March Streaming
I've Had the Time of My Life (and I Owe it All to Youse)
Welcome to March streaming.
Just call me Bowling for Soup, because this month, I’m still preoccupied with 1985. Specifically, Girls Just Want to Have Fun (1985), which celebrates its 40th anniversary on April 12th. The teen flick that (arguably) set the template for modern, youth-oriented dance movies, Girls Just Want to Have Fun is just one of several iconic dance movies to come out of the 1980s, an era we are (largely) reporting from this month.
In her pioneering 1989 work Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible, the late Linda Williams, a true personal inspiration, likened the structure of the comparatively sophisticated, hardcore pornography of the “Porno Chic” era—a far cry from the humble stag film of yore—to a host of other established film genres, particularly the Hollywood musical. Sex scenes, she argued, operate in a porno the same way musical numbers do in a musical: they provide the genre’s real stimulation (obviously), which film narrative shapes and informs; the resolution consists of a reckoning between the two disparate elements of story and song/dance (or plot and sex act). Specifically, she argues that the climatic scene of Dirty Dancing (1987), which she likens to a musical, is functionally an orgy: “orgies are like choral love songs celebrating the sexual union of an entire community…[like] the ‘everybody-out-on-the-dance-floor’ number of communal integration that ends Dirty Dancing (‘The Time of My Life’).” She’d go on, years later, to incisively compare Showgirls (1995)—another essential non-musical dance movie—to old Busby Berkeley musicals in a 2003 critic roundtable for Film Quarterly that first attempted to relitigate the discourse around a film which—almost twenty years later—would finally be accepted by mainstream cinephiles. A vulgar satire of sex work and performance under late stage American capitalism, the film isn’t the erotic thriller its illicit NC-17 rating (or creative backstory)1 promised: it’s a dance movie (the first NC-17-rated dance movie, surely, but a dance movie nonetheless), which is why, more-so than any other credible argument, it was trashed by critical bodies. Examining the way the film conflates sex, dance, and sex work, Williams insightfully notes:
“Indeed, what is most striking about this film is that all sexual clinching tends toward dance, just as all dance tends toward sex. I submit that it maybe this very blurring of the line between dance and sex that finally set off so many of the critics who hated this film…Whenever Nomi dances she seems to be having sex, and whenever she has sex she seems to be dancing; there is no pure sexual desire and there is no pure dance anywhere in Showgirls. Perhaps the critics’ hatred of the film was due to the absence of any “pure” erotic scene that is not tinged with power or stylized as dance.”
We’re talking “dance movies” this month, and yes—everything is sex, except sex, which is dance. Comparatively few scholars bother to treat the dance movie as a standalone genre, content to conflate it, as Williams did, to the traditional musical, in which characters sing and dance in synchronized pantomime. No one in Dirty Dancing sings in Dirty Dancing (unless, of course, you count the squawkin’ sister, or Patrick Swayze’s iconic disembodied vocal performance of “She’s Like the Wind” on the film’s soundtrack), but it is musically oriented, using the act of dance, achieved through movie magic montage and editing, as a euphoric reconciliation between story and performance (and dance and desire). It makes sense, in Williams’ defense, if you consider that “[just] dance movies” were sort of brand spanking new in the 1980s, and have only grown in significance and sophistication in the decades since, finding new relevancy in the post-MTV era, when music video directors brought dance culture to big screen fare, and filmmakers explored new horizons of performance space through the incorporation of 3D technology. Few scholars understood the cultural significance and specificity of genres aimed at female filmgoers like Williams, and it’s hard not to think of her while exploring my own deep, intensely personal connection to dance movies—and the process of individuation they bizarrely inspired.
Incidentally, 1985 is also the year this month’s featured performer made her final film, and the entire decade was an incubator for the prototype featured in our third program: the “girl boss.” Don’t put your heel down; take my hand; follow my lead…
God I’m a Dancer, A Dancer Dances: The “Dance Movie”
When I was 13, I developed a deep, profoundly existential attachment to the film Footloose (1984).
