The arrival of Mary, the naive new girl, offers an opportunity for a round of dos and don’ts that focuses on the correct exchange of cash for acts, but each sex scene is also a Lehrstück about sex and gender relations. Ranged by their sexual personae, the johns are not so much stereotypes as Freudian archetypes, while the working girls are full characters—notwithstanding Roger Ebert’s seeing it from the john’s point of view, in which “the woman is relatively unimportant, because she is not the fantasy but more like the supporting cast.” It is perhaps this topsy-turvy perspective that led Ebert to conclude that he “was moved less by the movie’s conscious attempts at artistry than by its unadorned honesty,” a familiar suggestion when it comes to work by underrepresented artists: that a—supposed or assumed—documentary quality is key. The film is searingly honest about gender and labor relations, and grounded in observation based on Borden’s direct engagement with sex workers. Yet it does not adhere to the codes of either vérité or verisimilitude. Its realism is, like its camera angles, canted. Everything is placed deliberately, as if the film itself were a session that delivers precisely what has been negotiated for the price, while reminding us that it is fantasy.
Perhaps that is nowhere clearer than when Molly ties up Joseph, at his request. It’s not just that she has to go down to the kitchen to locate the rope, nor that an enthusiastic Joseph interrupts the session when he realizes time is running out. It’s that Joseph is played by Richard Leacock, the pioneer of cinema verité. Documentary could not be more literally bottoming for expressionist fantasy in this exquisite scene. It’s a performance with gusto by the sixty-four-year-old documentarian, who was about to release his penultimate feature documentary, Lulu in Berlin (1984, codirected with Susan Woll), based on an interview he had conducted in 1974 with the legendary Louise Brooks. Lulu was, of course, the name of Brooks’s character in G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929), one of the most notable sex-worker protagonists in film history. In a 2007 DVD commentary (included on this release), Borden notes that Leacock told her, “I hope to be fired from MIT on charges of moral turpitude.”
Borden became acquainted with Leacock through working with Chris Hegedus on Born in Flames ; Hegedus was one of many camera operators who contributed time, energy, and observational flare to that film. Borden told me that Leacock “had so much fun; he was totally comfortable walking around naked, unlike some of the other actors.” She filmed the sex scenes with respect and consideration for the performers in mind; even so, after the film was finished, one scene had to be cut. The filmmaker told me: “There were six seconds of explicit material where Molly does a hand job and gets come on her hand. To her credit, Louise Smith was up for doing it. She was such a trouper throughout, a Catholic girl who’d never done any nudity, and she was just so brilliant. But I had to cut it to show it theatrically in the United States.” That cut ended up not being enough for the MPAA, however—its codes still, in 2021, control what aspects of sexuality can be seen on-screen—and Borden ultimately released the film with no rating.
Speaking to Jordan Flaherty at CounterPunch in 2015, Borden remembered that “the idea for the film Working Girls comes from the montage of women’s work in Born in Flames, the sequence of women doing things with their hands, including the shot of a woman putting a condom on a man’s penis,” a shot that had also suffered censorship. Working Girls was released the year before the formation of the AIDS activist group ACT UP New York, and not only does it offer a valuable PSA about the use of prophylactics, it is also haunted by the story of the several girls who “got sick” after sessions with a client called Don. Amid another public-health emergency that has asymmetrically affected poor communities of color, in spring 2020 Borden shared the film via YouTube with the message “Please stay safe, especially sex workers.” Borden noted to me that she was following, not leading: “A lot of radical action has come from the sex industry recently,” including sex-worker mutual aid, starting in March 2020, as Jack Herrera reported for the Nation, and the transnational organizing of the collective of Asian and migrant sex workers Red Canary Song. The importance of the latter’s work has been highlighted, as I write, by the devastating murders of eight people, six of them Asian American women, at three Atlanta-area spas in March 2021.
Sex work is still largely invisible in American cinema, as it is in America: delegitimized, policed, and punished. Its invisibility is a significant contributor to violence against sex workers, including representational violence (they are, all too often, silent victims in episodes of CSI). Since Working Girls, Sean Baker’s Tangerine (2015) has been the only major American fiction feature to center sex workers. Molly leaves the brothel at the end of the film, buying a bunch of flowers from a bodega for her girlfriend on the way home, but her work will have to remain secret.
The film’s closing shot is a repeat of its opening one, only this time it freezes as Molly, spooning Diane, wakes up and opens her eyes, the alarm clock stopped behind her. In the pause as the credits run, foregrounding every worker on the film—including assistant director Vicky Funari, who would codirect Live Nude Girls Unite! (2000) and direct other films, and unit manager Meg McLagan, who would direct Lioness (2008)—there is the sense of a new kind of surplus value, of stopping time to take time for oneself.
At the end of the credits, Molly blinks. The vision of feminist liberation imagined in Regrouping and enacted in Born in Flames is just such a pause, a waking dream on to which we try to hold. Almost alone in American cinema, Working Girls insists that sex workers are not just a belated or tangential inclusion in any such imagining but—in their “poses and affects, now seen in transgressive states, and across the boundaries of sexuality and gender,” and in their intimate knowledge of time, money, and labor—must be centered. Working Girls is, among its serious splendors, an act of solidarity. There’s more of that happening these days, as Borden has noted, but in the face of ever-increasing gentrification amid other forms of violence, we have ever more need of Working Girls to give us pause.