Revisiting the film ‘Working Girl’

Photo by Olivier de Sadeleer on Unsplash

On an 80s movie binge a few months back, we rented the film Working Girl, a Cinderella tale of class and gender struggles in the cutthroat financial world of Wall Street. I don't know exactly what I was expecting, but I have to say that it surprised me.

In fact most of the films we are re-watching are surprising me, whether they are from the 50s, 60s, 70s or 80s. I’ve been bowled over by the number of fabulous scripts that were written by women, by the racial diversity in casts, by the roles, jobs and storylines that were given to women. How did I forget or not even know that Clueless and Erin Brokovich ..were all written by women?! 

It has always been the case that our ideas and thoughts, our understanding and perception of the world are influenced by those around us and by their interpretation of the world. This is highlighted  by the greater understanding of how it is possible for social media companies to use our connections to others to guide us to certain products or even to particular beliefs. That is why who you spend your time with is so very important. And that isn’t just the people, but the news outlets, the films, the books. We are good at reminding our children of that - “be careful of the company you keep”. But as adults it is easy to get complacent.

“Who and what we surround ourselves with, is who and what we become. In the midst of good people, it is easy to be good. In the midst of bad people, it is easy to be bad.”

- Karen Marie Moning, Iced.

Now, what I say next may be controversial. May I suggest that instead of our typical reaction, to narrow our field of influence even more so that we have full content control, how about widening our field of vision? That’s right, what happens when we have real conversations with people we fundamentally don’t agree with? What happens when we watch a film from a perspective we find baffling? What happens when we read a book by an author from a different background from us that may be challenging or even confusing to us?

The more we reinforce our own beliefs, the more narrow our vision of the world becomes. Now I’m not saying to change your beliefs or your worldview, just trust that those beliefs and that worldview are strong enough to engage with others who think differently from you.

Something more?

My years spent with women fighting for equality in pay, for recognition in their field, to be heard in the present, coloured my understanding of the past. I'm a sucker for 80s soundtracks, fashion and big hair, and boy did they nail the big hair in Working Girl. But my assumption that the film was just a bit of 80s fluff was wrong. 

Though not all of the film worked for me, the fact that Melanie Griffiths’ character really did stand up for herself in many different situations was inspiring. Her character may have been ambitious, a bit promiscuous and feminine, but she was also smart, clever and hard-working. She rebuffed advances that were thrown at her just because she was a woman. She did her research. She also used deceit, was caught out and forgiven, taking down another woman in the process. In the end it wasn’t a story about women bringing down other women, or even about sexuality, it was about a secretary in a vast pool of secretaries who was told her best asset was her looks, who proved she had something more and worked her way up the ladder. The final shot of the film is her office window, one among thousands in the skyscraper world of Manhattan. She worked so hard to get that one little office, but even still she is just one small cog in the ginormous machine, one story.

I almost wrote off the film before I had re-watched it, but took the advice of a friend who highly recommended it. Turns out there was a lot more beneath the surface. It begs the question, how much more am I missing out on because I have pre-judged? By exposing ourselves to stories of others we expand our understanding of the world, and are more fully prepared to engage in it with both eyes open.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.