She Come by It Natural by Sarah Smarsh

Author:Sarah Smarsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2020-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

DOLLY PARTON BECOMES THE BOSS

— FALL 2017 —

In the 1980 movie 9 to 5, three fed-up women take on the male boss who berates, gropes, and demeans them. A parable imparting lessons for men and women alike, the movie was for many viewers the first articulation and condemnation of flagrantly, dangerously sexist office culture that had long been accepted as “the way things are” or “boys being boys.”

For Dolly Parton, playing the boss’s objectified secretary wasn’t a stretch. Just a few years prior, she had quit The Porter Wagoner Show, where she had spent years on the payroll of one of Nashville’s most infamous male egos.

“I know all about bosses from Porter Wagoner,” Parton told Entertainment Weekly in 2009, after writing the score for 9 to 5’s Broadway adaptation. “He was a male chauvinist pig too.”

Perhaps that is why, of the three powerhouse female leads—Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin—the least accomplished actress gives, for my money, the most convincing portrayal.

Fonda and Tomlin knew sexism, of course. And Tomlin, the daughter of a factory worker who—as Parton’s father briefly did—left the South for steady work in Detroit, surely knew firsthand the intersections of gender and economic strife. But something sparkles about Parton on-screen, in particular, and it’s not just her frosted eye shadow.

It’s that she was entering the apex of her career—a period in which she would become not only a movie star but a business magnate and global icon. She would do it all sporting a huge platinum-blond wig, skin-tight clothes, and ample cleavage.

She was, perhaps, a third-wave feminist born a generation early, simultaneously defying gender norms and reveling in gender performance before that was a political act. Country girls like me were watching.

I recently attended a screening of 9 to 5 in an Austin, Texas, theater full of women shouting at the screen. People think of the film as a comedy, and that’s how I had remembered it from TV airings when I was a kid. But rewatching it as a woman, I felt a wave of trauma-triggered nausea overcome me when Parton’s character is physically grabbed by her boss. Women in the audience cheered when the lead characters fantasize about murder and laugh when they stuff what they think is their boss’s dead body into the trunk of a car. I realized it is one of the darkest movies ever made about the female experience.

It is also, still, painfully relevant. Thirty-six years after the film’s release, the US president embodies the disgusting male boss. Starring in a reality show in which he got off on delivering the words “you’re fired,” Donald Trump infamously told a female contestant she would look good on her knees. Contestants in the beauty pageants he owned have reported that he had a habit of walking in while they were changing clothes. In these times, 9 to 5 feels so political that one wonders whether it would be greenlighted by a major studio today.

Born the same year 9 to 5 was released, I am now about the age that Parton was when she starred in the film.

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