When I was a kid, I had a very clear picture of what my adult life would be like. Every day I’d stride—not walk, STRIDE—into a steel and glass office building in an Armani skirt suit, pantyhose, high heels, and a camel-colored coat, fresh from a 7 a.m. salon appointment, clutching a briefcase in one hand and a paper cup of black coffee in the other, my Ferragamo heels click-click-clicking authoritatively on the sidewalk. Walking alongside me through the giant marble entryway to my office building would be two men in Brooks Brothers suits, talking urgently about how we had to close the Del Monte deal that day. As we got out of the elevator, I’d calmly reassure them that I had everything in hand and that they really needed to relax more, then I’d stride off while they gazed after me with expressions that suggested an equal mixture of awe, loathing, and lust. When they talked about me later they’d refer to me as “Killer,” my office nickname. I’d then go to my corner office, handing my coat to my secretary Tom on my way in (Tom would then bring in a cappuccino, made just the way he knew I liked it), and I’d make various important-sounding phone calls before meeting my silver-haired boss, Chesterton, for lunch at a new French place “downtown” with white tablecloths and white wine. Chesterton and I would have a father-daughter-like relationship, with absolutely nothing improper going on there: I would look up to him as a mentor and he’d look fondly upon me as the child he should have had. The afternoon would be taken up with meetings in gigantic boardrooms, where I’d close the Del Monte deal, of course, and everyone would shake their heads in murmuring wonderment at the Killer’s killer instinct. Then in the evening, my camel coat and I would meet my not-quite-as-high-powered boyfriend for dinner at a darling Italian place “uptown,” but we’d have to stay at mine as my personal trainer was coming over the next morning at six.
Most children take their template for adulthood from their parents. Some look to their teachers for inspiration. I took my cues entirely from eighties movies about working women, and, my gosh, there were so many to choose from. There was Working Girl, most obviously, in which a young woman hacks her way to the top of the corporate ladder through a combination of some smarts, a lot of deception, and even more sex (tchuh! typical woman, amirite?). But there was also Die Hard, in which John McLane’s (Bruce Willis, of course) wife Holly (the brilliantly named Bonnie Bedelia) does something that requires her to look very serious all the time for a Japanese company. Less generally enduring but no less personally formative was the Michael J. Fox yuppie comedy The Secret of My Success, in which Christy (Helen Slater) pushes her glasses up on the bridge of her nose very authoritatively in board meetings in between typing important memos and having sex with her boss, which is amazing to watch as a grown-up because that’s EXACTLY what my life is like now.I
Then there were all the kick-ass female hard workers who worked beyond Wall Street: Holly Hunter producing TV news in Broadcast News; Cher being the best damned accountant on the Lower East Side in Moonstruck (Cher as an accountant—now there’s some out-of-the-box casting); Meg Ryan as a successful journalist in When Harry Met Sally; Amy Irving running a bookstore in Crossing Delancey; Kathleen Turner playing a successful romance novelist in Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile. But there was no movie that was more influential on my fantasies about being an adult woman than the great 1987 comedy about the difficulties of combining work and motherhood, Baby Boom, cowritten and produced by Nancy Meyers.
I meet up with Meyers on a warm September afternoon in London the week her latest film, The Intern, was being released in the United Kingdom. Like Baby Boom, The Intern features a protagonist who is a working mother (Meyers describes the two films as “companion pieces”) and, as chance would have it, my interview with Meyers is my first as a working mother: three weeks to the day earlier, I gave birth to twins, my first children. So when I turn up, breast pump in ridiculous designer handbag,II hormonal head all over the place, utterly determined to act like nothing’s changed when clearly everything has, I realize that I’m not merely interviewing Nancy Meyers—I’m pretty much a character in a Nancy Meyers movie.
Meyers has always taken pride, she says, in “telling women’s stories.” She herself looks strikingly like a character in one of her own films—in fact, she looks a lot like Diane Keaton, who has appeared in four of Meyers’s films—and she has always talked about how she uses her own life as inspiration for her films.III More recently, that has meant making movies about fifty-something divorcées, such as Something’s Gotta Give (which starred Keaton) and It’s Complicated (which starred that not-a-million-miles-away-from-Meyers-herself Meryl Streep). Even though she’s made only two films about this world in her very successful thirty-five-year career, Meyers has become closely associated with this specific demographic because she is, amazingly, just about the only filmmaker around with enough clout to be allowed to cater to this apparently niche (but actually extremely large and lucrative) audience. No amount of box-office success seems to convince studios that it’s worth occasionally making films for fifty-five-year-old women as opposed to aiming always for their teenage sons.
