I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been drawn to cleaning in literature and films. Quite simply, I’m drawn to the Industry of People. People cleaning in stories usually means something has a new beginning, something is at the start of being made right. Like when the dwarfs in Snow White get to work cleaning I feel all happy and excited as they whistle while they work; as they sweep, wash, polish, and dump out sand and dirty water. I love it! If a place is getting cleaned, I imagine the beauty and serenity of its cleanliness. If a place is getting cleaned, I imagine a new beginning is around the corner.
Besides cleaning scenes, I can’t help but to be drawn to the cleaning ladies themselves, in everything from children’s books to all different kinds of movies! I have always loved The Secret Garden movie and I’m very fond of the Yorkshire maid, Martha, an older sister to Dickon. She sasses Mary Lennox, yet in a gentle way, and with all her energy and industry, gives little Mary an inkling of how wonderful it feels to be active, industrious, self-supporting!
Speaking of industrious and self-supporting, once discovered, I have always been a great admirer of Jane Eyre, as she set out in the world, self-determined as any could be, teaching, cleaning, you name it, she could do it! She was like the Nineteenth Century Wonder Woman in puritanical garb.
Jumping, or rather surfing across oceans, centuries, and mediums, and we come to my favorite surfer girl movie, Blue Crush. The surfer girls are just barely scraping by, working as maids at an upscale hotel in Hawaii. Despite the obvious low pay, and the bitchy boss, the girls do their jobs with a sense of mischievous fun, perfection, and even an eye for opportunity, like when they use a guest’s computer to look up the upcoming surfing competition.
We see them playfully spritzing glass doors and each other with Windex, we see them folding the end square of the toilet paper roll into a neat triangle with precision, and we see the main character, Anne Marie, neatly arranging a towel after using it when she is off-duty.
And through all of these cleaning rituals, I feel that sense of order and freshness that cleaning always instills. I can just smell the Windex and the fresh linens. I adore it when one girl puts her lips on one side of the glass and the other spritzes her in what would be right in the mouth if the glass wasn’t there. They wipe the spritz away and the window is perfect, shiny, clean.
But best of all, uniformed Anne Marie walks down to the private guest beach with a trash can under her arm. In front of the intimidating NFL player who owns up to the room number his maid calls out, Anne Marie, with her rubber-gloved hand, pulls a used condom from the can, and produces some toilet tissue. The NFL player gets “schooled by the maid” on how to properly dispose of his used condom after sex in a hotel room. I find Anne Marie’s bold confrontation tantalizing! For, like children of the olden days, maids, or cleaning ladies, are to be seen (perhaps in hallways discretely pushing a neat cart of supplies and linens) and not heard.
Another incredibly notable mention is Sunshine Cleaning, a 2008 movie boasting both Amy Adams and Emily Blunt. Rose, a thirty-something, single, ex-high school cheerleader, goes from being an employee of a residential cleaning company to having her own biohazard cleanup company. We see her sense of accomplishment, pride, and philanthropical achievement grow as she and her sister Norah clean sites of disaster or tragedy – a home gunshot suicide, and an elderly woman found dead in her trailer. Stellar, though, is when Rose attends a baby shower made up of former high school cheering squad buddies and they ask her what she’s doing with her life.
Full of pride, Rose explains her new business: cleaning up after crime scenes and other such biohazards. As the snobby ex-cheerleaders come to understanding, Rose tries to explain the sense of satisfaction she gets after a job well done, knowing she’s helped after other people’s tragedies and losses. The ladies are aghast, having zero understanding of why anyone would subject themselves to such labor and putrefaction. Me, however, I was beaming with understanding! I’m there with you, Rose, all the way. Give me a book or movie with a cleaning lady in it, and I’m in my element.
