FILM: Secretary (2002)
Today I had been carrying around in my back pocket a folded essay by a Philosophy professor, reflecting on the nature of romantic love and the meaning of marriage, when I sat down to consume what is reputed to be the best BDSM love story ever filmed. Secretary turns out to also be one of the smartest, most beautiful and thought-provoking films I've seen. Not only does it contain some tachycardia-inducing scenes of spanking, bondage, humiliation, and incidental exhibition along with a thoroughly winsome (and Golden-Globe-nominated) performance by lead actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, but it heightened my understanding of domination and submission and it again shone a light on the issues of faith that I was examining in my entry on The Princess Bride. The remaining question is, when viewed through the lens of the professor's essay, is it really *love* between Lee and Mr. Grey?
The way I've always understood it, BDSM is about creating an environment in which trust can most immediately and compellingly be communicated and in which sensations and intimacy are heightened above what can be achieved in the everyday. It's also a truism that the submissive is actually the one with the power. Where Secretary takes the paradigm one step further is in the climactic scene of her sitting still at his desk upon his command. These are, I think, the best lines in the movie: when the clueless Peter wanders in and inquires "Why don't you move your hands?"--Lee says crisply, "I don't want to." Her wrists are not bound by anything physical. She doesn't say "Because he told me to." How amazing that her submission looks like strength, free will, and defiance! When she makes Mr. Grey's command her own, their wills become one and paradoxically they achieve equality, no less than Jane Eyre did when she stepped up to her own employer Mr. Rochester (prenomen also Edward) and said "Equal--as we are."
Prof. Schwitzgebel writes in his musings, "A deep faith and trust must therefore underlie true conjugal love. That trust is the most sacred and inviolable thing in a marriage, because it is the very foundation of its possibility. ...Passion alone can't ground conjugal trust. Neither can shared entertainments and the pleasure of each other's company." As I recently noted, faith (outside of its religious meaning) is an alien notion with which I am only beginning to grapple; but in this film I am again taught by seeing an instance of faith enacted. The climactic scene only works because Mr. Grey has faith that Lee will carry out his order and because Lee has faith that Mr. Grey will come back for her. Faith only works in the dual, not the singular.
The fairy-tale corollary is that true love is always a two-way street. *Is* it love in the film? There doesn't seem to be much substance to their relationship (although as a proud Midwesterner I've gotta smile at the second-best line in the movie, "Des Moines, Iowa"), but maybe I've been misguided these past many years thinking that intellectual exchange is so important in a romantic connection. They're there for each other and take personal risks for each other, and I think they do achieve the ideal set forth by Schwitzgebel, that "[o]ne's life become a co-authored work." Sure, the ending still feels unrealistic--but wasn't the whole movie so?--who cares? Movies are about escape and fantasy. It is the intellect and insight of the art of cinema that make it such a worthy passion.
posted by sometime_reader at
11:23 PM
2 Comments:
Faith is also something I have had a lot of difficulty with. Although I'd rather put the problem in other terms: "putting trust in" another is a concept simpler and less fraught. This is something I'm uncomfortable both giving and receiving, and in certain moments I talk as though I wished humans could all be atomic and unrelated except by convenience and companionships of entertainment. (Something strongly suggestive of Schwitzgebel's "shared entertainments and the pleasure of each other's company". Arguably my last relationship failed for its limitation exactly to this.) "Responsibility" for another (and even myself) is something I haven't really had to exercise in a serious sense, not least because I grew up without a sibling or much family embeddedness. Parts of me are terrified of being responsible for another, but other parts are able to discharge responsibility fairly well.
I think neither one of us needs to worry about "faith" in our current circumstances, though the stakes will of course rise considerably in contemplation of marriage. The reason the Schwitzgebel piece struck me so strongly was that it talked about a never-ending "implicit conjunction" with the other person, such that one's conception of how one's own life will go is simply inextricably bound up with them. How much future projection does this have to involve to meet the bar for conjugal commitment? Is it just an extension of the short-term connectedness we feel with lovers on a daily basis, or does it involve a deeper, bigger step?
Hmmmm, in your list of values, art and philosophy alone got capital letters. What does that mean?
One of the things I've been considering lately about faith is how it is so often misperceived...
I have seen it treated, particularly by those who don't spend much time thinking about it other than to categorize it as one of those things that the crazy, brainwashed religious zealots have before brushing it aside altogether, as a very static quality.
I like things that show that it is not... that it is something to be cultivated and exercised and tested... that it is able to bring about action or deliberate inaction. We do not "test" static qualities of something. We don't test volume, or mass, or velocity... we measure them. We test things that can and do change over time. Strength, limits, knowledge, etc.
I think part of that is why faith is so important in love... the two are both meant to grow and deepen -- as love deepens, so does the amount of faith that we have in some set of attributes about the person we love. As our faith in a relationship or a friendship deepens, we are able to love that person more. But, in order to grow, faith, like love, must be cultivated and demonstrated.
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