Sexual candour is not a tradition of English-language filmmaking. Europe, especially France, has given us frank delicacies like Henri-Georges Clouzot's Woman in Chains (1968) an infinitely more erotic spiritual predecessor to Fifty Shades of Grey, in which a married woman enters an S&M relationship with a mysterious art gallerist; and Catherine Breillat's Romance (1999), which depicts a young teacher reacting to her sexually avoidant partner with a series of increasingly risky encounters with other men. Other bold depictions of kink with Gallic casts include Barbet Schroeder's Maitresse (1976) whereby petty crook Gerard Depardieu has his eyes opened after falling for a diminutive dominatrix with a briskly-run sex dungeon, and Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher (2001) with an unflinchingly masochistic lead performance by the grand dame of French cinema, Isabelle Huppert.

–      Why Hollywood is shunning sex

–      The films showing sex workers in a new light

–      The most subversive Western ever made

By contrast, US cinema has see-sawed between the euphemistic visual language of insinuation – a hangover from the Hays Code of 1934 to 68, which prohibited profanity, suggestive nudity, graphic or realistic violence, "sexual persuasions" and depictions of rape – and a giggling, adolescent approach to any mention of sex. Looking back, it's hard to find many unabashed portrayals of sexual people whose stories are powered by adult curiosity and an understanding that such details deepen, rather than derail a full-throttled character study.

Maggie Gyllenhaal gave a star-marking performance as Lee Holloway, a troubled young woman who finds herself through a BDSM relationship (Credit: Alamy)

One exception that proves the rule is a cult classic by the name of Secretary that turns 20 this year. The source was a dark little tale by US writer Mary Gaitskill published in her peerless 1988 short story collection Bad Behaviour. The protagonist of her Secretary, Debby, is numbly devastated by an employer who begins to mix up her admin duties with a side of unsolicited sexual humiliation – by which Debby is simultaneously traumatised and aroused. Director Steven Shainberg adapted it, at first into a tonally loyal short, and then into a feature, with a script by Erin Cressida Wilson, that recast the central dynamic as an unconventional office romance and found offbeat comic moments as troubled suburban ingenue Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) navigates her hot-and-cold boss, Mr Grey (the original and best character with this name, 13 years before Fifty Shades).

Secretary premiered at Sundance 2002, launching the career of Gyllenhaal in her breakout performance as Holloway, who we first meet waiting for her parents to pick her up post-discharge from a psychiatric institution. It's not long before the unhappy environment at home causes her to fall back on old self-harm habits. Her transformative event is finding gainful employment at the office of the lawyer, E Edward Grey, played by James Spader. This small amount of responsibility thrills her, as do the occasional flurries of interest from her often aloof and brooding boss. Oh so slowly, the dominant-submissive dynamics that will inform their sexual relationship begin to blossom to her delight and his self-loathing. Soon typos lead to spankings, and he is exercising authority by telling her how to get home and what kind of serving sizes to have at dinner. She self-actualises and leaves self-harm behind.

Gyllenhaal is magnetic and convincing as a shy and awkward person who eventually finds a confident voice through the expression of latent desires. The gradual discovery that she likes what she likes is played as emotional liberation, and it is genuinely moving to witness her newfound determination as the lights come on in her eyes for the first time. "Every single Hollywood actress of the appropriate age passed on the role and that was the only reason that we could cast Maggie Gyllenhaal," Shainberg tells BBC Culture from his home in Brooklyn, NYC. Established actresses were squeamish about taking on a role that involved being spanked over a desk and crawling on the floor on hands and knees, carrot in mouth. But having an unknown in the part ended up working to the film's advantage – as Shainberg says, "Part of the audience's response is that you just don't have any association. They are 'the girl'."

By contrast, the role of Mr Grey went to everyone's favourite sexy weirdo. By 2002 Spader had already played Graham, a man who likes to videotape women talking about sex in Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989) and James, a man who is turned on by car crashes in David Cronenberg’s Crash (1995). His preppy, delicate looks coupled with a willingness to calmly navigate kink made him a very specific type of sex symbol. "Women were drawn to him, and maybe they still are, in a cataclysmic way," says Shainberg. Gyllenhaal told the Independent newspaper in 2003 how he emulated Grey's ambivalence, sometimes doting on her, offering her chocolates and telling her she was his chosen ally; at other times, ignoring her and lavishing attention on the make-up artist instead. "It was re-enacting what was going on in the film. I don't think it was conscious for me, but it was for him," she said. I put this account to Shainberg who does not dispute it: "Everything about him understood how to play it both on screen and off screen," he says.

