According to the film "Office Space," Hell is a flourescently lit place where the damned are be penned in by tiny gray cubicles.
"Office Space" is one of the great underrated films of the 1990s. Directed by Mike Judge (of Beavis and Butthead and "King of the Hill" fame), the comedy is a hilarious, sometimes commentary on the soul-draining monotony and joylessness of the modern workplace.
The films' central character Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) is a man who hates his job so much that he can barely get himself to touch the door handle when he walks into the office in the morning. He works for a software firm called Initech, the type of place where people's only motivation to work is not to be hassled by one of their bosses and a typical job description might involve "taking specifications from the customer and bringing them down to the engineers."
Peter describes his job like this: "I generally come in at least 15 minutes late. I use the sidedoor so Lumbergh (the boss) can't see me. Then I sort of space out for about an hour. I just stare at the computer screen so it looks like I'm working."
Everyday at work as worse, Peter says, so that essentially everyday is the worst day of his life. Out of desperation he asks a hypnotist to just zonk him out, so he doesn't know he's at work and he can come home thinking he was fishing all day. All he wants out of life is to be able to do nothing.
If Peter were married and had kids, he'd be Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) from "American Beauty."
Then one day the alarm clock rings at 8 a.m. and he decides to just stay in bed. He just didn't feel like going to work.
Over the next few days he turns into something of a rebel. He walks over to the nearby bar and grill and asks the waitress(Jennifer Aniston), to come to his place and watch "Kung Fu." He still comes into the office , but does so on his own terms, wearing jeans and sandals, parking in the boss's spot, and playing Tetris on his computer.
"Human beings," he says, "weren't meant to sit in little cubicles, staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements."
What Charlie Chaplin's 1936 classic "Modern Times" was to the factory worker, "Office Space" is to the white collar worker. The movie makes some profound examinations on the ills of capitalism.
In the film a couple of corporate housecleaners are called to streamline the company's operations. In laymen's terms they're there to recommend layoffs. The employees waste the best years of their young lives, hoping for a promotion or profit sharing and then get thrown out, so that the boss's stock will go up a quarter of a point.
"If work my a** off and Initech ships a few extra units I don't see an extra dime," Peter says. "They (the workers) work just hard enough not to get fired."
The picture stumbles a bit in the second half with a plot about Peter and two of his co-workers Samir and Michael Bolton (no relation to the singer, he insists) hatching a scheme to rip off the company by transferring fractions of a cent from bank transactions and depositing them into a bank account until they accumulate thousands of dollars. The scenario was used in "Superman III."
"Office Space" has a keen eye for detail, from the morning rush hour (so tedious that Peter sees a man on a walker pass him by) to the completely redundant technical jargon (at one point Michael Bolton looks at the display on a malcontent fax machine and yells "PC load letter. What the f*** does that mean).
Though it performed poorly upon its initial theatrical release in1999, the film has attained cult status on video, where it struck chords with a number of disgruntled workers. But, "Office Space" is not so much about how works sucks as it is about how work can suck. In a perfect world we would all be able to lounge around and do whatever we wanted. In reality, though, there are bills to pay and mouths to feed. The key to happiness is finding something you like to do.
Write to Robert at rclopez@bsu.edu
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