Secretary begins with Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man,” a song that offers absolute submission in the voice of a man who still sounds completely in control. Cohen promises to become whatever his lover requires: boxer, doctor, driver, mask. The arrangement moves with slow, nocturnal confidence, but the lyric is a contract of service disguised as seduction. It is the perfect doorway into Steven Shainberg’s film, where dominance and obedience gradually stop looking like opposites. Angelo Badalamenti’s score takes that contradiction and makes it intimate. His music does not treat Lee Holloway and E. Edward Grey as specimens in a kinky comedy. It listens for the need, shame, discipline and unexpected tenderness moving beneath their rituals.
The “Main Title” introduces Lee through a theme that is playful, secretive and faintly wounded. Light percussion, plucked instrumental figures and soft electronic color create the sense of someone moving through ordinary life while protecting a private chamber inside herself. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Lee has recently returned home after psychiatric hospitalization following self-injury. Her family responds by watching her, worrying about her and avoiding any language precise enough to describe what happened. Badalamenti gives her something more complicated than fragility. The music contains curiosity and appetite alongside sadness. Lee is not waiting to be rescued from desire. She is waiting to discover a form in which desire does not destroy her.
The score’s balance is crucial because Secretary could easily have collapsed into either grim pathology or cute eccentricity. Badalamenti allows darkness into the music without making Lee’s sexuality sound diseased. He also permits humor without turning the relationship into a harmless bedroom joke. The rhythms often move with a slightly exaggerated office efficiency, while the melodies carry emotional uncertainty. Typewriters, red pens, file folders and formal instructions become parts of an erotic system before either character admits what is happening.
“Feelin’ Free” captures Lee’s first experience of discovering that structure can release rather than imprison her. The cue has a loose, bright movement that contrasts with the hesitancy surrounding her family life. Employment in Grey’s law office initially appears to be another attempt at becoming normal: learn secretarial work, wear acceptable clothes, answer phones and avoid drawing attention. Yet the office gives Lee a private arena where attention becomes intense and specific. Grey notices every error. His scrutiny frightens her, but it also makes her visible.
James Spader plays Grey as a man attempting to bury desire beneath procedure. His office is obsessively controlled, filled with rules whose emotional purpose remains concealed. Badalamenti’s music often mirrors this environment through careful repetition. Short motifs return with small changes, resembling instructions copied until their meaning shifts. Order becomes erotic because it concentrates attention. Every typo matters because Grey has chosen to make it matter.
“Snow Dome Dreams” moves into Lee’s interior imagination. Its delicate textures suggest an enclosed miniature world, beautiful because it can be held still. A snow globe contains weather without danger, preserving a tiny landscape behind glass. Lee’s fantasies function similarly at first. They give shape to desires she cannot yet bring into ordinary speech. Badalamenti’s cue is dreamy without becoming weightless. There is loneliness inside the beauty, the sense of a life observed from outside.
“Bathing Blossom” gives physical awakening a warmer sound. The title joins cleansing with opening, suggesting Lee learning to inhabit her body differently. Her self-injury had turned the body into a site where unbearable emotion could be converted into visible sensation. The developing relationship with Grey introduces another language of pain, one shaped by attention, boundaries and response. Badalamenti does not make that transition simplistic. The music is sensual, but its gentleness acknowledges how much uncertainty remains.
“Seeing Scars” approaches the film’s most vulnerable subject directly. Grey discovers the evidence of Lee’s cutting and reacts with authority, concern, anger and desire mixed together. He orders her never to hurt herself again. The command is ethically complicated because he has not earned the right to control her, yet Lee experiences it as the first instruction addressed to the exact part of herself everyone else has handled through fear or silence. Badalamenti’s music avoids triumph. It slows down, allowing exposure to remain painful even as it creates connection.
The scars are not magically cured by romance or discipline. They reveal the emotional territory the relationship enters. Grey’s control appeals to Lee because it redirects sensation into a shared ritual, but his authority remains unstable until he accepts responsibility for what he is asking from her. The score repeatedly distinguishes control from care without pretending they can always be cleanly separated.
