Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Working Girls
1987 · Lizzie Borden · Working Girls on Sightlines
Start with the towels. Before anything we would call a scene gets going in Lizzie Borden's Working Girls, there is the business of getting ready. Towels are stacked, condoms are on hand, the appointment book is open and the money is counted. Then it is counted again. Over the course of the film, the supplies of hygiene get more screen time than anything that looks like desire. You notice this, and then you notice that the film keeps showing them to you. That insistence is its whole wager.
Molly (Louise Smith) went to Yale and is a photographer. She lives with her girlfriend. To pay for a life and a career that ordinary jobs won't fund, she works shifts in an upscale Manhattan brothel that could pass for a therapist's office. The film covers one long workday there. Clients arrive and wait in the front room. Terms are settled, and the women and their clients go to the bedrooms. Afterward there is cleanup and the client leaves. The women retreat to the kitchen to sit for a minute. The phone rings, and Lucy, the madam, frets about costs. Then the cycle starts over.
It helps to know how the movies had usually told this story. Gilles Deleuze, writing about cinema in the 1980s, described a dominant kind of film he called the movement-image. In it, a character takes in a situation and acts to change it, and the editing carries us along that chain of cause and effect. The prostitution film had run on that engine for decades: the fallen woman, the rescue, the punishment, the rock bottom, the redemption. Every scene drove toward a situation transformed. Borden takes the engine apart. Her film has no arc of falling or saving. An appointment ends where it began, with a towel, some cash and a line in the book. The tensions that exist belong to any workplace: a difficult client, a scheduling squeeze, a boss who skims, and a shift that won't end.
Deleuze had a name for the time this kind of film lets in: dead time (temps mort). These are stretches where nothing moves the story forward and ordinary life is simply held on screen. His second cinema book opens with a famous example that André Bazin had already celebrated: the young maid in De Sica's Umberto D. getting up and making coffee, filmed for its own sake. Bazin praised neorealism for trusting the duration of the found world. Deleuze went further and argued that once such moments take over, a new kind of image is born, one in which we feel time instead of watching it being used up by action. In Working Girls, dead time is the subject. Think of the women in the kitchen between clients, or someone waiting in the front room for the door. Even in the bedroom, the clock is the real other party. Notice how often someone checks it.
The film works through a second concept: the gest. Deleuze borrowed the word from Brecht. It names a posture or attitude that reveals a social relation rather than a private feeling. He found this "cinema of the body" in two filmmakers who happen to be Borden's direct ancestors: John Cassavetes, whose Faces built American independent acting out of ensemble talk in ordinary rooms, and Chantal Akerman, whose Jeanne Dielman files a housewife's afternoon prostitution between peeling potatoes and setting the table. In both, the body carries time and history before it carries a plot. Borden's women are bodies at work. Lingerie is a uniform, worn the way a waitress wears an apron. Smith plays Molly watchful, dry and a little detached, and that detachment reads as a skill: a professional keeping her boundaries. Lucy's penny-pinching and her careful euphemisms are the gest of a small-business owner. Ellen McElduff makes her funny, and she is also the clearest picture of the economy that runs the house. When the women speak, their posture tells you who is waiting, who is occupied, who is resting and who is in charge. The hierarchy is legible in where people sit.
Judy Irola's camera is the instrument of all this, and her cinematography won an award at the festival in Park City that was about to become Sundance. The light is even. The palette is the beige of an office that wants to look like a home. Bodies are shown frankly and without spectacle. The camera watches. It does not caress. That restraint is a theoretical position put into practice. In Riddles of the Sphinx, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen had tried to show women's paid and unpaid labor while refusing the pleasures of classical identification, and they did it in an austere, essayistic form. Borden keeps the refusal and drops the austerity. You can follow Working Girls the way you follow any story about a job, and the critique comes in through the procedure. You are never lectured.
The film's ancestry is precise. From Barbara Loden's Wanda it takes 16mm observation of a woman's economic dependence, flat performance and the absence of moral framing. From Claudia Weill's Girlfriends it takes the low-budget feminist day-in-the-life about young women, work and money. From Frederick Wiseman's High School it takes the institutional method: watch one bounded space, its routines and its transactions, without narration or verdict. Irola brings that documentary look into a rented apartment. This was a striking turn for Borden. Her previous feature, Born in Flames, was a collaged, agitational science fiction of many voices. Here she chose sustained naturalism and a single house.
What Borden did to filmmaking was reclassify a subject. Prostitution moved out of the genre of vice and into the genre of occupation, and that move was made in the form of the film, not just in its message. The repetition, the props and the clock-watching are the argument. Molly's queerness gets the same treatment. It is a lived fact of her life, with a partner at home, and never a crisis the plot has to resolve. The film's politics are structural because its structure is a workday.
So watch it as a shift. Count the times money changes hands. Watch the towels. Watch where Molly's eyes go in the minutes between appointments, when the film has nothing to make her do. Then ask the question the film keeps quietly open: what happens to a person when a job like this is filmed as just a job, without tragedy or glamour, and you are left alone with the hours.
Concepts in play
- Dead time (temps mort) — The day-in-the-life structure: kitchen breaks between clients, waiting in the front room, cleanups and clock-watching. Procedural beats that advance no plot are the film's structure.
- The gest — Lingerie treated as a uniform; Lucy's penny-pinching and euphemistic management; staging that sets out who is waiting, occupied or resting and the house hierarchy, with the madam's office as its command center.
- Cinema of the body (attitudes and postures) — Bodies shown matter-of-factly at work; Louise Smith's watchful, detached performance as a managed professional posture; a flat acting style built from behavior rather than scenes, inherited from Faces and Jeanne Dielman.
- The movement-image (refused) — The film rejects the prostitution genre's sensory-motor arc of fall, rescue, punishment and catharsis. Appointments cycle without transforming the situation, and the tensions are routine workplace frictions.