Mary Gaitskill gets it

On Minority Report and being a loser

To be human is finally to be a loser, for we are all fated to lose our carefully constructed sense of self, our physical strength, our health, our precious dignity, and finally our lives. A refusal to tolerate this reality is a refusal to tolerate life, and art based on the empowering message and positive image is just such a refusal. [Mary Gaitskill, Victims and Losers: A Love Story]

When I first read Secretary, not having seen the film, I was surprised by the absence of sex. Debby isn’t an erotomaniac bristling under her workwear. Her life is dull and unrealised, populated by tax information offices and balled-up used Kleenex and doughnut stores. ‘I want to be bored,’ she says. ‘I like dull work.’ When her boss tells her to bend over his desk and spanks her, a beam of self-knowledge enters her life. ‘The word “humiliation” came into my mind with such force that it effectively blocked out all other words. Further, I felt that the concept it stood for had actually been a major force in my life for quite a while.’

The event marks a subtle shift in her understanding of herself and her place in the world. ‘I was more excited, in fact, than I had ever been in my life. That didn’t surprise me, either. I felt a numbness; I felt that I could never have a normal conversation with anyone again.’ Minority Report, Gaitskill’s follow-up to Secretary, details the aftermath, the way the event continues to shape her life in the years afterwards—not as trauma, exactly, but as an uncomfortable fact of her personality, which the event has dragged out of her unconscious in a jagged, premature way.