Movie Review #7

This post was written by guest author, Andy Gately.

I chose to revisit Mike Judge’s Office Space, to determine why the film, while often hilarious, always offended me for some reason with its final reel. Upon further viewings, I’ve concluded that, in many ways, it’s one of the most insidiously repressive films to emerge from the Hollywood system in recent memory.

It starts out more than promisingly, by presenting us with the perfect character to personify this era of white collar wage slavery. He’s a software engineer who crunches meaningless numbers from nine to five at what might as well be a factory rolling out widgets on an assembly line like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, his job security, company loyalty, and respect for his superiors are so fully absent. Peter Gibbons is a listless, alienated worker drone who essentially acts as a tour guide through the daily hell that is the average American job. Content to be reduced to interchangeable cogs in the very machines that are suppose to improve their quality of life, Peter and the other employees of the generic “Initech” are a sad collection of corporate casualties slowly losing their sanity to the dehumanizing effects of cubicle lifestyle in exchange for a weekly paycheck. Their company’s logo is a square peg driven through a round hole, and through countless sly details like this, the film relentlessly reveals these institutions for the models of inefficiency that they are, and the absurdity of corporate hypocrisy is savagely satirized over and again. The catalyst for Peter’s epiphany is witnessing the death of his “occupational hypnotherapist,” which reminds him of the joy and frailty of his own suppressed vitality. He then proceeds to cast off his corporate yoke through an unconventional protest - he doesn’t quit, he just stops going to work all together. Consequently, he’s promoted and given a raise, and his hard-working friends are laid off. When this happens, Peter realizes how destructive his kind of job is to people’s lives. “Human beings were not meant to stare at computer screens all day,” he tells his friends, and with a newfound conviction he sets out to strike a blow against his money-worshipping employers by electronically scamming them out of millions of dollars. His plan works almost too easily, and the audience is rooting for him all the way, sharing vicariously in his victory over the corporate oppressors.

Then, the film takes the safe way out. Peter has a sudden crisis of conscience, and attempts to give the money back, only to discover that one of his disgruntled co-workers has set fire to the offices. All evidence of their actions is neatly erased in the ensuing structure fire, but Peter decides that all he needs to be happy is a loving girlfriend, who’s played by Jennifer Aniston, and so he takes a job as a construction worker while his friends go on to work at different companies. It’s almost as if one of Peter’s countless middle managers stepped in to write this “love conquers all” bullshit. What is the director’s message here? That if you’re stuck in a demeaning, unfulfilling career, the solution is to get laid and start pouring cement? Such an ideological about-face nearly negates the entire previous hour and a half of subversive, intelligent satire by undermining it with a film that ultimately cops out and reinforces the surrender to corporate authority that it appears to have only been making pretenses at denouncing. What makes this contrived d’nouement particularly frustrating is the missed opportunity to really make a statement about the current state of business. Imagine if the film had ended with the credits rolling over the glorious images of Peter’s company as it burned to ashes, while he gets away with the money Scott-free, or an even darker, hard-hitting one, with perhaps Peter and his friends getting caught and prosecuted for embezzlement, and the last shot is a slow dolly out of their federal prison cells, which strike us as more than a little reminiscent of their cubicles, with wardens walking around like their previous bosses did, keeping them in line. Fade to black, cut and print. That would have driven home the point that Mike Judge seemed to be trying for.

Unfortunately, we are given another insulting Hollywood ending that merely upholds the status quo and placates the middle-class masses. With this in mind, one could even argue that Mike Judge wasn’t just careless in his decision to dissipate the rebelliousness that the film inspires with a conformist conclusion, he downright sold out by opting not to leave the film on a note that might actually encourage taking action beyond making the best of your situation. I’m not accusing Mike Judge of intentionally trying to disenfranchise his audience exactly. Odds are he didn’t sit down one day and say to himself, “You know, how can I make a film that will provide a nice escape from the monotonous life of your average American, then once the fantasy is over, show them they should get back to work?” Rather, I hold such obviously talented artists to a higher standard, one in which the power of movies and the intelligence of those who watch them are not underestimated. I can only hope the film itself is a victim of corporate censorship and studio meddling, and hoping for something like that is itself a sad commentary on the times.