Working Girl: Feminism through the generations
Disclaimer: This article contains spoilers, but if you haven’t seen the movie that’s kind of on you because it came out in 1988, so...
My mom has always been the ultimate independent woman and feminist. She and my grandma (a single mother) lived together in a dinky apartment in Queens, New York where they shared a bedroom. She became a working girl herself at 16 years old so she could help with the rent.
My mom would always tell me how she’d go to school, go to work, go out with her friends, come back at 3 a.m., sleep for a bit and then do it all over again. She had an “I don’t dance with ugly guys” pin she’d point at to crush the ego of scummy men who touched her ass or said something gross to her (which happened way too often).
Absolutely iconic.
That was her life until her late 20s when she met my dad and they moved in together. Needless to say, she loved Working Girl when it came out in 1988 because she saw herself in Melanie Griffith hustling in New York City. A lot of women of that generation felt the same way too. Finally, there was a movie about them! My mom always told me how much she loved the movie and how progressive it was, so finally, we sat down and watched it together.
For anyone who’s unfamiliar, this is the IMDB synopsis of the movie:
“When a secretary's idea is stolen by her boss, she seizes an opportunity to steal it back by pretending she has her boss' job.”
When I first read the synopsis I was intrigued. Knowing my mom and how much of a feminist she was, I had high hopes.
I was ready to experience a great, female-led story, ala Nine to Five, but I quickly saw the movie for what it was: a man’s shallow interpretation of what it’s like to be a working woman.
Granted, my mom hadn’t seen the movie in a long time, things have changed a lot (but not enough) since then. So as I pointed these things out to her, she started to see how the movie may not have been so progressive after all, even for 1988.
My first complaint was the title… I didn’t think much of it at first until I Googled how old Melanie Griffith was at the time. Sure, the age you’re considered “a woman” is completely arbitrary, and I could understand if maybe she was 18 or 19 years old. But in 1988 Melanie Griffith was 31 years old.
That’s a full-ass-grown woman. Period.
For anyone who thinks I’m being nitpicky— yes, it does matter when two men make a movie (Kevin Wade wrote the screenplay and Mike Nichols directed it) and decide to label their female protagonist a “girl.” She’s not a 12-year-old girl scout selling cookies outside of a Walmart, she’s a full-grown woman working in an office. As a 23-year-old woman who albeit sometimes still feels like a teenager and calls her mom to ask questions like, “How do I know the chicken is fully cooked,” I can personally think of multiple occasions where being called “a girl” was used to undermine both my intelligence and worth.
Words matter and besides, Working Woman is obviously a way better title. There’s alliteration and everything, like, c’mon guys, you blew it.
Now on to another thing that annoyed me about this movie: Tess’s voice. Or really, lack thereof. She’s so soft-spoken and meek sounding throughout the entire movie, you would have thought the director was shushing her off-screen or they filmed all her scenes near a sleeping baby. It’s one thing if her quietness was a trait that she outgrows as she becomes more accepting of herself throughout the movie, but that never happens.
This is yet another thing I can attribute to her story being told through the male gaze, her whispery cadence comes off as very sexual and submissive, which again takes me out of the movie and makes it harder for me to empathize with her.
Probably my biggest gripe and the most ANNOYING (yes this warrants all-caps), unoriginal and just plain lazy thing about this movie is the rivalry between Tess (Melanie Griffith) and Katherine, her boss (Sigourney Weaver), which drives the whole plot of the movie. The premise is fine, but the execution of it is what gets me.
Throughout the entire movie, Tess is competing against her boss who stole her idea, AND even worse they’re competing over the same guy, Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford). Because of course if the two leads of the movie are women, they have to be pitted against each other. Oh, and they have to fight over a man— that’s a must.
Just from the description of the movie alone, we know that only one woman can come out of this story a hero, and it wasn’t going to be the boss. The fact that Sigourney Weaver plays her boss is great, but why does she also have to be conniving and horrible? A man in charge in a movie means he’s respected and strong, but all of a sudden a woman is a boss in a movie, so hmm… scientifically she has to be a bitch.
Because that’s how it works right? Woman + boss = bitch.
Then we find out, not only are they pitted against one another in a professional setting, but romantically too. Harrison Ford’s character, Jack Trainer, is with Katherine (Sigourney Weaver) who’s painted as a controlling workaholic, but then gets seduced by Tess (Melanie Griffith), the young, sexy alternative.
Perhaps the most telling line that this movie was written by a man is in the first four seconds of the trailer, when Tess says to Jack, “I have a head for business and a bod for sin.”
I mean… really? Nothing even close to that has come out of a woman’s mouth, ever. Except maybe as a line in a porno also written by a man. I am willing to bet the whopping $30 I have in my savings account.
There’s a reason why Nine to Five, which came out 8 years prior to Working Girl still holds up today and it’s because the story was by Patricia Resnick and written by her along with Colin Higgins. The idea that women need to compete against each other is just lazy writing in my book. And I guarantee if at least one woman behind the scenes had more influence over the story, it would have been an entirely different movie.
How am I supposed to root for Tess when she quickly becomes the “girl” who says things guys want to hear, rather than the woman who says things that women think and believe themselves?
Another aside from the problems I had with the movie, I would also like to point out that Harrison Ford has top billing over both Sigourney Weaver and Melanie Griffith. I wouldn’t expect anything less at this point. Don’t get me wrong, I love Harrison Ford. He’s super funny, a great actor, a not-so-great pilot (we’ll forgive him for that one) but the movie’s not called Working Guy...
Perpetuating this idea that only one woman gets to have the big fancy job or the guy is just counterproductive. Women spend a lot of time comparing themselves to other women and it’s because we’ve been conditioned to think that way. We see it in movies and on TV, even still, so that’s how it must be. My mom told me a story once about a female boss she had who said to her, “You have to be more of a bitch if you want to make it.” No one is saying this to men, I can promise you that. Women are made to believe that they are always competing against each other and movies like this are to blame.
On the surface, I’m sure at the time people looked at the movie and thought, “Oh wow, a woman is a lead character and her boss is a woman too?! Woah. Now that’s progress.” But having female representation doesn’t matter if those women are represented poorly and perpetuate harmful stereotypes.
After my mom and I finished the movie we sat and talked for a while, going through each of these things. She said she hadn’t recognized all the negatives of the movie because, at the time, there were very few movies like this. In her mind, this was a really empowering movie about women, which just goes to show that things are both a lot better when it comes to capturing the female gaze and also how much progress we still have to make.
The women from her generation probably still see Working Girl as inspiring and empowering. It’s going to take more stories by women about women for them to recognize how the movie is framed by the male gaze. The old ideologies— that women need to compete against each other, that women who are in charge are bitchy, or that you need to be submissive to be sexy— are passed down by the previous generation. But the fact that I have seen enough TV shows and movies through the female gaze and witnessed so many strong women in my own life, shows that things have gotten better for women.
Now let’s make sure they keep getting better.
