Tag: Feminist Flashback

Motherhood in Film & Television: ‘The Great Lie’

The Great Lie (1941)
This is a guest post from Erin Blackwell.
My mother used to sit me down to watch movies in front of a small black-and-white TV in our Southern California living room, not far from Hollywood, where she’d spent the happiest years of her childhood. Watching movies was part of a wide-ranging curriculum of aesthetic exercises she assigned my brothers and me. Not just any movie. The classics from MGM, the comedies from Paramount, an occasional noir from Warners. I’ve never been able to simply watch a movie like a normal person. I’m always evaluating the design elements, the performances, the script. 
Bette Davis stars in The Great Lie
In 1941, when my mother was 17, the United States entered World War II and Warner Brothers released The Great Lie, starring Bette Davis and George Brent. Bette Davis was a great actress and George Brent was the only actor in Hollywood who hadn’t gone away to war. Unthinkable today that an actor would put his high-priced face in harm’s way but in 1941, the U.S. did not have a standing army, or a “volunteer” army of mercenaries, let alone private contractors. What was called “the war effort” included the publicity generated by the donning of uniforms by Hollywood stars, several of whom saw active duty. 
There are two scenes in The Great Lie that made an indelible impression on my teenage psyche. One involves crossdressing, the other involves food, and both express the anxiety attached to giving birth and the difficulties modern women have integrating this biological imperative into an otherwise blithely artificial lifestyle. But mostly, these two scenes depict powerful moments of emotional intimacy between women in which conventional gender roles go out the window. 
The Great Lie, despite its portentous title, was not part of the war effort, although George Brent’s character, Pete, dons a uniform right after his wedding and flies off on a secret mission to a South American jungle. Pete’s lackluster presence at movie’s start and extended absence during movie’s middle is characteristic of what was called “women’s films,” in which the man is merely a rag doll to be fought over by the real characters: female rivals who vie to possess him. 
Mary Astor plays Sandra
Mary Astor, whose name is one-third the size of George Brent’s (whose name is one-third the size of Bette Davis’s — whose name is alone above the title) on the original poster, is the pivot point of this romantic triangle. She’s better known for playing Brigid O’Shaughnessey opposite Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, a truly great film released the same year. Astor’s particular cocktail of beauty, eroticism, class, emotivity, intelligence, weakness, and the febrile glamour synonymous with mental instability raise The Great Lie to the level of… what exactly? Something more exciting than it deserves to be, something operatic with the frisson of a tabloid. She won an Oscar for her performance. 
Astor plays Sandra, the internationally acclaimed concert pianist, whose manager (Grant Mitchell) refers to her as Madame Kovac. Unthinkable today that a concert pianist could feature as a love interest in a Hollywood film but in the 40s, classical music was part of the national dialogue and every kid in Brooklyn was trying to get to Carnegie Hall. Astor is believable as a concert artist, although the script by Leonore Coffee (revised on set by Davis and Astor) trades in clichés about the artist’s life. No matter. Astor brings an innate musicality to her scenes. Her voice, a rich contralto, is itself a stunning instrument. 
The opening credits roll over a series of tightly framed shots of a woman’s arms banging out Tchaikowsky’s Piano Concerto Number One on a Baldwin, backed by a healthy string section. The piano is muscular, the ascending chords weighty, rhythmic, obsessive. The whole sequence establishes the beating heart of passion which is the source of the great lie. (Those aren’t Astor’s arms, but we do get some choice glimpses of her banging away at the keyboard. She brings to it the conviction of a trained pianist.) 
The production values in this film, dynamically directed by Edmund Goulding, are uniformly excellent, from the supporting cast, to the sets, props, costumes and the kind of chiaroscuro lighting you only get from Warner’s. Watching it for the umpteenth time, I was struck by the pacing, how the camera patiently tracks the actors. This approach is futile when filming George Brent, who has little to give, but pays off with Mary Astor, who has the reactivity of uranium. And, of course, Davis knows exactly what to feed the camera at all times. Starting with her famous eyes. 
Maggie and Pete post-wedding
Exhibiting those characteristics considered essential to the life of a temperamental musician, Sandra marries Pete while they’re both on a drunken spree, but the marriage is annulled post-consummation when it’s revealed Sandra’s divorce from her previous husband wasn’t yet final. That frees a newly sober Pete to rush back into the arms of Maggie (Davis), his true love. They marry without delay but the rivalry continues when Sandra discovers she’s pregnant. The fetus is considered a powerful bargaining chip in her attempt to recapture her runaway husband. 
When Pete’s plane’s reported missing somewhere in the South American jungle, the great lie is concocted in the head of his wife Maggie, who sees a way to preserve Pete’s only known earthly remains — his DNA — by getting his ex-wife to carry his child to term. In a stunning surrogate switcheroo, it’s not the paternity but the maternity that’s going to be in question. Maggie shows up at Sandra’s Central Park apartment in full noir regalia: wide-body fur coat and oversized black hat. Sandra’s in haute bohemian chic: a stunning floorlength black dressing-gown. 
