20 straight hours of 80s feminism: Working Girl

So working from home is great. (And by "working" I mean dutifully making coffee in the morning, writing several paragraphs of my novel, and then searching the internet for nine hours for the exact right brownie recipe to eat raw out of the bowl because THIS IS IMPORTANT WORK THAT I'M DOING. THIS IS HOW GREAT AMERICAN LITERARY CLASSICS GET WRITTEN.)

Anyway, when your desk is the card table you've set up in front of the TV, it's hard not get caught up in, say, four hours of Jennifer Aniston movies (shut up, you know you can't resist The Object of My Affection) or, say, four hours of Michelle Pfieffer and Melanie Griffith 80's Women Empowerment movies.  Because apparently, 11AM begins the Bitches Always Be Workin' block on HBO.

So anyway, yesterday morning Working Girl came on, and of course when Working Girl comes on you have to watch it because it's Working Girl and who the hell knows why, I don't make the rules. Which is when my husband -- who also works from home, but in a real way, as in he does real things for real people who pay him real money-- came into the room, took one look at Melanie Griffith in her underwear, and said, "What on Earth is this?"

WORD, Joan Cusack.

"Work," I said, as if that were obvious. (To be fair, I was hard at work on my laptop. To be ultra ultra fair, I was typing a Facebook post.)

"Maybe I don't understand your methods." He waved a hand at the TV. "What the hell is this garbage?"

Which is frankly a type of ignorance that borders on blasphemy so I said, "You don't know Working Girl? How do you not know Working Girl?" (And then I gave him a handful of hard candies and a shiny quarter and told him to get the hell off my lawn.)

Classic 80s rom com.

I then launched into an insane explanation of the entire plot of Working Girl for my disinterested husband who was staring at me like I'd grown sixteen eyeballs in the middle of my forehead.

"Melanie Griffith is a secretary from the wrong side of the tracks," I started, "But what she really wants is to be a hot shot business woman like Sigourney Weaver. Sigourney Weaver seems cool but is actually sort of a fucked up bitch and she betrays Melanie Griffith by stealing her big business idea, so Melanie Griffith finally realizes that the only way to get what she wants is to work with Mergers and Acquisitions big wig Harrison Ford, who of course she falls in love with--"

"This is a movie you like?"

Which is where I had to pause.  

Was it a movie I liked? I know it was a movie I USED TO like. As in, way back in the 80s, before the wheel was invented or fire was discovered, back when I thought the Starship Enterprise was a totally real spaceship and the WWE was "totally serious sporting" and work was just this unspecific, nebulous place where adult people went with briefcases to scream office-y shit at one another from their rotary desk phones.

Kevin Spacey, who is totally in Working Girl, trying to fuck Melanie Griffith

But according to Working Girl, the office is a place where women can maybe go to do vague, unspecific things -- just as long as they look nice and have "serious hair" -- or else "a head for business but a bod for sin," as Melanie Griffith's Tess McGill says. According to Working Girl-- a catchy title meant to invoke the image of a street walker-- the only way to get ahead if you are a lady is to fuck your boss, or else agree to be a secretary for ten years and THEN fuck your boss, or else pass out in a cab with an already successful business man whom you will of course at some point fuck. Because of course. Of course. Even Sigourney Weaver, the only woman in a position of actual power in this movie, spends entire scenes literally in her underwear seducing men. And in fact, there is a cocktail party scene in which the only thing Sigourney Weaver does is negotiate sex with a dude just to get him to listen for one goddamn second to the smart, business-y words coming out of her mouth, and Jesus Christ on a Triscuit with ham, how did I never notice this about Working Girl?

And ugh, even the end is a misogynistic pile of bullshit and hairspray! Because if you'll recall, for all of Sigourney Weaver's much coveted business skills,  it turns out that this whole time (this whole entire crazy time!) all she really wanted as the lady villain was to have a baby and get into Harrison Ford's pants. It's really all she ever wanted! (Even though, to be fair, getting into Harrison Ford's pants was everyone's goal in the 80s. Still. You see what I mean.)

"What's that, Jack? Tick tock, tick tock... my biological clock." - actual line from the movie

Sometimes when you work from home you have these epiphanies, guys - about really, really weird fucking things.

Also my husband was still standing there in front of the TV, still waiting for the rest of this deranged plot synopsis, and suddenly all I could say was, "I feel like I learned a lot of really stupid things from this movie."

To which my husband nodded. "So you're gonna turn it off?"

I glanced at the TV.

"Hello, Tess MgGill's office..."

We were at that point in the movie where Melanie Griffith - with her new, "serious hair" haircut, goes to the cocktail party high on Valium to try and strike up a business conversation with business people about business things. The next thing that happens, of course, is she passes out and ends up naked in Harrison Ford's bed, because in 1988, stripping an unconscious stranger down to her underwear and getting into bed with her, and then letting her think you fucked her without her consent, is a funny plot point we are all okay with.

"I dunno," I said, "It's only halfway finished. She hasn't even gone to the Trask wedding yet."

"The Trask wedding? What is the Trask Wedding?"

The Trask Wedding

Guys, I just don't even know. Why are we still talking about Working Girl? Maybe I just really need to lay off the HBO Signature. But the truth is the only other task in front of me at that moment was the note I wrote myself the month before: PLEASE WRITE THIS NOVEL GOOD, OKAY? and instead I chose Working Girl.

Also, like I said, my husband was standing right in front of the TV. So I said, "Look, I don't have time to go over the whole plot with you. I can't explain the appeal of this movie. It's complicated."

Really, it's not.

Working Girl is a terrible movie. 

IS IT? YES. IT IS TERRIBLE! TERRIBLE!

Perhaps this is a problem specific to my generation of feminists. We're progressives but we've aged now, like wine. Or moldy McDonalds hamburgers. We're hypnotized still by the idiocy of Working Girl but at least we're aware of the idiocy of Working Girl. We've got one foot firmly planted in the workplace but the other still up Sigourney Weaver's bony ass. It makes me wonder what the world will look like 20 years from now, when today's little girls are all shattering the layer of glass ceiling in which Working Girl lives with tools they've learned from Spring Breakers and the Kardashians.

Christ, that sounds bleak.

Perhaps the real problem is I need to get up off my couch and stop watching goddamn Working Girl?

(But in the meantime I will go back to my HBO block of retro nonsense because this novel won't write itself and Xbox Live won't let me get into Netflix and anyway we're right at the part where Melanie Griffith asks Joan Cusack to pretend to be her secretary and god help me with this fucking movie, I need to get out of the house.)