I probably watched the movie Footloose—in which a streetwise Chicago teen (Kevin Bacon) relocates with his mother to a small conservative town where dancing has been made illegal2 under the corrosive influence of religious puritanism—dozens of times. As I watched Kevin Bacon liberate his sheltered peers through the healing release of unbridled dance, over and over again, I was looking out at my own world, wondering who was going to liberate us.
It’s easy to forget the chokehold Christian evangelicalism had on American life in the now-fetishized 2000s, but as someone fully ensnared in its vice at the time, it’s really impossible for me to forget, particularly as it so strictly governed the parameters of my personhood. You can always revisit Jesus Camp (2006) if you need a refresher; I think constantly of one of the film’s subjects, camper/dancer Tory, who tells the camera, “When I dance, I really have to make sure that that’s [for] God, because people will notice when I'm dancing for the flesh.” Like Tory, I too danced for God. Each week, for a time, I danced as part of my church-sponsored dance troupe at “Kidstuf” (one f), a variety hour-style entertainment block put on by our church, which would likely resemble anything you might see staged in The Righteous Gemstones in terms of production value, content, and overall quality. I tried, oh how I tried, to dance only for Jesus; to think only of Jesus, as instructed; to sit safely in the corner, far from the temptations of the flesh, and bind the physical irrevocably with the spiritual.
But it wouldn’t take. It was just kidstuf(f).
I became disillusioned with the church—and organized religion—amidst a culture war that drew definite lines in the sand on almost every aspect of American life, not unlike the repressive world Kevin Bacon treads in Footloose. When our pastor endorsed the re-election of George W. Bush and condemned gay people to hell from the pulpit stage, I packed up my Jesus-branded skateboard—bought from the church “shop” with fake money, gifted for reciting scripture—and rolled the hell on out of there.
It’s a lesson every girl learns somehow, at some point, I suppose: this is a story about control. I wanna be the one in control.
In Dirty Dancing (1986), progressive-minded (and sheltered) Frances “Baby” Houseman (Jennifer Grey), daughter of a successful Jewish doctor, travels with her family to a Catskills summer resort in the “Borscht Belt” of an early 1960s Americana—and gets a lesson in life, fueled by lessons in dance, courtesy of a dishy, hardscrabble instructor (real-life Texan/dancer Patrick Swayze, whose mother actually owned a dance studio in Houston). “Some people count, and some people don’t,” an evil, Ivy League-bound waiter (Max Cantor) accused of knocking up one of the dancers tells her one morning, before handing her a copy of Ayn Rand’s fascist classic Fountainhead. “You make me sick,” she sneers in response, abhorred by his rightwing politics of unabashed individualism. Later, after she’s privy to the poor dancer’s botched abortion and decisively fetches her father to save the girl’s life, she’s forced to confront the man’s open scorn at all the ways she’s disappointed him by sleeping with Patrick Swayze and consorting with his dancer kind. No longer a child, nor a virgin, she gives him a lesson in class consciousness and his Liberal double standards: “I’m sorry I lied to you. But you lied too. You told me everyone was alike and deserved a fair break. But you meant everyone who was like you. You told me you wanted me to change the world, make it better. But you meant by becoming a lawyer or an economist and marrying someone from Harvard…I'm sorry I let you down…but you let me down too.”
These two 80s dance flicks were massive, massive hits in their time—a deeply reactionary, politically conservative era. But to someone who watched them, on repeat, at an impressionable age at an impressionable time, they were sort of a lifeline in my own reactionary, politically conservative era, even if I didn’t understand at the time exactly what I was responding to so strongly in these texts. I watched, and danced, and chipped away the pieces of myself that didn’t feel right, the way you do when you’re young and trying to refine the lines of your person along what matters most in that moment, even if it’s deeply stupid: I will never be this person, I thought, to all the rich people being mean to Patrick Swayze, so beautiful and graceful in motion, so sexy and sweet, in Dirty Dancing. I will never be this person, to the religious congregants frothing at the mouth to burn and ban books in Footloose. These guys just want to dance, I thought, and these prigs are ruining the vibe; I think I want to be on the team that’s having more fun. And I definitely want to have sex with Patrick Swayze.
