"So I was sitting in my cubicle today and I
realized that ever since I started working, every day of my life has been worse
than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me,
that's on the worst day of my life."
"What about today? Is today the worst day of your
life?"
"Yeah."
"That's messed up." —Office Space
What does the worst day of Peter Gibbons' life look
like? In Mike Judge's Office Space, it looks conspicuously like your worst day, too: Idling
for an hour in rush-hour traffic, outpaced by an old man with a walker; eight
hours in a cubicle under the sickly glow of florescent lights; the boss (or
eight bosses) hassling him over some meaningless bureaucratic addition to his
already meaningless job; lunch breaks at some chain eatery, where an overeager
waiter hard-sells "pizza shooters, shrimp poppers, and extreme fajitas"; and
the million other petty annoyances, from bum printers and motivational banners
("What can you
do for the company?") to static shocks and mini-battles over office supplies.
And at the end of the day, he returns to a one-bedroom apartment stocked with
cheap Ikea furnishings and those horrible blinds where the slats clack together
like wind chimes when you close them.
There have been many portraits of cubicle culture
before and after Office Space—The Office, Clockwatchers, Dilbert, and the early scenes of Joe
Versus The Volcano
immediately spring to mind—but none have laid out the parameters of this
soul-sucking modern world quite so comprehensibly. With that in mind, it's easy
to see why the film was such a dud at the box office. For data processors and
middle-managers across the country, the prospect of seeing your personal hell
projected on a big screen is the furthest thing from escapist fun. But as
legions have discovered on DVD, the experience is thrillingly cathartic;
finally, someone who understands how a desk job can, in fact, be worse than
logging time doing the drywall at a new McDonald's. There, at least, nobody's
saying, "Looks like somebody's got a case of the Mondays!"
For my money, the signature shot in Office
Space
finds four employees at Initech—a technologies firm with the vaguest of
mission statements—trudging across the lot at an industrial park. As they
chatter anxiously about the company bringing in efficiency experts to clean
house, they walk down and stumble back up a drainage trench dug out between the
parking areas. Judge catches the moment from a medium-to-long distance, and the
effect is like an anthropologist observing his subjects from afar, trying to
get a feel for how they interact with their habitat. The shot underlines how unnatural their occupations are:
Here are four of today's hunter-gatherers, each in a dress shirt and a bad tie
(no jacket required), trudging through this banal piece of sculpted landscape
in order to get back to a job that yields nothing of tangible value. There's no
dignity to it.
Were Office Space merely a comedy about
white-collar drudgery, however, it might have never found such an appreciative
audience. In actuality, it's as much a fantasy as Indiana Jones And The
Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, but more relatable, because Peter puts the
daydreams of many into action. Few people can imagine themselves embarking on a
globetrotting adventure, but there are legions of workaday types who dream of
unshackling themselves from their desks, sleeping until 3:30 in the afternoon,
and doing absolutely nothing with their oceans of free time. Call it a
permanent staycation. There are practical reasons this will never
happen—bills to pay and whatnot—but the revelation that it could be possible to not be
productive… Well, that's what moviegoing is all about.
Judge comes from the world of animation, and that
informs his decision to cast actors who look like live-action cartoons, and
have them populating a suburban pit that's all too real. As Peter, Ron
Livingston winningly plays the one average guy in a world of kooks, much like
Luke Wilson later would in Judge's flawed but inspired satire Idiocracy (a New Cult Canon contender in its own
right). Livingston has two friends in the software department, the comically
belligerent Samir (Ajay Naidu) and Michael Bolton (David Herman), who refuses
to accept a nickname just because some "no-talent ass-clown" sold millions of
records and made their shared name infamous. The other colorful employees
include potato-faced Tom Smykowski (Richard Riehle)—who admires the guy
who made a million bucks on the pet rock, and is formulating his own Big Idea
in the "Jump To Conclusions" mat—and poor, put-upon Milton (Stephen
Root), with his coke-bottle glasses, irritated skin, and mumbled threats that
he'll burn the place down if he has to suffer one more indignity.
