*This transcript is produced using transcription software and reviewed for quality. Despite our best efforts, some passages may be incomplete or contain errors due to audio quality or software limitations.*
Matthew
Hello and welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. Friends, for us, for any fans of cinema or music, or people who are just a little bit outside the common box, this has been a rough week. We’ve lost Dolly Parton. We’ve lost Tim Curry. Here at Superhero Ethics, we love to talk about the people who’ve had an effect on us, who’ve gotten us to love media and think about it in new ways. We’re going to do an episode on Tim Curry down the road, but today we’re talking about Dolly Parton, a real life superhero if ever there was one, and about her influence, especially through the movie 9 to 5, a workplace revenge fantasy that brought together some of the great actresses of her day, all of whom are still great actresses to this day. I have with me no one else I could imagine for this, Mandy Kaplan. Mandy is the host of the Make Me a Nerd podcast and has been a frequent guest on this show. She, Pete Wright, and I were part of the parenting podcast we did for a while, Once in a Future Parent. Mandy, how are we doing today?
Mandy
I am doing very well, other than grieving the loss of one of my all-time idols.
Matthew
Talk about that. When did Dolly Parton become a part of your life, and why was she so important to you?
Mandy
The answer is very personal. Heads up, everybody, we’re going deep. I developed in the chest area at a very young age, so by seventh grade everyone in school called me Dolly Parton. I definitely knew who she was. I had already seen Nine to Five, and I loved her music, but I didn’t want to be known as the girl with the big boobs. Still, I looked up to her, because yes, she had big boobs, and yes, she was a caricature of herself, but she backed it up with sheer talent like no other, and the purest heart, seemingly.
Matthew
Yeah, there are so many parts of Dolly’s legacy to talk about, and I’m really glad we’re starting here, with that statement about being the caricature. I’ve always thought there’s an interesting dynamic that she really embodied, this idea of, if people are going to think of me this way, I’m going to live into it and play off it, and keep taking advantage of it. It’s funny, because I think that’s how a lot of people, especially people our generation, first encountered her. I didn’t know anything about Dolly Parton as a kid except the size of her chest, because the first time I ever heard her name was Sam telling me the joke, have you seen Dolly Parton’s new shoes? No, neither has she. Then I had to ask my mother to explain it, and she rolled her eyes at the dumb things boys say, but told me about Dolly Parton anyway. Getting ready for this, I watched the movie 9 to 5, which is the main thing we’re going to talk about today, but we’re covering a lot of ground. I also decided to listen to her song Dumb Blonde, which she wrote in 1967. I think it’s one of the first times we see the theme she’d play out for her entire career: yes, she looked like the stereotype, the blonde hair, tight clothes, trashy makeup, the term she herself claimed, given how her mother described it, but she’d break all of people’s opinions of that stereotype. There’s no music video for Dumb Blonde, since they weren’t making music videos in 1967, but there’s a recording of her performing it on a variety show, where the host has such trouble introducing the song by name because you can see how careful he’s trying to be not to call her a dumb blonde. She just says, that’s the song, that’s just who it is. The whole song is about people seeing her as a dumb blonde because she has a big chest and therefore not taking her seriously, and it’s about subverting that: you may think I’m a dumb blonde, but don’t call me a fool.
Mandy
She reworked that song much later in her career for the 9 to 5 musical and called it Backwoods Barbie. It’s the same message: don’t underestimate me, don’t judge a book by its cover. That’s something I feel she’d earned the right to sit back from and say, I don’t have to fight that fight anymore, but she continued to fight it. She really did.
Matthew
Talk a bit about who she was as a person. You mentioned she was one of the sweetest, most wonderful people we’ve seen on this earth. Talk more about that.
Mandy
I’m not a foremost expert, I want to clarify that. I loved her, and I know a bit about her, but legend has it she was kind to absolutely everyone. She was always an outspoken ally for the LGBTQ+ community, because her brand of Christianity is the kind I’m really drawn to, which is let everyone live their lives and don’t judge. As long as you’re not hurting anybody, it’s all good. She was a very generous person, a philanthropist who started organizations to help with children’s illiteracy. One of the first COVID vaccines was funded by Dolly, because she wanted to help people, so she gave millions of dollars to do that. She’s one of a kind. I heard somebody recently in a tribute say that if sainthood were given out, she would qualify. I don’t know much about sainthood.