“A life lived in fear is a life half-lived,” as the mousy dancer Fran (Tara Morice) insists in Strictly Ballroom (1992), Baz Luhrmann’s delightful film debut, inspired by his own time in the wild, wild world of Australian ballroom dancing—where considerations of gender and gender performance are comparatively loose and lax, and “good taste” is a formally meaningless value. In Strictly Ballroom, dancing, particularly with star competitor Scott Hastings (Paul Mercurio), makes Fran feel, and look, beautiful; dancing makes her feel seen.
I’ve always loved to dance, and I’ve always loved the way dancing makes me feel: free; powerful; libidinous; and in tune with my body, which only ever seems to let me down in the real world. And I’ve always loved dance movies: the good, the bad, and the incredibly stupid. As strange as it sounds, dance movies found me where I was at, and dragged me to where I most needed to be (when I needed it most).
“When a girl feels good, it makes the world go ‘round,” FKA Twigs asserts on her latest dance album, Eusexua, inspired by the healing effects a night at a Prague rave had on her spirit after the crushing social and physical isolation of the pandemic, giving voice to the person who finds her true, beautiful self out on the floor. “When the night feels young, you know she feels pretty / a girl feels good, and the world goes ‘round: turn your love up loud to keep the devil down.”
Dancing saves lives is not a new concept: it’s the direct subject of Shall We Dance (1996), the Japanese cult classic receiving a 4K restoration and rerelease this May, which was previously adapted into a hit Hollywood version starring Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez in 2004. “Give me somebody to dance with / give me a place to fit in,” Donna McKechnie sang in earnest desperation on the original Broadway soundtrack of dancer-themed musical A Chorus Line, another youthful obsession, later butchered in a flop movie adaptation, A Chorus Line (1985), which excluded the song. “Help me return to the world of the living / by showing me how to begin!”
The dance movie, in which the very act of dancing is the subject of philosophical inquiry—a balm to the ills of a staid, punitive world—taught me a different way of seeing, in which joy, not misery, governed the way of things, and desire—that boogeyman of so many sleepless, confused nights—could be channeled and controlled (by me!). There’s a real power in the groove, warm and inclusive, so different from the harsh, discordant rhetoric of hate: hatred towards others. Hatred towards ourselves.
“BIG as a house!” Edna Turnblad (Divine) laments of her “pleasantly plump” teenage daughter Tracy (Ricki Lake) when she sees her dancing to “Duke of Earl” on local television in John Waters’ Hairspray (1988), another childhood favorite and one of the few films in American popular culture to star and celebrate a plus-sized teenager.3 “I think she looks pretty, Edna,” her husband Wilbur (Jerry Stiller) enthuses in response. And she does; and the fact that she does—to a young girl at war with her own body—was everything to me. Tracy’s weight is no hindrance to her love of dance: in fact, it gives her an edge. Dancing as a big girl is, itself, a radical act—the means by which she asserts her agency as a young, sexual woman in a world that sees her as a sexless, incapable freak. And just like Baby, dancing helps deepen her political consciousness—perhaps because of her outsider status, or as a result of her exposure to black music, she’s drawn to the black community of Baltimore, from which she develops her bolder style of dance and fights alongside her friends to desegregate the very television show responsible for her local stardom. The plot—weight and integration aside—is lifted wholesale from Girls Just Want to Have Fun (1985), in which an army brat (future Footloose star Sarah Jessica Parker) defies her strict father’s attempts to control her life by secretly auditioning for “Dance TV,” a program showcasing young dancers. “I don’t know, I guess I’m pretty boring,” she stutters, subconsciously flexing her foot en pointe as she introduces herself to her classmates at her new Catholic high school. “…I…I like listening to music, and I like doing gymnastics.” Then, with a confidence she’s lacked until that point, she gushes, in that sweet, undeniable SJP way, “And I love to dance.”
