Office Space is one of those movies whose target audience was a bit too young to fully understand or appreciate the context. Most Gen Xers and Millennials were still in school or college. There might have been some older Gen Xers in the early stages of office work. But the late 1990s weren’t no where near as bad as they would be since then.
So, when Michael Bolton (David Herman) and Samir Nagheenanajar (Ajay Naidu) pulverize a copier/printer, it might have went over some people’s heads. But as more and more people began to necessitate the use of a computer in their office work, we could understand their rage. Michael and Samir work at Initech, a software company where they work with the protagonist, Peter Gibbons (Ron Livinston).
What exactly they do is never really explained. It seems both Michael and Samir are software coders. Peter’s duties is to update software prior to the Y2K. There all in their mid to late 20s living in one-bedroom apartments with thin walls where they can hear their neighbors’ conversations. They eat at franchise bar restaurants like Chotchkies, a fictional restaurant modeled on TGIFridays, Chili’s, and Applebee’s. Peter has the hots for a waitress, Joanna (Jennifer Aniston), who also hates her job because her supervisor, Stan (played by Mike Judge who also wrote and directed), gets on her case for not having enough “flair” which are novelty buttons on her work vest uniform. Her jovial co-worker, Brian (Todd Duffey), is considered the model employee for wearing about 40 buttons all over his vest and a smile that seems more common on The Joker and just as sinister.
Peter has eight different bosses which means he’s constantly being belittled by his supervisors whenever he makes a mistake at work. The top supervisor is Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole), an obnoxious, arrogant man who wears better clothes, drives a Porsche and has a coffee mug in his hands that it’s surprised isn’t another appendage. He never yells or raises his voice but his condescending tone is the worst as he finishes everything with “Mmkay?” as if he thinks the people he’s talking to are morons.
The set-up is very simple. One night, Peter and his cheating girlfriend, Anne (Alexandra Wentworth) go to an occupational hypnotherapist who manages to get Peter to behave in a relaxed manner. But unfortunately, he dies of a heart attack before he can pull Peter out of it and rather than report to work on the weekend, Peter stays home. He’s not even phased by Lumbergh wanting to get on to him for not coming in. One factor I think Judge gets about this is how pointless supervisors are. What are they going to do if someone is “sick” for one day or two? Fire them?! They’d have to at least a week of tracking down new applicants.
There’s another employee at Initech, Tom Smykowski (Richard Riehle), who’s middle-aged and constantly paranoid he’s going to be fired every week. Tom’s job also isn’t revealed much, just as he says, he deals with the customers so the engineers don’t have to. But he has his secretary do a lot of the work, he says. Tom seems to be that middle-management type Initech has hired, but he doesn’t do much. It’s funny he works a job where he seems to do much of nothing. It’s part of the Baby Boomer mentality of having a job because he doesn’t want to be associated with those at the unemployment office.
Peter eventually asks out Joanna and they realize they both love the old Kung Fu show. And during this time, Initech is being downsized as two consultants, Bob Slydell (John C. McGinley) and Bob Porter (Paul Wilson), are interviewing the employees. Because Peter tells them that he doesn’t care because there’s no incentive for him to make Lumbergh and other higher-ups richer, they eventually see that Peter is speaking some truths. And they think Peter could be a better supervisor than in his present position. (Ironically, Peter’s position will become obsolete eventually at the end of 1999 as he’s updating software. However, since he tells the Bobs he “spaces out” so that it looks like he’s working while doing nothing, management isn’t paying much attention to what he’s doing anyway.)
However, Michael and Samir are going to be laid off with their positions replaced by entry-level people (who they can probably pay less and lay off after 90 days without any issues, just to do it again in 90 days and so on). Peter convinces Michael and Samir to upload a virus that will divert fractions of pennies in transactions in an account. This is called salami slicing and an actual hacking crime, as Michael says it was done in the 1970s and by Richard Pryor in Superman III. The fact that Michael, who is a tech nerd but blasts rap, unless he sees black men get to close to his car, drops that movie adds more depth to his character. It’s also the one of the most accurate portrayals of computer hacking in mass media as filmmakers and writers think it’s mostly someone typing away on a keyboard.
Yet things don’t turn out the way they should. They never do. The computer hacking subplot just gives the movie some type of structure. Judge is really looking at the employment world at the turn of the century. Much of the movie was filmed in Austin and surrounding Texas communities but it could’ve been filmed in any metropolitan area. Go to any major city and all you see are business parks spread out all through the area with franchise restaurants nearby that the customers could walk to from their workplaces.
It’s funny that Peter’s friend and next-door neighbor, Lawrence (Deidrich Bader), works in construction and seems to be the happiest one. Lawrence, in many ways, represents how some people have jobs that they can just leave behind when they get in their cars to go home. It’s also never specified what Lawrence does but he says he’s doing drywall all week at a McDonald’s and later shown shoveling and collecting debris from a building fire. But you get the sense that Lawrence isn’t like Peter nor Joanna were supervisors are constantly looking over their shoulders nitpicking everything they do.