Matthew
I’m not Catholic either, but that seems appropriate. I’m very far on the left, and I’ve spent a lot of time in leftist circles, and one of the things we often say is there shouldn’t be any billionaires. People hear that and think you don’t want anyone to be rich, but I think Dolly Parton is the perfect response. We don’t think people shouldn’t be rich if they’re successful, we just think it shouldn’t go too far, and a billion dollars seems like a pretty good line to draw. I say that about Dolly because if she had wanted to, she would have been a billionaire. She died with a net worth somewhere around 500 to 600 million dollars, a huge amount, but if you look at how much money she gave away, plus the interest she would have earned on it, she would have easily been a billionaire some time ago. She didn’t want to be. She made the radical decision that 500 million dollars is enough. She gave away so much in so many ways, both in how she gave money away and in how she invested it, even when it was for her own profit, it was thoughtful. One example: after 9 to 5, one of her most famous songs is I Will Always Love You, which most people know from the Whitney Houston version, a recording I think was panned at the time but is such an incredible song and an incredible vocal performance. Dolly owned the song, so she earned a ton of royalties from it, but she was generous about it too, telling Whitney this is your song now, I want you to have it. All the money she took in as royalties, she invested in job creating programs in the Black community Whitney came from. There are just so many ways she showed that sense of responsibility, care, and love for everyone she came into contact with.
Mandy
I don’t know about the last couple of years when her health was failing, but she built Dollywood and used to walk around it, meeting and hugging people. She’d spend time there because she knew it meant so much to people.
Matthew
One of my favorite stories about her is that she took part in a Dolly Parton lookalike contest and decided to exaggerate herself and then lost to a drag queen.
Mandy
Oh, wow, okay. And she was very [unclear] in many ways.
Matthew
Have you seen Ted Lasso?
Mandy
Yes.
Matthew
Ted Lasso brings up a Walt Whitman quote I love, be curious, not judgmental. I think about that with her a lot too, because she was pretty open about growing up in an incredibly poor community in rural Tennessee in the 1940s and ’50s, and having a lot of the ideas about people different from her that you grow up with in that environment. But from the first time she met people who were different from her, her approach was always, I want to learn more about this, I want to know more about this. She didn’t grow up around gay people or trans people, but when she met them, her reaction was, this is something new I want to learn about, instead of judgment. She became very outspoken in her support of queer people, trans people, people of color, and all sorts of communities different from her, partly because, as you said, she was very Christian and saw that as more of God’s creation and its beauty, and partly just because it was different and she wanted to learn about it.
Mandy
And she’d defend to her last breath people’s right to live the way they live. It wasn’t just curiosity followed by a passing phase, it was, I’m curious, and if you’re telling me other people are trying to suppress human rights, then I’m going to stand up and shout. And she did. Her song for the film Transamerica, Traveling Through, is from later in her career, and Matthew, that song guts me. I love it so deeply. I know I’m not supposed to sing on podcasts, but everybody go listen to Traveling Through. It just defines her. It exemplifies her. It’s beautiful. It really is.
Matthew
When I talk about being curious like this, sometimes people land in a place of, well, I don’t support that way of life, but that’s fine. That’s not her. She was very much, this is wonderful, this is great, I love this. I think she’d have been the first to say a lot of her over-exaggerated femininity, the image she became known for, drew from the drag queen community and things like that she’d encountered. I just think that’s wonderful.
Mandy
It seems that way, though I don’t know that firsthand. I do have two dear friends who had the honor of working with her. There’s a Broadway musical coming featuring her life and story, and they got to do a workshop of it. They have all these pictures, and when they were in Tennessee working with Dolly, they told me she just shows up to rehearsal, she’s just with us, she’s one of us. That was about two and a half years ago.
Matthew
That’s amazing.
Mandy
She’s remarkable.
Matthew
To give a plug here, though I think it’s a worthy one, and to draw one more connection before we get to 9 to 5: I went on Mandy’s podcast, Make Me a Nerd, twice to talk about the TV show The Orville and the wonderful storyline they did about gender and transness. One of the conceits of The Orville, which is very much a Star Trek-like show, is that for whatever reason, by the 23rd or 22nd century, the music and culture of the late 20th century, because that’s what the creator loved, is alive and well, and that’s what everyone remembers. There’s a scene where a woman from an alien planet, where women aren’t even supposed to exist, so her very existence is a feminist push in a wonderful way, is looking for something to unite her movement. She finds the song 9 to 5, and she finds Dolly Parton. That song becomes a repeated motif, and in the third season, using sci-fi technology where you can talk to a hologram of someone from the past, she gets to talk to a hologram of Dolly Parton [actress name unclear]. I love the idea that a woman born in a one-room shack with a dozen siblings in East Tennessee in the 1940s gets to be on a spaceship as a hologram in a sci-fi show in the 2200s. That just tears me up.