“My kind of movie, one with human stories, is not the kind of film studios have wanted to make for a while. They’ve been making Superman, Batman, Everyman films—comic book movies, gigantic action movies, and guy comedies. And all those kinds of movies, [studio executives] think only a man can direct, as if only a man can direct dinosaurs, or flying people, or whatever. Meanwhile my movies get called ‘female-centric,’ even though they star very big actors [including Jack Nicholson, Alec Baldwin, and Robert De Niro]. Studio executives make movies happen and the executive community is a boys’ club. They like each other, they like to go out with each other and meet up for a drink, so being a woman in that world is hard. So it’s been a dark time for personal films and comedies that didn’t only star men. It was a dark time for me—it was difficult! But I hung in there and a couple of those superhero films didn’t do so well and things swung back my way,” Meyers says (just as her films smuggle bleak themes—infidelity, widowhood, divorce—beneath a deceptively easygoing surface, so Meyers has a knack for smiling while making rather solemn statements).
But if Meyers sounds sanguine about this, that is probably because she has been dealing with sexism in the film industry since the start of her career. While working on her first film, Private Benjamin, she tried to hide her burgeoning pregnancy out of concern it would cost her the job. (“Can you imagine?”) Such anxiety is understandable, given that the studio had it written into her contract that she was never allowed to be on set without being accompanied by one of her male coproducers.
“I looked at this and said to my lawyer, ‘Should I agree to this, this is absurd!’ And of course, me in 2015 would have taken a red pen to it and said, ‘That’s ridiculous.’ But as a twenty-nine-year-old making my first movie I laughed at it and was obviously insulted, but I didn’t go to the mat about it, so it remained in the contract,” recalls Meyers.
Even after Meyers had achieved huge professional success, including being nominated for an Oscar for Private Benjamin, film executives still insisted on treating her as if she were an intern. When she and her partner Charles Shyer would go into studios for meetings, Meyers recalls, “they’d direct every questions to [Shyer]. Even when I’d answer, they’d then look at him to make sure it was the right answer.”
“Unfortunately, some men are more comfortable talking to men. If Nancy were the director on our movies, the studio brass would be considerably more uptight,” Shyer said at the time of Baby Boom’s release. (Shyer directed the film, Meyers produced it, and they wrote it together.) Considering only 1.9 percent of the one hundred top-grossing films released in the United States in 2014 were directed by a woman, it seems safe to say the studio brass are still pretty “uptight” about this issue. In any event, it was precisely these kinds of experiences that inspired the writing of Baby Boom.
Certainly there had been movies about women who work before—His Girl Friday and Adam’s Rib being two of the more obvious—but Baby Boom was the first to look at how repulsively unaccommodating the corporate world was, and remains, to mothers. The film tapped a real nerve, and it was hotly discussed in the media at the time. Think of Baby Boom as the Lean In of its time, but with a more realistic view of the business world’s limitations to accommodate motherhood than Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s book provided.
Baby Boom tells the story of J. C. Wiatt (Keaton), who is so successful in her job as a management consultant that she’s known as the “Tiger Lady.” (As will become increasingly clear here, my fantasy about adulthood was basically a bad sitcom rip-off of Baby Boom.) She lives with a boyfriend, Steven (Harold Ramis), who likes face packs, brief sex, and spreadsheets (swoon!). By day, she has lunches with her white-haired boss Fritz (Sam Wanamaker) and orders around evil young office upstart Ken (James Spader).IV Nothing can slow the Tiger Lady down.
Nothing, that is, except unexpectedly inheriting a baby from a dead relative. This baby, Elizabeth, is, despite being the cutest baby ever conceived, so horrific to those in J.C.’s world that she loses, in short order, her boyfriend, her partnership prospects, and finally her job, much to evil Ken’s delight. So she moves to Vermont, shacks up with a hot vet (Sam ShepardV), invents gourmet baby food, and makes an absolute fortune. Her former colleagues in New York then try to buy her baby food company and she returns there to tell them where to stick it, because she still hates James Spader. She then comes back to Vermont to run her company and make out with Sam Shepard in his office, the end.
You are presumably now getting an idea of why this film made such a deep impression on me.VI, VII And not just on me. As journalist Megan Reynolds pointed out in a 2014 article, Baby Boom created the mold from which movies and TV shows about working mothers have been fashioned ever since, from J.C.’s power suit wardrobe to her struggles with motherhood. This has influenced all depictions of the theme since, from the good (Cynthia Nixon in Sex and the City) to the bad (Sarah Jessica Parker in the execrable I Don’t Know How She Does It).