Secretary has, over the years, divided the kink community (an incredibly diverse counterculture united only by an interest in unconventional sources of erotic pleasure), most specifically on two points: the fairy tale, rom-com ending given to Lee and Edward, in which she ditches her fiancé and they get married, and the inclusion of self-harm as something that arguably pathologised Lee's sexuality. Furthermore, although the film scans as a fantasy, and scrutinising it through the lens of realism misses the point, post-MeToo, any depiction of a workplace abuse of power is not without a hint of sourness. The Gaitskill short story gives Debby's lawyer boss a comeuppance of sorts, as a journalist gets wise to his abuses, while the heroine is so disturbed that she simply stops going to work, while still being turned on by the memory of them. In adapting a dark short story into a fantasy romance, while keeping the workplace setting, there is a loss of a moral anchor and, what's more, some of Debby's complexity, as a woman in a deeply ambivalent relationship to her abuser, is rounded off. In this original Gaitskill depiction, there are shades of Liliana Cavani's film The Night Porter (1974), in which in 1957 Vienna a concentration camp victim, played by Charlotte Rampling, runs into her former Nazi guard, played by Dirk Bogarde, and the two rekindle a sexual relationship that began in the camp.

Nonetheless, at the time of Secretary's release, in a cinema landscape barren of depictions of BDSM [Bondage, Discipline, Dominance, Submission, Sadism and Masochism], it was a watershed film for many with BDSM interests. Madison Young is a non-binary femme writer and activist who rose to prominence on the US queer kink scene through directing and acting in feminist pornographic films. She has since left that behind to write a memoir, Daddy, exploring her personal relationship to BDSM and founded her own production company, Empress in Lavender Media. She recalls watching Secretary with her partner in 2005, less than five years into her BDSM journey. "Secretary along with 9 1/2 Weeks (1986) was one of the first times that I saw kink explored in a mainstream Hollywood film. That felt huge! Now we are at a different place of consciousness surrounding kink, sex, consent, communication, gender, and sexuality than we were 20 years ago. We still have massive work to do but, at the time, Secretary felt very radical. It was radical."

The film's fairy tale ending, in which the two lead characters get married, has been one of the key points of contention (Credit: Alamy)

Secretary was also "an emotional landmark" to Brian*, who was 19 in rural Indiana and coming to terms with the nature of his own sadomasochistic desires. "I had seen movies with BDSM as thematic material, almost used like production design, or of the cliched aesthetic of dark, leather and cool. But as far as the romantic side of it, absolutely not." The timing of Secretary's release chimed with the blossoming of his own sexual expression – and so the film had a real significance for him. "It was only several months after seeing the movie that I actually felt these things for myself with someone else for the first time. How many things can one see in a movie that are so cathartic and appealing to your intellect or your adrenaline, and later do those things for yourself and someone else?" 

Shainberg's attraction to the material was temperamental rather than personal. The child of two psychotherapists, from the age of 6-14, he listened to them talking about their patients over the dinner table. "I was raised to look at the problems or the 'strange and odd behaviour' of people as totally interesting and worthy of consideration and care," he says. "I wasn't obsessed with movies about sex, I was interested in characters doing things and living in a way that most people might reject or might not see the humanity or the beauty."

A formative film for his teenage self was Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) because of the complexity afforded to its anti-heroic lead character. "American filmmaking is obsessed with heroics. Most male actors are obsessed with being heroic in one way or another. They want to be muscled, or they want to be Don Juan. When I was younger, the most interesting character I'd ever seen put on screen was Travis Bickle. He was a homicidal lunatic, but he was also incredibly touching and needy."

