By Lola Sebastian
Movies used to have more sex in them. What happened? Can we go back? Should we?
In early 2024, when I started writing about the films of character actor James Spader, that was my line of questioning. It's true that the presence of sex scenes in mainstream Hollywood movies has declined in the past few decades. Simultaneously, these decades have been filled with discourse, mostly online about how sex in film is “unnecessary,” “uncomfortable,” “immature,” “misogynistic,” and/or “degrading.” As Emily Lynell Edwards noted in her Typebar Magazine Issue 3 essay The Death of the F*ck: Neopuritanism and Commercial Fiction, some anti-sex discourse is explicitly rightwing and some is not - but it’s increasingly difficult to tell where neopuritan white noise is coming from. Perhaps it should be no surprise that “the kids” are being blamed. It’s often suggested that Gen Z (typically defined as being born around 1997-2012) are fascinated by erotic thrillers of the 80s and 90s either because they love “spicy” content too much to be content with today’s mostly platonic Hollywood films, or they’re intrigued by James Spader’s filmography because they've never seen sex onscreen before in their lifetimes.
Young people today are being placed in a double bind, simultaneously considered “gooners” and “neo-puritans.” They are blamed for the lack of sex in film as well as the influx of “brainrot smut” on BookTok.
As a young person who loves these films and writes for a living, I feel obligated to chime in. I don't personally subscribe to "generationology" as a legitimate form of social criticism, but it's the framework most used when discussing young people and movie sex, so I'll engage with it throughout this essay.
To me, discourse around sex scenes has always felt rather hypocritical. After all, sex is not an unusual thing to have. If movies reflect life, why wouldn't they have sex in them? Many tout "show don't tell" while also hating on sex scenes, perhaps the most "show don't tell" screenwriting gets. Many of the most popular "golden age of television" shows (Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Sopranos, etc) feature prestige drama protagonists who routinely have sex to assert dominance, manipulate their peers, “prove” points, and/or disclose secrets. Perhaps even more valuable to screenwriting is "bad sex:" cringe-worthy partners, awkward encounters, faked orgasms, sex that isn't particularly memorable or enjoyable, and even failed seductions serve as strong narrative turning points. Sexual chemistry can also be rather unpredictable, disgusting and delighting an audience in equal measure.
Take Pete Campbell and Peggy Olson in Mad Men. Their attraction to each other might seem odd on the surface, but upon closer inspection it indicates how much they have in common at their core. Both spend the series brushing up against the patriarchal nature of their workplace. Both constantly strive to prove that they are “man” enough for their respective roles. Their hookup early on in the story reflects their mutual insecurity within this hierarchy; both are eager to be seen and wanted.
For these reasons and more, I do feel the need to push back against the increasingly popular narrative of "Gen Z" as uniquely sex-averse.
Firstly, the youngest "Gen Zs” (those born 2007-2012) are still teenagers. They can't even vote, much less consent. For obvious reasons, adults on the internet should not be shaming adolescents for their lack of interest in sex. Second, much of the prudishness young people display today is the tragic result of a media landscape that has increasingly discouraged overt sexuality.
Many, many historical analyses of fascism correlate sexual repression and material oppression. Fascist states deem depictions of consensual sex far more offensive than depictions of graphic violence, far more "violating" and "wrong,” so that sexual impulses can be redirected into violent ends. The most famous of these analyses is undoubtedly Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism. Reflecting on Mussolini’s Italy, he wrote “Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons – doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.”
Consider too that Donald Trump was first elected in 2016; even the oldest "Gen Zs” were just teenagers then. This is the world "Gen Zs" grew up in, and continue to come of age within: a world that treats sex as if it were violence, and violence as if it were sex. Eroticism causes inherent, predominantly involuntary physical, mental, and emotional reactions. These feelings can surprise, frighten, even delight. They also often prompt self-reflection, causing us to question things about ourselves and the lives we live. Erotic thrillers are so compelling to people of all ages because the audience's journey mirrors that of the character. The introspection that great erotic thrillers prompt tends to be incompatible with mindless consumption. Therefore, works that center sexuality are asking us to serve our own selves, our humanity, our inner worlds. They are, fundamentally, anti-slop. In this way, watching films like Crash can feel like an act of quiet rebellion.