I can’t be normal about “dance movies,” the thing that pulled me out of my shell—soldered in place by shame and self-hatred, which evangelicalism only fueled. The genre exploded in the early 2000s for the TRL generation, my childhood, with cheesy, fun nu-dance classics like Save the Last Dance (2001), Gotta Kick it Up! (2002), Honey (2003), Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (2004), You Got Served (2004), Step Up (2005), Take the Lead (2006), and Step Up 2: The Streets (2008) refilling a supply line that will always need to be re-upped, since it seems like each generation of dancers has a dance movie that pushed them towards performance. “And then I saw The Red Shoes [1948],” as dancer Sheila laments in a monologue in A Chorus Line. “And I wanted to be that lady, that redhead.”
The “dance movie,” a true poptimist construction that marries emotion with music, and music with movement, understands this compulsion: we’re taught by narrative cinema convention to watch movies as an extension of our own ordered world—as if cinema isn’t an inherently fantastical invention. The dance movie, like the musical before it, defies this convention: another world is possible, even if it’s only accessible in a fantastical dance number locked in the recesses of our own imagination. To dance is divine; to toil is human. In the best dance movies, dancing is the compulsion we fight, each moment, in a staid, repressed world, but the need to boogie always comes back with a vengeance. Just because it’s corny, doesn’t make it untrue.
“Ecclesiastes assures us...that there is a time for every purpose under heaven,” Kevin Bacon, triumphant, preaches at the town hall meeting in defense of a senior prom in Footloose. “A time to laugh...and a time to weep. A time to mourn...and there is a time to dance..see, this is our time to dance. It is our way of celebrating life. It's the way it was in the beginning. It's the way it's always been. It's the way it should be now.”
Getting to Know Who? Deborah Kerr!
“Years from now, when you talk about this, and you will, be kind,” Deborah Kerr, wife of a boarding school house dean (and coach), tells a young student (John Kerr, no relation) mid-seduction in Tea and Sympathy (1956), Vincente Minnelli’s achingly beautiful melodrama about the suffocating grip heteronormativity places on male adolescence. It’s a scene (and performance) loaded with suggestion: as an effeminate young man who prefers sewing and tea parties with his house dean’s wife to raucous fraternization with boys his own age, John Kerr repeatedly codes himself as gay, and thus subject to vicious hazing and gossip from his peers. Desperate to prove his manhood, he tries, unsuccessfully, to sleep with a sex worker by film’s end—only to stagger into the arms of Deborah Kerr, herself a maternal figure seeking kindness and softness from a distant husband, who, even in middle age, is still preoccupied with being “one of the guys.” It’s a shockingly modern turn from an actress who began her career fifteen years prior, in David Lean’s screen adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s antiwar classic Major Barbara (1941)—but that’s sort of the chief paradox of Kerr’s appeal onscreen: she was erudite and elegant, but that was just a smokescreen for her sheer, raw talent. Her performances are anything but staid and severe: she’s like if Grace Kelly could act!
Herself a former dancer, this Scottish-born ballerina turned stage thespian turned British film icon turned successful Hollywood leading lady was a graceful, beguiling presence onscreen, capable of everything from melodrama to farcical comedy, becoming one of the most lauded performers of her era. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress six times (making her the first person from Scotland to be nominated for any acting Oscar), never winning, including for Tea and Sympathy, and beginning with Edward, My Son (1950), in which she plays the alcoholic wife to an overbearing father (Spencer Tracy) in a sort of gender-flipped version of Mildred Pierce (1945). Yet her legacy is less discussed than her peers, for reasons that elude me, beyond the obvious observation that British cinema remains a bit of a laughing stock within international film culture—infamously, and inaccurately, François Truffaut quipped in 1962, “Isn’t there a certain incompatibility between the terms ‘cinema’ and ‘Britain?’”—and she seems to embody every stereotype about British screen performers. Frequently, I see her performances derided in contemporaneous reviews as “cold” or “prim,” as if her strong bearing and stiff-upper-lip nature was not the secret to her great depictions of feminine repression.