Mandy
When you talk about her childhood, I can’t get Coat of Many Colors out of my head. She acknowledged, and who knows how she actually felt as an eight-year-old going to school in rags while other kids made fun of her, but her attitude was, yeah, but my mom made this for me. We don’t have fancy clothes like all of you, but we’re happy.
Matthew
She loved growing, but I wouldn’t say she grew beyond her beginnings, because she loved where she came from. She never wrote an elegy for her past, the way some people do when they hate where they’re from, she always talked with pride about loving it. I think that’s part of why the movie and song we’re talking about today, 9 to 5, hits me so hard, because it was one of my first exposures to her work beyond the dumb jokes ten-year-old boys tell each other. If you listen to the words of 9 to 5, it’s a wonderful illustration of the life of the urban working woman in the late 1970s and early 1980s. You tumble out of bed, stumble to the kitchen, pour yourself a cup of ambition, yawn and stretch and try to come to life, and it’s all about working in an office with a boss in the city. She captured that experience so well that I was shocked to learn it’s not where she grew up. I assumed she was from somewhere like Dallas, and that her mother had been a working secretary or something. What amazes me about that song and that movie is that she spent a lot of time talking to women and men office workers of the era about what that life was actually like. Talk about the power of that, the song and the movie.
Mandy
I heard that she really wanted to act, and she wanted to be in 9 to 5, she cared about the script, and they said, but you’re not an actress. But if you’ll write a theme song for the movie, we’ll let you do it. That’s how it came to be. She obviously wanted to tell this story, and Dora Lee, her character, is the dumb blonde, the backwoods Barbie, so it’s a perfect match. She’s so savvy and passionate, and she can’t understand why the women in the office don’t like her, because she’s too pure of heart for this world. I think that’s all Dolly. I wonder if Dora Lee wasn’t originally written with those attributes, and once they cast Dolly, they adjusted the character to fit her. I don’t know, that’s a supposition on my part, but the movie captures this time in history when women were returning to the workplace but still expected to raise the kids and keep the house. It offers the world solutions, like job sharing, one of them coming in the mornings and the other in the afternoons, and daycare right there in the office. By the end, Violet, Lily Tomlin’s character, has basically solved all of America’s problems.
Matthew
For those who haven’t seen the movie, though I strongly recommend you do, it’s often described as a workplace revenge fantasy. The idea is that you have three women all working at the same office, at a company Matthew calls Corporate Amalgamated [exact company name unclear], a nameless, faceless corporation 101, it doesn’t matter what they actually do, but they’re all office workers in some capacity, not just secretaries, and they’re all being horribly disrespected. Each of them represents a part of that experience. Violet has been at the company for years, has a lot of good ideas, but the men keep taking credit for them. Jane Fonda’s character, and Jane Fonda was one of the people who really drove the making of this movie, inspired in part by an actual advocacy organization for women in the workplace called Nine to Five, plays a kind of waspish housewife forced back into the workplace after her husband divorces her for a younger woman. The third is played by Dolly Parton, as you said. The three of them have some tension at first, but bond over their boss, played by Dabney Coleman as the utter caricature of the 1980s male chauvinist pig boss, although a lot of the time you look at this movie and think, actually, the workplace is pretty much like this today too. It sucks. They wind up in a crazy plot full of shenanigans, very much a hijinks kind of movie, where they accidentally kidnap him, and by keeping him out of the office for months, they’re able to make a lot of the workplace changes they wanted, and it all works out. They get flexible schedules, on-site daycare, and full credit given to everyone who does their jobs, not just men taking credit for women’s work. Dabney Coleman comes back and has to eat crow because of everything that’s happened. It’s a ridiculous movie, clearly fantastical, but it’s such a fun movie, and it’s also a great indictment of how awful workplaces can be for everyone, but especially for women.
Mandy
I think this movie didn’t turn men off, because the whole situation these three women are in is really just about fighting to be treated like human beings. It’s not about women being better than men or outsmarting them, it’s just, if only we all behaved with respect and kindness and dignity, the world would be a better place. Everyone can get behind that message, so it’s a savvy movie as well, because men love it too. It’s girl power, sure, but what man could say women don’t deserve equal pay or to have their ideas heard? We know a few, but everyone else is behind that.