By 2024, I was often told that my essay on Lolita (which I had written as a teenager) had helped to re-orient broader cultural conversations about the novel around Dolores Haze. As edits, memes, and Halloween costumes of James Spader characters flooded my TikTok "For You" page in that year, I felt inspired. Fans seemed particularly fond of sex, lies, and videotape (1989), Crash (1996) (not to be confused with the infamous 2004 film of the same name), and Secretary (2002), which are often considered a thematic trilogy of sorts. I was a longtime fan of these films, all of which feature discussions of sexuality and some onscreen sex but are not really "about" sex. Nonetheless, the sexual nature of their premises often prohibits insightful conversation.
And so life imitated art: for a year I sat alone in my room watching videos alone. I’d dedicated myself to a never-ending, ill-defined, naval-gazing project, one with a moral imperative. I documented how others felt but rarely turned the camera on myself. By September of 2024, my "For You" page declared it to be "erotic thriller Autumn." I went to my local library to borrow a DVD of David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983) and found it had been vandalized for containing "gender ideology" - that’s according to the Heritage Foundation pamphlet that had been stuffed inside of its case. This seemed like a bad omen indeed. When Donald Trump won the presidential election two months later, my video suddenly felt pointless. Project 2025 - which blames "pornography" (a thing which it cannot define) for various social ills and calls for librarians and educators who distribute it to be jailed - was about to play out in real time. I had been vain to think that my naval-gazing could change hearts and minds. Moreso, I no longer wanted to defend a genre often called "regressive" and "sexist" for the right reasons.
When my laptop died, taking my completed video with it, I expected my fondness for these films to die alongside it. Instead, I then felt I could see their connecting threads more clearly. It wasn't sex drawing young people to these films - it was their discussions of technology. Indeed, a curious and lovely pattern emerges throughout James Spader's filmography: he has often been cast in films that encourage their audiences to prioritize compassion and human connection in the face of hostile technological hellscapes.
Many of the characters Spader plays are warped by and/or inseparable from their technologies. In his pivotal tome Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), media theorist Marshall McLuhan referred these characters as "Gadget Lovers.", comparing their plight to the Myth of Narcissus, in which:
"The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system."
Still McLuhan makes an important distinction: Narcissus didn’t know that the person he fell in love with was himself. In fact, McLuhan argues, he would have very different feelings about his reflection if he’d known it was just a reflection of himself. He also points out that the name “Narcissus” comes from the Greek word “narcosis”, often translated as "numbness."
sex, lies, and videotape focuses on Ann (Andie MacDowell), a woman who has quit her job and started seeing a therapist in order to address her obsessive ruminations on disaster. In the opening scene of the film, Ann discloses to her therapist that she's never been all that invested in sex. She and her husband aren't having it, and she doesn't miss it. Of course Ann’s husband, John (Peter Gallagher), who insisted she quit her job and be a housewife in the first place, is cheating on her with her sister, Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo), an outgoing free spirit. This messy situation is compounded when John's old friend Graham (Spader) moves back to town. Graham is positioned as the film’s Christ figure of sorts. He's a misunderstood, long-haired ascetic, frequently backlit by windows and draped in blankets. John tells Graham that when he first saw him he "almost called the cops" because he couldn't believe he was "the same guy who once held services in the back of the chapel on a weekly basis."
Although Ann is initially upset by the idea of having a stranger in her home, she and Graham quickly become close confidantes. Graham eventually confesses that he’s functionally impotent; he can only get off alone. When Ann finds out about his "project" of conducting interviews with women about their sexual histories and desires, often masturbating to them later, she initially feels betrayed. Later, when she discovers that her husband is sleeping with her sister, she insists on making a videotape. Ann is quick to tell John that she wants a divorce and that she made a tape with Graham, so John goes to Graham’s apartment, beats him up, locks him out, and watches the videotape. On it, Ann admits that she’s never had an orgasm with John, but confesses that she has thought of having sex with Graham. As their conversation intensifies, Ann turns the camera on Graham and interviews him instead. He finally confesses that he’s returned to town for closure - he’s haunted by the memory of his ex-girlfriend, Elizabeth. He also admits to having been a liar in his past, with emotional outbursts that were damaging to his relationships. Since then, he’s dedicated himself to reform, and is distressed to realize that his project has affected others. As Ann tells him: "You think [your problems] are yours, but they're not. Everybody that walks in that door becomes part of your problem." As Ann and Graham comfort each other, they begin to kiss, at which point they turn off the camera.