But Baby Boom wears its feminism more prominently on its sleeve than any of its copycat followers, certainly more than its contemporary Working Girl, which is just one of the reasons I prefer the former to the latter.
Working Girl is more interested in class snobbery than feminism, with the film emphasizing from the start that Tess’s (Melanie Griffith) accent and non–Ivy League background are holding her back, in contrast to her elegantly spoken patrician boss, Katherine (Sigourney Weaver). But the movie then sacrifices this potentially interesting path by turning the story into a predictable and ridiculous catfight between Tess and Katherine over the exceptionally dull Jack (Harrison Ford). Baby Boom, by contrast, lays its feminism out on the table from the start. The film opens with a montage of images of women going to work in New York City, clutching copies of the Wall Street Journal and cups of coffee. These women, the (female) voice-over says, “grew up being told to marry doctors and lawyers and instead became doctors and lawyers.” These women, Baby Boom’s audience is told, rather thrillingly, “are the phenomenon of our time” and are “turning thousands of years of tradition on its ear.”
But the film’s promises of the women’s movement’s forward propulsion look a little sad in retrospect, considering what’s come since. When I watched the opening of the first episode of Sex and the City back in 1998, I was delighted at how the program used strikingly similar imagery and narration to Baby Boom’s opening, with shots of working women marching down Manhattan sidewalks while Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), in voice-over, saluted these ladies who “travel and pay taxes, and spend four hundred dollars on a pair of Manolo Blahnik strappy sandals.” But whereas Baby Boom’s tone is celebratory, Sex and the City’s shifts swiftly into one of baffled sadness, noting how these women are “alone.” Instead of applauding women’s progress, the HBO show opened with a self-flagellating apology for it. This shift is dismayingly apt considering the difference in attitudes between the women who made the show and film. Whereas Meyers proudly describes herself as a feminist (“Of course!”), Sex and the City’s Sarah Jessica Parker, like a wearisome number of female celebrities today, shies nervously away from the term, insisting in interviews instead that she is “a humanist.” (Demi Moore and—O fallen idols!—Madonna also use that bullshit fudge.) Can’t possibly alienate all those male fans of SATC and I Don’t Know How She Does It with icky feminism, right, SJP?VIII If anyone watching Baby Boom today finds themselves wondering why this film feels still so relevant and why so many of the issues raised in this movie made more than thirty years ago—such as women’s basic rights in the workplace in the first world—are still a problem, here’s at least part of your answer. If even prominent and privileged women and modern TV shows and films made for women feel embarrassed about standing up specifically for women, then it’s hardly a surprise that sexism in male-dominated systems continues to thrive.
But Baby Boom is not rose tinted about feminism or, more specifically, its limitations and the sacrifices forced on women who care about professional success, because this is what the whole film is about. Meyers and Shyer researched Baby Boom by talking to women in the corporate world about the pressures they experienced, especially regarding motherhood:
“When Charlie and I interviewed women CEOs, we found that more than a few were told by their bosses when they got pregnant that they should have abortions if they wanted promotions,” she recalled at the time. Meyers, by contrast, was able to work on this movie with her family, even bringing her young daughter onto the set with her. “I went into labor [with her second daughter] in the editing suite!” she laughs. But even in this supportive setup, she still knew about the compromises working mothers face. In one instance, Meyers was late for a newspaper interview because her older daughter wanted to go to FAO Schwarz, mirroring the struggles of the lead character in her film to look professional with a baby on her hip. Never let it be said that Meyers knows not of what she writes.
Even by the eighties, the most overdebated and boring question was, Can a woman have it all? The film has as little interest in that question as any other woman with half a brain cell. So it settles the matter early on: no, a woman cannot have it all, not in the way the film originally sets out. When J.C.’s boss takes her out to lunch to discuss a partnership, he warns her about “the sacrifices you’ll have to make.” He continues, “A man can be a success and have a full personal life. I’m lucky—I can have it all.” J.C. knows all this already and leans across the table without an iota of doubt on her face: “I don’t want it all. I don’t.” This disparity between the sexes is not fair, the movie says, but it is the reality, and within that clear-eyed assessment of the corporate world the film has some fun mocking the institutional sexism. In one scene, two of the head honchos discuss the possibility of making J.C. partner.
“Do we have any women partners?” one asks the other.
“Mmm, down in Chicago,” his colleague replies.
“Right, right—the redhead!” says the first, satisfied.
No matter how successful a woman becomes, she’s still known only by her hair color.
