Product: Office Space (1999)
Rating: 5.0
Lives of quiet desparation
From the standpoint of one who's worked in software for thirty years it is dismaying to see the effect on the younger generation of the real computerized office, for it is either dystopian or perceived as such.In Office Space, the worklives of TwentySomethings have been structured by Baby Boomer technical obsessions and Romanticism. The offices which the Baby Boomers manage are computerized by unrelievedly bad software: the restaurants in which they eat lunch demand of the invisible "help" that the "help" cater to a commodified freedom and "flair."Of course, this dystopia is dystopia in part because of perceptions. Certainly, Java or HTML experts fleeing Kosovo in 1999, the year of the film's release, would be delighted to work in air conditioned offices not subject to artillery barrages.However, Herman Melville's 1850s short story, Bartelby the Scrivener compels us to take seriously the complaint that work is boring and unfair. In the short story, Bartelby, after years of clerical work (that was brutally boring, owing to the lack of office automation: Bartelby was a human Xerox machine, and even in the 1940s, Microsoft exec Charles Szymonyi was grateful to be hired as a human "computer"), "prefers not to", like the hero of Office Space, do any more fair copies.Office Space notes the unnoted ability of computer technology to generate absurd work at its margins, for its hero is engaged in manually scanning code for Year 2000 problems. Now, I'd ask why this fictional character did not write a Perl script (a computer program) to do his job for him, but only to be a smartass: for in the type of organization portrayed in Office Space, ideological control prohibits such vernacular creativity.Unfortunately, had this movie been resolved at all realistically, there'd be, as they say, no movie. For in fact very few people seem to ideologically rebel as our hero, who gets a job in construction (as if modern construction itself has not been Taylorized so as to render the construction worker equally subordinate as the computer programmer.)Here in the Research Triangle Park, it still seems the case that when most people are laid-off or otherwise maltreated by companies like Nortel, they respond by stronger adhesion to individualist narratives and at best form their own firms, wherein they replicate, in the small, the failure to address needs and narratives higher than the individual.Note that the hero of Office Space does not transform into someone who becomes a team player because he is informed by a mystical vision of the necessity of absolute care-for-others, to name one possibility. He is at first transformed into the type that our system says it desires: the whats-in-it-for-me individualist. The consultants like him precisely because he so perfectly "does" the entrepreneural spirit: but note that in reality, employment specialists have found that in the actual job market, the person who has in the past formed his own company or in other ways foolishly tried to act out a capitalist scenario is less desired than the long-term corporate type.Mike Judge does not, in other words, question some core assumptions of the business movie narrative. Our narcissistic question throughout Office Space is how the hero will fare.Like Herman Melville, Mike Judge sees no way out and has none of Hamlet's good sense: "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space."Perhaps this is an important limitation of the way the American Transcendentalists narrated the money-mad lives of their fellow man when in the 1820s it became clear that we were not about to become a country on their model, where instead of working in sordid offices, or on the farm driving the slaves, we'd sit about listening to blue-stockings recite poetry, and Think Uplifting Thoughts.The real story is not escape from the counting-house or the modern office it is the ability of most real people to be bounded in a nutshell and count themselves kings of infinite space. Some Americans do this through religion, others through drugs, still others by posting reviews on Amazon. Redemption consists in the final realization that hegemony for good or ill is here to stay and there really is no way outa this place. So get back to work on that perl program.