Afterward, John confronts Graham and tells him that, way back when, he slept with Elizabeth. Graham goes inside and destroys his videotapes. The film ends with Ann and Cynthia beginning to reconcile their differences, after which Ann and Graham sit together as it begins to rain. Whatever their future may be, whether they're a couple or not, the film doesn't say. But it doesn't really matter; the film centers two people so focused on their real, un-imagined faults that they fail to make fulfilling life choices, or recognize the positive impacts they make in other people’s lives. It advocates for reckoning as much as it advocates for grace, presenting the idea that one can find purpose in life not through perfection, but through being at peace with one's flaws.
Presciently, sex, lies, and videotape asserts that video is unable to ever fully replace human intimacy. Sight, it argues, can be the enemy of touch. Graham begins to shatter Ann’s perceptions of her reality when he becomes her voyeur; he spends much of the film gazing upon her, precipitating and preventing intimacy. In their very first conversation he asks: "Have you ever been on television?" This gives the game away; Graham cares more about transmogrifying women into images onscreen than he does about being with them. His mind is always on the end goal, his autoerotic “project.” Although he appears to have had many intimate sexual experiences with others, he's actually had almost none. Yet Ann also wields gaze as her weapon of choice throughout the film, most notably when she turns Graham's camera around on him. Early on in the narrative she watches Graham while he pretends to sleep. Shortly thereafter, he decides to get his own apartment. This, I think, is the moment that Graham stops believing in the myth of the harmless voyeur. What, then, is a camera? Could it be possible that film, as a medium, is another tool of detachment? Are we, the audience, complicit in Graham's “project?” Is the film we’re watching really any different from it?
The most vulnerable scene in sex, lies, and videotape is indeed focused on Spader. For an uncomfortable amount of time, we watch him viewing his videotapes alone, fully naked. Subsequently, we are forced to face the reality of Graham’s nakedness having actually been a performance by an actor. It only feels right to view Graham Dalton as the numb, narcotic Narcissus figure McLuhan was writing about, a character who has been staring into his own reflection for so long that he doesn’t even know that he’s staring at himself. Many critics have interpreted this scene as Soderbergh criticizing himself. sex, lies, and videotape can easily be interpreted as a film about film, particularly its entanglement with - and complicity in - abuses of power.
Yet today, I think sex, lies, and videotape is most effective as a film about finding one's way out of image-based isolation, or Plato's Cave; one that somehow arrived years before Web 2.0 or modern social media platforms and a decade before The Truman Show (1998). Yet, for some reason, I don’t see it mentioned beside popular films like The Matrix (1999), The Conformist (1970), or even Fahrenheit 451 (1966). Maybe that will soon change.
The erotic thriller genre is filled with characters reckoning with agoraphobia, asceticism, promiscuity, and celibacy, but most of these stories end in death or heartbreak. Nearly all erotic thrillers are about duality; the private, interior, sexual self conflicting with the public, exterior, social self. The terror of intimacy is rooted in the idea that you can never entirely know someone nor be known. sex, lies, and videotape is often said to have re-invigorated the erotic thriller genre, elevating it at last into a highbrow, sophisticated form. I’d argue it might just have predicted the genre’s slow death by introducing a character concerned with having only one self - a character to whom the private must become public, the sexual must become social, and the internal must become external - all in the pursuit of truth. The film’s tagline, as written on its VHS release, is “there can be no such thing as a private obsession." This is a fitting tagline for a film that helped make home media and "independent film" more popular than ever. Today, in a world ruled by surveillance, in which we are encouraged to log everything we do, think, and consume, it feels like little more than a statement of fact.
David Cronenberg is a known scholar of Marshall McLuhan. Nearly all of his films examine the human body's narcotic relationship to technology. Perhaps the earliest example of this fixation is Scanners (1981), in which telepath Stephen Lack (Cameron Vale) cyberpathically hacks a computer by calling it from a phone booth. He is able to do this because human beings and computers both have "central nervous systems." This idea comes from McLuhan's Understanding Media, in which he comments: "the successive mechanizations of the various physical organs since the invention of printing have made too violent and superstimulated a social experience for the central nervous system to endure." McLuhan also introduces the idea of "autoamputation" in this text. He argues that our nervous systems have become so overstimulated that we extend ourselves outside of ourselves through technology, as "a live model of the central nervous system itself… as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism."