Again, this inability to have it all, at least at the same time, was something else Meyers knew intimately and, like the film, she did not spend time fretting about it—she worked around it. When asked in one interview at the time of Baby Boom’s release why she was the producer and her male partner the director, she replied, “To direct a movie is an around-the-clock commitment, and now, because of [our daughters] Annie and Hallie, I just have to be home by 7:30 to feed them and put them to sleep. I think we’re flexible enough that on our next project, Charlie might produce and I might direct, because I’d like to very much.” Meyers did eventually move into directing when her daughters were older in 1998, with The Parent Trap. As chance would have it, she and Shyer, married at this point, promptly got divorced. Not all stories in the real world about women get to have a Meyers-esque happy ending.IX
J.C., meanwhile, who “graduated first in her class at Harvard,” as the film emphasizes, is most certainly a feminist. She explains to Steven she couldn’t give Elizabeth up for adoption because the adoptive mother “called her husband ‘sir.’ ” Later, when she reads Elizabeth a bedtime story she changes the ending of Sleeping Beauty: “The princess said, ‘Thank you for waking me—I overslept and I have medical school today so I can become a doctor like all women can be,’ ” she coos to her baby. Unlike certain modern female celebrities, this is not a film that feels any qualms about showing its allegiances regarding gender politics.
Just as J.C. finds a way to accommodate feminism within the not generally feminist strictures of children’s fairy tales, so the movie sets about finding a way for her to achieve professional success and personal satisfaction within the not generally feminist strictures of a Hollywood movie—and it succeeds. Working Girl, on the other hand, happily maintains the usual gender roles, and endorses those who do likewise. Jack is originally attracted to Tess when he spots her at a work event wearing a pretty dress: “You’re the first woman I’ve seen at one of these things who dresses like a woman,” he murmurs admiringly. Later, when he’s praising Tess’s intelligence to a potential business colleague, he says, “She’s your man,” because women wear pretty dresses but men are smart. Meanwhile, the film’s humiliation of the character of Katherine begins when she starts talking about her biological clock to Jack, much to his embarrassment and repulsion. Women should be women—but not to the point when it gets awkward for men, apparently. In Baby Boom, by contrast, the hot vet is utterly unfazed when he first meets J.C. and she mentions sadly how long it’s been since she had sex.
Which brings us to a very key element in Baby Boom: J.C.’s love life. J.C. starts off with Steven, who, as an investment banker, is her professional equal. He loves that she loves her job, teasing her fondly about her addiction to work and working happily alongside her in bed. She then ends up with Dr. Jeff Cooper, a vet who is vaguely impressed by her success but generally unbothered by it. In other words, J.C.’s ambition and success are, at best, sexy and, at worst, not an issue.
This is no anomaly to Baby Boom. One of my absolute favorite things about eighties movies set in the workplace is that male characters repeatedly fall for women who are emphatically more successful professionally than them, and that is part of their appeal. In The Secret of My Success, Christy is far more high-powered than Brantley (Michael J. Fox), who still works in the mailroom, and he is entranced by her partly because she represents, not a threat, but what he wants to be. In Moonstruck, Cher is an accountant whereas Nicolas Cage is a baker. In Broadcast News, Holly Hunter is senior to both Albert Brooks and William Hurt, and they both fall for her. Pleasingly, the film emphasizes that even though she ends up with neither of them, she does not then end up alone. In Raising Arizona, Holly Hunter (again) is so much more successful than her doting husband (Nicolas Cage, again) that they meet when she takes his mug shot each time he’s arrested. In Romancing the Stone, novelist Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) is far more successful than renegade Jack Colton (Michael Douglas), and this ultimately saves them when potential killers recognize her and profess themselves to be fans.
“Poor Michael doesn’t get much credit in that movie, does he?” cackles Kathleen Turner delightedly. Turner adds she “deliberately looked for parts that were the opposite to what I did before” in the eighties, and she succeeded, playing both a femme fatale (Body Heat) and a prostitute (Crimes of Passion), a frustrated divorcée (Peggy Sue Got Married), and a contract killer (Prizzi’s Honor).
Male characters who tell their female partners in eighties films to stop working are derided. In Coming to America, among Darryl’s (Eriq La Salle) many faults is that he thinks “my lady shouldn’t work,” whereas Akeem (Eddie Murphy) came to the United States specifically to find an independent, intelligent woman with ambitions beyond being his wife (although I do think it unlikely that Lisa keeps her job in a fast-food restaurant once she becomes the Queen of Zamunda). In St. Elmo’s Fire, Alec’s (Judd Nelson) dickishness is demonstrated by his lack of respect for his girlfriend Leslie’s (Ally Sheedy) job. “I have to have something for myself,” she tells him. “Will you just for once not use as the excuse for not marrying me, your goddamned career?” he snarls back, dismissing her ambitions with a sneer. Yet he’s so devoted to his career that he jettisons his dreams of being a Democratic senator in order to work for a Republican. Not even the assistant principal foresaw such duplicitousness in Bender.