It’s possible Lawrence may be in a union but if it is Texas, which was one of the first right-to-work, it’s apparent Lawrence may not have the most glamorous job but he does have the less frustrating one. And both Judge and Bader don’t play Lawrence as a dumb hick, even though he has long hair mullet and a burley moustache. We need people like Lawrence to help construct buildings and clean up when the buildings are torn down. Why would a supervisor bust his chops over someone cleaning up debris? Someone has to do it.
Now, 25 years later and after the Covid-19 pandemic showed just how worthless supervisors can be, this movie seems more relevant. What can Lumbergh do in his job that makes him irreplaceable? He finds himself even being interviewed by the Bobs for spending too much time reading TPS Reports. There’s also some humor how some of the people at Initech don’t even know who Milton Waddams (Stephen Root) is. Judge based the movie on some animated shorts “Milton” where the character is a squirrelly character who mutters a lot.
Apparently, Milton was laid off years earlier but no one told him. Because of a glitch in payroll, he still gets a paycheck. Initech is unaware of the people it has walking through it’s location. And after the glitch is fixed, rather than tell Milton, he’s been canned, Lumbergh can’t bring himself to fire him. It’s like Lumbergh wants the Porsche, the big office and the job title of a top supervisor, but doesn’t want the responsibilities. I’ve had to work in management jobs in which I had to remove people from their positions. It’s never a pleasant experience but maybe Initech is afraid of what will happen if they remove him on his own. They’re hoping Milton won’t come back if he’s not getting paid.
Bob Slydell said that this has happened before and usually plays it out that way. However, the Bobs say that they usually fire people at the end of work on Fridays because they’re afraid of any incidents. The audacity of supervisors and employers to think terminated employers will do something hostile. Ten years after this movie was released, there was Up in the Air based on the book by the same name published in 2001 in which third party people are hired to tell employees they’ve been fired, laid off, terminated, etc. It shows you shallowness of corporate America who will pay people to fire their employees rather than give them raises and/or more benefits.
While Up in the Air was released during the Great Recession of the latter 2000s hitting harder than it was intended, Office Space seems somewhat prophetic as it was released before the DotCom Bust and financial problems during that whole decades. The 1990s began with a recession that hurt President George H.W. Bush’s re-election but by the middle of the decade, the economy was starting to boom. But Judge must’ve known something was in the air. Before he was making TV shows in the 1990s, Judge worked in Silicon Valley in the 1980s. Lawrence is based on a neighbor he had. He said he wanted to take away all the glamour of other movies about the workplace and show how bleak it could be.
Judge said he never intended to do a movie based on the “Milton” shorts but Twentieth Century Fox wanted to piggyback off the success of There’s Something About Mary with another comedy. Sadly, it wasn’t the blockbuster that movie was and just barely broken even with $12.2 million off a $10 million budget. It didn’t help that the studio didn’t do much promotion, but it might have also been from the fact that King of the Hill, the show Judge had on the Fox lost some of its popularity from a foolish change from Sunday to Tuesdays.
Yet, like I said earlier, I don’t think many people who now love it would’ve found much of it relatable. Like Idiocracy, it’s one of those movies that seems to be get better on repeated viewers as you get older. When you’re stuck in one of those depressingly grey-colored cubicles sitting at a desk at some office with no window view, you realize that you’re a character in the movie. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The cubicles themselves seem like a jail cell with the supervisors as the boss screws coming around to bust your chops with empty toxic positivity and “Go Get ‘Em!” phrases.
You might be a Zen Buddhist Pacificist in your beliefs but if someone gave you a sledgehammer and 10 minutes alone in your workplace with absolutely zero consequences, you’d destroy the place. It’s only gotten worse over the years as the push has focused more on being supervisor. It’s like the Cheers episode where Rebecca offers to give them titles rather than raises. But yet, people like Peter, Joanna, Michael and Samir don’t want titles. They just want to make money to afford things but instead of work to in order to live, it’s become live in order to work.
Office Space found its audience on the home video and cable markets. It reportedly was aired a lot on Comedy Central back in the day. Joanna being chastised for not having enough flair led to TGIFridays doing away with the novelty buttons. And Milton’s love for a red-colored Swingline stapler led to the company actually producing them as they didn’t come in red at the time of the movie’s release. But the movies’ phrases has entered into the lexicon past pop culture references. “Didn’t you get that memo?” and “A case of the Mondays” have become staples of workplace. And the jokes about making making a Friday “Hawaiian Shirt Day,” motivation slogan banners and dull birthday parties for the boss where everyone sings with zero enthusiasm hit way too close for home.
The only thing missing in this movie is Peter and his co-workers getting a pizza party with cheap pepperoni and cheese and store brand soft drinks in lieu of raises. But Judge was making a comedy, not a documentary or horror movie.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 