Maggie arrives at Sandra’s apartment in suddenly-noir lighting
Sandra leans back on her white satin bed, cowed by the interloper’s assertiveness. Maggie stands looking down at her and explains, “He left us two things in this world. I have his money. You might have his child. You’re extravagant. You’re a woman of the world, a public figure. Your piano, your success, they won’t go on forever. None of us gets younger. Let me insure your future. And you ensure mine.” 
Sandra asks, “Your future?” Maggie says, “His child. That could be my future. And I’d make you secure financially always.” Sandra considers this, then says softly, “Money.” Maggie says, “Yes.” Sandra shakes her head dismissively. “It’s so completely mad.” Exactly what the audience is thinking. 
Fifty minutes in, we’re at the heart of the matter: an extended showdown between virtuous wife Maggie and vicious baby mama Sandra. Implicit to the great lie is the thwarting of an abortion but that precise issue is never raised. This kid’s life only has meaning as an extension of Pete’s. That’s the one thing these two women can agree on. They love that man! 
Their car arriving at the Arizona safe house
This scene kicks off twenty minutes of high histrionic and low comedic bliss as Bette convinces Sandra to hide out in a clapboard house in the Arizona desert, surrounded by dust and cactus, serviced by an untraveled road. Scenes of delicious intimacy suddenly erupt as the actresses sink their teeth into their new roles-within-roles. None of this would work with lesser actresses playing for laughs or, worse, camp. There’s a same-sex erotic undercurrent a mile wide to these domestic scenes, under a thin frosting of glamour puss personality. Astor unleashes a volatile vulnerability which Davis parries with pugnacious charm. And I’m suddenly reminded of a similar set-up in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), where Bette Davis dominates the wheelchair-bound Joan Crawford. That’s the late-career, Grand Guignol version. 
Maggie deploys wifely know-how to tend the tempestuous Sandra, grown crankier in a terrycloth bathrobe through forced isolation, dietary restrictions, and the gratingly upbeat companionship of her arch rival. But is Maggie the wife or the husband? She runs errands for Sandra in town. She monitors her cigarette smoking, unsuccessfully. She even keeps her from eating a pickle during a middle-of-the-night fridge raid. This scene is unique in the canon, for the pathetic self-abasement Astor offers up in her quest for a ham sandwich. 
Maggie relents and cuts a slice of ham for Sandra
Awakened by a wind storm, Maggie’s attracted by the light under the door to the kitchen. She enters and finds Sandra, frozen in dread, like a mouse cornered by a cat. Maggie gestures to the table full of food. “Sandra. Ham, onion, butter. Everything the doctor said you couldn’t have. What have you got behind your back? Come on. Hand it over.” Sandra puts a jar on the table. “Pickles. Oh, Sandra.” Sandra answers, “Yes, pickles. I like them. I want them. I’m sick and tired of doing without things I want. You and that doctor with your crazy ideas of what I can and what I can’t eat. You’re starving me.” The martyred Sandra practically sings her lines. “I’m not one of you anemic creatures who can get nourishment from a lettuce leaf. I’m a musician. I’m an artist. I have zest and appetite and I like food. I’ve being lying awake in there thinking about food and now I’m going to have it.” So Maggie gives in and makes her a sandwich. 
Maggie alone on the deck, awaiting the birth of the baby
The greatest transgressive thrill comes when the country doctor arrives to deliver the baby. Maggie’s prowling around in men’s slacks and loafers, odd man out at this female ritual. When the doctor says he’s used to having the father around, nervously wondering when the baby’ll be born, he’s describing Maggie. Then he closes the door to the bedroom, shutting her out of this women’s mystery. Virile Maggie can’t sit still but goes out onto the deck, alone in the night, smoking and pacing like a guy until that universal signal, a baby’s cry, summons her back inside. Women, too, can be fathers! She enters the bedroom only long enough to eyeball Junior. This baby is an abstract goal for Maggie and Davis is not a convincing mom. 
Sandra playing Chopin, dressed to impress
I don’t think it’ll spoil the movie for you to reveal that Pete is not dead and that his resurrection as a plot point reignites the women’s rivalry. The Great Lie is nothing if not a primer in how to get melodramatic mileage out of a baby. That’s when Pete surprises us all by declaring that he prefers a childless Maggie to a babied-up Sandra. Like the judgement of Solomon, this remark reveals the identity of the “true” mother, Maggie, who, while not the biological parent, is the one who wants to keep the kid. To cover her humiliation, Sandra sits down at the baby grand and starts banging out the same concerto we heard under the opening titles. We’re back where we started. 
Violet (Hattie McDaniel) leads the celebration
The one big glaring no-no smack in the middle of The Great Lie is Hattie McDaniel’s reprise of her role of Mammy from Gone With the Wind (1939). They’ve changed her name to Violet, but her function is the same. Treating Maggie the way she treated Scarlett O’Hara (a role Davis famously fought for and lost to Vivienne Leigh) only makes sense within a regressive, racist fantasy. It’s mind-boggling to watch the scenes of happy blacks celebrating their mistress’s wedding. Did anything remotely resembling that world exist in 1941? Because it sure doesn’t exist now. But then, The Great Lie is a time capsule full of outmoded conventions. Which is what makes it so fascinating.