“In movies from the 1970s and 1980s, you see the ascendancy of women, and that’s because feminism was in the ascendancy and people were interested in it,” says Melissa Silverstein, founder and editor of the website Women and Hollywood. “Movies didn’t cost a billion dollars to make and filmmakers were able to make movies featuring women in positions of strong leadership.”
Of course, not all eighties movies were totally on board with this crazy idea of women being high-powered. Katherine in Working Girl won’t be celebrated by feminists anytime soon, as I mentioned earlier, and let’s not even get started on poor Alex (Glenn Close), the deranged book editor in Fatal Attraction. In Die Hard, John McLane visits Los Angeles, where he is nearly killed by Alan Rickman’s German accent, because his wife insisted on moving there for her career. And look what THAT gets her: a destroyed office, dead colleagues, traumatized children, and a beat-up husband. FEMINISM RUINS EVERYTHING. Thank heavens her husband happens to be in town to save her from this dreadful feminist mistake, right? Just to clarify that this woman is a selfish feminist witch, she insists on going by her maiden name, which is, like, totally outrageous—the film suggests—because her husband loves her so much, despite his flaws. But by the end of the movie, Holly has learned her lesson and obediently introduces herself as “Holly McLane,” and her husband grins at his newly tamed wife. Yet these hilariously over-the-top counterarguments are vastly outweighed by the eighties movies that love career women—and they certainly love them a lot more than movies do now.
It’s astonishing to look around now and realize how rarely movies today celebrate high-powered women, particularly movies aimed at women. Sure, you don’t see too many films like The Secret of My Success (or, to a certain degree, Baby Boom), which celebrate the glamour of the corporate world, because that life isn’t seen as quite as desirable as it was in the eighties. But you also don’t really see women working at all. One recent study found that for every single career that the Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps data on, from bartenders to lawyers to nurses, women are represented on-screen far more rarely than they are in reality. Business professionals, the study’s author Walt Hickey noted, are especially “dramatically underrepresented on screen”: “When Hollywood depicts a prestigious occupation or a job that requires substantial post-secondary education, it usually goes with a man. And while the same is often true in the real world, it kind of sucks that movies are even worse,” Hickey writes.
Similarly, a 2014 study confirmed what any audience member could already see: while male characters in modern films were most likely to be identified by their job, such as “a doctor or business executive” (61 percent of male characters to 34 percent of female ones), female characters were more likely to be identified by their personal life, such as “wife,” “mother,” and so on (58 percent of female characters to 31 percent of males).
At best, women in modern movies have safely “feminine” and unthreatening jobs, such as Kristen Wiig playing a (deeply improbable) pastry chef in Bridesmaids (and a failed one at that), or Elizabeth Banks in the appalling What to Expect When You’re Expecting, playing the manager of a baby clothing store. In the execrable Love, Actually, the women are all pointedly professionally inferior to their male counterparts: Hugh Grant as the PM falls for the tea lady, Alan Rickman’s sleazy design exec gets off with his secretary, and Colin Firth’s character falls for his housekeeper, who doesn’t even speak his language. Laura Linney, meanwhile, is utterly denied a boyfriend in that film because she commits the unforgivable error of having a brother who occasionally needs her—doesn’t she know she must be available to her man at all times, for heaven’s sake? Hilariously, the one plotline in the film in which the woman is the professional equal of the man involves two porn stars. That’s where you can really win in the job market, ladies—porn!X
As for successful women, the modern-day female character cliché, aka the Ally McBeal stereotype, is so established it is damn near a trope by now: working woman—great at work, disastrous in her personal life! There are hundreds of examples, from Sandra Bullock in The Proposal to Bullock (again) and Melissa McCarthy in The Heat. Better yet, they are punished for wanting to work, like Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Chauvinistic Stereotypes, whose husband and boyfriend respectively leave them because they dare work late occasionally, and that is depicted as a fairly reasonable reaction to their selfish ways. (Hathaway’s boyfriend returns to her when she quits her job. Streep, presumably, remains alone for her stubborn insistence on staying employed.)
“There aren’t enough movies that show working women who are content at their job, good at their job, and good bosses. If I see one more movie where the horrible boss is a woman who is hated by her employees . . .” says Meyers with an eye roll.
