Different time, same issue
From The Apartment and 9To5 to our current moment of sexual harassment in the workplace.
ON Dec 12, former Price Is Right game show host Bob Barker turned 95, prompting a number of seemingly anodyne birthday tweets from news organisations including USA Today – which linked to an article that contains no mention of the lawsuits in which Barker was named over the years.
Funny, that.
Barker left the show in 2007. There was even a Time magazine story on the culture of the show’s workplace, which includes a history of “complaints – including sexual harassment, racial discrimination, wrongful termination and emotional abuse and intimidation – against Price Is Right producers and its longtime former host Bob Barker (that) depicts an institutionalised attitude that allowed executives to treat models on the show (and female staffers) as second-class citizens”.
That women, particularly women of colour, are often treated as second-class citizens in the workplace is not an aberration. We know this. We’ve known it for years. None of this is new information. And yet here we are in 2018 still trying to root out the rot.
Hollywood itself acknowledged this reality (and profited off it) decades ago when Billy Wilder served up a heaping plate of “get a load of this mess” in 1960’s The Apartment.
Twenty years would go by before 9To5 hit theatres in 1980, fuelled by many of the same issues, but this time with a story focused on the women themselves.
Both films are fiction – but the type of everyday harassment depicted therein remains anything but. Fast forward to earlier this month, when we learned the grisly details of a report prepared by lawyers for CBS investigating the workplace conduct of Les Moonves, the TV network’s former chairman and chief executive.
A few details of note: Lawyers were told by “multiple people that CBS had an employee ‘who was “on call” to perform oral sex’ on Mr. Moonves”.
And at least one board member knew as early as 2007 about an alleged sexual assault by Moonves – but considered it trivial and “said, in effect, ‘we all did that’,” according to the report.
In a recent op-ed for the Hollywood Reporter, former Tribune TV critic Maureen Ryan made this observation: “What the industry needs to do now is move beyond reading the latest exhaustive report about this or that individual and stop assuming things will change if we take out a few bad apples. Folks, the whole barrel of apples is rotten. It needs to be washed out and refiled from the bottom up.”
The movies told as much.
In The Apartment, which won Oscars for Best Picture, Director and Screenplay, Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter, an ambitious if not overly assertive insurance man who’s been swallowed up by a large corporation – in the parlance of the film, he’s just “some schnook that works in the office”.
And he’s easy pickings for his supervisors, who decide Baxter’s one-bedroom apartment shall be made available to them on demand in the evenings when they are cheating on their wives.
It’s literally a quid pro quo scenario: He’s being harassed by proxy – pressured into giving over his apartment for their sexual affairs, or risk a bad performance review. These executives are awful. The worst of them (in part because he hides it behind such a patrician and genteel demeanour) is the director of personnel himself, Mr. Sheldrake, played by Fred MacMurray.
Take that in for a moment. The director of personnel. The man who decides which employees shall rise through the ranks – or lose their jobs entirely – and the man who has slept his way through the office, including his secretary.
What’s maybe more interesting than the movie itself is how we collectively talk about its themes.
Often in reviews, the focus is on Baxter’s untenable situation. Or on Fran’s lovelorn arc.
The structural and institutionalised harassment that fuels the story – remember: “We all did that,” as that real-life CBS board member so nastily quipped – is downplayed or seen as incidental to the meat of the movie.
Revered movie ciritic Roger Ebert’s career was defined by his humanistic view of the stories movies can tell – he was and still is widely read, which makes his observations so influential.
But it’s startling to read his review for 9To5.
In the film, a trio of belittled and sexually harassed office workers – Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton and Jane Fonda – take matters into their own hands when they kidnap their boss, played by Dabney Coleman.
The movie’s early fantasy sequences of eliminating their boss become a semireality – and the back half of the film functions as a real-world fantasy all its own: Women could actually get things done without jerks like this guy around – as they make fundamental changes at work, including a memo that announces: “Effective immediately, employees will be paid equal salaries for equal job levels.”
Ebert’s takeaway: While the movie has a “dash of social commentary”, his interest was primarily Parton’s terrific performance (and I agree with him here; she’s wonderful).
But again, how we talk about movies says as much as the movies themselves.
To Ebert, 9To5wasa “good-hearted, simple-minded comedy that will win a place in film history, I suspect, primarily because it contains the movie debut of Dolly Parton”.
That it depicted the experiences of women in the workplace (and would continue to do so for the next 38 years)? That it validated – on the big screen, no less – what women have been saying for decades? That interested him less, I suppose.
Both films are available to rent via streaming, and they feel as though they were made today. – Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service