My friends occasionally (and justly) make fun of the desperate libertarian tendency to apply the l-word to any work of popular culture that shows even the most meager individualist or pro-market strand. (The protagonist bought something he wanted—a paean to the power of laissez faire! Keanu is “the one”—it’s all about the power of the indvidual!) But Secretary—in addition to making you need either a cold shower or a hot… well, anyway—did strike me as fitting the bill when I saw it last night. The story tracks Lee, a not-quite-right young woman with a penchant for automutilation, as she enters into an S&M relationship (with her employer, no less!) that looks pretty creepy at the outset but, as the movie progresses, is revealed as a pretty thoroughly positive thing for both of them. As Lee puts it late in the film:
In one way or another I’ve always suffered. I didn’t know why exactly. But I do know that I’m not so scared of suffering now. I feel more than I’ve ever felt and I’ve found someone to feel with. To play with. To love in a way that feels right for me.
The premise sounds more libertine than libertarian at the outset, but it isn’t really, in any kind of shallow hedonistic sense: A central point in the movie is that all the spanking and bondage is a slightly weird but quite genuine way of expressing real love, and that both parties are emotionally healthier for it at the end.
Interestingly, what makes the movie work is precisely that it does (I assume deliberately) seem creepy at the outset: The director wants your initial response to be a certain unease, if not revulsion. That allows it to serve what Richard Rorty sees as one of the core liberal functions of imaginative fiction: It allows us to come to see ways of living that aren’t (most of) our own as having a distinctive and real value, whether or not we ultimately want to embrace those modes of living.