Kerr first drew attention in artistic circles stateside with her strong presence in hit British films like Love on the Dole (1941) and Hatter's Castle (1942), as well as two of the greatest works from filmmaking icons Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp (1943), in which she plays three separate characters, and Black Narcissus (1947), which earned her the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress (alongside her performance as a devout IRA member-turned anti-British-inclined Nazi in I See a Dark Stranger (1945)). One of the highest grossing stars of the 1940s British box office, Kerr’s earliest notices fixate on her natural charisma, poise, and seemingly effortless performing style. “Miss Kerr is an artist, but better still she is unconscious of it,” Audrey Flanagan wrote of her performance in Love on the Dole for trade paper The Motion Picture Herald in 1941.
Her turn as a haughty nun in an unfamiliar land who is seduced by the allure of carnal comforts in Black Narcissus (1947) earned her a cushy contract with MGM and brought her stateside, where she was introduced to mainstream audiences opposite Clark Gable (struggling to revitalize his career after serving in the army) in The Hucksters (1947), a much-maligned, proto-Mad Men text about the world of postwar advertising. Stuck in thankless side parts in a number of splashy Technicolor adventure movies for a few years—including big hits Quo Vadis (1951) and The Prisoner of Zenda (1952)—she had her breakthrough year in 1953, appearing in four lauded films of the era: Joseph L. Mankiewicz’ terrific Julius Caesar (1953); Young Bess (1953), a drama about Elizabeth I timed to coincide with Elizabeth II’s coronation; Dream Wife (1953), her first of three onscreen pairings with Cary Grant; and Pearl Harbor melodrama From Here to Eternity (1953), one of the biggest films of its era. Cast against type (and bleached blonde) in the latter, Kerr made cinema history when she rolled around in the surf with Burt Lancaster, upsetting more prurient censors, in a steamy scene that’s become one of the most indelible images in American popular culture. An unhappily married woman caught in a trap and plagued by past trauma and resentment, she clings to a combustive affair with her husband’s inferior officer in a desperate bid to escape her life. It’s a magnificent performance, which garnered Kerr her second Academy Award nomination (she lost to Audrey Hepburn for Roman Holiday) and made her a bonafide box office star. “I don’t think anyone knew I could act until I put on a bathing suit,” she allegedly once quipped of the film.
Yet the very same year, she returned to the stage for Tea and Sympathy, receiving a Tony nomination for originating the Broadway role that would later prove a critical and commercial hit in film form, thanks to Minnelli’s evocative staging and sensitive approach to the material (the director was himself gay, though closeted at the time). A superlative run of commercial and critical hits followed—with Kerr’s performances frequently singled out as highlights—including her signature, Oscar-nominated turn in The King and I (1956), which allowed her to flex her dance skills (she was dubbed, like so many performers of the era, by Marni Nixon, though at least one contemporaneous review I scoured was fooled by her expert lip syncing). Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957) and The Sundowners (1960), both opposite Robert Mitchum, and her turn as a kindly vacationing spinster in Separate Tables (1958) garnered her three more Oscar nominations. An Affair to Remember (1957), an achingly beautiful remake of melodrama classic Love Affair (1939), re-paired her with Cary Grant, to ends so affecting, just reciting the plot brings Rita Wilson to tears in Sleepless in Seattle (1993), itself a remake of both films. “Is it ‘Car’ or ‘Curr’?” she asks, as an aside; “Kerr rhymes with star!” ads boasted in the actor’s time.
