For reasons that don’t need exploring at this juncture, I was in the mood to rewatch two big business movies of the 1980s: The Secret of My Success (dir. Herbert Ross, 1987) and Working Girl (dir. Mike Nichols, 1988). 

Eighties business movies are something of their own minigenre – see, e.g., Trading Places, Wall Street, and Baby Boom – but the reason Secret of My Success and Working Girl are worth comparing is that they basically tell the same story, but with the genders flipped.

Both films are about young business naïfs (Michael J. Fox and Melanie Griffith, respectively), who have jobs at the bottom of the corporate ladder (mail room, secretary).  Frustrated that their talents and skills are being overlooked, both impersonate corporate executives, colonizing vacant offices and aggressively pursuing their innovative business strategies.  There is plenty of farce as they juggle their dual identities, and both enter into conflicted romances with executives who have been taken in by the charade.  Ultimately, their identities are revealed but their talents recognized, and they are rewarded with the jobs (and love interests) they deserve.

But despite the nearly mirror-image plots, the two could not be more different in social message.

In The Secret of My Success, Michael J. Fox plays a young college graduate, raised in farm country and new to the big city.  He’s been hired for a junior executive position but when he arrives on his first day, he finds his job has disappeared in a wave of layoffs.  He can’t find new work because of his lack of experience, and because employers are only interested in hiring minority women, not white men.

His parents suggest he seek a job from a distant uncle, who just happens to head a multinational conglomerate.  The uncle puts him in the mailroom – an indignity not to be borne – which is what prompts Fox to embark on his grand ruse.  It turns out that he has greater insight, smarts, and diligence than any of his colleagues. 

In other words, according to this movie, even though Fox is just out of college with no work experience, he is entitled to a management job on the strength of nepotism, and it is the height of injustice that he’s expected to work his way up through corporate ranks. 

In Working Girl, by contrast, Melanie Griffith plays a girl from the wrong side of the tracks (Staten Island), who has been trying to climb the corporate ladder for years.  She fought through night school to get her degree; since then, she’s struggled at a variety of low-status business jobs, trying to learn whatever she could along the way.  What’s held her back, explicitly, is sexism and classism.  When she ultimately snaps and begins her ruse, it’s because the game is stacked against her – as she puts it at the end of the film: “You can bend the rules plenty once you get upstairs but not while you’re trying to get there, and if you’re someone like me, you can’t get there without bending the rules.”  Notably, she’s talented and insightful, but the movie revolves around the fact that she has one particular good idea – unlike Fox, who essentially is ready to restructure the company after a couple of months. 

Working Girl, then, is about forcing open the doors of the business world to people who have historically been locked out; Secret of My Success is about how, well, people who look like Michael J Fox are just naturally entitled to great jobs. 

I’m not saying the politics of Working Girl are above reproach – Sigourney Weaver’s evil-businesswoman character ultimately bears the brunt of the film’s criticism, blunting the feminist message – but the movie goes out of its way to indict the business world for excluding people who don’t begin life with privilege.  Secret of My Success does the other thing.