Give Me Half a Budget and...Any 20 Something Actress

I woke up yesterday morning feeling a bit of a hot mess. I had stayed up too late binge-watching Lucifer, put off blow-drying my hair too long, and forgot my lunch. (I did make it to work on time and looking put together, however.) When searching for a movie screen-cap for “hot mess” to post on Instagram, I came across one of Brittany Murphy from Uptown Girls and it reminded me of my former post about the disappearance of mid-budget Erotic Thrillers (which you can read here). Much like these thrillers, the once-popular “20-something woman gets a new job and it radically changes her life” subgenre is disappearing. That makes me sad because I LOVE these movies. So, I decided to write about these films, why they were so popular, and what we’ll lose if they vanish.

Something that I noticed while watching the late-80s to mid-90s thrillers was a fear of a changing domestic landscape. Probably the most egregious example is the 1994 film Disclosure. I write about that movie a lot in the Thrillers post, but during that time there was fervent cultural anxiety about women not only mass entering the workplace but also doing so in high earning and managerial positions. Even films that weren’t thrillers, like Baby Boom, feature a woman trying to have it all and then tie everything up happily by having her move to the country with domesticity on her mind, easing any viewer’s potential anxiety. (9 to 5 is a HUGE exception to this rule, of course.) By the time the 00s had rolled around that anxiety had lessened and we began to see hyper-masculine female antagonists become replaced by more friendly, out-going, and often quite feminine PROtagonists. The Devil Wears Prada goes out of its way to prove that Miranda is the haunting product of the previous era; she serves as both an inspiration and warning to Andy, who we will definitely get back too.

Enter: Elle Woods. How could we have this conversation without the self-assured girly girl turned self-assured girly girl attorney? We can’t. Legally Blonde is a landmark movie for the chick flick genre. Instead of a film filled with warnings about giving up things to be successful, audiences got to see someone “stay true to” herself and champion femininity in the workplace. This was a jarring turn from films like Baby Boom, and it started a trend of coming-of-age female characters driven by their JOB. Elle may have started down the path because of a man, but eventually, she did it for herself and the value that it brought her. Throughout the movies that I watched with this topic in mind that was a clear trend. While the leading ladies may have men in their lives, none of these guys are in any way part of the success story. It is certainly true that there were plenty of films released about the career girl that needs to chill, and the man child that forces his way into her life to help her do that (many of them starring Katharine Heigel). It is also worth noting that the other popular 2000s Reese Witherspoon vehicle, Sweet Home Alabama, leans much more in the “Baby Boom” direction; ending in our protagonist leaving a successful career in the NYC Fashion Scene and returning to the country to her husband. However, the massive switch from fear of women with white-collar careers to uplifting them deserves to be noticed.

Movies didn’t just stop there, however. There was another, totally separate, type of working-woman success story in the 00s: The Hot Mess Gets it Together. This version of the story starts with girls who need to grow up and eventually do. That was a common enough theme in chick-flicks already but this era is notable because for the first time there is very little help from the love interest. Uptown Girls and The Nanny Diaries, two extremely similar titles released four years apart, are especially interesting. In each film the two lost (or in the case of Uptown Girls lost and immature) women grow and change because of how children show them to see the world. The children, though, are NOT the end of the stories. Each of the two protagonists in these films leaves their nanny jobs under bad circumstances but move on to promising white-collar careers. Not accidentally either, the message is clear: they grew up, learned a lot, and can handle a big girl workplace. Probably one of the worst films to come out of the total mess category, however, was Confessions of a Shopaholic. Now, I am going to be fully transparent here: I skipped this one while doing my homework for this post and I have not seen it since it came out. That’s on purpose because I remember hating it. What I can tell you though is that a woman is in an impossible amount of debt from high-end shopping and gets an ironic job as a financial advice columnist. She’s somehow really good at it even though she can’t take her own advice. Eventually, she starts to improve her personal finances just as she’s called out as a fraud…and well, you can watch the rest. The gist is, though, that through her job she has grown into a much more capable woman and earns her place AND a new boyfriend—again, AS A BONUS, not because he helped her professionally.

The popularity of these movies, and the long-standing “classic” status of a few of them, speaks volumes about the early to mid-2000s. Women working was no longer an issue, and in fact, we were ready to encourage it. Legally Blonde inspired millennial girls to grow up and become Elle Woods. If ever there was a doubt that representation is important, these films and how they portray what it ACTUALLY means to be an independent, self-confident woman who earns her own money should be considered. Certainly, many of them are filled with problematic messages or dialogue, and not all of them aged well. Credit is merited though, and it’s worth thinking about keeping the core of movies like Legally Blonde at the heart of any female representation. Especially in the era of Me-Too and a rise in grassroots feminism, you would expect that this type of movie would sky-rocket. So…what happened?

I told you we would get back to Andy Sachs. My guess is throughout this post many of you were wondering: why hasn’t she talked about The Devil Wears Prada yet? It definitely could have been mentioned next to Legally Blonde—Andy wasn’t exactly a hot mess when started, she was confident in herself and had a lot together. And her skill sets from before her employment helped her navigate a foreign industry successfully—remember when she was able to name drop the ambassador that slipped Emily’s mind? There is a difference though, and that difference is important. Unlike Elle, Andy loses herself in the world of high fashion. She falls into brazen consumerism and corporatism, defends her abusive, gaslighting boss, and watches her personal life crumble around her as she skyrockets to the top. (She didn’t have help from her friends at all though, and they were definitely in the wrong.) The Devil Wears Prada makes it clear—sometimes you can’t have it all, and you need to be willing to make a choice. Andy chooses her dreams and her true self but doesn’t revert back to the woman she was at the start of the film. The message of this film is important to what happened to movies of the category because it was an early sign of what women (and men) would be feeling in the not-too-far-future.

Workplace-based films have taken a darker tone than the predecessors we discussed. The new woman working on-screen has fragmented. All of the movies that we covered have common overlaps—they’re white-collar and…white. We live in an era demanding more representation. Both racial and class. Furthermore, economic strains over the last decade or so have brought a skeptism of capitalism as a system and people are now asking: why should we have to be so upbeat in an often-toxic workplace? Many of the films of working women today have fragmented along with these concerns. Movies like The Assistant (which I would LOVE to write about in a comparison piece against The Devil Wears Prada) zero in on the many types of abuse and terror that far too many women experience at work. American Honey for all its faults (and there are many) shows how vulnerable it is to be a poor and working-class 20 something woman..and it doesn’t flinch once. Little Woods does something similar while also showing how all systemic issues can intersect with one another, why the issues matter, and how it can HURT women trying to get it together. While there will always be cheesy rom-coms and chick flicks with workplace settings, the era of a woman coming into her career and herself simultaneously is gone. Instead, it’s been replaced by themes that are much bleaker and also much more real. I still haven’t decided how I feel about this. On the one hand, the reality is that not every woman has the privilege of a safe work environment with plenty of room to grow and it’s important to be honest about that. It’s also important to be honest about the fact that killing yourself for a job is probably not going to get you to the top of a corporate ladder. On the other hand, there should be room for ten-year-old girls to look up at the screen and see a successful, happy woman, true to herself, pioneering her way through a law firm. I look forward to the movie that strikes the balance between the two.

This was the second in my Mid-Budget Magic series. Eventually, I’ll be getting to the 90s goofy comedies (you’re up, Jim Carey) as well as the rom-coms from the 80s-90s that always starred Meg Ryan or Julia Roberts. Now that I’m really getting settled into my new home I hope to be back to write more and to finish my Decades challenge as well.