Though the history of on-screen representation of sex work is complicated, problematic and often downright offensive, cinema is a medium uniquely suited to depict it. Both industries are fundamentally rooted in performance: as an actor or a sex worker, you craft a persona and become someone slightly outside yourself in order to give the customer or audience member an experience that feels sincere. Both lines of work bring fantasies to life for an exchange, but the person actually doing the work doesn’t get to reap the emotional rewards of illusion — what might be enthralling or euphoric for the client or viewer is often tedious for the worker. Like any job you do day in and out, making people feel for a living can wear you down.
Iconically named and consistently rebellious filmmaker Lizzie Borden is best known for 1983’s Born in Flames, a feminist landmark that’s half scuzzy speculative fiction in the form of a faux documentary and half searing manifesto. Borden’s career expands into greater focus with a new restoration of her 1986 feature Working Girls, a sociologically motivated study of a New York brothel that looks at sex work as strictly business. Originally released by Miramax, Working Girls was held in limbo for many years after Harvey Weinstein made Borden out to be “difficult” and essentially blacklisted her.
Molly (Louise Smith) is a young artist in New York City without many options when it comes to making a viable living and still having some time for her creative work, a situation faced by so many women in the arts. Her frustrations are universal: The money is solid, but the boss is demanding, the clients can be difficult and picky, the hours are dull, and the stress of work adds to the tensions she’s feeling with her partner. Whenever Molly is on the clock but doesn’t have a client, she takes out a little notebook and writes down her earnings — one column for the money she owes her madam, one column for the money she can keep, almost as if more will appear if she stares at the numbers enough.
Born in Flames is a lo-fi transmission from an alternate timeline, where socialism has been enacted on the state level but old divisions of gender, sexuality and race are still entrenched — it’s the rare American film that’s truly revolutionary in both its politics and style. Though it was developed from a tremendous amount of research and time spent with sex workers, Working Girls does not present itself as a documentary like Born in Flames does. But at its core it is a tremendously real film, a sober look at an often sensationalized subject and a thoroughly material analysis of a workplace.
More than sex itself, we see the things around sex, all the maintenance and upkeep, the aesthetic and emotional labor, the nagging of a boss who might act like your friend but still keeps a short leash. Working Girls is a collage of tissues, wet wipes and dollar bills; the girls are constantly having to run little errands and fetch condoms or birth control, just as office workers might make a run for paper or ink. Aside from bookended scenes outside the job, the film rarely ever leaves the brothel, a slightly uncanny and off-kilter studio set: It’s comfortable, but a little stuffy, with a sense the walls are slowly closing in, in the way that any work space will eventually drive you crazy. Given the almost sitcom feeling of its primary location, Working Girls has an appropriately sly sense of humor, built off the kind of natural hijinks and rapport that comes from co-workers stuck in a room together.
While Born in Flames might be radical in the in-your-face, in-the-streets sense, Working Girls is a very different kind of radical film — one that gains its power by showing how sex work, despite the misunderstanding and whorephobic society around it, is so often just as mundane as any other line of work.
