Note: Since Mercury retrogrades often invite (or compel) us to review some aspect of our lives, I offer you this piece from The Guardian in which Erin Cressida Wilson, who wrote the script for the 2002 movie Secretary, recounts her 1970s upbringing by bohemian parents and early introduction to erotica. — Amanda P.

By Erin Cressida Wilson

Growing up in 1970s San Francisco I was often dragged by my parents to explicit foreign films at small cinemas like the Clay or the Vogue, the Balboa or the Castro.

“In 2002, educated film-makers were not supposed to like this sort of thing…” — Erin Cressida Wilson. Promotional photo of Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary courtesy of Allstar/Lions Gate

There I’d sit, underage and somehow smuggled in, on a scratchy red chair that smelled of popcorn and sticky floors, surrounded by bohemians and intellectuals watching the same thing that I was watching: sex.

Back then, the entire city felt drenched in sensuality, and so did my home. It was here on sweaty afternoons that I watched Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman on TV, curled up with my mother, drawing constellations and stars and universes from freckle to freckle across her skin.

I was trying to find the secret – the reason that fueled her to grab my hand on Sunday afternoons, take a left turn as far away from the playground as possible, and rush me to the opening weekend of I Am Curious (Yellow) (1969 – age five), Carnal Knowledge (1971 – age seven), Last Tango in Paris (1972 – age eight), A Clockwork Orange (1972 – age eight), The Mother and the Whore (1973 – age nine), and Swept Away … by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August (1974 – age 10).

I would sit next to my mother on these afternoons and inevitably a tendril of tension would start emanating from the screen, and from her. Suddenly, in a fierce whisper, she would instruct me to look at the floor. And so I would stare at a discarded popcorn box, a spilled drink or simply the darkness that disappeared into the seat ahead of me – listening carefully to quickening breaths – allowing the film’s soundscape to caress me. I learned to peek with my eyes to see bodies in motion, pushing like animals, doing something mysterious that I didn’t understand, but somehow enjoyed.

It was during this era that even the more explicit films like Deep Throat (1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) managed to cross over into the mainstream. My mother blessedly spared me these films. A confluence of factors – among them the rise of television and a growing counterculture – led film-makers to mine previously taboo topics. The abandonment of the Production Code in 1968 opened the floodgates for sex to migrate from dirty theatres to more legit venues. But it was short-lived thanks to a 1973 Supreme Court decision that once again shunted these features to adult picturehouses. Nevertheless, it was a transformative time to be coming-of-age.

But despite this early education in sexually-explicit cinema, I never quite understood how I came to construct the power dynamics in my script for Secretary (2002 – age 38). It wasn’t until I came across my mother’s diary, a few months before her death, that I started to fully comprehend what was at work in my subconscious. This journal kept a weekly record of what turned out to be my mother’s 20+ year affair with her shrink. One afternoon in 1951, after only a few sessions, he pronounced my mother to be a sadomasochist. Not great shrinkage, but there was a lot of truth there. And reading my mother’s diaries brought me to understand that secrets that fly around a house actually do get absorbed by children in ways that are mysterious.

Ours was a house full of books. Food to eat was scarce but it was packed to the rafters with words to read. It took hours of searching the pages of highbrow literature to find anything naughty. I quickly figured out that in a cinephile’s house, some of the easiest sources of sexy images were film magazines. Curious and dressed in my school uniform, knee socks, and saddle shoes, I would sneak down to the basement and flick through my father’s stashes of magazines. Alongside the mildewed copies of Oui, Hustler and Playboy, were stacks of Film Quarterly whose pages were charged with erotica, drama, and – best of all – a lot of European men.

If the city and our house felt like extensions of all things carnal, then our derelict basement seemed to be the epicentre. Oddly, my parents’ bedroom, with its door always open, seemed to be the one place sex did not inhabit. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard has written much on basements and their psychological connotations. In The Poetics of Space, he posits the attic as the site of rationality and the basement as the site of irrationality – manifestations of the conscious and the unconscious respectively. While the attic provides reassurance, the basement provides mystery.

