The Real Estate Crisis of For a Good Time, Call… Holds Up 10 Years Later.
The Lauren Miller-Ari Graynor rom-com about women’s friendship For a Good Time, Call… came out ten years ago. Apart from a couple of distasteful, deeply 2010s jokes, the film mostly holds up. What I wasn’t expecting it to do is provide a commentary on 2020s work and living.
The premise of the movie is that Katie (Graynor) needs to find a roommate in order to continue living in her grandmother’s Gramercy Park classic six. Their mutual friend Jesse (Justin Long) reconnects Katie with Lauren (Miller) — who met in college and instantly despised one another — when she breaks up with her boyfriend, is fired from her book publishing job and finds herself in need of real estate and employment. As the two actually get to know and like each other, Lauren and Katie form a phone sex line out of their apartment.
Rewatching For a Good Time, Call… in the midst of a pandemic, I couldn’t help but think of how
sex workers were forced into their homes to perform their services, which led to the explosion and co-option of OnlyFans.
Lauren’s disillusionment at traditional book publishing is apt, with many workers quitting due to low pay and burnout amidst a restructuring of the industry as we know it. Meanwhile, Katie is chronically underemployed, so it makes sense that she’d take her earning potential into her own hands as a self-employed entrepreneur.
But For a Good Time, Call…’s most prescient theme is the real estate crisis. Since many companies have mandated that workers who have been remote — and, thus, may have moved out of the cities where their employers are located — are to return to in-person offices because the pandemic is apparently over, Manhattan rents have skyrocketed to an all-time high of $5000 in July. Of course the only way Katie would be able to afford to live in one of the most exclusive New York neighbourhoods is through inherited wealth.
Had For a Good Time, Call… been made in 2022, the only thing that would have been different is that, instead of a phone sex line, Lauren and Katie would be co-running and OnlyFans.