Erin Blackwell reviewed films for the Bay Area Reporter in San Francisco. She just finished writing a play. Her blog is Pinkrush.com.

Feminist Flashback: ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’

Written by Megan Kearns.

When I was young, my mom raised me on classic films: Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, The Great Escape, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I fondly remember watching Elizabeth Taylor on-screen. Hollywood royalty, we often think of her arresting beauty, numerous marriages, struggle with alcohol, philanthropy and perfume commercials. It’s easy to forget she was an amazing actor; a stellar artist who fluidly exuded strength, sensuality, vitality, passion and pain.Starring in over 50 films, Taylor often chose feminist roles.  In National Velvet, she plays a young girl disguising herself as a male jockey to compete. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, she’s a fiery survivor embracing her sexuality. And in the Texas saga Giant, she plays an educated and outspoken woman, challenging sexism. So after years of my mother urging me, I finally watched Taylor’s legendary performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Based on Edward Albee’s Tony Award-winning play (it also won the Pulitzer although it wasn’t awarded it due to its vulgarity and sexual themes), the 1966 film follows Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) and George (Richard Burton), a middle-aged married couple. He’s an assistant professor at a New England college and she’s his wife who happens to be the college president’s daughter. Through their vitriolic and bitter alcohol-fueled feuding, they lash out at each other. When a young couple, new professor Nick (George Segal) and his wife Honey (Sandy Dennis), visit their house after a late-night party, Martha and George continue their battle of wits, interchangeably attacking their guests and using them as ammunition, to further lash out at one another.
Director Mike Nichols wanted to have real-life married couple Taylor and Burton star in the film, a celebrity couple famous for their off-screen turbulent relationship. Known for its acerbic dialogue, Martha and George sling verbal barbs throughout the movie. Martha continually insults George calling him a “dumbbell,” saying he makes her want to “puke.” Critics often focus on Martha’s vicious verbal attacks but George equals her venom. He says she makes him “sick” and equates her voice to “animal noises.” Their guests Nick and Honey initially appear to be the quintessential couple, contrasting Martha and George in appearance, age and demeanor.  But as the night wears on and more alcohol is consumed, the problems both couples face come to the surface.
I’ve read that Who’s Afraid of a Virginia Woolf? is a feminist film.  But when I started watching, I initially thought, what the hell? There’s no way this is feminist as it’s mired in misogyny!  The film follows George’s perspective as there are scenes with just George and Martha, George and Nick, or George and Honey.  George is almost omnipresent. Also, there a few violent scenes in which George attempts to strangle Martha, pushes her, shoves her against a car and pretends to shoot her with a gun (an umbrella pops out instead of a bullet).  But when you begin to peel back the layers, you realize that while it might not be an overtly feminist film, feminist tendencies emerge nonetheless.
In the 1960s, the domesticity paradigm for women reigned.  In the beginning of the film, Martha tells George about a Bette Davis movie she’s trying to remember the name of.  She says, “She [Bette Davis] comes home from a hard day at the grocery store.”  George snidely and skeptically replies, “At the grocery store?” to which she retorts, “Yes, the grocery store. She’s a housewife, she buys things.”  Women were expected to be docile, obedient wives and mothers tending the home. Yet this revealing exchange shows the disdain for domestic duties women in the 60s faced.

