"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.