Rabbit Rabbit #8: Kelly Reichardt & the Ways Women Work

Michelle Williams and Hong Chau in Showing Up

I was reading from Patricia Highsmith’s published diary one day in April when I came across this revelatory passage:

“Thank God for work, the only balm in this world. Work, blessed murderer of the monster Time. Work makes the night come, makes hunger, fatigue, and sleep come. And when Time is dying, even makes the telephone ring. Work balms the flayed nerves, washes the eyes so one may see, mends the heart so one may love.”

Highsmith wrote this in the winter of 1944, toward the end of WWII, and on the precipice of her 24th birthday. In the midst of a major depressive period and a novel manuscript that she would soon abandon, Highsmith finds her only solace in working, in getting up in the morning –or, in Highsmith’s case, pulling all-nighters drawing and journaling– and having something to do.

I have discovered recently, especially since reflecting last month on the challenges and pleasures of writing, that one of my greatest interests in life is learning about the different ways that women work. Imagine a woman with a job she is good at. She does it every day. Is she brash and loud, taking charge? Or is she quiet, listening to someone else’s directions? Does she keep a checklist, ticking boxes as the day wears on? How does she eat lunch? Does she listen to music while she works? Will she stop and take a break if she gets tired, or crawl to a finish line?

I thought of these questions, and of Highsmith’s diary entry, when I watched Kelly Reichardt’s latest feature, Showing Up, last month. My viewing experience challenged me in a way I couldn’t quite articulate at first. Reichardt is known as a major player in the ‘slow cinema’ canon, meaning moviemaking that captures the natural and mundane pace of everyday life, resulting in films that are subdued and contemplative, filled with breaths and silences. In other words, it can feel like nothing is happening. It is ignorant to say that ‘nothing happens’ in Reichardt films, but her character-driven approach to both writing and directing challenges the viewer to do the work, so to speak, of thinking deeper about what’s being said.

Showing Up chronicles a few days in the life of Lizzy, a sculptor who works a desk job at her local art college in Oregon, as she prepares for an exhibition. Played by a lovably downcast Michelle Williams, Lizzy sculpts the day away in her garage studio working on a series of small feminine figurines, which she painstakingly models and glazes. Over the meandering course of the movie, we get a sense of Lizzy’s loving yet stressful relationships with her mother, father, and ‘tortured genius’ brother, as well as her general tendency to express excitement almost never, even and especially when important people give her attention.

What interested me most, however, was Lizzy’s relationship with her friend, colleague, and landlord, Jo (played by an exuberant Hong Chau), and the way Reichardt resisted the urge to pit the two women against one another, instead offering a gentle –sometimes hilarious– reflection on the various ways women work.

Jo is what I’d like to call a magnet character– you can’t take your eyes off of her. She’s emotionally expressive, wears Birkenstocks and bandanas, and has hair that cascades down her back. She’s someone you want to be around. Almost inexplicably so, because Jo is also pretty irksome. She’s delayed getting the water heater fixed for weeks, blocking Lizzy from the decency of a hot shower. She throws loud afternoon artist soirees on the porch and then ignores Lizzy’s calls of complaint from behind their shared wall. But she is extremely joyful, which her work clearly reflects. When we first meet her, she is racing down the block, rolling a tire that she fastens onto a tree in her backyard. “Hey, give me a push,” she beckons to a frustrated Lizzy.

And that is what these two women do: they push one another. If not to the brink of mental insanity (even I became angry with Jo for the hot water debacle), then to work a little harder, and to care a little more. When Lizzy’s cat brings a pigeon inside, it is Jo who rescues the injured bird and Lizzy whose guilt from tossing it out the window causes her to obsessively nurse it back to health. Working in tandem, they revive a tiny life.

Lizzy and Jo are polar opposites in the ways they work. Lizzy at night, painting slowly in silence, squinting and babbling to her cat, and Jo macroscopically, blasting music while weaving massive, colorful hanging structures. Because they live in the same building, we can infer that they share a broken water heater and thus Jo does not mind cold showering whatsoever, whereas Lizzy enlists the help of a janitor at the college to unlock the basement bathrooms for her.

On the surface, Jo’s work seems more exciting. “I have two shows, which is insane,” she exclaims to Lizzy. Her shows will also come with a coveted catalog, which will probably lead to new networking opportunities if her beaming personality hasn’t already. Lizzy, on the other hand, runs low on luck. At the final firing, one of her figurines gets torched in the kiln without time for repair, forcing her to display it burnt.

Lizzy gets annoyed by Jo’s fortune –things seem to come easily to her because of the way she acts– but in the end, both women have wonderful shows and maintain a palpable respect for each other. Marlene, a big-deal artist who shows in New York, expresses a desire to connect with Lizzy and learn more about her art. The film ends with an extremely long take of Jo and Lizzy walking home through Portland, chatting about this and that. 

It would be so easy for Showing Up to become a competition for success between two female artists– one who makes good decisions, and one who makes bad ones. But this film isn’t about ‘making it’ in the art world, but what it looks like to show up in the first place and just try. The daily routine of making art, of doing anything in this world that one feels called to do, promises a carousel of joy, discomfort, hardship, and above all, hope.

***

My fascination with women at work undoubtedly stems from my own desire to work. I want more than anything to earn my keep using my imagination to tell stories, whether through writing, acting, or directing; ideally all three at once. Obviously, “the arts” is a nebulous and trying career path to head down, especially fresh out of college in a new city. Right now, I work in food service, babysit, and take odd jobs modeling or copyediting, or jogging past Jeremy Strong in Succession to make money.

Because I have tasked myself with the responsibility of structuring my days, which requires equally fervent amounts of discipline and self-compassion, I have cracked open a deeper meaning to the word “work.” When we ask, “How does she work?’ we ask not only how someone does their job, but also how they function deep down as a person, very nearly on a cellular level. What makes her tick? What does she need? The answers are completely intertwined and different for everyone, and we must seek them out.

This is what compels me about Kelly Reichardt’s films. Foremost, not enough movies tackle these questions specifically about women, but more crucially, Reichardt carefully reveals to us that there is no one way to work –literally and figuratively– that is better than another. She reminds us in Showing Up of two proven facts: a) we know when we are working, and b) it feels great.

All of Reichardt’s women feel the “balm” of work that Highsmith wrote about in her diary, which could also be called a sense of purpose. Even Lizzy, whose love for artmaking is masked under a perpetual pout, feels it. Her frustration and stubbornness are love. Her personal working rhythms mark and carve up time, so fixed in their chaos we cannot imagine them to be otherwise. Jo’s too.

One of my coworkers at my service job works in tech. When I asked her why she takes shifts at a chai shop, she replied, “Oh, I do this for fun. Plus, I’m better at my tech job with it.” I had never considered this before, that a job could be just for fun, an outlet to do something different, thus enriching other areas of work and life. It helped me reframe my thinking around the kinds of work I do now which can so easily feel like a placeholder for something bigger and better.

In the words of Irina Prozorov in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, “I’d rather be anything but a young lady, who wakes at noon, drinks her coffee in bed, and takes two hours to button a dress.” Most of the time, anyway.

P.S. Recommendations: This perfect cold open of Lauren Ambrose in Yellowjackets (on a loop), “Angst in My Pants” by Sparks (also in YJs), and Robert Altman’s epic Nashville (1975) followed by this great Criterion article.