Office Space: A movie about the irrepressible impulse of creation
Office Space is one of those genuinely fine movies that simply has no place in the firmament of modern cinema: It’s a film that features normal people doing interesting things for comprehensible reasons, which is to say it would be absolute anathema to filmmakers today, who seem interested only in crafting rather unbelievable premises with unbelievable and/or unlikable characters. Consider what may very well be the next-best-known workplace comedy movie, Horrible Bosses, made over a decade after Office Space; in it the principle characters get wrapped up in a bizarre murder/manslaughter plot, and there’s a would-be rapist boss in there too, and a boss who’s irrationally afraid of a crippled guy, and all of the protagonists in it feel slightly elevated above the normal class, too perfectly coiffed and appointed, like they’re all social media influencers or tech company spokesmen or something. All of which is to say the latter is a thoroughly modern movie, the result of a very narrow set of cinematic priorities that are mostly divorced from the thoughts and the mores of most of us.
Office Space is not like that. Its very simple story of suburban spiritual malaise and white collar crime gone wrong might be unfamiliar to most of us in the particulars, but it’s all at least instantly recognizable in the generalities: Unpleasant jobs, awful bosses, personal dissatisfaction, bad decisions, vengeful impulses. The people in this movie are not even archetypes or stereotypes of tropial forms; they’re just characters, men and women doing stuff that you or I might find ourselves doing if our lives had played out slightly differently.
In Office Space, the protagonist Peter Gibbons is a deeply disaffected software engineer at the faceless Austin, Texas firm Initech. His job involves line-editing code in order to update it for the Y2K switchover, and he spends most of his days either gazing at his computer in a grim stupor or trying to avoid his abjectly awful boss, Bill Lumbergh. His workweeks consist of what at what he at one point frankly describes as only “about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work,” after which, so far as we can tell, he goes to the gym, goes home, watches television, and sleeps.
Peter’s life is one of awful, unceasing meaningless; he readily admits that he “just do[esn’t] care” about his work, that “every single day of [his] life has been worse than the day before it,” that the work he does “really doesn’t matter,” and that the “only real motivation” that drives him at work is “not to be hassled” by his eight different supervisors. He seems for all appearances to be clinically depressed, dreading nearly every aspect of his life, drifting from one lachrymose episode to the next like a sad stick figure in an antidepressant commercial. “Initech is an evil corporation,” Peter declares at one point, and you get the sense that he really believes that—but of course he himself has been working there for years, and so he is keenly aware that he is a willing cog in an evil machine and yet he’s nevertheless embedded in it all. The result appears to be his total spiritual devastation.
The dreary tedium of Peter’s life is interrupted by a fateful encounter with a hypnotherapist, who lulls him into a dreamy state of hypnotic laziness and then subsequently keels over and dies before bringing him out of it. Peter finds himself in a seemingly permanent “state of complete relaxation.” His newfound commitment to happy slothfulness is presented as if he has actually found peace and meaning in his life; he has at long last found the motivation to pursue his grand ambition of “doing nothing.”
But ultimately in his hypnotized state he appears to be less in the grips of a spiritual epiphany and more simply on the upside of a manic-depressive cycle. He decides he’s “not gonna go” to work anymore, he sleeps for long hours, he spends much of his time fishing and hanging out with his girlfriend, in the rare instances when he goes into work he divides his time between gutting the fish he’s caught and playing video games while eating junk food. At one point he declares that he has “never really liked paying bills” and so he’s “[not] gonna do that, either.” This is pretty standard borderline personality stuff, the kind of thing that can get a man evicted and/or with a devastating comorbid addiction in nothing flat. In no way at all does this behavior indicate someone who is genuinely happy, much less fulfilled or satisfied with his life. Obviously the depressive downswing is very close at hand.
The plot twists and turns to the point that Peter improbably ends up a moneyed supervisor at Initech and his two friends in development end up getting fired; the three hatch a plot for revenge against the company that, unsurprisingly, goes horribly wrong and puts the three of them quickly on the prison track. Yet the drama ends with the complete and total destruction of the company and the three heroes home free; Peter finishes the movie as a grunt construction worker, arguably the only time in the film he is depicted as unambiguously happy, shoveling the ruins of Initech into a wheelbarrow, ending the movie with a modern barbaric yawp tailored to the urban sprawl: “Fuckin’ A.”
