Lizzie Borden, the filmmaker who named herself after the 19th-century woman acquitted of axe-murdering her parents, has always been a self-styled rebel. Coming up in the downtown New York art scene in the ’70s, she thrust herself into an art practice that embraced unpredictability, endurance, and otherness. Her critically acclaimed 1983 cult film, Born in Flames, which boldly blurred the lines of fiction and documentation, is a landmark of independent cinema that stands utterly apart from the Hollywood system, the traditional art world, and the vocation of filmmaking itself. Borden held on to her instincts as a novice director, refusing to conform to a mainly white, patriarchal standard of moviemaking and instead making it up as she went along.
Now, at long last, the unrepentant feminist imaginary she built in collaboration with various artists, performers, and friends is being canonized. Her 1986 film, Working Girls, about a group of sex workers working a shift at a well-kept Manhattan brothel, was released as a Criterion DVD and Blu-ray on July 13.
Working Girls is astonishing in its perceptiveness, depicting sex work in relation to labor exploitation, sexism, racism, and homophobia, while maintaining an alternately light and melodramatic tone. The film follows Molly (Louise Smith), a white, Yale-educated photographer who lives with her partner, a Black woman, and their child. But we don’t get to luxuriate in their blissful domesticity. Instead, Molly kisses her partner goodbye and hops on her bike to attend work at a brothel managed by the prim and superficial Lucy (Ellen McElduff). It’s good money and an increasingly bad time, a bargain that initially makes sense for Molly; how else will she make it as an artist? Today, as sex work gradually receives more thoughtful consideration in the public sphere, Working Girls reemerges as an indelible work of art.
Vanity Fair spoke to Borden about the legacy of her films, the freedoms and dangers involved in sex work, getting put in movie jail by Harvey Weinstein, and the costs of working with a big budget.
Vanity Fair: I first saw Working Girls years ago, I think in college, and was astonished by it then. But there’s a particular resonance in rewatching it now, because so many more people are at least passingly familiar with the world of sex work. What’s been your experience of the general culture learning more about this very private world you depicted in 1986?
Lizzie Borden: The film itself doesn’t change, but the world changes, and then our perspectives change. That aspect is always fascinating to me—but it’s interesting that this change is also partly due to changes in communication among sex workers. When I first showed Working Girls, we did panels with sex workers in New York and in San Francisco. And I met people like Margo St. James and also Carol Leigh, who coined the term “sex worker,” although it wasn’t in parlance back then. And they were all in communication with each other.
But openly discussing sex work wasn’t a thing, through the ’90s. There was a lot of shame involved, and it was very underground, though there was global knowledge about it. And then, eventually, through social media, it exploded—for some reason now, there’s major communication. And it feels as if there’s a different kind of pride among sex workers—though not everyone, obviously. In so many countries, the work is still so deeply underground, and even here to some extent. But right now, there is a push towards criminalization, so there’s something to fight against as a community.
And I sometimes notice that in social media, in general, there’s more ability to connect with other sex workers, including strippers and dom workers et cetera, and even give and receive advice on how to do the work safely. And that shared knowledge is so important.
What about that aspect of danger? The film avoids alarmism, but the women’s vulnerability isn’t ignored.
With Working Girls, it’s a brothel, which is less dangerous than being on the street. However, when we were working on the Blu-ray for Criterion, a sex worker pointed out to me, “You can see the danger there.” These women in the film are always thinking, “Is it a cop?” They have to ask the johns to “make yourself comfortable” [i.e. to undress] in order to prove they’re not cops. So there’s always that current of danger running through, and when I was making it, I was less conscious of that.
There’s a sense that, because Molly allows her clients an extra level of intimacy—kissing them on the mouth and offering them detailed life advice—she is opening herself up to an additional level of danger. The Paul character, with whom Molly seems to have a strong rapport, eventually turns out to be the most sinister of these men. When you were talking to sex workers about their lives, did this idea of emotional labor come up a lot?
It was just thinking about the work one chooses, and wondering, “What is that trade off?” And in terms of everyone I knew who was working in that particular space, at that particular time, “Why choose that, in terms of the options available?” Do you work in a Xerox place for eight or 10 hours a day, being so exhausted at the end of it, you don’t have time to do your creative work? Or do you work in a brothel like [the one in the film] a couple of times a week? And what does one feel [about their choice]?
