Entertainment
Stargate Star’s Craziest, Kinkiest Film Is Now Free To Stream
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
While she has had a magnificently varied career, Maggie Gyllenhaal established herself early on as a genre queen thanks to movies like Donnie Darko, Stranger Than Fiction, and The Dark Knight. If you’re one of those who crushed on her when she was the love of Batman’s life, you probably never thought you’d see her letting someone spank her, and liking it.
That’s exactly what happens in Secretary (2002), a kinky classic starring James Spader and Gyllenhaal that you can now stream for free on Tubi.
Begging For a Good Time
The plot of Secretary begins with a young woman who starts working as a secretary for a powerful lawyer. Beneath his briefs (legal and otherwise), this attorney harbors a secret passion for BDSM and dreams of dominating his new hire. When this doe-eyed secretary realizes just how much she likes being spanked, these two must wrestle with what to do with a mutual attraction built on breaking some of society’s most sacred taboos.
If you’re someone who dislikes the markedly puritanical streak in American movie criticism, you will likely get a perverse thrill out of Secretary’s frank and unapologetic approach to kink. Modern online film criticism is filled with endless navel-gazing discourse about whether or not movies should have sex scenes, even if the internet (comprised largely of virginal zoomers) has decided it didn’t advance the plot. By contrast, Secretary is a movie where sex, plot, and character development are delicately intertwined, and it feels genuinely refreshing to watch a film that questions the validity of our most sacred taboos, one transgressive scene at a time.
The Movie Fifty Shades Of Grey Wished It Could Be
It’s almost impossible to watch Secretary without comparing it to Fifty Shades of Grey, the literary adaptation of what many mistakenly consider the kinkiest book ever written. For the record, Secretary is the far superior film for many reasons, starting with the fact that Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character maintains her agency throughout the entire film. That’s a marked contrast from Fifty Shades, in which Dakota Johnson’s character is portrayed as so one-dimensional that she might as well be just another accessory in her wealthy boyfriend’s garish sex dungeon.
Additionally, Fifty Shades of Grey, like the book it is based on, seems to delight primarily in its portrayals of sex and breaking of society’s mildest taboos for the sake of mere shock value. By contrast, Secretary emphasizes how the main characters’ exploration of their desires helps them learn more about who they are while bringing them closer together. The result is something that feels sensual and sexy, while Fifty Shades of Grey is content with just being empty erotica with plenty of nudity but almost no character development.
The Perfect Leads
Speaking of characters, James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal deserve full credit for making their characters so convincingly complex, which may surprise audiences expecting to see an angry man with full control over a mousy woman. Spader gives his character a powerful streak of vulnerability that bounces perfectly off the steel Gyllenhaal embeds within her character’s otherwise submissive exterior. In this way, the two actors embody the important kink concept of power exchange, highlighting the consensual nature of their relationship in a way that Fifty Shades of Grey never did.
Does all this mean you have to be a super-kinky person in order to enjoy Secretary? Of course not, no more than if you’d need to actually be a costumed vigilante in order to appreciate a Batman movie. But those who do like to let their freak flag fly are sure to enjoy a movie where kink is treated in a serious and respectful way instead of as a cheap, unearned punchline.
A Kinky Crossover Straight Out Of Fanfiction
Even the most vanilla audience is likely to enjoy the strange spectacle of a freaky-deaky movie starring actors who went on to do bigger and better things. In this case, James Spader went on to star as the titular villain in Avengers: Age of Ultron, whereas Maggie Gyllenhaal replaced Katie Holmes as Batman’s wannabe girlfriend in The Dark Knight.
If you don’t want to watch Secretary for its bold, modern take on alternative lifestyles, it’s worth it for the fanfiction-like mashup of three things almost never seen onscreen together: Marvel, DC, and eroticism.
Will you enjoy Secretary for being the best modern take on this lifestyle, or will you need a safe word while watching this throwback’s rawest moments? The only way is to be a good girl (or boy) and stream it for free on Tubi.
