To those of us who have toiled at fast food joints designed to be as alienating and as profitable as possible, the feeling is a painfully recognizable one: After eight hours of working on your feet, peddling here and there—but mostly staying in the same, agonizingly static position—your knees begin to give, your back to seize, and your feet to cramp. Lisa (Regina Hall), the manager of a Hooters knockoff located somewhere between the highways and byways of Austin, Texas, knows the physical cost of streamlined labor all too well. On the single day portrayed in Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls, this tenacious yet tender middle-aged black woman mostly pulls off the virtuosic juggling act demanded of her. As new recruits are hired (to keep up with the accelerated turnover at low-income jobs) and long-standing ones wrangled, the troupe of young, scantily-clad waitresses prepare for the day ahead. Drinks will be poured and cars will be washed, egos lifted and libidos titillated, all in a mildly provocative manner that never upends the illusion that this is a “mainstream,” as Lisa likes to repeat—“mainstream!”—establishment.
Support the Girls is a rollicking workplace comedy, timed to the fast-pace of life and labor at Double Whammies, where the long list of things to do include but are not limited to: appeasing the white, financially unstable owner who is under threat by a forthcoming competitor; keeping an eye out for Lisa’s son, who loiters in the back of the restaurant, occupied with various digital gizmos; and monitoring disruptive newbies, who are eager to push the legal boundaries of what services a bar and grill akin to “Chili’s or Applebees”—“but with better tips,” the bubbly Maci (Haley Lu Richardson) interjects—can provide. For all of its faults and deficiencies, this kitschy crapshoot is a god-forsaken refuge to those resistant to change. It’s an old-fashioned “family place”, simple and quaint, homey and local—which is to say: it’s owned by a racist who won’t assign more than one black waitress per shift, patronized by a disenfranchised ensemble who enjoy ogling the workers more than they do eating the food, and staffed on the cheap with young women who can barely afford their rent. Oh, and how could I neglect to mention the fry cook’s cousin, who Lisa happens upon in the opening minutes of the film, jammed stuck in an air duct directly above the restaurant’s safe?
In such an erratic environment, immediate and direct choices must be made, and Bujalski, true to his mumblecore roots in films like Funny Ha Ha and Beeswax, makes proficient use of the most unobtrusive of formal means. Support the Girls appears to think on its feet, adapting to an ever-morphing environment that can go from flirtation to assault without any prior indications. Largely composed of handheld shots, the film documents the procedures and routines that have become muscle memory, immerses us into the ongoing operation, and thus reveals unforeseen circumstances that alter the pre-set pace set by corporate standardization. As with Results, Bujalski’s previous film, in many ways a template for how he would approach the broad comedy here, Support the Girls forgoes a narrative trajectory for a density of incident, our characters bustling between destinations—from tap to table, from errand back to work—only to reach a point where they can continue living as they were. Because if they’re living, they’ll sure as hell have to keep working.
Emotional labour goes unpaid, but it’s as, if not more, demanding than the overtly physical tasks necessary for the bar’s ongoing operations. Support the Girls is about a system of support bound together by capital: waitresses, bolstered by Lisa who provides emotional and financial aid, offer their attention—or at the very least, a performance of attentiveness—to those who indirectly pay for these services through the cost of food, drinks, and tips. Among the regulars, are: a middle-aged queer woman who covertly expresses her sexuality; “the professor,” a rich, old and stereotypically perverted man Maci secretly shags; and an awkward 30-something, who asks for a date with Danyelle (Shayna McHayle, a.k.a. Junglepussy, an independent rapper from New York City), in exchange for the sound system needed to run the night’s pay-per-view.In all of the above cases, life and labor have become inextricably and ineluctably one. The system isn’t content with just your body; it also wants your soul.
Months later, as Lisa, Maci, and Danyelle end up broke and jobless, standing on a precipice overlooking a sea of highways and overpasses—the whole world seemingly in front of them—they are left with one final option, to assert their individuality, frustration and self-worth by letting out a flurry of primal shrieks. However cathartic this release of pent-up emotion might initially seem, Bujalski is wise to leave us with one final, cursed detail: these cries have gone unnoticed, imperceptible within the din of rush-hour traffic.
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