Kerr made several movies well into the late 1960s, when, like most of her peers, her career waned alongside changing tastes and demands (and the emergence of the “New Hollywood”), sending her back to the stage, her true calling, as well as television. But her “waning” film period is actually full of some of her most interesting work—beginning with her turn as the abhorred matronly figure to Jean Seberg in Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse (1958), a spiritual precursor to Breathless (1960) that’s a comparatively daring look at female adolescence and ennui. In Jack Clayton’s low-key terrifying The Innocents (1961), a painfully underrated adaptation of Henry James's 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw, she plays a governess unravelled by ghostly visions on the isolated estate she’s sequestered in while looking after two mysterious children. Proto-Scream Queen, it’s maybe her best performance—a masterclass of Victorian repression—in which she skillfully telegraphs fear that is primarily shown in suggestion, selling the sense of horror. She’d deliver another deceptively buttoned-up, but road-weary, character in The Night of the Iguana (1964), John Huston’s strange, smutty adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ play of the same name, in which a disgraced priest (Richard Burton) fights the temptation and influence of three women—Kerr, Lolita’s Sue Lyon, and Ava Gardner—while escorting a tour group through Puerto Vallarta. With Casino Royale (1967) and The Gypsy Moths (1969), she broke new ground in unexpected ways, in the former, playing the “oldest” Bond girl, at 45—until Monica Bellucci in Spectre (2015)—and appearing nude in the latter, which was virtually unheard of at the time for a star of her caliber (and “pedigree”). Both were derided on release, though Casino Royale (one of just two Non-Eon Bond films, made through a rights loophole) was at least a hit. But with the passage of time, both have received a sort of new cult appreciation—Casino Royale for its star-studded cast, bizarre lore, and overall vibe, which epitomizes 60s excess, and The Gypsy Moths for its pioneering use of aerial photography in the service of its incredible skydiving stunt work.
And maybe that’s ultimately the coolest thing about Kerr—for all the hay made of her prim, high-class bearing, and for how easily she could impress an audience merely by showing up and blinking her big, beautiful eyes—she was out there continually taking risks for over two decades, an impressive run in an era that punished women for running too hot or, apparently, too cold. More than a screen icon, or a pretty face, she was an artist; a real actress. Her significant success on the stage and television (including an Emmy nomination for 1985 British serial A Woman of Substance) kept her well-occupied until her retirement sometime in the mid-to-late 1980s. She stopped making theatrically-released movies after The Arrangement (1969), Eliza Kazan’s maligned adaptation of his own (maybe partly autobiographical) novel of the same name, though she returned just once, in 1985, for The Assam Garden, which earned her, of all things, a nomination for the David di Donatello award for Best Foreign Actress (aka the “Italian Oscar”), an award she previously won in 1959.
She lost to Meryl Streep.
Today's Junior Prick, Tomorrow's Senior Partner: The “Girl Boss” and the Empty Promise of Pink Capitalism
In December of last year, Nasty Gal founder Sophia Amoruso, author of the 2014 memoir #Girlboss, spoke with The Cut’s “In Her Shoes” podcast on the legacy of her passé creation, the “girl boss,” a lean-in-style female archetype meant to inspire ambitious young women to become female CEOS, which epitomized the priorities of the women’s movement in the 2010s. A cultural phenomenon (and inescapable buzzword) that failed to survive the disillusioning force of the 2016 election—even garnering a maligned, single-season Netflix show of the same name—the “girl boss” was a pinkwashing scourge that very few women stood to benefit from. It took itself out to pasture long before the radicalizing movements of the post-pandemic era begat a boom in labor activity, the strongest organizing surge in decades, an organizing boom, which, incidentally, is being led by many young women. After a series of high-profile scandals involving female CEOS in the late 2010s, The Cut officially declared the girl boss “dead” in 2021, though feminist author/editor Samhita Mukhopadhyay, in the course of eulogizing her, couldn’t help but absolve the archetype her worst crimes, invoking that old chestnut that female bosses are held to unfair standards in comparison to their male counterparts for similar crimes. As if the people that these CEOs systemically abused and exploited were not…also…largely women…
“When you have to make unpopular decisions you’re evil,” Amoruso claims in her own 2024 postmortem. “…There’s an expectation that you’re gonna build some culture that cures everything, that permeates society. And that’s really fucking challenging. And I don’t think that men are—that’s not expected of them, right?” Here’s the culture that the O.G. Girl Boss created: in 2014, the U.S. Department of Labor found that Nasty Gal, which specialized in peddling low-cost copies of runway looks, relied on sweatshop labor; in 2015, Nasty Gal was sued by four pregnant women (and one man) for being fired after taking maternity/paternity leave; in 2017, after Amoruso stepped down as CEO, the company was sold to fast-fashion empire Boohoo—itself later charged with gross exploitation at its factories, where garment workers were paid well below the minimum wage.
