“All the Voices That Are Frightening.”: FFC Interviews Lizzie Borden

by Walter Chaw Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls (1986) was foundational for me. Looking for titilation as a young teen in the VHS age, I found instead a sensitive, uncompromising, unfiltered look at sex work as a blue-collar profession that portrayed sex workers as human beings. Neither revelation should be startling, but for a 13-year-old raised in a culture (two cultures) in which women are largely treated as objects for my consumption, it hit me like a thunderbolt.

Ms. Borden shocked me by being aware of my habit of referencing her film in my writing; I’m always surprised when an artist I admire is at all familiar with my work. She continued to show an interest in me in a way that interview subjects seldom do. Indeed, she had done her homework about my writing, and challenged me to contribute to our conversation as an equal–something I was again shocked and even discomfited by, albeit in the best way. Ms. Borden is the real deal.

I teach her seminal Born In Flames (1983) in my Fundamentals of Film and Television course and was thrilled to see Criterion restore the film and reissue it last month on physical media and streaming. I like to alternate Born In Flames with Paris is Burning as examples of both stories from vulnerable populations (queer and minority) and movies that maybe wouldn’t be made today. Who is allowed to tell these stories, and what happens if they’re not platformed by voices considered to be more mainstream? My conversation with Lizzie Borden began with us discussing the notion of permission and, in a broader sense, who in our culture is allowed to create.

LIZZIE BORDEN: You know, that’s a really interesting question, because when I made Born In Flames, I really wanted the Black women in the film to create their own characters and to have their own voices. You know, I didn’t want to put words in their mouths. Back then, it wasn’t like today. I hadn’t seen any films that were like that, you know? Especially set in that world of now what they’ve since called “no wave cinema.” It was a lot of guys kind of doing new wave as no wave, and not a lot of overtly political stuff. You know, maybe Vivienne Dick a little bit, but I really didn’t know any Black women and had to find them. So I felt that if I was really working with them that I would be able to do it, because the film was about Black women. [About their] not having rights, and especially Flo Kennedy being in it, you know, Flo being the matriarch, who in essence was speaking for other Black women… That was sort of what I saw as the conduit to the rest of the story.

FILM FREAK CENTRAL: Tell me more about Flo.
It was such an amazing thing to have Flo in the film. I still, people ask me all the time how I met her, and I’m just really not sure. But when people say to me, “Why don’t you do Born in Flames now?” I always say I can’t. First of all, the community has gone, the energy in L.A. around me is not there, and besides, other women are doing it now. Maybe not in a feature-length film, but as three-minute films. And I don’t feel I have permission anymore, if I ever did. I write scripts, and I don’t know that I necessarily have permission to create too much of a voice that is not mine. Especially now, when there are so many authentic Asian and Latina and Black voices who should tell their own stories, or at least collaborate very, very closely with creators.

Both Born in Flames and Working Girls were collaborations.
Yes. Yes, absolutely. I worked so closely with sex workers, and the writing was by me and a woman who was a sex worker. (Sandra Kay-Ed.) I would not have done it without her, you know, and it was so much a collaboration with people who were there, much more on-the-ground than I was. I did it for a few months, but I still didn’t have that same closeness to the ground, obviously, as women who’ve done it for a really, really long time. I always ask, when I do a Q&A with Working Girls, “Has anybody ever had a job like this?”–not necessarily in the world of sex work–and a lot of men’s hands go up. The best compliment I ever had was a young man who said, “I had a boss just like her,” so we’re not just talking about sex work now but how sex work is like any service-industry job. The idea of this is that this is common, that this kind of erosion of the soul doing jobs like this is common, and what is work? And how are we satisfied by work? How can we find work that is creative for us? Did I read that you spent time in the service industry?

I worked in the service industry for forty years before being able to support myself just on the writing and teaching. It eroded my relationship with the human race.
I think it does erode this relationship that you have with the human race when every relationship is always about, you know, giving on the one hand and taking with the other. When it’s always transactional.

To what degree is capitalism the root of our social problems?
I think capitalism has absolutely played a central role in reshaping how we see one another. Its logic turns everything into a transaction–time, care, even relationships–and rewards competition and accumulation over mutual responsibility. That inevitably erodes the kinds of social commitments that can’t be monetized. But I don’t think capitalism is the only force at work. Patriarchy, racism, and authoritarian structures also weaken our sense of solidarity, often intersecting with capitalism in ways that make it harder to imagine collective alternatives. What I wanted Born in Flames to explore was precisely that tension: How do people come together when every institution around them is designed to divide or contain them? The women in the film are trying to invent another way of being together, outside of those dominant structures. And the fact that, forty years later, we’re still asking these questions tells me how deep the problem runs–but also how persistent the desire for solidarity remains.

