In 1980, Dolly Parton became Doralee Rhodes for the proto-feminist workplace comedy 9 to 5. “Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a livin’ / Barely gettin’ by, it’s all takin’ and no givin’,” she sings in the film’s eponymous theme song. “They just use your mind and they never give you credit / It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it.”
Perhaps a 22-year-old Alice Bag sat in an East Los Angeles movie theater in 1980 and sneered at the silly white women onscreen. Or maybe she identified with Judy’s, Violet’s, and Doralee’s desire to avenge themselves against their “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot” boss, Franklin Hart Jr. Alice Bag was, after all, the bloodthirsty Chicana punk legend who wrote “Violence Girl“: “She’s taken too much of the domesticated world / She’s tearing it to pieces, she’s a violence girl!”
In “77,” the second single off Bag’s upcoming album, Blueprint, Bag is the ghost of female office-comedies-past. Riot Grrrl royals Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and Allison Wolfe of Bratmobile — who both inherited the feminist punk mantle that Alice Bag and the Bags created in the ’70s and also appear on “Turn It Up” — provide guest vocals and appear in the video. They are the Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton to Bag’s Lily Tomlin, each fake-typing in correspondingly colored wigs. They are angry that as of 2012, American women still only earned 77 cents to a man’s dollar.
9 to 5 — the movie, song, musical, et al — has aged into its silliness. Like the actress who played her, Doralee is portrayed as beautiful, busty and unintelligent. Many of the film’s jokes hinge on Judy, Doralee, and Violet occupying roles that their characters weren’t meant to have. Yet in the moments when the trio aren’t accidentally poisoning their boss, Doralee provides the film’s best-aged and still-relevant emotional core. She confronts her harasser boss after he spreads a false rumor that he is having an affair with her.