Videodrome (1983) is Cronenberg's most overtly McLuhanist film, even featuring Jack Creley as Dr. Brian O'Blivion, a media theorist based on McLuhan who appears only on televisions. The film follows Max Renn (James Woods), a television exec who runs a UHF station specializing in content other stations feel is "unfit for broadcast" (primarily, sex and violence). One ordinary enough day, his pirate in residence discovers a disturbing broadcast featuring the prolonged torture of a woman. The program in question is called "Videodrome." The violence is shockingly realistic, and Max becomes fascinated, believing "Videodrome" to be the next big thing in television.
Max's quest to acquire the rights to "Videodrome" leads him down a dark rabbit hole of conspiracy, being manipulated all the while by the program's producer Barry Convex (Leslie Carlson), CEO of the Spectacular Optical Corporation. He wields the program as a tumour-inducing weapon, asserting that anyone interested in mindless sex and violence, anyone who would tune in to "Videodrome" in the first place, is morally decayed and beyond help. "Who would anyone watch a scum show like ‘Videodrome?’" he asks, "Why deny you get your kicks out of watching torture and murder?" Of course, the broadcast being the name of the film is meta-commentary; if you’re watching Videodrome, you're the kind of person Convex considers degenerate and therefore deserving of death. This could be why that Heritage Foundation pamphlet was stuffed into my library's copy of Videodrome - they believe that eliminating "degenerates" starts with eliminating their access to "scum shows like 'Videodrome.'"
Crash, not unlike the fictional "Videodrome," is composed mostly of scenes of sex and violence. To many prominent critics upon the film's release, Cronenberg had become a parody of himself. Many critics despised it and advised their fans not to see it. This backlash seems to have been largely forgotten in recent years. Crash, it should be noted, was booed at its Cannes Film Festival screening. When jury members insisted that the film deserved a Special Jury Prize for "audacity and daring and originality,” Francis Ford Coppola (then Jury President) refused to present the award. AMC claimed it was posting security guards outside of screenings of the film in case minors tried to sneak in. The Evening Standard and Daily Mail launched campaigns to ban the film, claiming it was offensive to people with disabilities. Ted Turner, who at that time oversaw Fine Line Features' distribution, had a strong, personal dislike of the film and worried about "copycat incidents." He refused to release the film in the United States, delaying its release for months. In an article for Entertainment Weekly in November of 1996, Cronenberg criticized him: "[Turner] did what amounts to behind-the-scenes censorship of my movie, which I resent, to say the least." Holly Hunter (who stars in the film alongside James Spader) conceded: "Ted Turner's moral fascism has no place in the entertainment industry."
I hesitate to compare Crash to Videodrome because Crash is not actually "Videodrome." It is not solely footage of people being actually injured and sexually tortured. Watching it won’t poison your brain. The moral panic it was met with initially was, I think, critics failing to engage with the text due to their own discomfort. So although Crash is often described as "plotless," I'm going to summarize some of its events here for context.
The film centers on James Ballard (Spader) and his wife Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger), a married couple living in Toronto. They are in an open relationship of sorts and struggle to find sexual fulfillment despite engaging in increasingly outrageous exhibitionist acts. They have this little mantra throughout the film expressing their mutual disenchantment: "maybe the next one." When James gets into a serious car accident, he meets Dr. Helen Remington (Hunter), who introduces him to a world of car crash fetishism centered around Vaughn (Elias Koteas). Vaughn is obsessed with recreating crashes featuring significant people like James Dean and Jayne Mansfield. The Ballards are intrigued. They cozy up to Helen and Vaughn, as well as Seagrave (Peter MacNeill), the professional driver helping Vaughn to recreate famous accidents, and Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette), whose body is badly disfigured from former crashes. Gabrielle wears permanent leg braces and her leg wounds, I am obligated to report, are fixated upon in the film. James has a thing for Vaughn in particular, but Vaughn seems more interested in general in his nebulous "project" than the Ballards. Like Graham's, Vaughn's project shifts and grows fluidly over the course of the film. In JG Ballard's novel (which Crash is adapted from), Vaughn's vision is to die in a head-on collision with Liz Taylor, whom he stalks relentlessly. In the film, his motivations are far more abstract.
