“I’m a Secretary!”: the aesthetics of pain
Imagine: a young un-toward woman, Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal), recently released from a psychiatric hospital after six months of treatment for her tendency to self-harm, gets a job at a small legal practice as a secretary. After a short time, her employer Edward Grey (James Spader), engages her in a seemingly sado-masochistic relationship, transgressing relationship boundaries delineating the sexual from the professional, the perverse from the ‘normal’. Following some time apart, and at Lee’s own instigation, they reunite, marry and live blissfully-ever-after, free to revel in the established ’sado-masochistic’ parameters of their union. (Note: the term sado-masochistic is here placed in inverted commas in recognition of Gaylan Studlar’s theoretical work acknowledging the oxymoronic nature of the term, and although this film is largely descibed by film commentators as sado-masochistic, the singular term ‘masochism’ is a more apt description).
I first viewed Steven Shainberg’s film Secretary soon after its release in 2002. Following a more recent viewing, I searched the web for evidence for the expected feminist outcry upon the release of this provocative film – which on its surface appears to reify patriarchal social structures –but to no avail. Although this may say more about my web-surfing skills than anything else, reviews that I have found communicate a certain resonance that the film achieves with its spectators, regardless of their gender.
The resonance lies with the film’s aesthetics of pain. Pain is exceptional in the ‘whole fabric of psychic, somatic, and perceptual states for being the only one that has no object’ (Scarry 1985, 161). Unlike seeing, hearing and touch which relate to the physical world outside of the boundaries of the body and which enables us to articulate a desire for x, or a hunger for y, the ‘complete absence of referential content, almost prevents it [pain] from being rendered in language’ without recourse to metaphoric description (1985, 162).
When Edward discovers and confronts Lee about her compulsion to self harm he asks
‘Is it that sometimes the pain inside has to come up to the surface and when you see evidence of the pain inside you finally know you are really here. Then when you watch the wound heal, it’s comforting, isn’t it?’
Edward is verbally acknowledging Lee’s compulsion as a symbolic gesture that attempts to breach the skin, that corporeal boundary that marks the limits of physical pain as it is experienced. He articulates the significance of creating a wound, a scar, describing it as an action that seeks to create an object, a referent, a means of expressing the pain negated by language.
The alcoholism of Lee’s father, the physical abuse suffered by Lee’s mother, and the obsessive compulsive behaviour of Edward himself are similar manifestations of personal pain and suffering. Similar in that they resort to self-destructive behaviours that are denied currency within our representational economy. Theirs is an intentional self-objectification that is unable to imagine into being anything other than a closed circuit of communication with one’s self.
Elaine Scarry states that:
‘Through tools and acts of making, human beings become implicated in each other’s sentience. Seeing is seeing of x, and the one who has made the x, has entered into the interior of the other person’s seeing, entered there in the object of perception’ (1985, 176).
This points to the way that Edward breaks into Lee’s – and out of his own – closed circuit of communication not by verbally acknowledging her pain, or even by assuming an authoritative role in her life. Rather, it is through his subsequent actions whereby he substitutes the tools that Lee uses to cut herself with his own hands.
The formal devices utilised in Secretary, specifically the use of sound, framing and editing, points to the cinema as itself a tool, a mode of substitution for the tool that cuts; it incorporates the spectator in the closed-circuit of communication and the fabric of the film embodies a new language for the body in pain.
Following the above mentioned conversation, Edward calls Lee into his office demanding that she bring the letter that she has been typing. As she enters the office behind Edward the camera pans in a sweeping movement locating the two characters within a single frame and emphasising the space that they occupy as a work environment. Lee obeys Edward’s command that she place her elbows on the desk, palms down, and bend over whilst reading the letter. She lowers herself into the requested position, simultaneously lowering herself into the next frame of the sequence, which is a medium close-up of Lee in profile. As Lee begins reading, the shot cuts to a frontal close-up of her, and Edward is visible from torso to knee (his head is excluded from the frame) immediately behind her. Edward begins to slap the behind of Lee with a force that makes her body shudder with each moment of impact. However, what is to become a ritualised ceremony for the two characters is predominantly represented by a a shot-reverse-shot sequence of a close-up of Edward’s face and the fore mentioned frontal close-up of Lee reading.
This particular construction of the scene places emphasis on the experience of pain, it attempts to transgress the corporeal isolation of the sensory phenomenon. The close-up shots of each character do not indicate their point-of-view, what they see, rather it is an attempt to communicate the experience of pain by representing its affects such as contorted facial expressions. Perhaps more poignantly it is a formal technique that denies the viewer visual access to the act being implied. The moments of pause in Lee’s recitation of the letter as a result of the pain she feels flags the ways in which a body in pain is transformed into a site where language is destroyed (Scarry 1985, 172). Furthermore, the sound of Edward’s hand impacting on Lee’s butt displaces the primacy of visual representation, appealing instead to aural senses to produce a visceral reaction within the spectator.
There are two other angles from which this scene is represented: from a canted angle, slightly above and behind the characters; and from the doorway to the office at the approximate eyelevel of an on-looker who could, hypothetically speaking, stumble onto the scene. These two shots have the momentary effect of breaking spectatorial identification with the characters. In so doing, the embodied representation of pain is juxtaposed with a more distanced visual representation of violence. The camera itself is utilised to self-reflexively point to the ways in which a specifically cinematic language is being used to construct a language for pain.
Not only is closed-circuit communication circumvented through the ’sado-masochistic’ ritualisation of pain between these two characters, but the camera, the screen, is also inaugurated as a tool that attempts to incorporate the spectator as an object of perception.
The film challenges the limitations of narrative cinema to create viewer identification, manipulating its ability to simultaneously call upon a number of senses to overcome the isolating nature of pain and suffering in particular.I think it is the monadic quality of pain and suffering that resonates with spectators. Conservative ideologies of gender are recognised by most as influencing the social framework within which the individual characters attempt to terms with physical pain, rather than misidentifying (as I had expected) the film as a treatise on the deep-seeded desire of women to be subordinated in a patriarchal society.