In Baby Boom, by contrast, J.C.’s personal and professional success are inextricably linked—the movie never suggests she has to sacrifice one for the other. If anything, it’s the inverse: when she’s happy at work, both in New York and Vermont, she’s happy in her romantic life. Whereas Steven leaves J.C. because she inherits a baby, the men in The Devil Wears Prada leave their partners because they have jobs, which is a far more conservative message to send to women especially given that it was filmed nineteen years later.
Even more grating is the very popular modern trope that working women succeed by sleeping their way up the career ladder. For some reason, this is a particularly popular view of female journalists in modern movies, as filmmakers seem to think the only way a female journalist could possibly get a story, or even an interview, is by sleeping with her subject, which is an intriguing insight into how filmmakers see journalists, considering how much time they spend with them. Admittedly, given that I am a journalist—and (spoiler alert!) a female one—I probably find this shtick especially strange, but it is an amazingly popular setup in modern films. Amy Schumer in Trainwreck, Dakota Johnson in Fifty Shades of Grey,XI Rosario Dawson in Take Five, Maggie Gyllenhaal in Crazy Heart, Angela Bassett in Mr. 3000, Judy Greer in Three Kings, Katie Holmes in Thank You for Smoking, Bridget Fonda in The Godfather III: all journalists, all apparently able to get a story only by use of their Magical Vagina (an essential part of a modern female journalist’s kit, along with Frumpy Spectacles and an Ugly Jacket). Honestly, it’s amazing that female journalists get any work done at all, considering how much time they spend dropping their underwear. Even smart comedies that could have spiked the cliché with their female journalist characters, such as Christina Applegate in Anchorman or Christine Taylor in Zoolander, merely rehash it. (It is depressingly needless to say that male journalists in movies—from the good, such as David Strathairn in Good Night and Good Luck, to the evil, such as Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler—get ahead in their professions without use of their genitals.) Eighties films weren’t averse to this trope themselves—who among us can forget Linda Kozlowski’s performance as a Newsday journalist in Crocodile Dundee, sent off on a totally believable assignment to Australia to hang out with grizzled Paul Hogan for no obvious reason but to sleep with him by a swamp? But it was nowhere near as popular as it is now, and, in fact, it was often undermined. In 1981’s Absence of Malice, Miami journalist Megan (Sally Field) does end up sleeping with the dodgy salesman (Paul Newman) whom she wrote about. But this ends up jeopardizing her job and when the film ends it looks like she might actually be fired. And Veronica (Geena Davis) in The Fly learns that the downside of sleeping with a story subject is that you might end up pregnant with a gigantic maggot and having to shoot your mutant lover. Meanwhile, Holly Hunter in Broadcast News pointedly doesn’t sleep with anyone in her role as a news producer (although she does have something of a soft spot for the airhead anchor played by William Hurt) and duly rises to the top of her profession.
• • •
Exactly when things shifted for women in movies is impossible to date precisely, but Melissa Silverstein knows the decade when everything changed: “It was the nineties, for sure. That’s when we saw the ascendancy of the blockbuster, which led to a regression of female characters. There was also a cultural backlash in America in the nineties after the Anita Hill hearings and the Bill Clinton scandal, and suddenly we’re not seeing strong women in leadership roles on-screen anymore. With movies about working women in the seventies and eighties, we saw the struggle women were going through in the workplace represented on-screen. But movies today do not reflect the reality of women’s lives today, especially working women’s lives, and that’s what makes people so angry.”
Silverstein is right about disconnect between movies and reality, because what makes this fear in modern films about working women even more ridiculous is that women are increasingly the primary money earners in America. In America in 1980, the woman earned more than the man in only 10 percent of households; by 2011, this had risen to 24.3 percent. And guess what? Most Americans are absolutely fine about this. According to the study, 63 percent of Americans said it did not harm a marriage if the wife outearns her husband, a rise of more than 20 percent since 1997.XII And yet movies do not reflect either this reality or attitude. “This is the backlash. The backlash comes when women make strides. The studio convention now is that movies work better when women characters have unthreatening jobs. They say audiences think it’s cuter,” says film producer Lynda Obst.
“The biggest cultural struggle in America now is white men holding on to power and we see that in superhero movies—white men saving the world, with women just there to be saved,” says Silverstein. “The only job available to women in movies now is being a princess, and that is not a job that is actually available.”