And mysteries it held. It’s where my father hid not only his porn, but his alcohol. It’s where my mother, a lover of many men, hid her love letters – locked in a metal box buried in the dirt under the house. She would often say to me, “Don’t go under the house.” And just as her order to not look at the sexy films had spurred me on to do so, I would indeed look under the house. When I finally uncovered “the box,” I found on the very top, a note to my father: “Dear heart, if you find these letters, I loved only you.” And then underneath were handwritten and typed letters from the men, often writers. On thin onion skin paper were words of love and sex and longing. But my mother had, like a true self-censor, carefully cut out all the explicit words with scissors. If I held the paper up to the light, it was like lace.

It was also in this basement that my mother would invite the dustbin men in. They were Italian-Americans who collected our trash in large burlap sacks that they’d throw over their shoulders before going back down the 30 or so stairs to their truck. In the same way I imagined my father would linger on the sexy images of his magazines, my mother admired these men, their muscles dancing and backs straining under the weight of our detritus. She would say to me, “Look at his hands. Look at his lips. Look at his back. Listen to his voice.” She was giving me erotic instruction.

It felt natural that in my early adulthood I would start writing plays about sex. Though in the 1980s New York theatre scene, a woman liking men was practically against the natural order. There appeared to be a rulebook thrown at every emerging playwright. If you were gay, an obligatory coming-out play was what was called for. If you were a person of colour, you were told to cash that card in and write with that in mind. If you were a woman? It was advisable to write about how abusive men were. It was not so good to be a thinking woman who was phallus-embracing. At Smith, the all-women’s college I attended in Massachusetts, girls walked around in T-shirts that said, “A Century of Women on Top”. And I remember asking, “What if you don’t like being on top? Does that mean you aren’t a feminist?”

My Women’s Studies professors would say: “You don’t know how hard we fought for you.” And yet, when they told me my sexuality was not correct, I felt embarrassed. I knew I had longings that didn’t line up with the politics, but I refused to repress them, particularly in my writing. I fought to unravel a political correctness that was censoring desire.

By the time I wrote the screenplay for Secretary, I had given up all hope of ever reaching a wider audience. No movie star would accept playing the lead in that film. After all, to portray a submissive and to be spanked onscreen would be a disastrous move for their careers. In addition, there was talk early on that the script was sexist because it ended with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character making a bed and dropping a cockroach on it – so that her husband would find it and punish her. It was repeatedly suggested to me that – instead – she should “find herself,” and become a lawyer herself. She should be powerful in a way that appeared strong through a traditional feminist lens. There was also a vibe around the film that Gyllenhaal’s character should overcome her problem. Again, I didn’t consider her to have a problem. And so I decided that this was a coming-out film for a masochist.

When the film screened at the Sundance film festival, middle-aged feminists stomped out during the spanking scene. I’d sit on the bus that shuttled us through the snow between screenings and eavesdrop on conversations. When the subject of Secretary came up, film-goers would look sideways. No comment. After all, in 2002, educated film-makers were not supposed to like this sort of thing. They were not supposed to like BDSM. And so we came away from Sundance with an honourable mention and exhaustion. We had not sold the film to a distributor. I had observed other films like Tadpole getting sold to Miramax for $5m. It was not a sexy situation. Perhaps we were the ultimate masochists, attempting to make this film in such a climate.

But Secretary was allowed to sit on the vine for a long time thanks to an eventual distribution deal from Lion’s Gate Entertainment, the advent of home video, DVDs, streaming and the glory of late night airings on the Sundance Channel. Today, it seems that what was pornographic 12 years ago is passé and maybe even clichéd. One generation’s risqué becomes the baseline for the next.

My mother used to tell me – among the many things she told me – that there was nothing sexier than a man whose breath smelled of scotch and cigarettes. I miss cinema and sticky floors and popcorn on an empty stomach. We move forward, but some of us stop sometimes to remember what it was like to fill in the blanks of a dirty letter, to hunt for the naughty film magazine, and to look up between one’s fingers to catch a glimpse.