There is a Light That Will Never Go Out: "Office Space"
In the last decade, a distinctive scent of despair has come to envelope America. Recently, I've been noticing it particularly strongly in the world of television.
In Mike White's White Lotus, on HBO, a group of wealthy tourists at a resort in Hawaii rather blithely wreak havoc on the lives of the employees and on themselves. The tenor of the whole is not so much one of human indignation as it is of a kind of assumed negativity on the part of the audience: we all know people tend to be weak if not downright odious, the show seems to be saying to us, so let's have some fun rubbing our faces it.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Mr. Corman, on Apple TV, is less cynical but just as bleak, featuring a protagonist who has given up his dreams of being a musician and lives in a world that feels incapable of supplying him with meaning. The sensation of living through a moment of doom is so strong that in one episode the outdoor sequences all feature the image of an asteroid descending through the atmosphere towards our protagonist, in a rather direct visual metaphor for his state of mind.
Even Ted Lasso, maybe the biggest TV success story of the last several years, partakes in this. The show is famously, and relentlessly, gentle, upbeat, and reassuring. Jason Sudeikis's titular character – an American football couch who finds himself in England heading up a pro soccer team, even though he knows nothing about the sport – is a font of down-home Midwestern positivity, and the show seems determined to assure us that there's no issue in life that can't be solved by simply being good to each other. Fair enough. But this determination, and the show's massive success, begs a question: why are we all in such need of reassurance right now?
The answers to that question may seem clear to you, particularly if you are one of these sorts of people who reads the news. But even only judging by the kinds of things Hollywood is thrusting at us, the world is on fire, the center cannot possibly hold, and the kids are not alright.
But what to do about it? This is a different question entirely. And here I'm not talking about calling the office of your Congressperson, or going to a school board meeting and screaming so loudly you get forcibly removed, or composing elegant and magnificently scathing aphorisms for social media, or even marching in the street.
Instead, I'm talking about the question of what to do about all of this internally, in your heart and mind and soul. And this is where comedy comes in.
True lightness in the arts is more difficult than true darkness. Which is to say that relentless negativity in something like a film or TV show is often the easiest way out. It's almost laughably simple to make someone feel bad by telling them a story in which bad things happen. It's easy to create unlikable characters who do bad things and make terrible choices. But making an audience laugh? This is far harder.
By true lightness, I don't mean pratfall humor, or gags like a man stepping on a rake and getting smashed in the face – although that old Sideshow Bob sequence from The Simpsons reminds us how effective that particular gag can be – but the magic of getting the audience to smile at real misfortune, and in particular about misfortune they are actually involved in. This is the deepest and most important job of true comedy. It relieves us of the tremendous burdens of the world, if even for just a moment, by rendering them laughable. And by doing so it reminds us of the strange, innate, almost nonsensical ability that we have to make it through the continual tragedies of life with something like a joyous, communal will intact.
Mike Judge's Office Space, from 1999, is one of the finest comedic diagrams of modern life made in the last thirty or forty years. It tells the story of young software engineers working for a company called Initech, which is itself an epitome of the American working world writ large.
Our hero is Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) who spends his days updating code in preparation for the Y2K scare, meaning that, in his own description, he goes through hundreds of thousands of lines of code, changing two-digit numbers into four-digit numbers. His best friends are Michael Bolton (David Herman), a meek fellow who loves gangster rap and hates the famous singer he shares a name with, and Samir Nagheenanajar (Ajay Naidu), who suffers the continual indignation of being the one non-white person in the office, with a name the white people smilingly assure him is weird and unpronounceable.
The three are ruled over by incompetent middle managers, forced to abide by strange and arbitrary rules (You must attach a cover sheet to those TPS reports! Or else!) and do daily battle with faulty office equipment. Their work life, in other words, is hell.
Two things happen to shake up this situation. Peter, at the insistence of an annoying and unfaithful girlfriend who soon leaves him, attends a hypnotherapy session; the therapist puts him into a trance of deep and abiding relaxation, and then dies of a heart attack, stranding Peter in his new state. He stops caring about work at all, and does all kinds of things he's always wanted to, like asking out a cute girl named Joanna (Jennifer Aniston) who works at a nearby restaurant called Chotchkie's. At the same time, Initech brings in a set of efficiency consultants, both named Bob (John C. McGinley and Paul Willson), whose job it is to "streamline" the company, meaning they will interview every employee and fire as many as they can.
Peter, in his new relaxed state, tells the Bobs the truth: his work is soul-crushing, he has absolutely no motivation be a "team player" for Initech, and spends most of his day goofing off. This attitude of not caring about anything excites them, and they recommend him for a management position. At the same time, he finds out that that Michael and Samir are going to be fired. Furious at this injustice, the three come up with a plan to slowly embezzle money from Initech by using a virus to funnel off fractions of cents so slowly that the company will never notice.
