America is Once Again Working Girl
It's a quiet Saturday afternoon in Dallas after one of the most consequential weeks in American history, and I am on the couch under a duvet watching Working Girl, a fabulous film I have not seen in ages. Mike Nichols made it in 1988, and it is bright, beautiful and optimistic. It is set in New York City, and the Twin Towers appear throughout. As was typical of 1980s romantic comedies and most American films of the 20th century, there are no openly gay characters.
As the film progresses, I find myself watching three things: women in the workplace, and whether things have improved for them; the September 11 still to come, and what it will do to Lower Manhattan and the country; and the seeming absence of gay men from American films of the 20th century, even though gay men are part of everyday life in the real world. My four collages take up that last absence and put two gay characters into the film.
Women in the Workplace
Tess McGill, played by Melanie Griffith, is a Staten Island secretary with a business degree from night school. She begins the film at a secretary's desk outside her boss's office and ends it with a window, a door and a secretary of her own. In 1988, that office signals that she has arrived.
Since then, women's pay has improved, but slowly. In 1988, women working full time, year-round earned 65 percent of what men earned. In 2025, they earned 84 cents for every dollar men earned. If the gap keeps narrowing at the rate it did from 2000 to 2025, equal pay will not arrive until 2071. The gap is wider for most women of color: compared with white, non-Hispanic men, Black women earned 64 cents and Hispanic women 60 cents.
September 11 and Lower Manhattan
Before 2001, almost every film and television show set in New York City included a shot of the Twin Towers as a symbol of progressive modernity and American success. Working Girl is no exception. Seeing the towers today, in any context, is always sad. The film is also a record of Lower Manhattan before September 11. Tess's office lobby is the lobby of 7 World Trade Center, with Alexander Calder's red sculpture Bent Propeller visible through the glass doors. Her new office in the final scene is in One Chase Manhattan Plaza, a few blocks away.
Tragically on September 11, 2001, 2,752 people died in Lower Manhattan. 7 World Trade Center collapsed and crushed the Calder sculpture featured in Working Girl. Fourteen million square feet of office space was damaged or destroyed, 65,000 jobs were lost or relocated, and more than 20,000 residents were displaced. One Chase Manhattan Plaza still stands.
The Men Hollywood Left Out
For decades, American films kept gay men off the screen. From the 1930s, the Hollywood Production Code stated that "sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden." The code was gone by 1988, but an upbeat studio comedy still had no place for a gay man. Eight years later, Mike Nichols made The Birdcage, a major studio comedy with a gay couple in the leading roles, shown with warmth and affection instead of as a tragedy. It marked a dramatic change in the film industry's representation of gay men and in his own oeuvre as a filmmaker.
In Working Girl, Alec Baldwin plays Mick Dugan, Tess's philandering boyfriend. Tess comes home on her birthday and finds him in bed with Doreen. My four collages imagine she finds him in bed with Jason, his best friend from work instead. Mick tells her he loves her, that it is only sex with Jason, and that it has nothing to do with her. She still leaves him, and the plot stays the same. The scene would have worked in the film, and added surprising depth, but in 1988 it was not something the film could do. As such, I am doing it now with my four digital collages.
Mick is not only a 1980s story. In a New York City Department of Health survey, almost 10 percent of men who called themselves straight had had sex with a man in the previous year, and 70 percent of those men were married. Nationally, about 3.3 percent of American men report sex with another man in the past year. Because these men keep their lives hidden, every count of them is likely too low.
A Hopeful Note
Working Girl ends on an uplifting note, and I still find the film inspiring. Nearly 40 years on, women are still paid less than men, Lower Manhattan still carries the scars of 9/11, and men like Mick are still keeping secrets. Even so, in the days after the most dramatic midterm election in 100 years, the pursuit of justice and a better world remains strong. It is the right film for this weekend. America is indeed Working Girl again.
— Behan
Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Monthly Labor Review (July 1990); Center for American Progress, analysis of U.S. Census Bureau, "Income in the United States: 2025" (September 2026); AFI Catalog, Working Girl (1988); On Location Tours, Working Girl filming locations; National September 11 Memorial & Museum, Bent Propeller fragment; Downtown Alliance, "The Post-9/11 Triumph of Lower Manhattan" (2012); EBSCO Research Starters, "Hollywood Bans 'Sexual Perversion' in Films"; Pathela et al., Annals of Internal Medicine (2006); Bennett et al., JMIR Public Health and Surveillance (2024).