I was also thinking about the idea society poses that a woman shouldn’t give away this precious thing. What is this precious thing? Is it your body? Is it numbing repetition? What does the labor of sex work do to your mind? But then, you bring up the very interesting point of emotional labor, and also what hurts. It’s physically exhausting to work at most jobs that are just regular jobs. Workers get back problems; their bodies are broken. The emotional distress that’s caused from working at a brothel, it’s a whole different thing.
The way I tried to structure the script was to show how, in a day, Molly is allowing herself to do the number of clients that she knows she can handle. But then the villain, Lucy—who is a capitalist—compels her against her will to work a double shift, and then just keeps piling on her regulars. Perhaps Molly could have handled Paul in the daytime, because she was surrounded by women who would have been a chorus of support for her. But she was emotionally exhausted, and she couldn’t take that game. Ironically, the best compliment I ever got about the film was from a guy who said, “I had a boss just like that.”
If you have a more conventional desk job, there’s a kind of game you play: You create some performance of the work you’re doing from 9 to 5. And the level of that performance is often reflected in how you get paid or even promoted. But, at the brothel, it’s almost the inverse. These women put in extra time with clients so they can take more money home. They are the business, but Lucy, who obviously owns the means of production—which is to say the apartment, the supplies, and the system that allows the women to operate with some measure of safety—has more control.
You’re right. And what that made me think of, is in offices, the way that people take the pens and pencils home. “Well, I’m going to take some supplies, because that’s what’s owed me for the extra I put in.” And the extra always goes without saying, because nobody is ever really quite compensated for the work. And especially during the pandemic and working from home, if you’re doing research, let’s say, on somebody who you’re going to be talking to, and going down some rabbit hole, and then you find yourself spending an hour looking at something else—who can put chains on your brain, or your time? What is time?
Lucy’s refusal to see what she is doing with this business is represented in her flagrantly showing the girls the fancy things she bought. Basically telling the girls, “If you play your cards right, you can do the same. You can be what I am”—to have a brothel, see a married man, and find a way to get him to give you things. Which is the ultimate capitalist position. It’s the idea that that’s the only option.
I was struck by the scenes of Molly logging her earnings, and how doing that is a way to maybe remind herself why she’s doing it, why she’s taking these risks.
Exactly that. She’s adding up the money from each client, and then having two different columns. One is the amount she made, and then the amount she is giving Lucy. I’m sure Lucy knows what the women are doing, and I’m sure Lucy did it when she was a working girl, very quickly finding out, “Well, if I am the madam, I don’t have to do all those things. I can just get other women to do them for me.”
There’s this moment where there’s a new girl working at the brothel, and she’s Black and very beautiful, and a very well-dressed Black man comes in and dismisses her. I thought that scene was so ahead of its time in recognizing the dynamics of what might happen between a Black woman and man in this space. Lucy’s boyfriend, who is white, is kind of looking at this woman with interest, but this Black man is not interested. In fact, he seems offended by her presence.
To me that was the most complex scene in the whole film, because there’s such racism. And still today, the racism in brothels and clubs hasn’t changed. But that a Black man would come in and the last person he’d want to see is a Black woman—he’d want to see the blonde whatever, and that Lucy would be oblivious to all that. And she is obviously the most beautiful of all, and it’s just that moment, that triangulation, would be there. Obviously now there are all-black strip clubs, but in New York, it can still be like this.
And there’s such rage about this in so many strip clubs. They will only have one or two Black strippers, and they have to be a certain color. And it’s infuriating. Atlanta is different. There are so many clubs that just cater to thick bodies, and it’s all twerking, and it’s all Black and it’s very cool, but that’s Atlanta. But New York is so fucked up.
What was it like to get this film made? It has an unusual narrative structure, and a mix of tones—it feels almost like a sitcom before it becomes a melodrama.
Exactly. It was supposed to be funny.
