Office Space

You may remember the ad campaign for 1999's Office Space. The commercial clips included the exchange, "You're been missing quite a bit of work lately"—"I wouldn't exactly say I've been missing it, Bob," and a guy cleaning a fish at his cubicle and tossing its guts on a pile of forms. The tagline was, simply: "Work Sucks."

It looked like a movie with a one-joke premise, a white-collar Take this Job and Shove It (a cover of which song plays over its end credits) or live-action Dilbert. We're taking another look at it now not only because its themes are so in sympathy with the sorts of issues that interest LiP—the bland, hateful hegemony of corporate culture and ways we can fight it—but, more importantly, because it's one of the funniest films to come out in years. But at the heart of all comedy is rage, and beneath its broad caricatures and gags, Office Space is an angry film, in dead earnest, condemning not just the absurdities of the workplace but its humiliations and cruelty.

Office Space was the live-action directorial debut of Mike Judge, creator of Beavis & Butthead and King of the Hill, and some critics complained that its characters were just as cartoonish as Beavis or Boomhauer. The film was, in fact, based on a series of animated shorts Judge did for Saturday Night Live, but anyone who's ever worked in an office, or just spent time in real life, knows that caricature can be the truest form of portraiture.

Judge's uncanny ear for the ugly tics and mannerisms of modern American English have made some of his characters cultural icons , and in this film his actors' impersonations of universally recognizable types are just as creepily accurate: passively aggressive asshole manager, Bill Lumberg, his lips pursed, prefaces every prissy reprimand or unreasonable demand with the vague affirmation, "hmmm… yyyeeahhhh..." The eponymous star of the SNL shorts, Milton, is a toadlike office misfit who blinks through half-inch-thick glasses, talks to himself in a frightened, defensive mutter—"I… I was told I could listen to my radio at a reasonable...a reasonable volume"—and clings to his precious Swingline stapler as though it were job security.

"Hmmm… yyyeeahhhh..." | Peter Gibbon (Ron Livingston)'s banally diabolical boss (played by Gary Cole) clocks his late arrival.

One character, good ol' boy next-door neighbor Lawrence, with his moustache and receding mullet, is a creation worthy of the Coen brothers. When asked what he would do with a million dollars, he doesn't hesitate: "I'll tell you what I'd do, man, two chicks at the same time, man." He is not kidding.

Seldom has a film so unflinchingly catalogued the accumulation of little frustrations and indignities that compose an average white-collar working day. We see our protagonist, Peter Gibbon, trapped in stop-and-start commuter traffic, switching lanes only to get stuck again and watch as the lane he's just left finally starts to move; listening to the singsong repetition of a receptionist's "just a moment," as maddening as a stuck record or barking dog; getting the same friendly, informal ass-chewing from two different bosses; and, finally, lying awake at night being tortured by the echoes of the office's beeps and chatter. "Ever since I started working, every single day in my life has been worse than the day before," he explains. "So that means that every single day that you see me—that's the worst day of my life."

Pretty much everyone in Office Space seems on the verge of a workplace shooting spree. Peter's best friends at the office share an unhappy bond; celebrity homonym Michael Bolton has to go through his life politely reciting, "No, it's just a coincidence," through his teeth, while no one even tries to pronounce Samir Nayeenanajar's last name. They're both barely repressing just as much rage as Peter: stuck in the traffic jam, Michael Bolton sings along to violent gangsta rap, quieting down abruptly and discreetly locking his door when he sees an actual black man selling flowers on the median, while Samir pounds his steering wheel and screams, "Mothershitter, son of an ass!" Joanna (Jennifer Aniston), the girl Peter covertly adores from afar, waitresses at "Chotchke's," a restaurant where a "fun" atmosphere is humorlessly enforced and she's required to wear no fewer than fifteen pieces of "flair" to "express herself."

Peter snaps out of his quiet, seething passivity when his impatient and ambitious girlfriend pushes him into a session with an "occupational hypnotherapist" who suddenly keels over dead while Peter's still under suggestion. It's the same sort of magical intervention as when Jim Carrey's forced to tell the truth in Liar, Liar or Jimmy Stewart meets the giant talking rabbit in Harvey; it gives Peter license to act out the audience's wish-fulfillment fantasies and tell the sorts of obvious truths that usually go unspoken, and Judge the chance to suspend the rules of real-life actions and consequences. Peter sleeps in until three on a Saturday he's supposed to work, shows up at the office sporadically, unshaved in jeans and a flannel shirt, and swerves neatly around his boss without a word when he steps peremptorily into his path to give him a little talking-to.

"My only motivation is not getting fired," he tells two efficiency experts who've been brought in to fire people. "…I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual work." Upper management reacts to the threat of an insider's intelligent, well-informed criticism in its standard way—by offering to promote him from fuckee to fucker, a well-paid suit with four people "under him."

The fun-and-games part of the film ends when Peter learns that Michael and Samir are among those slated for downsizing. That's when he has his great political awakening: "It's not just about me and my dream of doing nothing—it's about all of us, together!" He enlists his friends in an obviously Superman III-derived computer embezzlement scheme, and for a short time they're empowered to the point of drunken breakdancing. There's even a rap-video parody when the three of them take Michael's personal nemesis, the office copier, out to a field and stomp the shit out of it.

Fucker to Fuckee | Efficiency experts overseeing the downsizing of Initech attempt to transform Peter's corporate lot in life.

