In Which I’m Not Lazy, I Just Don’t Care

Way back in my piece about Reality Bites I took aim at the conceited antagonism that film had to the idea of selling out. That the existential horror of work life should be avoided at all costs, that dropping out with a shitty boyfriend was preferable to all other actions. While chiding this position there is a hint of truth to the matter. The world of office life can be frustrating and deadening, the dull burden of bureaucracy and office politicking can be aggravating to many people in all positions. However the heft of time and culture has changed perspective on this arrangement.

The horrific post-modern landscape of cubicles and copiers are no longer the workplace nightmare of the day. Instead we have dystopian Amazon warehouses, part-time gig workers whose livelihoods depend of the whims of app makers, freelance content producers who have to beg money through sites like Patreon and GoFundMe, and even in the traditional workplace we are treated to open air workstations and zero job security. Today, ideas like unions, health insurance, and retirement funds are treated as morbid impossibilities rather than the goals of a working a mundane job.

It’s with these facts flowing through my head that I approached 1999’s cult classic Office Space. Would I be able to put aside the knowledge of the worsening labor conditions around the world to hear how steady but boring employment amounted to the death of the human spirit? The answer is mostly yes, I was, because writer and director Mike Judge is able to be more piercing and insightful into why the work environment of the late 90s was so aggravating. And the deadpan tone keeps the thing from feeling too self satisfied. Unfortunately Judge squirrels out in the end, and relinquishes much of what makes the movie interesting for a more a pat and jokey conclusion. It’s obvious why this failed in theaters and ruled on DVD. In full it’s clunky and inconsistent, in moments it shines with great wit and insight.

So in the dreary world of the workplace we find Peter (Ron Livingston) an office jockey with no future fixing Y2K bugs at tech company. He finds meager camaraderie in friends Michael Bolton (David Herman) and Samir (Ajay Naidu), but is constantly pestered by VP Lumbergh (Gary Cole) and office weirdo Milton (Stephen Root). After a therapy session goes awry Peter decides to throw caution to the wind and become a full on asshole and slacker. Through this he starts dating Joanna (Jennifer Aniston) and making his ways up the ranks of the company. Filled with confidence he decides to scam the company out of thousands of dollars with his friends. Unfortunately their plan falls apart and the gang is only saved when Milton burns down the office.

In this mundane absurdity Judge is able to pick at a point that cuts to the quick of why office life sucks. It seems to only reward the incompetent and aggressively unlikeable, and it’s this insight that elevates the material over many contemporary “work sucks” stories of the time. It indulges in a bit of Gen-Xer fantasy that brings some actual bite to the proceedings: Peter is rewarded for his ostentatiously bad behavior. Consultants see his ability never to show up on time and talk shit about management as the straight shooting information needed to make the company run better. The movie all but admits that the office environment rewards those antagonistic to actually improving the work being done. Peter might literally destroy doors and desks, but is heaped with praise for taking no guff.

It demonstrates that the government of the cubicles can be nothing more than an ecosystem of petty tyrannies, where people shuffle around and do things because they have nothing better to occupy their day. Lumbergh is a loathsome character not just because he needles people’s time and resources, but that lords how useless he is over the other workers. He just shows up, mug and smug, with nothing more to say than do your job more. Really the best way to get ahead in the world of business is just being annoying.

Judge is able expertly milk this scenario for smart comedy on how boring the success Peter experiences is. During the celebratory “Good to be Gangster” montage Peter is jubilant in achieving gross and frivolous actions. He parks in the VP’s reserved spot, brings a fish to the office, knocks out a wall, and plays Tetris. But all in all these things amount to little besides him getting satisfaction over the managers who bug him. There is nothing gained but self satisfied superiority.

It’s unfortunate that Judge doesn’t follow this plot all the way through to its logical conclusion (Peter becoming fully elevated in the company) and instead shifts gears to a low-key crime comedy with low scale hacking and heisting. This story shift doesn’t really play into the successful skewering that the previous two-thirds of the movie engaged in. Instead we are treated to some sub-Coens bumbling criminality without the deft hand that the directing duo has. And Judge really does whiff the ending. Outside a short (but funny) dream sequence we never see Lumbergh and Peter interact again, thus robbing the film of its best comedic friction point, and all the business with Milton comes off as little forced, even as it does provide an absurd counterpoint to the more day-to-day insights.

Judge also has no idea how to handle the romantic angle of this story. Peter confronts Joanna to go on a date while she’s on shift as a waitress (a big no-no in my books), and just kind of treats her as an object to acquire out of selfishness. Joanna does get a few moments of her own to counteract this (mainly telling her own boss to shove it, and calling out Peter’s idiocy of being mad at her sex life), but it’s so sidelined from what works with the rest of the movie that it feels more like an afterthought than integral component. Combine this with a healthy sprinkling of homophobia (lots of prison rape jokes and calling people fudge packers) and you get a series of sour notes that disrupt the films otherwise low-key good time.

However it still serves as one of the stalwart pieces of fascination of this series, a time capsule of when the angst of the time was wound up into uncertain mundanities rather than earth shattering existential threats. Where the frustrations of an office printer deserve the greatest amount of our hatred, and the worst person in existence are ego driven managers. These days we would only be so lucky.

Odds and Ends

• This might just be one of those cases where a later work (here Silicon Valley) does kind of usurp the intentions of a previous entry purely on contemporary cultural context. I’m not saying one is better than the other, but SV does cut deeper now.
• You can tell this a pre-9/11 movie because none of the jokes at the expense of Samir’s ethnicity are about him being a terrorist.
• Judge might be one of the definitive voices in comedy during the 90s. Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill, Office Space, and related output like Daria are perfects snapshots of different forms of turn of the century misanthropy and culture.
• The Jump to Conclusions Mat is a funny and marketable idea.
• The consultants float offering stock options to make employees work better. Imagine shit like that nowadays.

As always, twitter, letterboxd, and I Chews You (the podcast about cooking and eating Pokemon).

Next week: Can you believe it’s been 20 years since Fight Club.