I came from the art world, and was more influenced by people making films downtown and art. And I thought, “It’s going to take as long as it’s going to take.” The reason I made Born in Flames is because I was really disenchanted by the art world, because everything was white, everything was middle class. There were maybe three black artists getting recognition. One was Adrian Piper. And I just thought, “There have to be other voices and simultaneous voices.” So for five years, it was about trying to find a multiplicity of voices. And second wave feminism really affected me, and then it made me question everything.
After Born in Flames, I wanted to do something which didn’t take five years, but I could also do downtown in my loft. And I had everything I needed. I had all the tools of production. I had a few grants—D.A. Pennebaker helped me get one. I had my rent money in escrow because of complications with my loft. And, I just thought I’ll get in the can. And then thankfully, there were two women at Alternate Current, who came to help me get money after that, to finish Working Girls.
There was a woman who helped me with the script who was a really long time working girl then ended up at the last moment being in the film; because a lot of the nudity, one of the women who was going to play a part left. She had never acted before, and she was lovely. So there were actors and non-actors in the film. I had an editing machine in my loft, I could edit as long as I needed to.
I can’t remember who saw it for placement in the Cannes Film Festival, for one of the side bars, the Directors’ Fortnight. I had no idea what Cannes would be like. I had to borrow clothes once I was there. I was like, “Oh, my God, everybody’s so dressy.” I mean, I shot it for $100,000. I had a camera that Spike Lee had used to shoot She’s Gotta Have It. Three other filmmakers used that same camera before it got stolen.
I didn’t have any sense of it showing in the larger film world. And then what happened was that it got picked up by Miramax. There were a couple of other smaller companies that wanted it. But Miramax—at one point I think Bob Weinstein came in with a suitcase filled with $25,000 [and] said, “well, we’ll give you this much more.” This was one of his first films. And the way they advertised it was very… It was not the way we wanted. But what did we know about advertising anyway? The idea of who it was for was not something in our minds.
You’ve spoken before about how being with Miramax eventually led you into a place where your filmmaking didn’t feel like your work.
This happened not with Working Girls, but with the next film I did with them, Love Crimes. That ended up not being the film I intended to do, which was starting from a really interesting script by Allan Moyle, and then became something else. It was not just that Moyle’s script was cut up by them and other people, but the whole thing eventually put me into film jail—which was also a phenomenon that happens to women more than men. Not only did it give me post-traumatic stress disorder for a long time, but it speaks to a larger issue. And then I also found out that Sean Young [the star of Love Crimes], who was also a complicated character in her own right, was a #MeToo victim of Harvey Weinstein’s. [Weinstein has denied all allegations of nonconsensual sex.]
I had come from a place of innocence, which was Born in Flames and Working Girls. I did have the means of production in my hands. I did write the scripts, more or less, along with the women I worked with, who wrote their own speeches and created their own characters. And I edited the films, and editing is a way of controlling the voice at the very end.
And with Love Crimes, I don’t know that they ever had any intention to do Allan Moyle’s script [Editor’s Note: The final film co-credits Laurie Frank as screenwriter], which I really thought was brilliant. In working with larger budgets—and that wasn’t such a huge budget, it was maybe 6 or 7 million, but it was huge compared to $300,000—you give up so much autonomy, and there are so many people you have to please. And unless you have people who really understand and support what you’re trying to do on every level, it doesn’t work. There’s so few people who have final cut and unless you do, it’s not you coming through.
I didn’t know any of this. And I didn’t know that I could walk off in the second week. But I could see clearly that it wasn’t going to pan out. Things were falling apart. And Harvey, as you may have read, he wouldn’t let me take my name off of it. He said if I walked, he would destroy my career—which he did anyway, by saying I was difficult. And I didn’t know where the difficult label came from.
Everywhere I would turn, it would be like, I was difficult. I said, “Wait, I was the most accommodating person in the world.” Everyone else who he did that to, he said that to, they were destroyed. They were actors like Mira Sorvino, [who claimed he sexually harassed them], and other women who he assaulted.
For a long time I didn’t say anything, because the damage he did to women who he’d actually touched or raped or hurt physically was so much more horrendous. I feel like it’s taken me a long time to get out of movie jail and do more projects. And I just have to say, in a kind of Susan Sontag Aesthetics of Silence way, my voice will be picked up where I last left it. But it’s okay that it took extra time, because these women who have been physically attacked, their trauma is deeper.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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