Film Studies: Spader - saviour of the perverse

James Spader's face is completely unavailable for a happy ending

James Spader is 43, and I daresay that's a little old for the kind of public naughtiness he does so well. Naughtiness is so perilously un-American now; we're back in an age where everyone keeps to his assigned duty, and the range of human nature shrinks. The mere existence of Spader in 2003 is enough to remind you how, in the past, the only chance that kind of "weak" actor had in American film was to seem disturbed, and therefore villainous.

You don't have to go beyond the front rank of our leadership to see chronic failure to live up to manly ideals, to find "weakness", irritation and worse. And moving around in American society, you meet such a mass of the bogus, the veiled and the "weak", that James Spader could pass for Everyman, instead of the vaguely disturbed fellow that seems to be the only way of explaining his patent intelligence.

Take Secretary, a picture ignored in America or trashed for being very nasty and unwholesome. You guessed it: it's one of the most interesting US pictures of 2002 in which Spader plays E Edward Grey, a lawyer who, in the words of the script, is "a man waiting to be saved". Saved from what? Well, let's call it the creeping emptiness that seems to be invading his wide eyes, his standard handsomeness and what you'd have to call his good looks. But "good looking" now has become such a cliché, and such a warning, that the only interesting way of being good looking is to nurse that strange "weakness", allegedly alien to America's tough monotony, but actually so fascinating. (In case you're having trouble picturing this look, think Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Tom Cruise – call it the boy-wreck look.)

Mr E Edward Grey needs a new secretary and he acquires Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal), only just out of a mental hospital, yet still held back from all the supposed American rewards for her pensive prettiness. Mr Grey is terribly fierce about typing mistakes (part of the charm of Secretary is that it seems to be taking place pre-word processor). However, the mistake can be the key to paradise. For it is Mr Grey's trembling inner desire to have a miscreant typist bend forward over his desk so that he can spank her. And Lee likes it.

These scenes are beautifully done by director Steven Shainberg: they are suspenseful, very sexy, funny, and entirely credible in their revelation of two mercifully un-normal people. For Secretary is a movie about the romance of perversion – the way a kind of magic always (and only) clings to the forbidden. In other words, it is hinting at the notion that the only kind of real sex is illicit – the other kind, the regular normal practice, that is just habit.

This is very alien to that standard version of the American ending: that moment when problems have been solved and happiness achieved. And this is where we get to what is really thrilling about the look of James Spader: for his face is completely unavailable for that self-satisfied, locked-in ending. I won't tell you how Secretary ends, but the film faces the undermining threat of saying that "perverse" sex – spanking – is just a block on the troubled way to happy, satisfactory, normal sex.

Secretary does not fall for that. Rather it says that in a world of people who look like James Spader, we must all wander around like lost souls, doing our best to put on a cheery grin and grabbing crumbs where we can. This will not be owned up to, but it is what living in America feels like – there is a suspicion that the body-snatchers (as in the Invasion Of...) are making progress, and sometimes when you look in the mirror you wonder if you dropped off last night.

Secretary is subversive – the only real art, perhaps, that is left in America. Spader's is the face of this mood and tone, and here he is reminding us of sex, lies, and videotape (1989), still his best film if only because it understood how naturally suited his look and manner are to that wellspring of American behaviour – lying.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk

'Secretary' is released on Friday