In 1984, with another term in the White House at stake, Ronald Reagan’s team decided to accentuate the positive. “It’s morning in America again,” proclaimed campaign ads that showed men and women hurrying to work, buying new homes and getting married. Reagan won by a landslide.
Four years later, as the nation bade its tinseltown president farewell, a film came out that seemed to sum up the reinvigorated American dream even more effectively. The opening scenes of Working Girl might be the best advert for New York – and, by extension, for American capitalism – there has ever been. As the morning sun spills out over the Hudson, we circle the Statue of Liberty to the drumbeats of Carly Simon’s anthem to sheer determination, Let the River Run. Goosebumps are obligatory. The camera homes in on the Staten Island ferry, which transports our heroine, Tess, and thousands like her, to the bustle and business of Manhattan.
This is Mike Nichols’s fairytale of New York. And while his death has rightly seen much ink spilt in praise of The Graduate, Working Girl has faded into the background, despite six Oscar nominations, including best picture. When critics sum up a film-maker’s life, they are at pains to emphasise the artistic, the era-defining, not the commercial, the unashamedly fun. It is great fun, but Melanie Griffith’s Tess is also the emblem of a generation, just as Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin was. We might not like that it’s a generation defined by self-interest and getting on, rather than self-doubt and dropping out, but that shouldn’t blind us to the fact that it is a razor-sharp piece of work.
As a director, Nichols isn’t an agenda-pusher. “If you want a giant reputation, then do one thing, be a master of suspense or whatever,” he said at a question and answer session hosted by the New York Times in 2012. “I’m more interested in what kind of a time you have when you do it. The whole point is to examine different situations.” Ironically, this openness to the moment, the lack of any programme, is what allowed him to produce films infused with the politics of their time. It looks harmless, because it’s funny, but Working Girl is more quintessentially Wall Street than Oliver Stone’s Wall Street ever was.
The Cinderella of our story is a struggling temp at the beginning of the film, an earnest working-class woman just turned 30, with a considerable brain under her gravity-defying hairdo. As well as her undeniable “smarts”, she has a fearsome ambition, which has driven her through night school, to elocution classes during lunch and up against innumerable glass ceilings. When Bob from arbitrage, a fresh-faced Kevin Spacey, attempts to turn a promised mentoring session into a grope-fest, something in her snaps. She gets the sack, but the agency gives her one last chance, this time working for a woman. The deliciously narcissistic Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver) is a year younger than Tess, but rich, well-educated and already halfway up the career ladder at brokerage firm Petty-Marsh. She too, promises to mentor Tess, but instead tries to steal her idea for a media takeover, something Tess discovers when she is arranging Katharine’s affairs after a skiing accident has her laid up and out of town for weeks. Having played it straight until this point, Tess realises the odds are stacked against her, and plans her own deception. Assuming Katharine’s identity, she is transformed into Wall Street Woman, “with a head for business, and a bod for sin”, as she puts it to pleasantly surprised broker Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford) at an industry party, wearing Katharine’s $6,000 cocktail dress. She explains to her old friend from the typing pool, Cyn, played by Joan Cusack at her saucy best: “I’m not going to spend the rest of my life working my ass off and getting nowhere just because I followed rules that I had nothing to do with setting up.”
This tension – between the ideal of meritocracy and the law of the jungle, where native wit battles unearned privilege – is what elevates Working Girl above simple propaganda for finance capitalism. Though he hardly spares us glittering vistas of the “silver city” – New York has never looked more like a New Jerusalem – Nichols sounds a note of scepticism as he shows us that nothing short of a freak series of events can really elevate the common woman.
Emboldened by her success in passing herself off as a powerful woman, Tess tries to seal the deal she has been planning at a society wedding hosted by media mogul Oren Trask. For the Guardian’s US finance editor, Heidi Moore, this is one of the key moments of the film. “Tess doesn’t belong there, but she manages to pitch her idea to Trask, making a good impression fast,” she says. “This illuminates a basic principle of Wall Street: the fastest way to become a capitalist is to get another powerful capitalist to accept you.”
At its best, Moore says, there is a system that allows the striving sons and daughters of immigrants to become millionaires, as long as they have the appetite to bear down on spreadsheets, thanklessly, for years. “At its worst, that’s the same social loophole that allowed Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford to cheat people out of millions of dollars: once they crashed those weddings and were accepted by powerful investors, they never had to prove their bona fides.” “What feeds the strivers also feeds pretenders: once you’re in, on Wall Street, no one asks whether you have a right to be there. Geniuses and scam artists take the same path to prominence until the law eventually forces them to diverge.”
Tess’s luck holds and, despite her true identity coming out, she ends up with both her man and a career. But, as in many fairytales, something faintly malignant hangs in the air. The final scene, an unsettling counterpart to the sunlit beginning, is where Nichols’s scepticism hoves into view again. Having been convinced of her guts and determination, Trask has given Tess an office and a secretary, everything she has dreamed of all along. With the door closed behind her, she calls Cyn and bursts out: “Guess where I am?” An exterior shot slowly zooms out to reveal her window as one of a grid of nine, then 25, then 49, then 81. She is a unit in the machine of profit and loss, more worker ant than romantic heroine. After morning in America comes another morning, then another, then another, all in the service of the dollar. And isn’t that what being a working girl, or boy, still means today?