This plan goes sideways when they accidentally steal $300,000 over the course of a weekend. Peter decides to take the blame himself, and returns the money to the office in the form of cashier's checks; but their somewhat deranged and most derogated co-worker, Milton Waddams (Stephen Root) finds the checks, steals them, and burns down the office to hide what he's done. At the end of the film, Michael and Samir are working at a new software firm; Peter has realized that what's most important is his new relationship with Joanna, and is happily working a construction job alongside his blue-collar neighbor Lawrence (Diedrich Bader).
One of the central sources of joy in the film is the precision with which it lays out the realities of working life. At various times, I've been employed by universities, community colleges, bars, restaurants, landscaping operations, in freelance writing positions, on film sets, on a construction project in Africa, as a croupier in a company that provided casino-table games for parties, and in many more places. Some of these jobs I've enjoyed immensely, and some I've loathed, but I'm here to tell you that every place I've ever worked – and I suspect this is true of every business in the world that employs more than ten or twenty people – has its version of Office Space's Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole), the managerial type whose assurance is matched only by his incompetence, and who has risen to his position of power for reasons shrouded in incomprehensibility.
Every job also has its Milton Waddams, sad and looked-down upon by his coworkers, and its Tom Smykowski (Richard Riehle), struggling to defend a position in which he does nothing at all; every job has its bureaucratic arcana that accretes for reasons no one can really explain and its malfunctioning equipment, like the inane copying machine with its "PC Load Letter" error message; and every job comes with the requirement that you visibly pretend to enjoy what you do (whether you like it or not) and be a team player (whether you feel like it or not), like Joana's restaurant which requires that she wear 15 pieces of "flair" designed to express her fun, outgoing personality, regardless of her preferences.
The magic trick that Office Space performs, in other words, is to expand its relatability out from the sphere of white-collar office life to the broader sphere of the working world that most Americans occupy. Even those who have never worked in an office can relate to the people and predicaments the film presents.
In this way, the film operates as an instantiation of one of life's immutable rules: The Proportions Never Change (TPNC). This is a rule people learn when they go from high school to college, or from college to graduate school, or from school to work, or from one city to another, or from a job to a better job. It states that no matter where you are, the proportion of more capable people to less capable ones, of more intelligent people to less intelligent ones, of people who understand the world better to those who understand it worse, of people who are more kind to those who are less kind – all of these proportions remain constant.
The average levels of certain things – from education to competence to political awareness – may vary from area to area. People in grad school may be better educated; people at your new high-end restaurant job may be better at French service. But once you're in your new group, TPNC holds true. There is no area of human life that doesn’t have its savants and idiots, its hard workers and layabouts, its arrogant climbers and humble tread-upons. To wish differently is to misunderstand humanity, and to turn a blind eye to what makes our species wonderful and infuriating and comical.
This recognition of TPNC is, at base, what gives Office Space its true illumination. It sees our predicaments, not matter how terrible, as unavoidable. And once something becomes unavoidable, a part of the fabric of life, it becomes material for comedy.
This is also the film's response to the miasma of American despair. It isn't, as I intimated at the start, a film that's going to make you feel better about climate change, or national or international politics, or whatever large issues weigh on your mind. It’s instead locally and internally focused, addressing the question of how you approach your day-to-day life. Limiting itself to this scope, the movie suggests that certain things are possible – quitting terrible situations, rejecting some of the daily inanities that govern you, finding love and happiness – but reminds us that no one (except perhaps the very wealthy) will ever escape the fact that if we want to survive we need to work, and work incorporates us with other people, and other people are always governed by the rule of TPNC.
This doesn't constitute a plea for resignation. The moments of assertive rule-smashing in the film are not so much liberating as necessary for survival. When Peter, Michael, and Samir kidnap the temperamental fax machine that's been wreaking havoc on their mental well-being and smash it to pieces in a field, they're not simple taking revenge; they are, rather, insisting on the importance of their human existence over and against the awful, deadening technology that controls so much of our lives.
When Joanna quits her job at Chotchkie's, giving the finger to her boss, it's an assertion of the only pure resistance available to many of us, in many situations: if this is the game, then I shall not play. And Peter's choice in the end to work a construction job rather than a white-collar one is as pure an act of self-determination as most of us will ever be granted: he will determine what to do with his life.
Beyond this, though, lies the reminder. No one can escape, really. The proportions never change. Michael and Samir have to work, so they get a job at another software firm. Joanna gets a job at a new restaurant, and Peter can't simply be unemployed, much as he might like to be.
But what they can do, or more exactly, what we the audience can do by witnessing their adventures, is remember that beat us down as they might, those middle-management Bill Lumberghs, hassle us and judge us and fire us in the name of efficiency as those Bobs of the world do, the thing they can never take away is our ability to laugh at them, and at ourselves.
Is this enough to override the despair the world can at times surround us with? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But it can certainly lighten the load, if only for a few hours, and that's worth a hell of a lot.
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