Why do you think society sees women as so dangerous?
Because, you know, I hate to say this because I, I don’t have children and never wanted to have children, because I know that if you have children, you can never not have children. And I also had a mother who was very depressed and I thought, no, I don’t wanna inflict that on anyone. But it’s… Women can bear children, and that frightens men. You know, the power that women have that men can’t do the most essential thing that women can do. Thus comes “Handmaid’s Tale”, which is even more relevant now than it was when the series came on television, and what they’re doing now with, oh my God, the Christian National Movement, is–well, here we are again. Women shouldn’t vote, only the man should vote. It’s really frightening. I wonder how some of those wives can abide with that. JD Vance’s wife, who is smart, a lawyer–what are they thinking? But I do think it’s the power to reproduce, and men have to control that. And they only want white children, they wanna destroy children of colour. What do you think it is?

Well, all of that plus sexual repression. So many of our institutions and organizations seem to derive from the desire to suppress female sexuality. There’s something unresolved in them that makes them afraid and unconfident about themselves. Bullies and cowards.
Every film that I’ve done, especially Born in Flames, is just a series of questions. Questions of, you know, what would lead women to pick up arms and blow up the World Trade Center transmission tower so that women can have their voices heard? So the question is really around being heard, the repression of voices, which is so manifest now by the systemic suppression of opposition voices. Strategically now all voices, women’s voices, Black voices, all the voices that are “frightening,” are being taken away. It’s really about the ability to have a dialogue, and get beyond being frightened. To get past what people think are truths about other people. Like the virgin/whore dichotomy with women–like in Working Girls, how it wasn’t about archetypes, it was that these women are workers like anyone else. Look at them that way. Look at them like human beings. What is a dialogue such that people can see other people as human beings and open themselves to different cultures, even as we acknowledge the rifts between cultures? In Los Angeles, for example: Black people live in a different place than white people. Koreans and Japanese and Chinese people and Latinos, totally different places. They speak different languages. Where there’s no communication, there’s fear. How do we find a way to get through the fear in order to communicate? ‘Cause if we don’t…

Honey in Born in Flames (inset: The girls of Working Girls)

“What happens to the women after the last shot of Born in Flames? Well, they get arrested, and obviously I stole a lot from Battle of Algiers, but change has to happen, and one has to keep pushing for change.”

I was just in Greer, South Carolina, the last few days working, and I was afraid, you know? I’m this liberal guy in an ivory tower, I live in a blue state surrounded by all my blue friends, and I was afraid. They’ll hate me. There’s gonna be MAGA everywhere. I was scared. First day, we went to this family-owned restaurant, and I talked to the grandmother and I talked to the daughter and the granddaughters, and their warmth towards me, it was overwhelming. I sat at the table and I cried about it. From shame. I was shaken by how bigoted I had become in talking to people one-on-one. The humanity and the shared fears, the shared aspirations. We’re just people, you know, it’s, these, these platitudes are all true. How do we get to this point where our communication now becomes between human beings rather than ideologies that are not compatible?
Yes. That’s so beautiful. What happened with you, because I have found that to be true, too. However, the question for me… A lot of it was [Born in Flames star] Honey. Honey was from Brownsville. I didn’t know anyone from Brownsville in Brooklyn, and she called herself a “singing evangelist,” and her experience was so different from mine. She maybe got through eighth grade. She was not somebody whose path I would normally cross. Some of her talking to the camera, that final speech, was her interpretation of a Malcolm X speech, and so much of what she said was directly from the heart, and so much was guided from her own religious background, of which I had no common experience. She brought it to the screen. I understand what happened when you were down there in Greer, because I have found that to be true, when I would be in a small space and I end up talking to people, say, on the bus. What is the circle that surrounds us? What I was trying to say earlier was: How do I talk to people if they don’t live anywhere near me? How do I communicate with people who don’t speak my language? With whom I don’t share experiences?

