Working Girls: Have You Ever Heard of Surplus Value?

Conceptual spaces, too, were being gentrified, with the emergence of antisex feminism that saw queer filmmakers such as Borden, her friend Sheila McLaughlin (thanked on Working Girls), Abigail Child, Barbara Hammer, and Yvonne Rainer (also thanked) challenged over their depictions of sexuality and the body. Molly needs money to keep shooting her intense portraiture of queer friends and family (images provided by Nan Goldin)—at a time when aesthetics had also become turbocapitalized by the visual language of advertising. While she waits for a john, she leafs through an issue of Amateur Photographer magazine placed on the coffee table in the brothel’s bougie reception area, all beige sofas and decanters. The magazine, by contrast, is full of violent, exposing, highly stylized images in saturated colors that render women’s bodies as commodities. Molly—like the film—is a skilled navigator, carving out a space in which to represent and experience not only sexuality but also labor on terms she can, to some extent, control. Although they’re usually mentioned in the same breath only through titular confusion, Working Girls could productively be read as a less romantic older sister to Mike Nichols’s Working Girl (1988), where the solution to workplace harassment, sexism, and capitalism isn’t to become the #girlboss but to get out. When Molly asks Lucy, “Have you ever heard of surplus value?”—calling Lucy out on increasing her skim from the workers’ earnings—Lucy hears it as Molly showing off her college education (something Lucy has used as a lure to sell her financial adviser, Joseph, on a session with Molly), but Molly is asking as a precursor to reclaiming that value for herself.

For Borden, the film is as much about money as it is about sex—or, more precisely, about how sex (as identity, as activity) is shaped by money. In a 2017 interview with Christoph Huber for Cinema Scope, she noted, “In Working Girls, I basically ask, What is worse, forty hours a week in some boring office job, or eight hours in a brothel? It depends on what you can handle. Some people can’t deal with it, but is renting out your body for eight hours really worse than renting your mind for forty hours by, say, working at Kinko’s?” The reference to Kinko’s is instructive. Molly and her fellow workers Gina (Marusia Zach), Dawn (Amanda Goodwin), Debbie (Carla-Maria Sorey), April (Janne Peters), and Mary (Helen Nicholas) not only do office work between clients, they also produce facsimiles, ones that are performed with their bodies. Serving clients drinks, asking them about their work and its emotional toll, even giving dating advice—even when not offering the “girlfriend experience,” the working girls exemplify Arlie Russell Hochschild’s term emotional labor, coined in her 1983 book The Managed Heart to refer to managing one’s own emotions in paid work.

“There’s a lot of that happening these days”: Molly’s pointed comment to Miles could also refer to the film as a whole, in its reflection on the all-consuming nature of paid work—and particularly women’s work—under neoliberal capitalism. Rather than employees, the women are freelancers from whose earnings Lucy takes a significant percentage, and whose hours are subject to her judgment. The workers pay for their own condoms, lube, douches, and food. They also cheat the boss when they can, logging one-hour sessions as halves. Molly keeps meticulous notes of her earnings as well as writing down the (adjusted) figures in the brothel’s official ledger. Writing in the Chicago Reader in a 1991 review, Pat Graham referred to the film’s point of view as “Marxian”—with Borden “revealing, like an anthropologist on a meticulous structural binge, the social dynamics of the trade.” 

Thus, the film’s surplus value is in the doubling of its conceptual framing: on the one hand, its theoretical background of a grassroots Marxist feminism that places labor politics front and center, and on the other, its aesthetic conceptualism, particularly its striking intertwined use of the frame, lighting, and sound to think with the spaces of sex work toward expressionism. With its explicit parallels to the global postcolonial movement of Third Cinema, and likewise influenced by Jean-Luc Godard and Gillo Pontecorvo, Borden’s filmmaking is unusual even within the American avant-garde for its consistent commitment to a continually developing political aesthetics. As Vera Dika notes in her 2012 study of the downtown New York art scene, The (Moving) Pictures Generation, Borden’s second and third films destabilize “both established avant-garde and mainstream film practices” through their focus on “the cinematic body, its poses and affects, now seen in transgressive states, and across the boundaries of sexuality and gender.” 

Working Girls’ cinematic language, developed with director of photography Judy Irola, operates exactly to create transgressive states to frame the working girls’ poses and affects. Many shots in the film feature canted reflections in the numerous mirrors, which also provide some light and depth within the claustrophobic interiors while at the same time marking the absence of windows and circadian light. Just as frequent are shots through half-open doors, playing knowingly with psychoanalytic film theory’s “keyhole” reading of the cinematic experience (“There’s nothing Oedipal going on here,” says Molly to the much older Joseph). More striking are the shots that keep the space of the reception area varied and dynamic to mark the differential tensions of scenes between workers, between workers and clients, and between workers and the boss. The camera peers through the banister or, in one dramatic instance, from behind the liquor cabinet. As Borden noted to Huber, “so many shots are obviously set up, with weird angles.” These trick and canted angles are paired with another classically expressionist touch: dramatic and dynamic lighting. “In the second shift,” Borden continued, “the lighting goes from bright to dark and she has clients who make her feel bad.”

In an essay in the 2006 book Understanding Representation, which she also edited, Wendy Helsby argues that Working Girls’ “arrhythmic and atonal music effectively ‘triggers’ a heightened mode of attention to what is on the screen . . . while the editing abbreviates the scenes into a set of ‘emblematic’ moments (‘snapshots’).” Emblematic and arrhythmic, the film is thus exactly expressionist, delivering a deliberately heightened, theatrical aesthetic that underlines its nature as a Brechtian amorality play. With its many scenes of on-the-job conversation—in which the proverbial “watercooler” topics range from inserting a diaphragm (to which the Motion Picture Association of America objected strongly) and prostate stimulation to ordering takeout and cleaning the kitchen—the film is a Lehrstück, a learning play, in which all kinds of social and political education circulate among the women. Dawn begs, and even offers to bribe, Molly to write her essay on “the curious nature of communist charisma” (to which Molly responds sarcastically, “I’m already renting my body, I don’t want to sell my mind”), while later Molly gets educated on her class assumptions by April, who upbraids her middle-class colleague for asserting that she should quit sex work and sell the jewelry she makes (designed for the film by Monifa Edwards).