I didn't really get Working Girl

I recently watched 1980’s classic Working Girl and I found the experience confusing. I came to the conclusion it it’s fame must lie in it’s naffness, kind of like a corporate Showgirls. Looking at its legacy, I then find out it's a feminist classic, directed by the brilliant Mike Nichols. It got 6 Oscar nominations! I am a little weirded out by the glowing reviews and the contemporary thought pieces celebrating the various anniversaries of this beloved movie. Did I miss something?

I may have been continuously distracted from the plot by all the cray fashions. The 80’s were fucking ridiculous. Do you remember the 80’s revival in the 00’s, when everyone just wore a lots of bright American Apparel leggings and got back into Tears for Fears? This isn’t anything like that. This is the 80’s that people tried to forget. The look is basically the 20th century’s version of the powdered wigs and lead face paint people used to wear in times of yore. It’s genuinely frightening.

Working Girl tells the story of Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith), a plucky working class lady with a “head for business and a bod for sin” who is sick of not being taken seriously. She’s got the smarts, but in the super sexist 80’s corporate world, that's just not enough. To me, it doesn’t seem too surprising that she is struggling to be taken seriously. She's kind of scary. Like cross the street scary. Like she’s recently been hit by lightning and is still dazed. She talks like a sexy baby. In the course of the movie her mad mane turns into classic 80’s mom cut, but the creepy voice remains. In a way she becomes the perfect corporate woman in a mans world. Useful, sexy, and infantilized to the point where she is completely unthreatening.

Anyways, Tess gets mad at her sexist colleges and gets a new job for posh executive Katharine Parker (a gleefully narcissistic Sigourney Weaver). Tess impresses her new boss with her knowledge of dim sum, but it all goes sour when Kath has a skiing accident, and asks Tess to take care of her affairs. Through this, Tess discovers that evil Katherine has been trying to steal her ideas. She decides to take fate into her own hands, posing as a high level executive to make things happen.

Part of this plan involves getting investment broker Jack Trainer on board. Enter peak Harrison Ford. We are meant to love this guy, despite the fact that he lies to Tess about his identity on the first night they meet, gets her blackout drunk, undresses her unconscious body and sleeps in her bed. I think we are meant to take the fact he didn’t rape her as a sign of his innate gentlemanliness. Tess leaves in the morning, horrified, only to meet him again later that day, in the meeting she organized. Of course, this is somehow charming and they have a torrid affair, whilst he is secretly cheating on (SPOILER) Katherine! Trainer is clearly a creepy cheating cad, but with the use of Ford’s handsome hangdog face the film frames him as prince charming in this dystopian capitalist nightmare fairy tale.

Katherine on the other hand is a mean ol’ ball-breaking bitch. She is a total caricature of the unfeeling, unnatural ambitious woman. She tries to ensnare Jack into marriage, using business speak (“let’s merge”). We know she’s unhinged when she gets all hormonal and mentions her biological clock. Weaver’s performance is very entertaining, but not particularly nuanced. I felt sorry for her. Stealing ideas sucks, but it’s something we would expect from a Wall Street dude, right? Once her transgression is revealed, she is punished and humiliated at every turn. The message is, there is only room for one woman at the top: let it be humble baby woman Tess.

Tess is so humble that when she eventually wins at business she literally can’t believe that she gets an anxious secretary and depressing office of her very own. She still thinks she’s the secretary! You have to wonder how much she’s getting paid in her new position for this adorable little misunderstanding to happen.

For a something that’s considered a feminist movie, most of the women are pretty awful. Tess’s terrifying clown friend (played by Joan Cusack) is a rather unprofessional sex monster, who, when pretending to be Tess’s assistant asks Jack: “Can I get you anything Mr. Trainer? Coffee? Tea? Me?”. She continually tries to dampen her friend’s ambitions and get her to stay with oily boyfriend Alec Baldwin, who in turn is sleeping with some super tarty 80’s babe. Kath is the backstabbing ice queen on the other end of the spectrum. In the middle we have wetter than the ocean floor Tess. It’s not a great representation of womankind.

I’m still trying to get my head around how this film is so celebrated. My conclusion is the fact that it tells a story of women in the workforce, dealing with sexism directly (even if unhelpfully). This is a rarity, even today. Clearly we love it, because this film is apparently a classic, despite being more dated than tuna jello salad. Perhaps people were so excited to see a movie that had so many big names attached, and two women at the center, that they assumed it must be a positive cultural moment. Sadly, Working Girl just left a sour taste in my mouth, sweetened only by the fact it is no longer the 80’s. Seriously, the 80’s were fucking weird.

First published on strongfemalelead.wordpress.com