Matthew
My research turned up that a lot of people were pretty against the movie at the time, especially because, similar to how we have the trad wife movement today saying women shouldn’t be in the workplace, back then there was still a large portion of people who felt the same way, without the trad wife label attached to it. I think you’re right, and part of the movie’s charm, and I think this is what Dolly Parton could do, is take an idea that many people think they’re against and make it seem like common sense. Of course, why wouldn’t you support this? Look at what actually happens, why would it be a problem? I think that’s part of the brilliance of her.
Mandy
You catch more flies with honey, and everything she says and does sounds sweet. She’s the right messenger. This movie is an enduring success, still going strong decades later with a successful musical, though the musical isn’t quite as good. It’s endured because of the humanity behind it, not just the brilliant performances and hilarious comedy. Everybody can feel good about humankind after watching it.
Matthew
I will say I love the musical, but that might be in large part because I saw it on Broadway with Allison Janney, [the actress who played C.J. Cregg in The West Wing], as Violet Newstead, the Jane Fonda role. It wasn’t great, but I…
Mandy
…just to see her on stage was tough. To me it’s stunt casting, and I could think of a hundred theater actors who would have been better. I love Allison Janney, I think she’s a perfect actress, but she can’t sing.
Matthew
That’s the world where I’m the amateur and you’re the professional. You’re going to see it through much more discerning eyes than I do. For me, it was just, oh, this person I love is on stage.
Mandy
Well, and I’m picky as hell.
Matthew
Yeah, and you should be. That’s fair.
Mandy
I also think it’s interesting, the three actresses in the musical: Allison Janney, Stephanie J. Block as Judy Burnley, and Megan Hilty as Dora Lee, Dorley Rhodes. Janney wasn’t impersonating Lily Tomlin, and Block wasn’t impersonating Jane Fonda, but I think the world wouldn’t have accepted a different version of Dora Lee, so Megan Hilty is imitating Dolly Parton as Dora Lee, and she was perfection. Megan Hilty has too much talent. I just think that’s interesting, it’s not that Jane Fonda isn’t worth imitating, but imagine a world where we went to see 9 to 5 and didn’t get the Dolly we love. Unacceptable.
Matthew
I think you’re right. Part of it is that Jane Fonda, to me, I can think of a lot of Jane Fonda roles that I can also imagine Meryl Streep playing. That’s not to take away from either of those incredibly talented women, but I don’t think they’re quite as one of a kind as Dolly Parton. That’s a good sign of it, even the original casting, you couldn’t imagine that role being played by anyone but Dolly, because it really was Dolly.
Mandy
We’re saying the same thing in different ways. I do love Jane Fonda in this movie, though. It’s uncharacteristically light for her, Jane Fonda has substance, she’s got gravitas, and Judy Burnley flits and blinks through the whole movie, always a little flighty. I think that’s a fun departure for Jane Fonda, who was probably coming off Klute or something very heavy and dark.
Matthew
This isn’t too many years after she was Hanoi Jane, having done so much anti-Vietnam and civil rights advocacy. You’re right, and I don’t know if I’m reading too much into this or if it was intentional, but the word that comes to mind for her character is ditzy, not in a bad way, but she’s someone who probably met her husband in school or college and never really been in the workplace, or at least hasn’t been for twenty years. To me, that pairs well against Dora Lee, because she’s what people imagine Dora Lee to be, the dumb blonde who doesn’t know how to file, but everyone’s happy to have her as a secretary because of how she looks. That contrast, Dora Lee actually being an incredibly capable secretary who’s also capable of putting the boss in his place when he gets handsy, compared to a character who’s really kind of a shrinking violet, her name is even Violet, is one I hadn’t thought about before now.
Mandy
Lily Tomlin is Violet.
Matthew
Oh, you’re right, okay, she’s not a drinking violet then. That would be too perfect. But you get the idea.
Mandy
Hate to dash your dreams there, sorry.
Matthew
No, it’s okay. Every now and then a beautiful idea has to be cursed by an evil fact, I understand these things. Any other last things you want to say about the movie, the power of it, and why you think it was so influential?
Mandy
We should all just do a rewatch. Whether you’ve seen it once or a hundred times, it’s the best of her, and some of the best moviemaking of that era. I love it so dearly.
