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Nine To Five directed by Colin Higgins, story by Colin Higgins, Patricia Resnick, starring Lily Tomlin, Jane Funda, Dolly Parton
Reviewed by Caitlin Manning
When I went to see the movie the day it opened in San Francisco, I got the
impression that, like me, many people in the audience were office workers, curious
to see how the film portrayed a world that was very familiar to them, We'd been
hearing about the movie for weeks, thanks partly to Jane Fonda's propaganda
on its "feminist" themes, and its relevance to working women.
The action is instigated by the humiliations and frustrations suffered by women
at the hands of their male boss. Three secretaries work in the same office of
a large corporation: Dolly Parton, as a wholesome, down-home sex-bomb with a
wholesome, down-home husband; Lily Tomlin, as a wised-up, hard-working widow
with a family to support and repeatedly frustrated executive ambitions; and
Jane Fonda, as a marmish, naive middle-aged divorèe newly thrown into
the working world when her husband jilted her for his swinging secretary.
In several all-too-typical sequences we see how these women are wronged by their
boss, a caricature of back-stabbing, slave-driving, male chauvinist idiocy.
He constantly insults and offends his underlings and forces them to do demeaning
favors for him. Worse still, he fires one unjustly and covers for his own incompetence
by taking credit for the ideas of the Tomlin character, who, by contrast, is
super efficient and bright.
From the very beginning, though, poignant depictions of the miseries of office
work are lightened up with absurd exaggerations and knee-slapping humor. The
emotional impact of seeing one's own experience more or less accurately portrayed
as a common plight is dissolved in hilarious fantasy. Not that zany farce and
serious social comment can't mix. A play like Dario Fo's We Ca, It Pay, We Won't
Pay, performed by the S.F. Mime Troupe last year, is one example. But socially
conscious comedy has to be careful of what it makes audiences laugh at, and
Nine To Five isn't.
For instance, it doesn't take a feminist to see that Dolly Parton's casting
is a classic case of spectacular sexploitation. It was clearly not Parton's
acting that got her this role. Although her charismatic personality goes well
with the wry, gutsy lines in her part, she delivers all her lines in the same
flat tone. Ostensibly, the movie attacks the on-the-job sexist abuses that have
been important targets for the women's movement. But the fascinations of Parton's
figure were clearly not lost on the director. The way she is filmed, always
in astonishingly high spiked heels and skin-tight tops revealing several inches
of cleavage, is calculated to direct the viewer's attention to her voluminous
chest.
In fact, the film's critique of sexual oppression is as shallow as Parton's
cleavage is deep. The drooling sex-maniacal boss is masculine evil incarnate,
and Parton, despite her provocative dress, is merely his upstanding, innocent
victim. I don't mean to imply that women aren't sexually victimized, at work
and elsewhere. But the reality of relations between the sexes is a lot more
subtle. Sure, it's sad and frustrating that women can't dress in an even mildly
"sexy" way, or show warmth and openness, without provoking unwanted
aggressive come-ons or verbal harassment. On the other hand, women are often
complicit in their own oppression by creating and using "sex object"
images of themselves. But this film doesn't help us understand either problem.
The "fantasy" sequence*--as if the whole film wasn't fantasy to begin
with--are likewise two-dimensional. The three women get stoned and one by one
describe how they'd like to avenge themselves on their boss. A potentially great
device, both for showing the deep contradictions in worker's feelings about
their collective plight, and for introducing possible resolutions to it, is
wasted on silly wish-fulfillment.
Tomlin's fantasy, complete with Disney-cartoon animals and Tinkerbelle glitter,
at least has the grace to admit it's a fairy tale. But Parton's fantasy is a
simple role reversal. She imagines having the same power over her boss that
he holds over her in reality--the power to treat him like a slave and humiliate
him sexually. As though we would be any freer if women were just as sadistic
and sex obsessed as men like him! Fonda's, where she appears as a cool slick
"white huntress" whose bullets send video display terminals flying
satisfyingly apart in showers of glass, isn't much better. For one thing, her
acting is dreadful. Throughout the movie, she just can't help playing herself,
which is not what the script calls for.
According to the hype, Fonda was a big mover behind this production. She has
the reputation, especially since teaming up with Tom Hayden, of being the most
"political" of Hollywood actresses. That she could have insisted on
the political value of this film is another example of the depth of her political
thinking. It isn't only that Fonda talked it up as feminist when it's so obviously
sexploitative. The whole plot trivializes the situation of office workers, especially
the resolution. The women kidnap their boss and chain him in the bedroom of
his mansion, while they transform the office to their liking. They bring in
flowers, redecorate in bright colors, introduce flex-time, a day-care center,
and an AA program for employees. These changes make everyone happy and result
in a 20 % increase in productivity, to the great pleasure of 'he Chairman of
the Board. The movie ends triumphantly for the secretaries when the boss, ready
to turn them in to the police, is forced to acknowledge and support the improvements
and the indispensability of his secretaries in front of the Chairman of the
Board, As a reward, the boss is dispatched to Brazil on a special corporate
assignment. Justice prevails and everyone lives happily ever after.
Once again, the problem is not so much that this is fantasy, but how the fantasy
meshes with the more "realistic" themes in the movie. The way the
secretaries go about getting what they want is so preposterous that top management's
eventual benign acceptance of their reforms (except for wage equality) doesn't
seem preposterous enough. More important, though, the film ignores the ways
in which clerical workers are fighting to improve their condition in the real
world. Instead, it focuses on the hilariously improbable adventures of three
individuals. In this way it obscures the real nature of the conflict hinted
at in the early scenes--the conflict between managers and workers in general,
between classes.
The barriers which prevent workers from joining to fight for their desires,
the forces which divide them and instill a sense of powerlessness and resignation
are complex and operate at many levels at the workplace. They involve the structure
and nature of work itself: wage policies, job hierarchies, division of labor,
favoritism, traditional paternalistic ideologies, misplaced loyalties and fear.
The problems of office workers are not dispelled simply by replacing an evil,
incompetent boss with a benevolent and efficient one, even if it is a woman.
And contrary to the postscripts which sketch the futures of the three heroines,
most clerical workers are chained to their form of employment with little chance
of escape. Even the fulfilled aspirations of the triumphant secretaries are
basically accommodations to the existing set-up: Tomlin gets her promotion,
Fonda gets married again and presumably quits the workforce, Parton becomes--guess
what?--a country western star.
Despite its title, Nine To Five never questions the fact that most of us have
to spend forty-plus hours a week doing jobs which are of no value to us except
as a means of survival. It criticizes bad bosses but not bossdom, bad working
conditions but not the condition of wage-work itself. In this sense, maybe the
Chairman of the Board's acceptance of the reforms engineered by the heroines
isn't so preposterous after all. Daycare centers, flex-time, job-sharing and
pretty offices may cost a little more, but if they cut absenteeism and stimulate
huge increases in productivity, management will come around all right.
Finally, what is particularly offensive about this film is that it uses real
problems -- my problems-for purely escapist purposes. By presenting conditions
which are a daily source of anxiety and despair to millions (and not only women),
the film hooks its audience, but only to get a laugh. It exploits rebellious
feelings of an increasingly important group of workers in a period of rapid
change and emerging self-consciousness.
We can watch Nine To Five and go home chuckling to ourselves thinking about
how these secretaries, whose concerns we can identify with, finally get their
own. But we know very well, even though the movie does its best to help us forget
it, that tomorrow or the next day we're going to have to go to work just like
any other day, and the all's-well-that-ends-well message has little to do with
what we will have to face when we get there.