At this point, in its final minutes, the movie’s deeper, subtle message becomes clear. Office Space is outwardly a satire about the potential soul-deadening effects of suburbia, corporatism, cube work, useless consumerism. It is most certainly all of those things, but its secret heart is one that underscores the deeply human impulse for creation, to engage in an act of creative endeavor of some kind as a necessary fulfillment of one’s self. Peter himself doesn’t just see his job as stressful, boring or unfulfilling; he sees it as entirely purposeless, without a point, a function of “human beings…sit[ting] in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms.” In effect the only meaningful outcome of Peter’s work while at Initech is destruction: Of his time, his life, his happiness. The grinding misery of this destructive endeavor is such that the best life Peter can imagine for himself outside of it is doing “absolutely nothing,” sleeping until late afternoon as a means of escaping the brutal chewing machinery of his job.
It is actually an open question as to whether or not Peter is even right about his job in the first place—if it’s really as bad as he depicts it, or if his brutal despondency is only the result of his own idiosyncrasies and desires. It is worth pointing out that his two work friends, Samir and Michael, themselves appear relatively untroubled by working in an office; at the end of the film they are contentedly employed at another cube farm, and even while at Initech they reject Peter’s implicit claim that working there constitutes some kind of catastrophic personal failure:
Peter Gibbons: Lumbergh's gonna have me work on Saturday. I can tell already. I'm gonna end up doin' it, because, uh, because I'm a big pussy... which is why I work at Initech to begin with.
Michael Bolton: Uh, yeah, well, I work at Initech and I don't consider myself a pussy, OK?
Samir: Yes, I am also not a pussy.
These are agreeable characters, presented to be likable, which means we have to assume that their own values and choices are not meant to be rejected by the viewer out-of-hand. The broader point seems to be not that working in an officespace is inherently bad, but rather that, merely, it is not for everyone. Some people will thrive in this kind of environment, others will get along fine in it, others will despise it beyond all comprehension. In the end, of course, it’s all creation. If you’re getting paid for a job then you’re making something. Peter’s assessment of his job as “useless” is flatly contradicted by the fact that he receives a paycheck each week; he is, in one way or another, manufacturing something, making something of some value, creating something in some way. His own chronic unhappiness, then, appears to be a function of both his personal desires and more importantly his personal choice: I mean, his job wasn’t that bad, it was pretty boring but he didn’t have to be such a drama queen about it.
Office Space, then, dictates that the impetus for figuring out one’s place in the firmament is incumbent upon oneself. It doesn’t just happen, it takes work, and if you’re unhappy then you’re being told something is wrong and you need to do something about it. This is a more revolutionary concept than it would appear: There are many millions of Peter Gibbonses out there, people who have made miserable lives for themselves but who refuse to recognize that they themselves are responsible for changing it. We have been created by an omnipotent Creator and have been imbued with a deep and good desire to emulate that creativity in our own right; we lack the omnipotence, however, so the struggle to figure out just what we’re supposed to be doing must be a necessary part of it. Twisted by his own inward focus and relentless narcissism, the only meaningful life Peter could envision for himself is “doing nothing;” by the end of the movie, fully actualized, he is happily engaged in construction work, “makin' bucks, gettin' exercise, workin' outside.” This work is arguably no more or less productive than that which he did at Initech; and in many ways it is just as intellectually un-stimulating, going from typing numbers into a computer to shoveling piles of cinder. But plainly Peter is fulfilled, doing something that gratifies his own personal creative impulses, at least for the moment; so are his friends, who end up basically in the same exact place they were at the start of the film. Everybody wins.
Office Space is, like most great movies, often misinterpreted; one critic a few years ago claimed that the movie “rebuked [the] way of working … that favoured conformity and the bottom line above all else, and that led to physical and intellectual monotony.” It doesn’t do that, not really—its various character arcs plainly show that individuality and intellectual satisfaction can exist quite easily within the economy of “corporate banality,” colorless and toneless though it may be. The movie rather showed simply that that kind of life is not for everyone; it’s a movie about individuals, not corporations. The critics who unthinkingly reject this kind of work and life in toto are making the same mistake of communist planners and public school administrators, believing that you can impose certain rigid standards on broad population sets without any ill effects.
The bottom line, if you’ll forgive the idiom, is that we all like and want and need different stuff; we were created by someone, not something, and so we bear the unique peculiarities of things created by a being instead of a machine. Working in an office can be okay, if you like it; so can working outdoors on a construction site; so can being a waitress. It is not actually all that hard to “go out there and find something that makes you happy.” You just have to, you know, do it.