Why Jane Fonda thinks ‘9 to 5’ is outdated: “It’s really hard”
Jane Fonda was at the height of her fame when she spearheaded one of the most groundbreaking comedies of the 20th century. She had been nominated for four Oscars and won two at that point, the first in 1972 for playing a sex worker in Klute, and the second in 1979 for the Vietnam War-era drama Coming Home.
Fonda was friends with someone who had set up an organisation for female office workers, and their stories about workplace discrimination inspired her to make a film about three women battling their sexist boss. She brought in Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton to play the other two leads and reworked her idea to be a comedy instead of a drama.
In 9 to 5, Fonda plays Judy, a shy housewife who is forced to take a job as a secretary after her husband leaves her for a younger woman. She quickly befriends Violet (Tomlin), an experienced employee at her new company who trained the man who is now everyone’s boss, Franklin (Dabney Coleman). Judy and Violet also become close with Doralee (Parton), Franklin’s personal secretary who he constantly sexually harasses and tells everyone he’s having an affair with. When the women have finally had enough of his unchecked misogyny and exploitation, they take matters into their own hands.
In 1980, movies starring women were not particularly bankable. Star Wars, Smokey and the Bandit, and the Rocky franchise had been dominating over the previous few years, and even a musical like Grease featured male stars. The idea that an openly feminist workplace comedy starring three women could dominate cinemas was laughable, which was probably why 9 to 5 was made on a scant budget of $10 despite the stature of its three stars. Against all odds, however, it was a huge hit, raking in over $103 million to become the second highest-grossing film of the year behind The Empire Strikes Back.
It was one of those rare films that touched a nerve. It was both perfectly timed and yet ahead of its time. You can watch it today and see the same parallels between the women in the film and women in the workplace now. However, Fonda herself has said that she thinks it hasn’t aged particularly well. It isn’t that things have gotten better for women. On the contrary, things have gotten worse.
“The situation for people who work in offices today in a way is worse, because now, those three women wouldn’t even know who their boss was, probably would never meet him face-to-face,” she said in an interview with Conan O’Brien on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast in 2023. “They’re hired by a contracting company that contracts them out to another company, and so who do you complain to?”
Even worse, she continued, is the fact that companies now use computers to spy on their employees, shifting the balance of power even further away from the workers and towards their anonymous overlords. “It’s really hard,” Fonda said, pointing to what is perhaps the most obvious change since the film came out. “The three of us probably would have had two or three jobs in order to be able to afford the lifestyle that you saw us living at that time.”
All of this adds up to a pretty bleak picture of the present, but perhaps if there is one good thing that could come out of it, it’s another film about the perils of office life produced by Fonda. There is no indication that a sequel is in the works, but if any film deserves one, it’s 9 to 5.
