Secretary's Consent Question Took Twenty Years to Land

Jane Schoenbrun is directing a live reading of "Secretary" next month. Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson will perform the 2002 film about a court stenographer with sadomasochistic desire for her boss. The event is presented by Film Independent and MUBI. This is the same Schoenbrun who just made "We're All Going to the World's Fair," a film about online grooming and the blurred boundary between performance and authentic self. It is the same director preparing "Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma" with Einbinder and Anderson. The pairing seems obvious only if you haven't thought about what it means.

When Steven Shainberg's "Secretary" opened in 2002, critics treated it as a novelty. A kinky rom-com. Charming, weird, but fundamentally a jailbreak fantasy where a woman with a history of self-harm finds redemption through voluntary submission to a man with absolute control. The film was read as wish-fulfillment dressed in leather. What critics dismissed then was the same thing that made the film prophetic: it was already interrogating consent as performance, as something that lives in the gap between what we agree to and what we actually want. Fifteen years before #MeToo, it was asking whether desire expressed under conditions of power imbalance could ever be freely chosen. The answer the film gives is not reassuring. It is "yes, but."

Schoenbrun's entire body of work circles this same anxiety. Her documentaries and fiction films are obsessed with how we perform identity in spaces designed to surveil and shape us. How we mistake recognition for safety. The offer to name your desire becomes the mechanism through which you are captured. When she returns to "Secretary" now, she is not endorsing the film's answer. She is excavating it. She is asking what it means that we needed twenty years of cultural reckoning before we could see what Shainberg had already shown us: that consent in an asymmetrical relationship is an act of faith in someone else's restraint, not a proof of it.

What changes this time is that the audience knows what happened to women who made that bet. The film doesn't become dark in retrospect. It becomes documented.