directorial intent is why kink viewers still claim Secretary as a mainstream ally text even when they critique how consent is shown on screen.
Production Design: Natural Office, Artificial Outside
Shainberg and production designer Amy Danger spent roughly two years shaping Edward and Lee’s office after prior collaborations. They wanted the office to feel homemade and to express Grey’s plant obsession: natural wood, bamboo, ironwork, botanical wallpaper, natural colors. Outside that bubble, Danger pushed artificial materials and manufactured color—plastic sheeting over Lee’s house, fake textures—so the SM office reads as the place where the characters can be “natural.” Danger noted that with S&M material they could have gone dark; instead she and Shainberg chose the opposite so the relationship frees the characters into themselves. Crew joked about wanting to “go back to the office” because the emotional temperature of that set felt better—not because the house sets were physically harder to shoot.
Location headaches still happened. At one point the team had shooting rights for the wrong park; Gyllenhaal pushed them to grab the needed park shot anyway without permission while crew distracted police. Despite a Florida setting, principal photography was in Los Angeles.
Release Path and Home Video
Secretary premiered at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, where Shainberg won a Special Jury Prize for Originality. Lions Gate took U.S. theatrical rights; the film also played Toronto International Film Festival the same year. Limited U.S. release began 20 September 2002, with foreign rollouts into 2003–2004. Region 1 DVD arrived 1 April 2003; UK Tartan Video issued a disc 5 January 2004, with a Prism Leisure budget edition on 7 February 2005. Blu-ray followed 4 October 2010 with trailer/TV spots, cast and director interviews, a behind-the-scenes documentary, “curricula vitae” extras, and audio commentary by Shainberg and Wilson.
Critical Response and Box Office
Rotten Tomatoes lists about 77% approval from 155 reviews (average near 6.8/10); the critics’ consensus highlights Gyllenhaal impressing in a romantic comedy with a kinky twist. Metacritic’s weighted score sits around 63/100 from 39 critics—“generally favorable.” Roger Ebert praised the film’s careful tread around sadomasochism, avoiding the twin traps of pure offense and pure joke. Ain’t It Cool News noted that claiming pain can heal when applied by the right hand might sound bold, yet Gyllenhaal makes even that feel almost obvious and normal. Commercially the film took roughly $4.1 million in the U.S. and Canada and about $9.3 million worldwide—modest theatrical numbers with a long afterlife on home video and kink-positive word of mouth.
Controversy, Fifty Shades Echoes, Consent Critiques
Because the film centers a BDSM romance and Spader’s character is surnamed Grey, commentators have compared it to the later Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon, with some suspecting influence on E. L. James’s branding of Christian Grey. Separate feminist and literary critiques (e.g. Emily Kenway in LitHub, Adele Melander-Dayton in PopMatters) argue the film idealizes a potentially abusive dynamic that begins without explicit negotiated consent. Those critiques matter for community readers: many love the chemistry and still teach that real D/s needs clearer safewords, limits talk, and ongoing consent than the movie’s erotic shorthand shows. Holding both responses—cultural gateway and incomplete consent model—is standard adult media literacy around Secretary.
Awards Focus on Gyllenhaal
The film collected numerous nominations and several wins, especially for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s breakthrough turn as Lee—performance awards that helped cement her early career and kept the secretary’s awakening at the center of the film’s public memory rather than only Spader’s dominant lawyer archetype.
Soundtrack
A soundtrack CD released 8 October 2002 (MP3 edition 11 July 2006) mixes Angelo Badalamenti’s score with songs used over erotic montages, notably Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man” and Lizzie West’s “Chariots Rise.” The film slightly alters West’s lyric from “what a fool am I, to fall so in love” to “what grace have I, to fall so in love”—a one-word shift that matches the movie’s redemptive framing of submission. Badalamenti cues on the album include titles such as “Main Title,” “Feelin’ Free,” “Snow Dome Dreams,” “Bathing Blossom,” “Seeing Scars,” “Loving to Obey,” “Office Obligations,” “The Loving Tree,” “Orchids,” and “Secretary’s Secrets.”
What the Film Teaches—and What It Skips
Community educators often assign Secretary as a cultural gateway, then immediately unpack gaps. The early spanking grows from workplace hierarchy and non-negotiated surprise, not a checklist of limits and safewords. Lee’s history of self-harm is redirected by Grey’s command—an emotionally potent movie beat that is not a clinical treatment plan. The three-day chair ordeal eroticizes endurance and public scrutiny in ways real couples would need extensive CNC negotiation, hydration plans, and medical common sense to even approximate. The happy marriage ending is the film’s thesis, not proof that every boss/employee kink dynamic is healthy. Used well, the movie starts conversations about dominance as care, submission as agency, and shame as the real antagonist; used badly, it becomes a script for boundary-skipping “surprises.” Adult viewers can love Gyllenhaal’s performance and still insist their own D/s be more verbal, more reversible, and less dependent on workplace power imbalance than Hollywood found romantic in 2002.
Further Reading and Shelf Placement
Erin Cressida Wilson’s screenplay was published by Soft Skull Press in 2003 (Secretary: A Screenplay, ISBN 1-887128-19-0). On a BDSM-in-film map, Secretary sits with romantic and comedic treatments of D/s rather than pure horror-sadism titles: office power exchange, spanking as love language, pet-play-adjacent obedience, and a marriage ending that refuses to pathologize the couple. Related nodes include Gaitskill’s fiction, other Spader/Gyllenhaal work, debates over Fifty Shades, Badalamenti’s score craft, Sundance prize cinema of the early 2000s, and educational conversations about how Hollywood stages consent. For adult viewers, it remains the early-2000s mainstream text that said a dominant lawyer and a self-harm-recovering submissive secretary could become a married power-exchange couple—and invited the whole culture to argue about whether that fantasy heals, harms, or both. Two decades on, the typing pool is mostly gone; the argument about romanticized D/s is not.