But just as they're initiating their Stick-it-to-the-Man scam, they hear a cautionary tale about a man who suddenly Got What He'd Always Wanted. Tom Synkowski, a thirty-year-employee of the firm, is the one who advised them earlier in the film that what they had to do was to come up with just one brilliant idea that would make enough money that they'd never have to work again—"like that guy that invented the pet rock." It's at the very moment that they're implementing their own version of his plan that they hear about an accident that's made his dream come true by providing him with a seven-figure settlement.

But money, it turns out, doesn't buy Tom freedom or happiness—just the opposite. When they see him at his celebratory barbecue, he's beaming up from a wheelchair, completely immobilized in plaster casts, plastic splints, braces, slings, and a stainless-steel halo, unable even to laugh without pain. What's more, he's finally manufactured a prototype of his own lifelong pet-rock brainchild, which turns out to be pitifully stupid—a Twister-like board game called "Jump to Conclusions."

The flashback in which we see what happened to Tom is one of the strangest, most disturbing scenes in the film, unexpectedly dissonant in tone. The malicious dork who's telling the story cracks himself up with the anecdote of how Smykowski, who'd been fired by the company, attempted suicide by carbon monoxide inhalation in his garage: "Check it out, that wife of his comes home early from work and catches him, so he tries to play it off like nothin' happened… and as he's lookin' at her, he decides he wants to live!" His derisive snort is jarring over what we see onscreen: a man caught in the embarrassing act of trying to kill himself, offering a lame excuse to his beloved wife. "I was having some trouble with the shifter here, it's jammed," he coughs. "I couldn't get it into drive...I...I mean reverse."

This isn't funny, and it isn't supposed to be. It's a moment of true pathos. This is an example of an inappropriately ironic voiceover belied by a heartbreakingly honest image, inviting us to join in callous cynicism at a scene that's visually presented as tender and sad.

Here is the film's most unfunny and earnest indictment of the corporate culture—it shows us that it kills people. The argument isn't so much ideological as existential. (Even Peter realizes he sounds like an idiot when he tries to make radical political statements—"You know, the Nazis had 'flair' that they made the Jews wear!") We learn that it wasn't the silly fantasy-film device of the hypnotic suggestion that changed Peter's attitude; it was witnessing the hypnotist's fatal heart attack. "We don't have a lot of time on this Earth," he tells Michael over beers. "We weren't meant to spend it this way!" That urgent truth is reinforced by one image after another throughout the film, from the old man with his walker outpacing Peter in the traffic jam to the crippled Synkowski telling him that "if you hang in long enough, good things can happen in this life!" to the excruciatingly slow digital sands running out of the hourglass icon on his computer screen.

Peter Gibbon actually undergoes a fairly complicated political metamorphosis in the course of the story—from sullen, resentful subservience, to self-indulgent dropping out, to a sense of solidarity with his co-workers, to sabotage and theft—only to conclude, finally, that you can be happy if you go out with Jennifer Aniston. It's her character who delivers the film's moral, which smells a lot like a TV sitcom's: "Peter, most people don't like their jobs. But you go out there and try to find something that makes you happy."

"I may never be happy with my job," he says. "But I think that, if I could be with you, that I could be happy with my life." Believing that the Right Person can be enough to compensate for an empty, demeaning life and make you content has got be one of the leading causes of divorce. To Judge's credit, Joanna does shut Peter up with a kiss, but it's nowhere near soon enough.

It may be inevitable that the resolution of Office Space is more problematic and unsatisfying than its hilarious exposition and development, for the same reason that coming up with solutions to intractable social problems is always trickier than pointing those problems out. The most childishly gratifying act of defiance, Milton's, is the Gordian-knot solution of burning down the building—there's a gorgeous shot of a Cathy cartoon tacked to a cubicle wall curling up and blackening to ash.

But property damage is just a gesture—not an answer. In the film's denouement, we see three responses to the oppression of the office: Peter joins good ol' boy and next-door neighbor Lawrence in working on a construction site, Samir and Michael find jobs at another computer firm, and Milton ends up the inadvertent beneficiary of their embezzlement, retired to a tropical Paradise. The fact that one of these solutions is a step down in pay and status to another arguably dead-end job, one is a lateral move to more of the same and one an escapist fantasy feels like a defeat, like an admission that no real refuge or resistance is possible.

In the end, the film Office Space most resembles may not be comedies like Take This Job and Shove It or Nine to Five, or even Wall Street or Network, to all of which it was compared, but Brazil.* The movie's poster even borrows an image from that film—a man engulfed and dissolving in a blizzard of paperwork. It's a real-world version of Gilliam's dystopia, complete with a harried, discontented everyman, his dream girl, a larger-than life, working-class hero, an absurdly inefficient but evil bureaucracy, and a falsely happy, ultimately hopeless ending.

"Set the building on fire..." | Milton (Stephen Root) mumbles about staplers and fiery vengeance in a cramped basement office.

When we last see Milton, he's reclining on a white sand beach in the brilliant Caribbean sun, wearing a pink "I ATE THE WORM" T-shirt, and thoroughly unable to enjoy any of it—he's already complaining feebly that he specified no salt on his margarita and "there was salt on the glass, big grains of salt," and threatening under his breath to put strychnine in the guacamole.

Unlike blissful Sam Lowry, who believes he's escaped and living happily ever after in a bucolic cottage even as he's still strapped into the torturer's chair, poor Milton, who really has made it into a travel-poster daydream, has been so warped and stunted by the claustrophobic confines of his cubicle that he might as well still be there.

Reviewed by Tim Kreider
06.25.01

* Thanks to David Andler, the drummer of National Razor, for the insight about Brazil.