The centerpiece of the film is a sequence where the three main characters smoke a joint (something that I also think you wouldn’t see in a mass-market light comedy aimed at middle-class women today) and visualize their elaborate fantasies of what they would do to their terrible boss (Dabney Coleman) if they could. Dolly Parton’s scene is fairly tame: she turns the tables on his constant sexual harassment, then lassos and hog-ties him and (here’s where it gets a little much) roasts him over a fire. Jane Fonda, who was horrified by Coleman’s hunting trophies, imagines pursuing him through the office with a shotgun, before eventually cornering him in a bathroom stall and and shooting him at point-blank range. In light of high-profile workplace shootings that have taken place in the last 20 years (not that I think such things are new by any means), I can’t imagine any studio would greenlight this today. (As a side note, Jane Fonda is dressed in a very fetching hunting outfit in this scene, whereas in the “real life” aspects of the movie, she’s dressed quite dowdily.) Lily Tomlin’s sequence is the best, though: she’s dressed as Disney’s Snow White and tailed by cute cartoon animals, but the action takes its cue from the Warner Brothers cartoons as she poison’s Coleman’s coffee (while the adorable animals egg him on), watches him drink it (he reacts similarly cartoonishly, with his head whirling around and smoke coming out of his ears), and then kicks him out the window of his skyscraper office.

In the rest of the movie, certain aspects of these violent scenarios play out in “real life”; they are much more “realistic” in those scenes, but still fairly broad and cartoonish. What most struck me was how light and airy the movie was, despite the fact that the bulk of it involves the three principals kidnapping their boss at gunpoint and keeping him hostage in his own home (dressed in a weird S&M mishmosh to keep him restrained, no less). I think if the movie were made today, the violent aspects would almost demand that it be done as a very black comedy, and maybe that’s how it was perceived at the time, but in the present-day context its unrelenting sunniness made it all the more unsettling.

(I should add that I actually really liked the movie, perhaps not least because it was violent but not graphic — there’s something very visceral about hearing bones break and seeing blood that bothers me, though even if I know that would be the logical result of on-screen violence and I don’t see it, that doesn’t really resonate.)

Anyway, sorry for the long comment, but I had to talk about it with someone.

On the pleasures of witnessing violence, and the range of moral and immoral reasons for such enjoyment, George MacDonald Fraser’s Black Ajax, which I have recommended for other reasons before, is very good.