Policing of sexuality also appears.  When Martha calls George a floozy in one scene, Honey jovially and drunkenly retorts,  

“He can’t be a floozy.  You’re a floozy!”

The film makes a subtle commentary of the double standard in sexual conduct between women and men.  Men could sleep with whomever they pleased while women who did the same were branded as “sluts.”

A role that earned Taylor her second Oscar, she considered the role of Martha her “personal best.”  A bravura performance, Taylor seamlessly sinks into the part; it’s difficult to ascertain where she begins and the character ends.  A college-educated woman, Martha perpetually humiliates her husband for his lack of ambition and professional failures:

Martha: I hope that was an empty bottle, George! You can’t afford to waste good liquor, not on your salary, not on an associate professor’s salary!

She pushed George to be the head of the History Department and the head of the university.  But why couldn’t she do those things herself?  In an exchange with Nick:

Nick: To you, everybody’s a flop. Your husband’s a flop, I’m a flop.
Martha: You’re all flops. I am the Earth Mother, and you are all flops.

In a time when women weren’t supposed to have jobs beyond wife and mother, perhaps Martha wanted her own career.  As she came from a wealthy family, Martha had money so she didn’t need George to succeed for fiscal security. It seems as if Martha lived vicariously through her husband and his capacity for success which would explain why his lack of ambition was such a blow.
While the play was written a year before the publication of feminist Betty Friedan’s ground-breaking The Feminine Mystique, the play explores the same issues Friedan railed against.  Friedan writes about the “feminine mystique,” where the highest value for women is embracing and maintaining their femininity, and the “problem that has no name,” the unhappiness women faced in the 50s and 60s and their yearning for fulfillment beyond being a housewife and a mother.  Friedan argues:
“They [women] learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights – the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for…All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children.” (58)

“Self-esteem in woman, as well as in man, can only be based on real capacity, competence, and achievement; on deserved respect from others rather than unwarranted adulation. Despite the glorification of “Occupation: housewife,” if that occupation does not demand, or permit, realization of women’s full abilities, it cannot provide adequate self-esteem, much less pave the way to a higher level of self-realization…But women in America are no encouraged, or expected, to use their full capacities. In the name of femininity, they are encouraged to evade human growth.” (435-437)

[Warning: Spoilers ahead!!] Motherhood, a reoccurring theme in the film, comprised one of the few ways society allowed fulfillment for women. Both women don’t have children, Martha is unable to and Honey, whose “hysterical pregnancy” led to her marriage with Nick, takes pills to eliminate any pregnancies as she’s scared to conceive. As women were supposed to be good wives and mothers, society viewed reproduction as one of their vital duties.  If a woman didn’t have children, ultimately she was a failure.  Friedan writes:

“Over and over again, stories in women’s magazines insist that woman can know fulfillment only at the moment of giving birth to a child…In the feminine mystique, there is no other way she can even dream about herself, except as her children’s mother, her husband’s wife.” (115)
As someone in their 30s who doesn’t have children (and isn’t even sure I ever want them), even in this day and age, people often act as if there’s something fundamentally wrong with you if you don’t have or want children. Martha invented the story of a son probably because she genuinely wanted one.  But I think she also did it to make it easier for her to fit into society. As a woman, I often feel I don’t fit the stereotypical mold of what a woman “should” be. Perhaps Martha, with her abrasive, obnoxious persona, wanted at least one component of her life to fit. While I genuinely believe Martha wanted a child, her yearning may be tempered by the fact that society views her as an inadequate woman. It’s as if she can handle being a non-conformist woman in every way possible except this one.
What makes Martha so interesting is that she’s not merely a bawdy, angry woman.  Taylor imbues the complicated character with fleeting moments of agony and vulnerability.  In a tender rather than simply rage-filled moment, Martha refutes George’s accusation that she’s a “monster.”  She asserts,

Martha: I’m loud and I’m vulgar, and I wear the pants in the house because somebody’s got to, but I am not a monster. I’m not.

