Working Beauty

thenewinquiry:

The disappearing work-life divide and the feminization of abstract labor in SleepingBeauty

By Malcolm Harris

In the opening scene of Julia Leigh’s debut film SleepingBeauty, Lucy (Emily Browning), our beautiful college-student protagonist, serves as a medical test subject. She leans her head back as the doctor slowly threads a tube down her throat, then fills a balloon in her chest with air while she holds the tube in place. Lucy cooperates excellently and leaves with an envelope of money and a smile.

Her still, submissive choking and gagging lend the scene a heavy erotic charge, an allusion to the sex work the viewer may already know is to come from reviews and trailers. In this first scene, Lucy is already selling her body; the distinction between this and prostitution is a symbolic technicality.

What’s most off-putting in this scene is Lucy’s ability to hold a smile on her face throughout the ordeal. If Lucy’s remaining still while holding the tube down her airway as her body jerks around isn’t work, then I don’t know what is.

Though she usually wears the uniform of an Anthropologie model and often seems to be doing not much at all — there are a few scenes of her cleaning up a coffee shop after working a closing shift and others of her biding her time in the copy room of the office where she’s an assistant — almost all of what we see Lucy do in the film is work. We know she’s working, but she hardly looks like a worker.

But what does a worker look like? Even the most traditional economic models, as well as revolutionary counter-currents, had to deal with changes over time in the character of what they called labor.

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Even though it’s stomach churning and disheartening, this is a great article.