Yes, the “unfair expectations” Amoruso cited were well-documented abuses perpetrated by several prominent female CEOs in the late 2010s, including Away co-CEO Steph Korey, who oversaw a toxic workplace full of harassment and abuse; Thinx CEO Miki Agrawal, accused of sexual harassment; “Lean In” scribe Sheryl Sandberg, revealed to have targeted protestors and critics of Facebook as part of the company’s attempts to whitewash the Cambridge Analytica data scandal; and Audrey Gelman, of the Wing, charged with facilitating a hostile, exploitative work culture towards employees of color at her defunct all-women social clubs while cynically, simultaneously touting the spaces as feminist utopias. There’s more; probably more than you can remember.
When we look back on the 2010s, I wonder how much of it will feel like a mass hallucination. Trump’s recent, concerted rollback of DEI programs, which disproportionately benefit white women, a demographic that predominantly voted for him, makes it all just feel so…pointless. Why, with Roe on the line, and with no enforcement of the ERA—technically ratified in 2020 but never certified by the sitting Democratic president, who issued an effectively and legally meaningless “endorsement” statement as one of his last acts in office—were we so preoccupied with painting the deck chairs on the Titanic the right shade of “millennial pink”?
Happy Women's History Month. This program is a eulogy for the “girl boss,” that false idol of pink capitalism. Or: I do not support all women, some of you bitches are very evil!!
As much as we pretended otherwise, the “girl boss” phenomenon was really an aesthetic designation: a new generational spin on an old idea, and her construction really dates back to the first depictions of female executives in the wake of the second-wave feminist movement, which was also accused of prioritizing white executive advancement over meaningful gains. Although there’s a smattering of female executives onscreen before the 1980s—all…mostly evil, or forced to give up their position by film’s end4—the archetype really developed in the 1980s, with the “Manhattan power executive,” a glamorous creature straight out of Dynasty with the balls to stand up to her male coworkers as one of the anointed, chosen few. Films like Baby Boom (1987), Big Business (1988), Working Girl (1988), and She-Devil (1989) explored the fraught experiences of powerful women in the workplace—though only one, misandrist classic 9 to 5 (1980), could really conceive of the female executive doing anything materially meaningful for her female employees (the 9 to 5 girls introduce flexible hours and paid childcare after they overthrow their evil, sexist male boss).
In the 90s and into the new century, the female boss bitch got a third-wave makeover: Ally McBeal (1997-2002) worked at a top law firm while controversially rocking mini skirts, Elle Woods proved herself as an attorney in pink in Legally Blonde (2001), and Erin Brockovich (2000) defied our low expectations of sexy women to turn the real-life paralegal behind an environmental pollution case into a real-world media personality. But a different, and far more fascinating archetype emerged in this period as well: the young, sexy, and evil lady exec, who exploits her power to dangerous, destructive ends. Diversity hire Demi Moore harasses and punishes her male underling (Michael Douglas) in Disclosure (1994)5; Nicole Kidman tears through men and teenagers alike in her attempt to become a famous television journalist in To Die For (1995); Denise Richards mugs her way to the top of the military industrial complex in Starship Troopers (1997); and Reese Witherspoon embodies Hilary Clinton (the Teenage Years) in Election (1999), a story about a go-getting student body president candidate who overcomes a teacher’s unjust sabotage of her campaign only to work for a Republican by film’s end. And with The Devil Wears Prada (2006), Meryl Streep canonized (and maybe accidentally downplayed) the legitimately evil behavior of Anna Wintour, a girl boss so bad, she’s been accused in real life of everything from union-busting to employee exploitation to perpetuating a system of entrenched racism.