In films today, women are rarely celebrated when they are more successful than men. “To make a woman adorable you have to defeat her in the beginning. It’s a conscious thing I do—abuse and break her, strip her of her dignity, and then she gets to live out our fantasies and have fun. It’s as simple as making the girl cry, fifteen minutes into the movie,” one female screenwriter told the New Yorker in 2011.XIII
Even in one of the more successful modern films about a working woman, 2000’s Erin Brockovich, the eponymous character was, according to her real-life counterpart, sexed up and dumbed down in the film, presumably to make her less threatening. In the movie, when her boss (Albert Finney) asks Brockovich (Roberts) how she is going to find the documents she needs in an archive, she famously replies, “They’re called boobs, Ed.” The actual Brockovich dismissed this version of the story: “I don’t know that I had in my mind set, I’m going to come in here and show my cleavage to get these documents. I really don’t think I was operating at that level. . . . So, however you dress, it’s your own personal style. I don’t mean to offend anybody. That’s just who I am, and I don’t deliberately utilize it as a tool to get what I’m looking for,” she said at a National Press Club luncheon. In other words, contrary to what the film suggested, Brockovich relied on her brains to succeed, not her bosoms.
Whereas movies from the eighties sneered at the men who tell women to quit their job to focus on their love lives, movies today fully endorse that clearly ridiculous message. The previously mentioned 2015 Amy Schumer comedy, Trainwreck, opens with the now rarely acknowledged proposition that a female film character, Amy (Schumer), can love her “kick-ass job” as a magazine journalist, not be in a settled relationship, and be totally happy in herself. But because this movie was made in 2015, this setup is quickly shown to be a myth. The film mocks Amy’s job from the beginning, sneering at the stupid articles she writes, which embarrass even her. In contrast, the movie is cringingly in love with her boyfriend Aaron’s (Bill Hader) job as a sports doctor, featuring endless starry-eyed shots of him mixing with sports (male) celebrities. This is a notably common ploy in movies made in the past two decades: by having female characters work in jobs that can be dismissed as fluffy, such as fashion journalism (The Devil Wears Prada), it is then easier for the movie to mock them for caring about their jobs more than their boyfriends. When Amy and Aaron fight, he is scornful about not just her job but ostensibly the entire journalistic profession as something for those “who don’t even try,” and she miserably agrees with him. The film’s happy ending shows a now-unemployed Amy attempting a routine with the Knicks cheerleaders since this, apparently, will prove that she does “try,” unlike writing for a magazine: “I just wanted to impress you,” she whimpers to Aaron as she lies on the pad between the net, injured and humiliated. Yay, women! (Aaron, it should be added at this point, has done absolutely nothing to try to win back Amy. But why should he? He’s an important sports doctor.) Pretty hard to imagine J.C. abasing herself like that to anyone, let alone the sexy vet, and even harder to imagine Baby Boom feeling like she needs to do so. So regarding the issue brought up in the chapter on When Harry Met Sally about whether romcoms have died because it’s too hard to translate them into the world of today, it would help if modern pop culture weren’t so scared of working women, because working women are a modern-day reality. After all, in Ephron’s film, Sally is a successful journalist and does pretty much the same job as Jess (Bruno Kirby), even writing for the same publications, because Ephron knew there was no divide between jobs for the men and jobs for the girly girls.
For Meyers, the issue that interests her isn’t even whether men and women work differently but how little things have changed for women in the workplace. One of the reasons she returned to the subject of working mothers in The Intern, she says, is that she wanted to show “there are huge differences [being a working mother in 2015 from being one in 1987] and also problems which have not been solved.” In Meyers’s more recent film, Anne Hathaway plays Jules, a high-powered founder of an Internet fashion company, and one big difference between her and J. C. Wiatt is that when she encounters sexism in the workplace, instead of trying to work around it she calls it out, “and that,” says Meyers, “is absolutely a generational thing.”
But the responses to her movies, she says, prove how little things have changed. Her working female characters, she says, are repeatedly described as “workaholics” by male film critics. “She’s hardworking, not a workaholic. Men don’t even realize they’re saying these things.” Then there are the repeated sneers in reviews and blogs about the lush interiors of Meyers’s films, although no one ever comments on the similarly deluxe houses in James L. Brooks’s or Judd Apatow’s movies. Focusing on the surfaces of Meyers’s movies, reducing them to catalogs, is an easy way to belittle Meyers, her audience, and the female stories she tells.
“I know why people go to my movies and it’s not to look at the houses,” she says simply.
In her latest film, Meyers emphatically overturns all the now-expected clichés about a working mother: Jules is not a nasty boss, she is not hated by her employees, she has a happy home life and a husband who ends up begging her not to quit her job for him.XIV
“I wanted to show a woman who’s starting her own business and who isn’t punished for being ambitious—she keeps her family. She has a stay-at-home husband and a little girl who is not suffering because her mother works. Telling women’s stories is something that’s really important to me because there are so many people telling those other kinds of stories,” she says.
