Higgins: 9 to 5 (1980)

From Baby Boom to Big Business, the 80s abounded with films – usually romantic comedies at heart – that attempted to come to terms with women as corporate creatures. None of them, however, were as clear-eyed in their radical feminism as 9 to 5, which also managed to pull off one of the funniest comedies of the decade, suffused with a delirious, campy sense of joy that completed Dolly Parton’s country-pop crossover, and propelled Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda even further into the cinematic stratosphere. Part of what makes the film so powerful is that it operates more or less as a revenge fantasy that refuses to ever give up on its fantasy, as a group of three female employees form an unexpected alliance after discovering that they’ve all dreamed of taking down their misogynistic boss, Franklin Hart, played by Dabney Coleman in the 80s corporate schmuck persona he owned before it was gentrified by Michael Douglas. All three women have different grievances – Judy Bernly (Fonda) is bullied throughout her entire probation period, Doralee Rhodes (Parton) is repeatedly sexually harassed and Violet Newstead (Tomlin) is passed over for promotion because she’s a woman – but they’re united in their cause, and even more united by the fact that the film makes no efforts to explain or justify why they’ve chosen to work, despite the fact that they’re all in some variant on the nuclear family setup. In fact, some of the most utopian moments actually take place against the backdrop of their family and home lives, as writers Patricia Resnick and Colin Higgins envisage a cinematic universe in which women can be presented as professionals without some laborious back story about how they’re extra-hard-working mothers and wives: these three women just simply happen to have relationships, and to work, and that’s it. Perhaps that’s why so much of the revenge takes place at Hart’s own home, as the trio’s revenge fantasies start to unexpectedly come true, launching the film into a dark, picaresque comic register that often plays as a siege narrative as much as anything else, a series of logistical hurdles and pragmatic challenges standing in the way of the equal rights they’re so keen to sequester. As Hart is progressively poisoned, shot and imprisoned, Judy, Doralee and Violet are forced to confront their deepest longings for liberation, the dicta of their most subscionsious selves emerging before their eyes, while also playing wife and mother to Hart as never before, creating a wonderful double bind in which their greatest burden is protecting their boss, co-workers – and themselves – from the corrosive rage forged from years and years of sexist subjugation. How they manage it is the ingenuity, beauty and comedy of the film, which draws on the gritty realism of 30s comedy, the backstage sisterhoods of early sound cinema, to envisage a fully unionised workplace, driven by proper benefits, job-sharing and equal pay. Of course, that can’t completely last, but the grandeur of the film is the way it refuses to dismiss fantasies as fantasies – if anything, the comedy is a way of keeping fantasies resilient – thanks to Dolly in particular, whose robust, bluegrass ability to present herself as a kind of grounded fantasy gives the film a lot of its heft. Still, it takes all three to remake every workplace montage sequence over in their own image, as they yearn for an alternative to the 9-to-5 day that nevertheless avoids the pitfalls of the flexible, casualised labour that has also started to emerge around female workers in particular – an alternative that may only exist in their welfare state of three, their charismatic communion, but never feels any less utopian for that, or makes them feel any less a force to be reckoned with.