At Initech, many of those indignities come
courtesy of Bill Lumbergh, who lords over the place with ridiculous suspenders,
a coffee mug, and an almost magical ability to materialize when he's least
wanted. As played by Gary Cole, one of my favorite character actors, Lumbergh embodies a
common type in the white-collar middle-management world: the excruciatingly
passive-aggressive boss. Instead of firm, respectful directives, Lumbergh gives
a deep inhale of big-fish/small-pond superiority and spouts orders like, "Yeaaaaahhh…
if you could go ahead and make sure you do that from now on, that would be
great," or "Yeaaaaahhh… I'm going to have to ask you to move your desk down to
Storage B." Cole makes a meal out of lines like those, but his performance also
has some subtle modulation, like the way the faux-enthusiasm drains from his
voice when he realizes that "Hawaiian Shirt Day" may not boost the spirits of
employees facing unemployment. Here's Lumbergh at his best, muscling Milton out
of his precious stapler:
Judge includes what might fairly be viewed as an
obligatory romance between Peter and Joanna, a waitress played by Jennifer
Aniston, who does sort of a downscale variation on her character in Friends. Their relationship
doesn't have any comedic payoff—she's the straight woman as much as
Livingston is the straight man—but here again, Judge uses her occupation
to evoke the crushing, cookie-cutter banality of suburbia and the modern
workplace. The restaurant where she works, Chotchkie's, is a thinly veiled
swipe at restaurants like T.G.I. Fridays or Chili's, where the atmosphere and
the waitstaff jam fun down people's throats like so many delicately battered
awesome blossoms. Just like Lumbergh, the waiters at Chotchkie's have to wear
suspenders—maybe there's some symbolic significance to that, or maybe
Judge just finds them funny—and they're required to don at least 15 "pieces
of flair," quirky little pins with homespun expressions or blinking lights on
them. In this world, Joanna has a lot in common with Peter: They're both
underachievers. She thinks it's enough simply to do her job and go home without
bowling people over with her enthusiasm like her co-worker, a "case of the
Mondays" kind of guy. In this scene, Judge gives himself a plum cameo as
another passive-aggressive boss who wants her to want to show more "flair":
Though funny and affable all the way through, Office
Space
loses some of its snap in the second half, once the downsizing starts and
Peter, Samir, and Michael hatch a scheme to embezzle money from the company one
fraction of a cent at a time. (It should be said, however, that the Superman
III
connection is ingenious, as is Peter's attempt to compare the plan to the
"take-a-penny, leave-a-penny" trays at the convenience store.) For example, a
scene where Orlando Jones turns up as a fake mentally challenged door-to-door
magazine salesman takes away more than it adds, in spite of the nugget that he
makes more at that shady enterprise than he ever did working in tech support.
Judge seems so at home documenting the narrow hierarchies, annoyances, and
power plays at Initech and Chotchkie's that it's almost a shame he ever has to
leave. (If King Of The Hill weren't occupying him, he'd have been well qualified
to bring The Office to the U.S., though Greg Daniels and company are doing a fine
job on their own.) He ran into the same problem—but worse—with Idiocracy: He's exceptionally
skilled at slice-of-life comedy, not so much at the plotting needed to bring a
movie to its close.
But you know what else he's really good at? The
montage. With their wonderfully ironic use of gangsta rap and mambo, the
montage sequences in Office Space slather slo-mo badassery worthy of Scarface into gags like the
opening traffic jam, Peter's dismantling of the workplace, or the whitest of
white-collar criminality, like planting a virus or laying waste to a printer.
Judge's deceptively unadorned shooting style, which is more like deadpan with a
camera, shouldn't obscure the fact that he's using the movies to enlarge the
life of a painfully ordinary guy and and make it important. His universe is
modest, but on that scale, his triumphs are epic. Damn, it feels good to be a
gangster.
Coming Up:
Next week: Rounders
Horror Month
Nov. 6: Near Dark
Nov. 13: Audition
Nov. 20: Pulse
Nov. 26: The Devil's Rejects