Just this morning, an Asian woman shared my lane in the pool because all the men were sort of in formation–swimmers and splashing a lot. I kind of said, let’s just share my lane, ’cause we both are very calm swimmers. We shared a small space and we communicated. She was so kind and sweet, and I didn’t have to know anything more about her than that for us to make a connection. But how do you create those spaces? How can people communicate if you don’t live in the same places? There is so much segregation because of this, the way we live, that isn’t being addressed at all. So people have fear, let’s say about a trans person, but they have never met a trans person in their life. People’s experience of Latinos might be as a landscaper you see but not as somebody who is doing other things. Maybe the gardener has a beautiful house somewhere and you never get invited there. You never go to dinner there and you never invite them into your home. But you [went] to Greer, and you broke bread. You had the opportunity to talk to them, you know, so that’s kind of going back to Born in Flames. I wanted to bring people together who at first might have some friction with each other. But in a small space, they find commonalities and, in their shared concerns, a way to collaborate on an action.

But I think what I’m missing now is the ability to talk to people who live miles away, you know? Not just physically, but ideologically. Yes, I have fear about the Right. There are places like Orange County where cops live, and when things get really hard, if a car [drives past me on the road] and it’s got an American flag, I’m scared, you know? I’m scared. There’s a lot of rage. How do we talk through the rage? What you are saying is beautiful, because there was no rage, there was genuine communication. And yes, that would be my sense of how we do it. Like in New York… I think New York is different because it gives one the opportunity to, like, be in the same space with people with different experiences just because of public transportation, you know? So very often in New York, there is the opportunity to talk to somebody. It doesn’t often happen. People are silent. But how do we create those spaces where we can know each other?

Part of it is we don’t make our cities habitable for people–we take away places to sit, we criminalize sitting…
In New York, it used to be in a park there were chess boards where anybody could sit and play a game of chess or checkers, and those kinds of random relationships happen. You know, one of the things that hasn’t changed from when I made Born in Flames to now was the thing that women have to worry about their personal safety. Women are afraid of men. Women are really afraid of men. So it’s hard for women to engage with men randomly without having to figure out what they mean. Like, what are they up to? Are they coming onto them? Is it, is it safe? Is it not safe? Do you [still] have to walk with your keys in your hands when you get older? It’s less, it feels. People don’t see you as much as they do when you’re younger, but it’s still there, and for younger women, they live in constant fear about that. They have to close themselves into themselves so often. That’s universal. That’s universal. That’s in every country. I think the question of being able to talk if you see women alone somewhere, like in a restaurant, very often they’re not open to talking to other people. They have a book, they’ve got their food. They just are very isolated because that openness is not culturally available to them.

I know I’m coming back to women, but that is the experience that I have had and women have had through negotiating the world. I mean, in the old days I used to hitchhike everywhere. I went to Wellesley. I didn’t wanna go to Wellesley, I wanted to go to NYU, but my parents thought, yo, no, you have to go to a girl’s school. But it was all Buffys, and I was Jewish. I was–I felt really out of place. So I would hitchhike, but you have to clock who you’re getting into a car with, you know, and then at the heart of it is it was a much different time.

Thank you for calling this out. It’s so easy for me to forget I speak from a real position of privilege as a man. Of course my interactions with strangers are different. I don’t have to worry about anything like that. I maybe should be afraid, but I’m not. Not in the same way. I don’t get sexually harassed constantly.
You know, one of the things that I love the most over the years are Q&As after showing my films, because I don’t feel like the films are mine anymore, they’re just their own entities that have their own beings as they go through the world. I want to hear from audiences. What they feel about the films. And it’s changed. I mean, it changed during Occupy Wall Street with Born in Flames and young men started to relate to the film and not see the women as just strange or weird or, you know, sexual, asexual, or whatever. It wasn’t about sex. The same questions you’re asking me, I wanna know what they think about it because it changes, and they’re the ones out in the world. A lot of them are filmmakers, artists, writers, and they know, they know digital stuff much more. I don’t, I’m not a digital person.

A whole new world of communication.
Yes. They know their way, so I need, I really always need to ask them the questions you’re asking me. I do Q&As around the world, and the last question is almost always, “Are you hopeful?” And I am. I think we have to have hope. What happens to the women after the last shot of Born in Flames? Well, they get arrested, and obviously I stole a lot from Battle of Algiers, but change has to happen, and one has to keep pushing for change. With Working Girls, the question is: what is she gonna do at the end? Well, she may get a sugar daddy, you know, she may go back to work. Because the truth is, after the money she deposited is gone, what is she gonna do if her true passion is photography? So it’s really asking the question of survival. But if you survive, if you want to survive, that’s hope! Yeah. That’s hope.