My Pain Is So Significant

Last night I took a trip back to 1988, courtesy of a half-smoked joint I found in my room AND the classic Mike Nichols opus Working Girl. 

 I, of course, was aware that this movie is awesome, and not least for the ill Carly Simon. It had been several years since I watched it though, and I had forgotten that in addition to giving us an hilarious Kevin Spacey on coke scene, this movie is much more progressive in regard to female lead characters than almost any movie made in the past decade.This is true in virtually every respect, but in particular with regard to the treatment of the bodies of the women in the film.

 Early in the movie,  Melanie Griffith’s character Tess celebrates her birthday. Her boyfriend Mick, played by Alec Baldwin in a Crispin Glover wig, “gifts” her- just kidding! I’d never do that to you!—gives her, this merrywidow-type lingerie getup with garter belts and the whole sexy nine.  Melanie-as-Tess reluctantly puts on her gift, which WE, the viewer, KNOW symbolizes Mick’s inability to properly appreciate her as an intelligent dynamic woman , but Mick’s rapidly stiffening hard-on also indicates that she looks pretty good. As soon as the camera swung over to Tess in front of the mirror, my jaw dropped.  

Melanie Griffith’s ass looks, like, not perfect and her thighs are  actually appreciably wider than Ashley Olsen’s upper arms.  There is no visible evidence that she’s been to Jazzercise, and yet we, the audience, are invited, nay expected, to view her as a sexually enticing being, which she is, absolutely. This would never happen in a movie that’s made today, because it would mean that the female lead’s body isn’t the most important thing about her which would mean that other things about her were actually more important, and nobody in Hollywood thinks that way.

In a later scene, Tess is in the apartment belonging to her boss Katherine, played by Sigourney Weaver, and is going through her closet. Her best friend Cyn is with her, played by a young, aggressively eye-shadowed Joan Cusack who I love despite her hacked up accent. I am, regrettably, an individual who has had occasion to attend more than a handful of family-related functions at The Excelsior Grand and I know from Staten Island tonal modulation. 

Here in Katherine’s apartment, Tess is going through her boss’s clothes, dressed in tights, underwear and every pair of tits’ greatest enemy, the no-underwire strapless bra.

She doesn’t look in the mirror and moan about her thighs. She doesn’t ask her friend if she  looks fat and then dissolve into unhappy tears. The notion that clothes that fit whippet-thin Katherine would never have fit the shorter and curvier Tess is never even mentioned.

I watched Tess, panties-clad, sifting through her boss’s closet while Cyn looked on, and waited for the inevitable “I’m sooooo faaat”, “Oh my God, no you’re not” back-and-forth between the two women, but it never came and that was refreshing. 

 Although the romance aspect of this story is certainly the B-plot-a rarity for a mainstream movie with a female lead-we are aware that Tess is hot AND driven.  She catches Harrison-Ford-as-Jack-Trainor’s eye instantly, prompting the classic line “I’ve got a head for business and a bod for sin.” 

It sucked laying there on my bed, knowing that it would be so, so hard to produce a movie like that post-1993. To have a movie with a female lead who doesn’t get naked solely for audience boners and doesn’t necessarily need to look like a Megan-Fox-pre-pube-Lolita pneumatic sex doll, because that’s actually really boring. Tess and Cyn, free from body obsession were free to focus on what is actually important in that moment: a dress that costs $6,000 and “isn’t even leathah!”