As far as more direct inspirations for Secretary went, Jane Campion's Sweetie (1989) and Mike Leigh's Life is Sweet (1990) were instrumental in helping him through a block as he wrestled with how to adapt his original short into a feature. He felt that the source's dark tone would grow monotonous when elongated. Seeing, by chance, two films that dealt with psychological complexity with respect, but also had playfulness and comedy, enabled him to progress with the adaptation, after he had given it up. "They gave me the courage to see the humour, and that's what freed the whole thing. Once I made that shift in my point of view, all the other changes, and all the other transformations could happen."

I ask about the transformations that have provoked divided responses: the ending and the self-harm, neither of which are present in the source text, although a reference is made to Debby staying in a psychiatric facility and her bitterly repressed home life is faithful across both works. To Shainberg, a happy ending was central to his vision, to normalise BDSM and give his kinky characters a destiny distinct from, say, Isabelle Huppert’s sadomasochistic heroine Erika in The Piano Teacher who ends up brutalised both by her teenage pupil/lover and her own hand. He says, "It offers you a different vision of S&M, it offers you a different vision of what love can be." Gaitskill, who Shainberg first approached in 1992, gave her full views on the adaptation in her essay Victims and Losers: A Love Story published in the 2017 collection Somebody with a Little Hammer. Although she initially, scathingly, refers to the film as "the Pretty Woman version of my story" she says that she "admires" Shainberg for attempting the "almost impossible" in making a movie of it. While she draws out the contrasts between the earnest sweetness of Lee and her own more ambivalent heroine, she praises Gyllenhaal's performance, and eventually surrenders, albeit with a glint of tooth and claw, saying that: "If falsely positive movies can be made about everybody else, why not make them about sadomasochists, who are surely an underserved population in this regard?"

If Gaitskill’s critiques are levelled against a change in the story's DNA, though, she takes no issue with the addition of self-harm. For Shainberg, this arose from a dramatic need to use a visceral event as an early benchmark against which to chart Lee's transformation in the course of the movie. There is a scene in the law office, before the onset of Lee and Mr Grey's sexual relationship, when the latter is putting the former through a bizarre series of paces, drilling her in phone etiquette, asking about sex with her boyfriend and offering her a hot chocolate. Unbeknownst to her, he is wise to her self-harm and so it is out-of-the-blue when he says, "You will never ever cut yourself again. You're over that now. It's in the past." Shainberg says, "That's powerful and means something. It raises the stakes of what's happening in the office exponentially."

Fifty Shades of Grey has been by far the most prominent example of BDSM representation in Hollywood cinema (Credit: Alamy)

For Young, the most resonant element of the film was the way it showed both Lee and Grey struggling with internalised shame around their kinky desires. "Growing up kinky and queer in southern Ohio I often felt like – and everything around me pointed to – you are weird and broken. One of the things that Secretary does really well is that it shows two characters who are kinky that have sadistic and masochistic desires but that don’t have the language, education, community or resources to know how to explore these desires in a way that is mutually agreed upon, consenting, and healthy. I mean – a boss spanking your butt is sexual assault not kink."

Watching a boss spanking his employee and otherwise exerting sexual authority over her in 2022 is not as a jarring as that sounds, starkly written down, as the film stakes no claim to realism. An eerily euphoric score by David Lynch's musical soulmate Angelo Badalamenti creates the mood of a fairy tale through the looking glass; while Secretary's sly humour gives an overall sense that we are watching an extended role-play that the entire cast and crew is in on. This is a felt effect of the rehearsal period scheduled ahead of the 40-day shoot, says Shainberg,"With Maggie, we rehearsed for several weeks, just she and I talking about every single scene and what is going on with her. And, I mean, every single scene, reading them, thinking about them, talking about the character's emotional experience. Then between Maggie and Spader, I think we had a week or maybe even two. This is unheard of now." When it comes to the disconcerting nature of its central romance, with the BDSM relationship taking place within a professional, workplace framework, Young takes a nuanced and sophisticated approach to the film. She appreciates it for what a formative movie it was – "for many of us, it was the first time in which we saw a masochist/sadist or submissive/dominant portrayed in a mainstream Hollywood film" – while understanding it as problematic. "I do not in any way think it is the model of a healthy sexual relationship or [a good example] of how to go about a kink scene or how to initiate a kink relationship." The crucial absence is a proper language of consent established between the two of them. "Kink and BDSM rely on [this]. That communication from all participating individuals of expectations, desires, safe words, what and how you would like to explore different aspects of BDSM, etc, create the container for a BDSM relationship, a kink scene, a safe container for surrender. This container was never created within Secretary. Instead we witness two kinky folks fumbling toward connection, leaning into moments of eroticism that are never really communicated about."