In the 2010s, prestige television gave the girl boss a new, more complicated sheen, like the trailblazing women of 60s period drama Mad Men (2007-2015), who overcome adversity through highly individualized value systems that represent the very schisms of the second wave feminist movement, and whose professional prowess comes with significant personal shortcomings (primarily: racism). Veep (2012-2019) offered a glimpse at a female vice president-turned president that proved so uncomfortably prescient, it predicted that such a figure would be subsumed by a desire for power so great it would strip her of all ideological beliefs, leaving only a craven drive for nominal success. Succession (2018-2023) gifted us an actual #girlboss-era girl boss, Siobhan “Shiv” Roy, based on real-life Murdoch spawn Elisabeth Murdoch, whose “black sheep” liberal politics mask the fact that she very much benefits from her father’s blood money. These comparatively rich, complicated female characters stand in total contrast to their cinematic girl boss counterparts: Joy (2015), The Boss (2016), Miss Sloane (2016), Molly's Game (2017), Bombshell (2019)…the era is littered with disposable hagiography, tepid biopics, and dead-on-arrival invocations of the pussy hat energy that swept the nation with the rise (and fall) of Hilary Clinton.
Pink Capitalism, clearly, will not save us, nor will the girl boss, as much as we may have longed to dress, move, or act like her. The girl boss of the 2010s may be “dead,” but she’ll always come back, with a different look, and new, marketable buzzwords codifying her existence. For many privileged women, the end goal of feminism is the end of public scrutiny towards their actions—their fight is one of public relations, not empowerment. And that’s all the girl boss ever is or was—marketing. After all, the girl boss is just that: a boss. The girl boss does not care about her underlings, nor the ones cleaning her home, nor making her coffee, nor watching her child. She doesn’t fight for universal healthcare, or subsidized child care, or livable wages.
Only we can do that.
That’s it for March! We’ll be back in April with all new programming. Until then, sun lights up the daytime, moon lights up the night. I light up when you call my name, and you know I'm gonna treat you right, so subscribe and don’t miss a step, won’t you?
Showgirls was greenlit off the massive success of Basic Instinct (1992), a straightforward erotic thriller penned by Joe Eszterhas and directed by Paul Verhoeven, who reunited on Showgirls. Showgirls was also sandwiched between two Eszterhas’ erotic thrillers Sliver (1993) and Jade (1995), so it’s not surprising that people might expect it to be an erotic thriller—but of course, it’s not. Well, not really: it’s sort of a hybrid of Flashdance (1983), Eszterhas’ first screenwriting success, and the erotic thrillers he’d become synonymous with. He simply wrote another bawdy dance movie!
Based on the real-life town of Elmore City, Oklahoma, which had its first prom in 1980!
You can imagine my surprise (and disdain) that Hairspray, a film/musical about being fat, is being stripped for parts and mined for content over at Vogue this month, with nary a fat person in sight.
Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell, in particular, played trailblazing (white) women in the workplace (before the war sent millions of women into the workforce). Joan Crawford, in Mildred Pierce (1945) and later, The Best of Everything (1959), was an important pre-Women’s Lib onscreen lady boss: in the former, she’s a pushover, in the latter, she’s a ball-buster. Range!
This is actually explored decades before, albeit without our cultural understanding of sexual harassment and power dynamics, in two of the most fascinating films in the program: Female (1932), in which Ruth Chatterton, lady executive, has a bad habit of harassing her male employees, and Man Wanted (1932), in which magazine editor Kay Francis falls in love with her male secretary—and refuses to give him up!