Working Girl (1988)

Working Girl is a cute 80s romance with a supremely hot Harrison Ford, and its “happy ending” ends with Melanie Griffith alone in an office.

On paper it is one, and I was so happy for Tess. She finally gets her dream job, she gets to tell Sigourney Weaver to get her bony ass out of her sight, and she gets her man. It’s a compelling movie, too. It’s also such a time capsule of the 80s, and I can’t believe it was nominated for Best Picture.

Can a woman have everything? The answer in this movie is yes. It’s such a boomer feminist film, made at the height of the 80s mergers and acquisitions girlboss era, when winning meant getting out of the secretary pool, not changing it. Griffith’s Tess is a Staten Island secretary with a night-school degree and better ideas than the people she fetches coffee for, and the movie is on her side the whole way.

The most fun anyone has in this movie happens out on that floor. The scene I laughed out loud at is a room full of secretaries watching Harrison Ford change his shirt in the office and cheering for him. It’s so funny.

There’s one image I can’t get out of my head. Tess calls her best friend Cyn (Joan Cusack) from her new office, and Cusack is ecstatic, screaming and yelling the news across the bullpen while the women around her cheer. Then the camera slowly pulls back from Tess, alone at the window of her empty office, until she’s one lit square in a skyline full of them.

The movie plays this as a triumph. To me it felt like a snapshot of capitalism: money just affords you the ability to stay away from people. The women who cheered her on are still out on the floor, and she has a door. She even gets a secretary of her own and tells her not to fetch coffee unless she’s getting some for herself, and the movie treats that like things are going to get better.

Being nicer to your secretary doesn’t fix it. We’re almost 40 years out now, there are more women in the workplace, and it’s just as shitty, and in a lot of ways way fucking worse. What is all this for? The mergers and acquisitions, the crazy runaway business culture of the 80s, it makes me kind of sick, and it overshadows the film for me.

So yes, she gets everything, except the room full of women screaming her name. It’s still a cute romance. I don’t know.

Stray thoughts:

• Harrison Ford is in total command of his star power in Working Girl.

Also on Letterboxd