George: You’re a spoiled, self-indulgent, willful, dirty-minded, liquor-ridden…
Martha: SNAP! It went SNAP! I’m not gonna try to get through to you any more. There was a second back there, yeah, there was a second, just a second when I could have gotten through to you, when maybe we could have cut through all this, this CRAP. But it’s past, and I’m not gonna try.
To me, this is such a pivotal scene.  Women are supposed to be, especially during that era, docile, proper and well-mannered; the epitome of femininity.  Blond, thin, meek Honey appears to be the perfect wife while bawdy, brash, raven-haired, curvy Martha stands as the complete opposite.  In the equally ground-breaking The Second Sex published in 1949, philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote about the treatment and oppression of women.  In her tome, she argues that society teaches us that passivity is “the essential characteristic of the ‘feminine’ woman.”  Society encourages men and boys to explore their freedom while women and girls are taught to embrace femininity, turning their back on what they themselves want. She asserts:

“In woman, on the contrary, there is from the beginning a conflict between her autonomous existence and her objective self, her “being-the-other;” she is taught that to please she must try to please, she must make herself object; she should therefore renounce her autonomy. She is treated like a live doll and is refused liberty.” (280)

 

Wives were supposed to support their husbands, echoing their desires.  While Martha eventually admits that George is the only man who has ever made her happy, she refuses to silence herself. She is loud, vulgar, shrewd, intelligent, assertive, sexual and outspoken; the antithesis to femininity. And in many ways, society punishes Martha and women like her for it. Yet she rails against constraints, struggling to navigate the sexist terrain on her own terms.

The title of the play and film comes from a riff of “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” with the wordplay on Virginia Woolf.  It was a quote that playwright Albee saw scrawled on a bathroom mirror in a bar.  It’s also an allusion to show that people concoct imaginary scenarios and personas in order to cope with their lives, a theme that runs throughout the entire film.  The audience is never quite sure what is fact and what is fiction, the line often blurred.After the pivotal climax and shocking revelations, in the penultimate line of the film, George asks Martha, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” to which she replies, “I am, George, I am.”  Some scholars assert that this alludes to being able to live without illusions, which both George and Martha, with their web of lies and treacherous games, clearly find difficult.  But the play/film’s title is also an accidental feminist reference as feminist author and writer Virginia Woolf famously advocated for women to be able to possess their own money and space to be creative and ultimately themselves.

Captivating yet uncomfortable to watch, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? depicts the brutal deterioration of a marriage and the crumbling of hopes, ambitions and illusions.  Through their cruel taunts and insults, the film exposes the illusory facades people create, while challenging stifling gender roles.In the 60s (and to a large extent still today), society demanded men act assertively and women behave passively. As men wield a disproportionate amount of power over women, people often fear female empowerment.  Despite her brazen outspokenness, Martha might be afraid too — afraid of her own power in a society that doesn’t embrace or accept powerful women.

———-
Megan Kearns is a blogger, freelance writer and activist. A feminist vegan, Megan blogs at The Opinioness of the World.  In addition to Bitch Flicks, her work has appeared at Arts & Opinion, Italianieuropei, Open Letters Monthly and A Safe World for Women. Megan earned her B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Politics and Public Policy. She currently lives in Boston. She previously contributed reviews of The Kids Are All Right, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest and Something Borrowed to Bitch Flicks.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Black Swan & Drag Me to Hell. Feminist Horror Fans Rejoice! from MovieChopShop

So in a horror film, you can approach issues that are complicated, frightening, and beyond the black-and-white world of the “stand up and cheer” drama. Portman’s character is so complex not in spite of the genre but directly because of it. We can peer into the deep dark depths of her mind and confront the murky reality of how her life choices have stunted her growth as a person…and how her intense need to break free from her self-created prison leads to a horrendous expression of human weakness and base instinct.

“Crazy Chicks Are Hot?” 8 Messed-Up Portrayals of Women Going Insane in Film from AlterNet

Everyone loves to watch a hot babe going batshit crazy. At least that’s what the astronomical success of Black Swan would have you believe, the film in which Darren Aronofsky casts his misogynist gaze upon Natalie Portman, gorgeous and coming completely undone, for what is essentially a two-hour snuff film.

Classic Feminist Writings (H/T to Fourth Wave)

Full-text articles available to read online for free, including pieces by Marlene Dixon, the Women’s Collective, Barbara Ehrenreich, and more.