“Loving to Obey” is the album’s clearest statement of transformation. Its rhythm carries anticipation and a rising sense of confidence. Lee’s obedience is not presented as passivity. She becomes increasingly active in recognizing what she wants, preparing for it and testing Grey’s willingness to acknowledge it. Badalamenti lets the cue feel liberated because Lee is no longer merely enduring impulses she cannot name. She has found a structure that answers them.
The title also exposes the film’s central provocation. Lee loves to obey, but that love gives her leverage. Grey can issue instructions only because she chooses to invest them with power. When he retreats in shame, his authority vanishes. The relationship depends upon mutual recognition, even when its visible form appears unequal. Badalamenti’s music understands this exchange through recurring phrases that require both tension and release. One cannot function without the other.
“Office Obligations” turns professional routine into erotic choreography. The cue’s brisk movement suggests paperwork, deadlines and controlled motion, but every practical action has acquired another charge. Lee types while waiting for correction. Grey circles the desk, pretending the rules are merely professional. Badalamenti does not need an oversized seduction theme because the eroticism lives in timing: a pause before a command, footsteps approaching, the silence after a mistake has been noticed.
The music also preserves the comedy of the situation. Grey’s elaborate seriousness can be absurd, especially when applied to minor spelling errors or office etiquette. Lee’s growing pleasure makes his attempts at denial increasingly transparent. Badalamenti allows little instrumental flourishes to reveal the ridiculous machinery surrounding desire. The joke never cancels the feeling. It makes the characters human enough to carry it.
“The Loving Tree” opens the score outward with guitar and a brighter emotional tone. The title suggests affection as something organic rather than administered, a living structure whose branches do not obey office geometry. By this point, the relationship must leave the controlled environment in which it first developed. Lee can accept her desire, but Grey remains frightened by what it reveals about him. The cue’s warmth is therefore hopeful without becoming secure.
Grey’s shame is different from Lee’s. She has been taught to see herself as damaged, while he has built an adult life around hiding the possibility that he could damage someone else. His withdrawal is partly cowardice and partly fear of becoming abusive. The film does not dismiss that fear. It requires him to recognize that refusing communication can also become cruelty. Badalamenti’s more tender themes appear when control begins accepting emotional accountability.
“Orchids” gives that tenderness a strange, cultivated beauty. Orchids are carefully maintained, exotic and often associated with sexuality. Grey’s office contains a controlled environment in which desire can bloom only under precise conditions. The cue is elegant but fragile, suggesting that beauty developed through discipline can still die when deprived of honest care.
“Secretary’s Secrets” gathers the film’s emotional contradictions into one private space. The title refers not only to Lee’s fantasies but to the office itself, where professional hierarchy conceals a relationship neither participant can explain publicly. Badalamenti’s music remains restrained, preserving the secrecy without making it sordid. What happens behind the closed door is unusual, but the emotional problems surrounding it are painfully familiar: fear of rejection, unequal vulnerability and the wish to be known without being condemned.
The film’s longest test arrives when Grey orders Lee to remain seated at his desk with her hands placed upon the surface. He leaves, expecting the command to collapse once he is gone. Lee remains through hunger, exhaustion, family intervention and public scrutiny. The scene transforms obedience into confrontation. By following his instruction beyond what he intended, she forces him to recognize that his words carry responsibility.
Badalamenti does not score the vigil as helpless waiting. The music gives it ritual weight. Lee’s stillness becomes more active than everyone else’s attempts to move her. Her family, former fiancé and outsiders interpret the scene according to familiar categories of victimhood or madness, but Lee knows exactly why she remains. The desk becomes altar, protest site and declaration.
Lizzie West’s “Chariots Rise” closes the soundtrack with acoustic warmth after the score’s enclosed office textures. Its altered lyric, “What grace have I, to fall so in love,” removes humiliation from surrender. Falling in love is not foolishness here. It is grace because both characters have survived their shame long enough to become visible.
Secretary works because Badalamenti never makes its erotic rituals louder than the people performing them. His score remains close to breath, hesitation, footsteps and small changes in posture. Cohen supplies the seductive contract at the beginning. West offers acceptance at the end. Between them, Badalamenti creates the music of two damaged adults learning that control without trust is empty, while surrender freely chosen can become an astonishing form of self-possession.
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