Over the course of the film, the car crash polycule drives around Toronto, hook up with each other and prostitutes, crash their cars together, go through car washes, and photograph car crashes. Seagrave dies recreating the Jayne Mansfield crash by himself, which breaks Vaughn's heart. He, perhaps intentionally, flies off an overpass and crashes his car into a passenger bus below, instantly dead. Later, Gabrielle and Helen visit Vaughn’s trashed car in memoriam, and embrace in the backseat wreckage. The final sequence of the film sees James and Catherine mimicking Vaughn - James rams his car into Catherine’s, sending her car flying into a grassy embankment. As Catherine lies injured on the grass, James cradles her body. When she tells him she's not badly hurt, he responds "Maybe the next one, darling."
Not unlike rightwing influencer Debra Lea posting selfies during the White House Correspondent’s Dinner shooting, James and Vaughn see their world through the lens of "content.” They have no qualms about invading the privacy of strangers in order to create it. Vaughn is obsessed with images in particular, intruding on the sites of car crashes to take photographs. When he and James Ballard bond emotionally for the first time, it’s over a folder filled with his pictures of mangled bodies. What results is an incredibly indirect, hands-off form of sexuality: cars and photographs are both mediums through which these characters can forego intimacy to find sexual gratification. The damage done to their bodies is not a concern because, to them, eroticism is the direct result of auto-amputation. They would prefer to live in the "extensions" of their bodies. When Vaughn is gone, he's not really gone - he's still there in photographs. This could be why these characters fail to fear death, even chasing it: "maybe the next one, darling."
In this light, Cronenberg's framing feels particularly bold. He could have used “glamorizing” film language to communicate this form of fetishism. Instead, the film's car crashes are rather realistic and unglamorous: brief, jagged, and straightforward. Its bodies are scarred, textured, and bruised. Critics who feared the film depicts an admirable lifestyle failed to consider that its car crashes are not the point; the film instead seems to be saying that the camera - like the automobile - is not entirely harmless. I'm reminded of McLuhan's reflections on the 1930s, cars, and comic books: comic books caused moral panics, while cars caused millions of actual deaths. "Are people really expected to internalize and live with all this power and explosive violence," McLuhan asked, "without processing and siphoning it off into some form of fantasy for compensation and balance?"
Ultimately, Crash is prophetic and resonates with young people today not because of its characters' philosophies but because of its characters' actions. James, Catherine, and their love interests are so wrapped up in their desperate, paraphilic quest that their lives become consumed (yet in other ways liberated) by it. I think obsession, in its truest form, is cart before horse. These characters don’t know why they do what they do, so they come up with newer and better reasons for their otherwise inexplicable compulsions. The film’s detractors often bemoan that we never get to learn anything about the characters, but I’ll argue the opposite - we know everything about them. This is who they are, and what they have going on. The penultimate sequence reads as a kind of comic conclusion, an ending both happy and tragic. James and Catherine wanted Vaughn, and sought relationships with Helen and Gabrielle, but in the end re-couple and become sexually fixated on each other. Helen and Gabrielle are both implied to be widows, and both have affairs with James, Catherine, and Vaughn. But in the end, following Vaughn’s demise and James and Catherine’s re-coupling, they share an embrace tinged with romantic feeling.
The sex scenes in Crash - although often compelling and sometimes hot - are nonetheless detached and icy, mirroring not just the cracks in James and Catherine's relationship but also Toronto, that endless stretch of icy highways and skyscrapers. The city becomes a symbol for the vast emptiness these characters feel inside. Here you’ll find nothing but runways, parking lots, and wide stretches of concrete. Aesthetically, I'm reminded far less of Easy Rider and far more of Red Asphalt. McLuhan wrote that "the motorcar ended the countryside and substituted a new landscape in which the car was a sort of steeplechaser. At the same time, the motor destroyed the city as a casual environment in which families could be reared. Streets, and even sidewalks, became too intense a scene for the casual interplay of growing up. As the city filled with mobile strangers, even next-door neighbors became strangers." It seems to me that the internet has caused something similar to happen. That this film resonates with "Gen Z" should be no surprise. The expected landscapes of our existence are being transformed by the increasing presence of automation. AI is increasingly posited as a solution for our isolation - "create an AI girlfriend," "have AI work as your personal assistant," "ask ChatGPT for help," "Hi, I'm Y, your favorite clothing brand's new AI chatbot."
Cronenberg has claimed that Crash is about connection as a farm of artistic expression and "sex as a human creation." This feels particularly daring right now. Highways are ordered spaces only when its illusions are abided by. We respect the lines on the concrete in order to stay safe and be good citizens. In a car crash, we become uniquely aware of the dangers daily life asks us not to consider. We are compelled by bigger forces than the rules of the road. Maybe the message to take away from Crash is that we don't have to play along - we have a choice. Even when we feel that technology mirrors only our worst impulses, sexuality can always be a tool of human creation, one that may just help us contend with daily illusions.