Is Hollywood Pushing Black Actors to TV? from Racialicious

Oscar nominees have been headed to TV: Taraji P. Henson just did a Lifetime movie; Terrence Howard has been doing a Law & Order spinoff; Angela Bassett signed on to a cop drama on ABC; Don Cheadle is creating his own series for Showtime; and Michael Clarke Duncan is doing a Bones spinoff. Rising stars like Columbus Short is joining Washington’s series. Common is headed to AMC. Of course, stars like Blair Underwood are already headlining series.

It seems that there are so many crazy women in Hollywood that it’s hard to find a sane one.  Maybe it’s not the women who are crazy, but it’s the situations they are put in on a constant basis that make them act crazy on occasion. Maybe they are sick and tired of being treated like shit each and every day that they are fighting back and get marked as crazy.  Crazy is a euphemism for a woman who has an opinion in Hollywood. 

Cut! Hollywood’s lady troubles go way back from The Smart Set

Things in Hollywood have been stagnant for so long that a book such as 1974’s From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in Movies by film critic Molly Haskell’s has not faded become a historical document. The book was written during the Golden Age of American cinema, the age of Coppola and Nichols and Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider — and yet women were left out of the renaissance. As Haskell writes, “Here we are today, with an unparalleled freedom of expression, and a record number of women performing, achieving, choosing to fulfill themselves, and we are insulted with the worst — the most abused, neglected, and dehumanized — screen heroines in film history.”

A New Low: Bad Teacher Trailer from Women and Hollywood

Personally, I find it way more offensive that this stars a woman.  Is this the parity we wanted?  A woman who is just as much of an ass as the guys?  What the hell happened to Cameron Diaz’ career?

Neko Case Can’t Get Laid!  (for its discussion of 30 Rock) from Ann Friedman

I just can’t take any more of the “Liz Lemon is absurdly, comically unattractive and unlucky in love” plot lines. It’s simply too incongruous with Tina Fey’s beauty, Liz’s smarts, and her position as a successful, prominent head writer and producer of a major network television show.

Leave links to what you’ve been reading or writing about this week in the comments!

