Office Culture in the Movies
It's a strange but understandable phenomenon that people who spend 40+ hours a week working in an office environment would want to go to the movies to see a bunch of actors pretend that they have stiff jobs for a couple hours. Office movies plug into a steady source of relatable material that they proceed to magnify, twist and otherwise turn goofy for the sake of narrative or maybe just to tickle the fantasies of the audience. These films are rarely the most successful at the cinema, but they're still important documents about our culture's perceptions of one of its most pervasive elements. Often times, it's just as important to see what parts of corporate culture get twisted as it is to see which parts are left intact in an office movie.
Steven Soderbergh's 2009 comedy The Informant! is the movie that inspired this article. It's the true crime story of Mark Whitacre, the biochemist and middle manager of giant agri-business corporation ADM who informed on his bosses during their massive price-fixing conspiracy, only to be exposed himself for various business crimes when his complicated web of lies fell apart. The beautiful thing about The Informant!'s depiction of office culture is how true to life it actually is. There are no over-the-top characters, Kafkaesque bureaucratic absurdities or surreal moments of existential weirdness. The offices in The Informant! feel like actual workplaces, the only indication of any silliness coming in the form of the film's cavalcade of terrible neckties.
Of course, a little weirdness can go a long way, but a lot of weirdness can make a cult classic. Mike Judge's Office Space, now considered the quintessential corporate comedy, magnified every annoyance about being a cubicle drone until the whole thing played like a cartoon farce. From the rush hour traffic jam ironically set to salsa music in the opening to the thousand little knock-downs that make protagonist Peter Gibbons's life a nightmare, Office Space brings its satire intensely and ceaselessly. Though it died in theaters, the film quickly found a huge following in home video and TV broadcasts. It's a hilarious and cathartic take on everything that's wrong with life in the office.
From the silly to the disturbing, Mary Harron's 2000 adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's hit novel American Psycho concentrates on the ruthlessness and conformity of corporate culture by making its protagonist an executive who is literally willing to kill for success. In Patrick Bateman, Ellis created a character who exemplifies and amplifies every aspect of the white collar world circa 1989. His inner monolog obsesses over the relative merits of nearly identical business cards, whether or not he'll be able to get a table at the most trendy restaurants and occasionally what it might be like to murder his coworkers. American Psycho is about a lot of things, but it rides in on the implication that corporate culture is vicious and soul-crushing.
On the far end of the weirdness spectrum, Spike Jonze's take on Charlie Kaufman's script for Being John Malkovich lends a sickening drabness to the already disheartening office on floor 7 1/2 at LesterCorp. Washed out to the extreme and seemingly designed to make its workers uncomfortable, this office hides a strange and alluring secret that plugs into the idiosyncratic fantasies of cubicle drones. While it's unlikely that any real-world workplace is so bizarre, Kaufman and Jonze present viewers with a setting that reflects the soul, if not the form, of the job nobody wants.