Secretary - very, very loosely based on Mary Gaitskill's short story of the same name - is another film that's a bit tricky to summarize. It's the story of Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a young woman attempting to regain her sense of normality. She’s an adult, but due to a lifetime of mental health issues (including a severe incident of self-harm which left her institutionalized) she finds herself failing to launch. She still lives at home with her dysfunctional family. Her father, in particular, has substance abuse issues that cause them to have a rather tumultuous relationship. And so Lee, desperate for independence, gets a job as the secretary of E. Edward Grey. Grey is a fastidious lawyer who insists that his office proceedings remain entirely analog. For example, all text must be written on a typewriter, never a computer.
Lee and Grey are immediately attracted to each other but keep things chaste due to the nature of their professional relationship. That said, when Grey discovers that Lee has a history of self harm, he pleads that she put that part of her life behind her. A push-pull develops between professional conversations, in which Grey is a somewhat cruel and persnickety maniac, and the confessional conversations, in which Grey is a sweetheart who lovingly tends to his orchids and makes a mean hot chocolate. This tension culminates when Grey calls Lee into his office and spanks her for committing a typo. The two then begin to have sadomasochistic sexual encounters. For Lee, this is a positive awakening; she feels she is coming into her own. Grey, however, perceives their sexual relationship as a terrible lapse of judgment (which it plainly is) and feels tortured by his paraphilias. This is the main source of the film’s conflict; Lee is unconcerned by their power dynamic and finds kink empowering. Grey, conversely, cannot forgive himself. This conflict comes to a head when Lee confesses to the obvious: she to know Grey as more than an employer. Grey terminates her and severs ties entirely as she protests: "But I want to know you."
Although Lee is emotionally devastated, she focuses her attention on Peter, a nice local boy with whom she has tried to have a vanilla relationship throughout the film. (The fact that I haven't even mentioned him yet goes to show how inconsequential he is to the plot.) Lee even considers marrying Peter, but upon seeing herself in a wedding gown realizes she's still in love with Grey. The final act of the film sees Lee going hunger strike for Grey. As the days pass, Lee is visited by friends, family, and Grey’s former secretaries, all of whom have opinions - some approve, some disapprove, some understand, some don't. On the third day, Grey returns, takes Lee to his orchid-filled greenhouse, and bathes and feeds her. They all live happily ever after enough, married in the suburbs and free to pursue their desires.
I find so much about Secretary fascinating. Is it progressive, regressive, or problematic? The answer, in my opinion, is yes: it is all of those things.
The obvious issue with Secretary is that its characters don't always adhere to the adage “safe, sane, and consensual.” The film is often mentioned as an alternative to Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), but both Secretary and Fifty Shades contain dubious consent. When Lee and Grey have their initial sexual encounter, in which Grey bends Lee over his desk and spanks her, the camera hovers on them holding hands and grasping pinkies, signalling to the audience that both characters are enjoying themselves. In real life (as it is in Gaitskill's short story), this would be sexual assault. Within the framing of the film, it’s consensual non-consent. This is why Secretary has a divided reputation within actual kink and BDSM communities. Overall, the film argues that kink can be a tool for healing via sublimation.
Still, many critics have insisted that Lee and Grey’s relationship is not framed by the film as a substitute for self harm. To me, this argument feels willfully obtuse. I don’t think there’s any way to interpret Grey’s actions as altruistic, especially given that the film’s primary theme seems to be that one can change the form of their inner turmoil, but not the essence of it. We see this in both characters. The institution of Lee’s youth fails to help her manage her self-harm because it doesn’t offer her any sort of alternative release. Much like an orchid, she needs special care. Grey, in turn, projects his own agonies onto Lee when they first meet, comparing her to "a wall." I’d argue he’s really talking about himself. We’re left with the sense that this is a man who very desperately wishes he could tear the walls of his life down and become vulnerable. His love of flowers shows us that he has a strong desire to help things bloom, blossom, and grow. His orchids humanize him as we see his desire to nurture conflict with his sadism. Lee, an orchid herself, is living proof that the two forces need not live in opposition. Her inner world is a garden, and the film shows us this through its fantasy sequences.
These elements make Secretary a contradictory and intriguing text, one I was hesitant to write about. I can't endorse every aspect of the film's messaging, yet I find it rather captivating. Sure, we could talk forever about Secretary's uneven power imbalance, its potentially problematic theme of sublimation, or its position within the ever-controversial cultural recuperation of BDSM… but I would be remiss not to point out that these are the main conflicts of the film. Not only does Secretary address these points, they're very much what the film is about. Like the Ballards in Crash, Lee and Grey regress to the appearance of heteronormativity by the time their story ends. Yet, like with Crash, the audience knows that appearances aren't everything. What could be a conventional, heteronormative rom-com in which the power dynamic reinforces expected gender roles (Fifty Shades, for example) instead feels like a gothic satire. Grey is positioned by the film’s narrative as "the dad who stepped up," framed in contrast less against Peter and more against Lee’s troubled father. During her hunger strike, Lee urinates in her wedding dress, functionally destroying it. One of her friends who confronts her in the film's final act leaves her with a pile of feminist literature and tells her that she should "read about women's struggle first."
There also seems to be a consistent failure in critical spaces to address the tone of the film, which is far from "realism.” Secretary has a heightened, whimsical, tongue-in-cheek look and feel. Grey's office is painted in rich purples and browns, with curvilinear wrought iron throughout, doubtless inspired by Art Nouveau's focus on organic shapes and botanical tendrils. Lee first meets him wearing a cape reminiscent of Little Red Riding Hood. This is fitting - Angela Carter is easily the film's closest comparison in terms of tone. Still, rather than the Big Bad Wolf or even Bluebeard, Edward Grey reminds me most of Jane Eyre’s mysterious Edward Rochester, Jane’s employer who speaks earnestly to her only in disguise. While I don’t think Secretary is literally a modern retelling of Jane Eyre, many of the criticisms of Secretary also apply to the Brontës. "Why would anyone want to read a story in which the love interest has a violent streak?" is a question that's been asked for centuries. The answer is simple: because it's compelling to watch characters fall in love despite differences that should be insurmountable. That’s the point of the story.
Grey's actions are repeatedly framed as abuses of power, each with devastating consequences. Grey, like the real life Spader, was written to have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. His emotional distress manifests in an ongoing battle against red markers, the buying and subsequent discarding of them symbolizing his battle against his own sexuality. He also exercises and performs kinetic routines until he is too exhausted to move. The near insurmountable disgust he feels with himself for his proclivities and personality is palpable. At times, these traits are both funny and tragic, comic, yes, but humanized. Not once in the film does Lee look down on Grey or speak condescendingly to him about any of his "quirks." This, in return, adds a tragic element to Grey asking Lee never to self-harm again: he has never been capable of practicing what he preaches.
Like the other films I've written about today, Secretary advocates for the power of human connection in an increasingly tech-dominated world. This is best shown through its persistent typewriter motif. Through its use, fallibility becomes Lee and Grey's connecting force. However, in order to truly "know" each other, they must retire the typewriter entirely. Of all the technologies and mediums addressed in Understanding Media, it is perhaps the typewriter that McLuhan considers the most admirable. He writes about how "Seated at the typewriter, the poet, much in the manner of the jazz musician, has the experience of performance as composition. In the nonliterate world, this had been the situation of the bard or minstrel. He had themes, but no text. At the typewriter, the poet commands the resources of the printing press." McLuhan also positions the typewriter as a tool of women's liberation.
Typists and secretaries were women seeking financial independence. Many of those same women also sought a level of sexual freedom that could not be achieved through traditional means. The first wave of young secretaries, in turn, revolutionized the garment industry: "What she wore, every farmer's daughter wanted to wear, for the typist was a popular figure of enterprise and skill." Yet, as Nina Luther writes in her analysis of the film’s use of the typewriter motif for Typebar Magazine Issue 8, the mass adoption of the typewriter also objectified women by defining them as “worthy” through performances of efficiency. Women are not robots, and yet throughout the 20th century their “value” became increasingly determined by their ability to behave like one:
“It’s a point of pride for Lee that she gets the highest score in her typing class. But Lee is never perfect at her job, no one is. Women were expected to be and still are. In a way, though the use of the typewriter opened up the world for women, it seemed to also turn them into machines. [...] As Judith Butler states in her essay Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory, the identity of the typist and thus the woman, is defined by the repetition of acts that go into the work and ideally they become efficient and mechanical, like a robot (1988). Lee’s consistent typos contradict this and are eventually intentional; the machine is made to be broken.”