Over the 18 years that have passed since she first saw Secretary, Young does not think there has been much progress in the representation of BDSM in mainstream film and TV, a disillusionment that helped fuel the creation of her own feature film and television production company. Empress in Lavender Media has put out the show Submission Possible, a documentary investigating the kink scene in various US cities, and is adapting her memoir, Daddy, into a feature that will be released in US cinemas in late 2023. Empress in Lavender Media's MO is to enable queer, transgender and sex-worker artists to tell their own stories. "I'm not dreadfully impressed by anything that I've seen surrounding kink in mainstream TV or film," says Young. "There are so many misconceptions about kink and BDSM and most of the folks that are controlling the narrative are writers, directors, and producers that are not a part of the BDSM community."

The elephants in the room are EL James's bestselling erotic novel, Fifty Shades of Grey and the resulting film franchise that made stars out of Dakota Johnson for her game ingenue and Jamie Dornan for his tortured millionaire whose "desires are unconventional". Brian did not read the book or watch the film and Young "didn’t like the book and couldn’t stand to watch the movie" but both concede that it opened up a new space for discussion, education and even filmmaking. As Young says ”it has paved the way for more in depth conversations and representation of our community." 

Another mainstream depiction of an S&M relationship that has been criticised is Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People, and its hit TV adaptation, in which heroine Marianne’s depressive slump is telegraphed by her willingness to enter into a bondage-infused sexual relationship with an abusive photographer. This is a throwback to what Brian refers to as "the most harmful stigma," ie that an interest in kink is "some sort of signifier for more sociopathic behaviours". The way that these sexual interests are used as a shorthand explanation for violence and self-harm has parallels with the way that mental illness has historically been portrayed.

Peter Strickland's 2014 film The Duke of Burgundy is one of the most interesting explorations of BDSM relationships in recent years (Credit: Alamy)

More happily, he refers me to two positive, recent portrayals of kinks and BDSM that he believes are more accurate and interesting: Peter Strickland's 2014 film The Duke of Burgundy and the perfectly formed 2020 US short film Marcy Learns Something New.

Shainberg would like to be contributing to this small canon with a new work. Despite his proven form in Secretary, he has been struggling for the last 10 years to make a passion project that deals, once again, in the transformative power of an awakened libido. "It's very difficult to get movies made that have something unusual in them, particularly if that unusual thing has something to do with sex. People read this new movie, and invariably, their response is, 'It's gross what these people are doing, I don't want to see this'."

He gives me the elevator pitch for The Big Shoe, a project that at various points has had Kristen Stewart, Joaquin Phoenix and Juliette Binoche attached and features shoes co-designed with Alexander McQueen designer Georgina Goodman. "This is a story about a genius shoe designer creatively devastated by his boot-maker father. A psychiatrist comes to live in his house and brings a girl with a beautiful foot. He gets sexually turned on by her foot to such an extent that his creativity is reignited and he designs a line of gorgeous shoes for her."

"Trying to get that movie made, I've experienced the exact same opposition that I faced when I tried to get Secretary made. In this case, 'Ew, this is a sleazy movie about a foot fetishist.'  I always say, 'No, it's a beautiful movie about the rejuvenation of an artist's spirit.' So, you know, it's funny or disappointing. I was sure, when I wrote this script that because of Secretary we would easily get the money. But it was not true. Even with great casts, we still faced all this serious doubt."

There is a link between Shainberg's current struggle and the essence of what makes Secretary great, and its sunny outcome feel earned. Both Lee Holloway and Mr E Edward Grey carry loneliness: they are convincingly crafted as characters who are not familiar with the loving recognition that mainstream romantic leads take for granted, because what they yearn for is a specific type of connection that by the same token renders them outsiders. So when they receive it from each other, it lands as an epiphany – and one that Shainberg carefully offers up to those of us watching too: that when your tastes alienate many, finding those they resonate with can feel positively euphoric.

*Brian's name has been changed as he wishes to remain anonymous

Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world.

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday