A Film Canon

If Wall Street drew a spun-gold thread between Manhattan and Long Island, then Working Girl unravels the tangled skein of Staten Island-Manhattan mobility, opening with the sweeping, panoramic wake of the Staten Island ferry, and anamorphically distorting the respective size and status of the two boroughs, until Manhattan becomes a promontory, rather than an island - a mere extension of the mainland, so far as Staten Islanders are concerned, and little more than a series of vantage points onto that southern extremity. At the same time, Nichols transplants the Hudson mouth into a pervasive, moody greyness that offsets the jaunty, inspirational narrative, in which secretary Tess McGill (Melane Griffith) bypasses her suspiciously transparent boss, Katharine (Sigourney Weaver) to propose a merger to executive Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford). It's an ambivalent, nuanced account of corporate gender politics, suggesting that a woman can only hold down an executive job insofar as she inflects it through a simulation of femininity - a simulation reiterated through a gradual replacement of class convergence and mobility with media convergence and mobility. Not only does Tess' merger involve urging her employers to purchase radio networks, as well as television networks, but it stems from her principle of reading, watching and consuming "everything"; an ability to reloop apparently antiquated media back into into an increasingly flexible and sophisticated circuit. It feels as if the film is ultimately designed to disavow this simulation - or to come to a more staid conclusion - but Kevin Wade's script is also anamorphic, a cascade of mild twists that leave the possibility of a corporate feminism open so many times that it remains open, distantly reviving the backstage sisterhoods that cinematised out of the last great depression; a pitch for Gold Diggers Of 1988, with Carly Simon's "Let The Rivers Run" as its showstopper.