It is a boring song but it works every time.

Her willingness to keep treading water without the promise of anything better to come, her ability to communicate nonthreateningly and stay quiet at the right times are parts of what Nina Power describes in the chapter “The Feminization of Labor” in One Dimensional Woman:

All work has become women’s work, even that of men. No wonder the young professional woman beams down at us from real estate billboards as the paradigmatic image of achievement … At this point in economic time, those character traits [of precarious professionality] are remarkably feminine, which is why the pragmatic, enthusiastic professional woman is the symbol of the world or work as a whole.

Sometimes Lucy looks like she could be on one of those billboards, or at least the ones for community colleges, but the film is about the other times as well. It turns out the models in the pictures only own one set of clothing. Lucy persists and survives using what Lauren Berlant describes in her book on precarity, Cruel Optimism, as “durable norms of adaptation,” repeating the play of control and submission that characterizes precarity but under circumstances of her choosing. Whether Lucy is fucking guys at the bar based on the fall of a coin, taking drugs from strangers, or repeating ironic formalities (“And how are you miss?” “Oh very well, very well. And you sir?”) over glasses of vodka with a terminally self-destructive friend, she finds ways to make her being in the world sting less. Or the right amount. This is a nonrevolutionary enduring, a body’s holding together in a sea of dismembering tugs.