Guest Post: The Connection Between Sex and Money: Lizzie Borden’s WORKING GIRLS

Perhaps it was the unending coverage of Eliot Spitzer’s hooker shenanigans two years ago that reminded me of Lizzie Borden’s 1986 film Working Girls. I must have seen this for the first time in the late 1980s, when I was working in a video store and could rent any title for free. I avoided this one for a long time, as I thought that a film about female prostitutes wouldn’t particularly appeal to me; this was also just before hookers got Disneyfied in the form of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. But when I finally saw it, I was mesmerized. It has stayed in my mind since, though I did not actually see it again until quite recently. I’m happy to report that not only does the film hold up, but it is perhaps better in 2010 than it was in 1986.
Working Girls covers one day, late morning to evening, in a fairly upper-class New York City brothel, and is told largely through the eyes of Molly (played by the excellent Louise Smith), a Yale-educated lesbian whose African-American lover (who has a young daughter) doesn’t know what she’s doing for a living. Molly rides her bike through the streets of Manhattan after a cozy and domestic breakfast with her girlfriend and the child, and after parking her bike in one of the brothel’s rooms, dons a slinky but not slutty blue dress, applies makeup, and readies herself for the day’s work. She interrupts her colleague Gina (Marusia Zach) inserting a diaphragm; when asked why she doesn’t simply use a sponge or the pill, Gina replies, “I’m not screwing up my hormones for two shifts a week.” The work in question is depicted in a routine, definitely un-erotic fashion: the men who pay for Molly’s services are catalogues of ticks and fetishes and fantasies. One insists that Molly pretend to be blind so that he, the “doctor,” can cure her condition by taking her “virginity.” Another likes fairly standard bondage, while another gives her a wrapped package containing a beige shirt that Molly had admired on him the week before—he follows this gift by asking if he can see her “on the outside,” a request which Molly routinely turns down. The film admirably and somewhat bravely shows men with less-than-perfect bodies—in other words, normal men—and women whose breasts are not perky Playboy images, but real breasts: somewhat saggy, somewhat out of shape. The sex scenes sometimes have a startling pathos and poignancy: the men are all rather sad cases, either because they’re smarmy and arrogant, or because they’re painfully shy, inept, or so locked into their fantasies that they dare not reveal them to anyone they can’t pay. Particularly lovely is a moment where Molly coaches a very nervous guy about how to put his arm around his new girlfriend, how to kiss her, and how to know whether or not the time is right for sex. “What if she wants to have sex with me?” the man asks plaintively, and Molly’s kind and compassionate response highlights more than any other moment in the film the skill with which a prostitute makes her customers feel important—I truly can’t tell whether Molly actually likes this man or if it’s part of the act.
Far more interesting than the sex is what goes on between the sex. The brothel’s main room could be just another office: the girls have lunch, gossip, make fun of Lucy, their horrid boss (played with delirious bitchiness by Ellen McElduff), compare notes on the various “RGs” (regulars), talk about what their lives might have been and still could be. One of the girls is a college student, who has to leave her shift early, this being Thursday—she has a night class. The film’s feminist slant—the women are all strong in their own ways and have a competence and control in their work that is remarkably out of keeping with the image of prostitution as a slipshod and scattered profession—was probably something of a novelty for the mid-1980s, a time I remember of appalling backward conservatism. (Not that this time is much better, of course.) Working Girls is a time capsule in another sense: in a scene that is chilling in hindsight, a john refuses to wear a condom, and Gina informs him that this is okay, but that it will cost him extra—those were the early days, when AIDS was still a “gay disease.” But the true glory of the film is the way in which the mundane routines—again, this could be your standard office, and just as boring for its workers—are laid bare for the viewer: the procedures involving the phone, appointments (particularly whether or not the john is a “one”—one hour—or a “half”; he can “go” twice in a “one”), showers, towels, and the exchange of money. The girls are instructed to make sure that the customer is “completely comfortable”: in other words, naked, so that they’ll know he’s not a cop. Borden, who wrote the story and the screenplay, introduces a new employee, Mary (Helen Nicholas), so that Molly can show her around the house and teach her the ropes. There’s the standard pocketing of a little extra cash on the side, the standard faking of appointment lengths in the ledger, the standard smoking of pot when the boss lady’s gone. Lucy, the madam, appears midway through the film and again at the end, and is a gaudy tyrant and former prostitute herself, who is now the mistress of one of her own RGs (all of the other women in the house have slept with him too, declaring him “easy” to work with) and who yammers on incessantly about the panties she purchased that day, the ski trip she’s taking to Gstaad, and, above all, “class” and how the other girls don’t have it—all before getting taken out to be screwed by her former john at the Plaza Hotel. It’s reassuring to know that even a female pimp leaves something to be desired.
The film is very low-budget, and sounds as though it was looped in its entirety. But I find something very appealing in that mid-80s film stock in low-budget pictures—most 80s films feel too slick for my taste, and Working Girls has a tactile feel to it, a texture. It reminds me of the long conversations with my friend Brad in which we would wax rhapsodic about the glories of the graininess of 1970s film stock. Only a few films from the 80s have this feel: Working Girls is one; Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glancesand Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette are others. For want of a better phrase, this graininess, this texture, gives the viewer something to gnaw on, or something to cling to—you could slip and slide easily on most of the glitzy films of the decade. I’d actually hate to see Working Girls remastered, for the visual texture matches the subject matter. It’s a shame that Borden—who was born Linda Borden but changed her name to that of the axe-wielding figure of turn-of-the-century legend—who had directed the intense Born in Flames, about a futuristic socialist America, has vanished from the scene; after Working Girls she directed the flop Love Crimes with Sean Young, and since then has directed only a few episodes of soft-core programs like Red Shoe Diaries. American cinema needs in-your-face talent like Borden’s, at a time when films are more and more homogenized and user-friendly. Working Girls is anything but either.
Some might find the ending of Working Girls a bit predictable, but it gives the film a nice circular shape, and reinforces the film’s latent feminist intent, which is to show that these women are not stupid, not disease-ridden, not perverse. They have fallen into a profession that none of them can claim to enjoy, but one that they stay in from what might best be called a sense of inertia. “The two things I love most in life are sex and money,” says Lucy, in a rare moment of honesty. “I just never knew until much later they were connected.” Working Girls is probably the only film I’ve seen that explores that connection in a witty, sad, poignant, smart, raw, unglamorized, and surprisingly honest way.

Drew Patrick Shannon received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Cincinnati, and currently teaches 19th and 20th century British literature at the College of Mount St. Joseph. He is at work on a novel and on a non-fiction book examining the diary of Virginia Woolf. A previous version of this post appeared on his blog, atleswoolf.