Meyers is hopeful that the representation of women in movies will improve “just because the conversation is so out there now. I’ve been working for over thirty years and this is the first publicity tour I’ve done where everyone has asked me about this. Everyone! People are talking about it.”
So does she think it’s gotten worse since the early days of her career?
Meyers thinks about this for a few seconds: “Well, of course, in some ways things have improved a lot. No one would write into a woman’s contract that she wasn’t allowed on set without a man! But in terms of getting women’s stories on-screen, I don’t see a lot of movies about complicated women with real problems, and studies tell you that’s true. When I think back on the seventies and eighties I think of Network, Baby Boom, Working Girl. [And today] It was a real struggle getting The Intern made! No one wanted to take it on. Audiences always want to see real women characters but, I have to be honest with you, I think it’s gotten worse.”
I didn’t grow up to be Killer. I didn’t even grow up to work in an office where anyone else is called Killer. In fact, I don’t even work in an office—I work at home. So in my working life, it’s a good day if I get dressed before 11 a.m. and remember to brush my teeth before the postman turns up—fantasies about a 6 a.m. session with a personal trainer are about as close to my reality as my once-cherished dream of owning a unicorn. But even if my life turned out to be nothing like that of the women in these eighties movies, they taught me something else, something that has stayed with me forever, which is to not apologize for working hard. Okay, Steven from Baby Boom might not have been perfect (did I mention the face packs?), but he loved JC’s professional drive and smarts, and that’s because he was an adult. She never played down what she did at work to him in order to ease his and the audience’s precious male egos. If only more filmmakers today treated female characters with so much respect, and gave male audiences the credit for being able to cope with the prospect of a successful female character. It is jaw-dropping that so many films still feel the need to undermine successful women in their movies to the extent that the sexism on-screen is not only more exaggerated than it is in the real world, but actually worse than it was thirty years ago. After all, we women might not all be the actual Tiger Lady, or even Killer, but we all deserve at the least a partner who encourages us to be the most we can be, and audiences, male and female, should be seeing better.
I. Legal disclaimer: that is not at all what my life is like now. I still can’t even walk in high heels, for God’s sake.
II. In the early days of parenthood I had a theory that if I carried around the baby stuff in a fancy bag I would feel more like me, my old self, and show I hadn’t collapsed under the weight of motherhood. You’d think that someone who watched Baby Boom more than a million times—in which the lead character tries to kid herself in one scene that if she can push her baby in her stroller just that little bit quicker she’ll prove to herself that she is on top of things—would be a little more self-aware about these kinds of misguided attempts at overcompensation.
III. Predictably, though, critics have often used the fact that Meyers parlays her life into her work as proof that her work is somehow lightweight, or limited, or cheating, or just for women (as though women were a minority group instead of half the human race). When, say, Judd Apatow does this, however, he is praised for being “honest,” “open,” “accessible.” Don’t worry, I won’t bang on about this too much—there’s only so much room in a footnote, after all—but it is predictable, given that when a woman writes about herself she is being narcissistic but a man who does the same is brave.
IV. She lives with Harold Ramis and she works with James Spader: not only is Baby Boom my fantasy about adulthood, it is my ultimate sexual fantasy.
V. Like I said, this movie is SERIOUS sexual fantasy fodder.
VI. Have I mentioned all the sexual fantasy stuff yet?
VII. It also helped that the town she moves to in Vermont is called Hadleyville. These things are extremely important when you’re eight.
VIII. Other modern female celebrities who refuse to describe themselves as feminists include Shailene Woodley, Marion Cotillard, Katy Perry, Melissa Leo, Carrie Underwood, Kelly Clarkson, and, most dismayingly of all, Björk.
IX. Although it’s worth noting that Meyers has had notably more professional success than her now ex-husband since they split. This might not be the kind of happy ending that Meyers would write, but it is one that would please her characters.
X. And to be fair to the film’s writer and director, Richard Curtis, porn is the one area of the film industry where women make as much money as men, so maybe he’s making some fascinatingly meta point about gender equality in the movie industry. Or, quite possibly, not.
XI. One minute you’re interviewing someone, the next you’re chained up in their sex dungeon—it’s a situation all female journalists have experienced.
XII. Wendy Wang, Kim Parker, and Paul Taylor, “Breadwinner Moms,” Pew Research Center, May 29, 2013.
XIII. Tad Friend, “Funny Like a Guy,”New Yorker, April 11, 2011.
XIV. Despite all these admirable touches on Meyers’s part, I have to admit The Intern is not my favorite of her films (that would obviously be Baby Boom). But I salute her valiant efforts here.