Matthew
It’s really great, it’s zany, it’s off the wall, it’s funny. And this is kind of bittersweet, but I know a lot of people, both our generation and much younger women in their 20s and early 30s working in office cubicles, have been watching it since Dolly passed and saying, these are the same problems I’m dealing with in my workplace. There’s that level of watching them fight off sexual harassment and thinking about Me Too, that we’re still fighting some of these same fights, which is sad, but it also shows how powerful the movie is and how much we can still relate to it. There are also a lot of subtle ways it’s pretty progressive, even for its time, let alone today. Yes, it’s a movie about three white women, and that’s the main focus, but two of the other women whose rights they’re fighting for are specifically named, a Latina woman and a Black woman. Granted, they don’t get to be part of the advocacy directly, and I think if we’re going to be…
Mandy
…able to do it, and somebody goes by in a wheelchair.
Matthew
Yeah, someone goes by in a wheelchair. It’s progressive in a way that today we’d look at somewhat differently.
Mandy
Tokenism, but there’s a reason for it, and it’s…
Matthew
…tokenism at a time when no one was doing tokenism. Today we’re on step five, but this was doing step one, and that’s still really important.
Mandy
Atta girl, I just had to say it one time. It’s important.
Matthew
I want to close by saying one of the things that’s struck me most since Dolly passed is the breadth of tributes we’ve seen for her. One thing I hadn’t really realized was how much she’d supported other musicians. She was very good friends with Billy Ray Cyrus and was actually godmother to Miley Cyrus, and I think was a real support to Miley through a lot of what she went through, so Miley did a very emotional tribute to her. Pitbull, the rap and reggaeton star, apparently had supported her in ways I don’t fully know about, but he was one of many musicians who heard she’d passed and performed her music at their concerts that night. Jack White of the White Stripes did one of her songs. Eminem and Motley Crue both posted about the musical support she’d given them. The Buckingham Palace Band [exact name unclear], a traditional English military band, did a version of Jolene and 9 to 5 with the big horns and everything. You can find it all on YouTube. If you just search YouTube for tributes, the breadth of people from so many different parts of the world, and so many different musical cultures, whose lives she touched is just breathtaking.
Mandy
Before we wrap, I wanted to talk about Steel Magnolias for a moment. [unclear]
Matthew
I’ve not seen it, I want to.
Mandy
It was a play before it was a movie, so the character of Truvy existed on stage first. She brings pure light and love to it, and even though she’s gossipy and judging other women, you can see she’s angelic through it all. In our little friend group, I named myself [unclear], which is a famous line from Steel Magnolias. You root for her, you care about her. She’s not the main character, but she is that movie, she’s the heart of that movie and that town. I defy you to watch it without crying. You always make me cry, so now I’m going to make you watch Steel Magnolias and cry too.
Matthew
I want to, and I’ll freely admit I didn’t watch it when it came out, because it was popular in a way that got tangled up with sexism, I was in high school at the time, and the joke was that you were whipped, using that sexist language, if you went with your girlfriend to see Steel Magnolias. I’ve definitely come to realize that was a stupid way to think about it. It’s a great movie, I’ve just never gotten around to watching it. We had planned to watch 9 to 5, then Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, then Steel Magnolias was next on the list, but then we had to go watch Clue, because Tim Curry died, and then we had to go watch Transformers, because that voice actor died too. It’s just been a rough week. But Mandy, there’s no one else I could think of, given your musical theater background and how important she’s been to you, since you’ve talked about her before. I’m so glad I could have you on and be part of this conversation.
Mandy
Thank you for reaching out. It’s always wonderful to connect with you, but I hate doing it with a heavy heart. We’re going to turn around and do Make Me a Nerd about Rocky Horror, to honor Tim Curry, so we’ll be together again soon.
Matthew
We’re going to have a lot of fun with that. Thank you again to all of our listeners. Please check out the Make Me a Nerd podcast, Mandy has incredible guests every week, myself included, though most of the other guests are wonderful too. Every week, someone comes on to introduce Mandy to the thing they’re a nerd about, and Mandy, you always bring that curiosity, not judgment. I’ve brought you some things you’ve loved, and some things that weren’t your cup of tea, but you always show up for it. I remember most the conversation about the thing you didn’t like most, what was that again?
Mandy
The Last of Us, I couldn’t do it, it was just too bleak for my little heart.
Matthew
That’s very fair. You were so curious about why I liked it, genuinely interested, and to me that’s very much that Dolly spirit we were talking about, the Walt Whitman idea. So check out that podcast. And check out all the other great podcasts here on the TruStory FM family of podcasts, and check out all the great things we’re doing, and most importantly, may the Force be with you.