The fantasy of the sexually submissive secretary in relation to the legacy of the typewriter is a layered one. One could argue that it speaks to the patriarchal desire of men to force independent women to submit, to regress, to be punished for daring to exist outside of the home. By the end of Secretary, Lee and Grey have a June wedding at the courthouse, honeymoon in the mountains, buy a beautiful house with a big garden, and, as Lee puts it, they "look like any other couple you’d see." She is, ostensibly, "in the home." On the other hand, Lee’s phrasing is ambiguous. I think the implication is this: although they may look like an ordinary couple, they’re not.
Indeed, Secretary is easily read as a film about the relationship between sexuality, technology, and mortality. Grey is petrified of sickness, illness, and death to the point of paranoia. He seeks relief from fear through domination in part because fear dominates his life. He advocates for the transformative virtues of walking in the park but spends the majority of the film indoors, even exercising each night on a treadmill. He asks Lee to live the life he wishes he could but cannot. He dedicates the majority of his free time to his orchids perhaps because he cannot accept their deaths. Lee, conversely, has flirted with death since childhood. She struggles to feel alive unless she's on the brink. Perhaps this is why Grey asks her to subject herself to total boredom and deprivation as the final test of their love - he wants to know that she isn't just using him for stimulation, auto-amputating through kink. His attachment to typewriters in an increasingly digital era is, I think, a reflection of his overall desire to cling to the past, perhaps even a world in which typewriters were considered romantic and revolutionary. This is also the world in which secretaries were viewed as The New Woman. McLuhan compares British women acquiring affordable typewriters to Ibsen's Nora Helmer, "who slammed the door of her doll's house and set off on a quest of vocation and soul-testing. The age of the iron whim had begun."
What elevates Secretary is the emotional truth in its performances, the compassion and humor Gyllenhaal and Spader bring to their characters. They are both so painfully neurotic throughout that it can hurt to watch. They seem to be communicating in the only way possible for them, somehow speaking a language only they share. An optimistic reading of Secretary is one which positions the natural world as our purest escape, sexuality and nature being the "places" in which we can access our truest selves. Perhaps this is why Lee and Grey honeymoon in the mountains: their marriage marks the beginning of their mutual liberation. Throughout the film, Lee places dead insects in Grey's sightline to provoke him. At the end of the film, she places one in their bed. The film ends with Grey bringing Lee into his greenhouse and embracing her. This room has remained a secret to the viewer until this moment, and it represents Grey's inner world, the outside brought inside. It's here where Lee finally feels comfortable asking personal questions, and she does: she asks Grey where he was born, and finally he answers: "Des Moines, Iowa."
In a bonus feature on the Criterion release of Crash, Cronenberg says that its characters are “hermetically sealed and having to invent strange new ways to connect.” Ultimately, I think that is the reason these films resonate with young people on such a deep level: they portray the desire to connect without knowing how to. "Gen Z" spent multiple formative years in lockdown. Our socialization, our schooling, even our romantic lives have been mostly digitized. Young people today are often stereotyped as squeamish and awkward, but is that not the natural result of our environment? Is it not possible that many of us are failing to bloom due to our conditions? It often feels like my older friends have lived a different kind of life entirely, one alien and intriguing to me in its intimacy. I often find myself hesitating to get too close to them for fear of being perceived as little more than a stereotype: a kid just standing there, staring blankly. I often find myself wishing I could say what Lee Holloway does: "But I want to know you."
Watching through James Spader's filmography, I'm struck by how little he orients himself around an audience’s “gaze.” Instead, his performances are entirely informed by his characters' values, neuroses, and beliefs. By the 2010s, Spader was an elder statesman performing parodies of the “homme fatales” he’d played in the 90s. The Office’s Robert California, for example, is a character from an erotic thriller stuck in an aging sitcom, an employer who abuses his power and frequently references films like Eyes Wide Shut (1999) or Caligula (1979). Spader receives ample credit for his "eccentric" and "nefarious" characters, but he should be recognized more for how thoughtful and humanizing his performances are. Maybe young people today could stand to have that level of compassion for ourselves - to recognize that our impulses may sometimes appear irrational or peculiar to others, but caring how we appear to others should never be our top priority. After all, it’s raining.
Lola Sebastian is a video essayist on Nebula. You can also find her work on YouTube. She hopes to branch out more.