If "The Matrix" is the great allegory of the boom, its mirror is the rather modest comedy "Office Space" (1999), written and directed by Mike Judge, purveyor of the animated MTV serial "Beavis & Butthead." It’s not a remarkably comical comedy; its caper subplot is even more negligible. Nonetheless, unerring in its processed landscapes and corporate culturespeak, it’s a Rosetta stone of the banalities pooling in the technology parks of Silicon Valley.
The narrative pits software engineer Peter Gibbons, and co-workers Samir and Michael, against their life of vacant and ever-expanding labour for a tech company. Office Space’s DVD packaging refers to its lead as "cubicle slave Peter Gibbons"; the theatrical trailer offers "a movie about people who go to work...and need to escape." This alone ought be enough to put us in mind of "The Matrix" – the difference rests largely in whether the language of "cubicle slave" is used figuratively or not.
There’s more to recommend "Office Space" than its value as an analogy, and elements that exceed the tale of millennial wage-slavery. This includes, for example, the satisfying if politically incoherent episode in which the plot’s three conspirators vent their frustration on the reviled office fax machine; the punishment, set to a gangster-rap soundtrack and meted out via baseball bat and stylized kicks, again recapitulates the beating of Rodney King.
The movie, that is, has room for other nightmares. But they do not career toward the riotous apocalypse threatened by "Strange Days’" millennium. The movie refuses to leap into allegory, or even hyperbole. The nightmare to which it always returns is the blunt quotidian of work; a nightmare as discomfiting for its ennui as its ensnarements. On the Friday of the plot’s turning point, Peter attempts to dodge his blandly soulless boss Lumbergh amid the identical cubicle enclosures of Initech – but, like Thomas Anderson fleeing Agent Smith through the fluorescent abyss of Metacortex, it’s to no avail.
Because this is no allegory, our hero isn’t eluding the sinister representatives of a shadow regime – just the murmuring blackmail that is the natural language of the middle manager. Anti-heroic to its core (in reaction, one suspects, to the hero narratives endemic to the boom’s self-mythologizing), "Office Space" is 'the Matrix' portion of "The Matrix" with every trace of the uncanny evacuated.
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No fantastical plane leaks into the real world. This defines the film; its world is one in which the imaginary has been utterly disallowed. Instead it tells the story of work as the ever-expanding construct in its most abject form. Caught by Lumbergh, Peter is subject to that increasingly familiar demand:
I’m gonna need you to go ahead and come in tomorrow. So if you could be here around nine, that would be great, mmmkay? Oh . . . oh . . . and I almost forgot: Ahh, I’m also gonna need you to go ahead and also come in on Sunday, too, mmmkay?
In the stylized "Matrix," the cut-on-capture is to a classically uncanny interrogation (in which, we recall, the hero is shortly reminded of his destiny as pure labor: "You’re Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company, you have a social security number, you pay your taxes"). "Office Space" splices immediately to Peter's visit with an "Occupational Hypnotherapist," for whom he limns, in his decent, crushed tone, the conditions of his working life:
I was sitting in my cubicle today and I realized ever since I started working, um, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me – that’s on the worst day of my life.
The soliloquy of the alienated worker is followed by the film's one reach toward a dreamworld, what we could call the originary fantasy that begets the bifurcated world of Thomas Anderson and Neo:
Is there any way that you could, sorta, just zonk me out so that, like, I don’t know that I’m at work – in here [pointing at his head] – could I come home and think that I’d been fishing all day, or something?
There is no awakening from his nightmare, and the film knows it; the only escape from pure work is in the plea for a better dream. As if in answer, "The Matrix" would be released six weeks later.
No wonder the multi-stage final battle of "The Matrix," wherein Trinity and the now-superconscious Neo jack back into the Matrix to rescue Morpheus, must begin with a return to office architecture, to the dully grand corporate tower rising into a skyline built of nothing but business.
However, this is wish fulfillment of a scale only Hollywood could manage; such a move toward resolution expresses the film’s theoretical problem all too well. Its 2199 allegorizes the condition of the laboring classes at the end of our 20th century. But within the film’s logic, its 1999 is the Matrix, the delusion, the acme of all ideology. The office building can’t be destroyed; like Metacortex, it is itself an allegory, a tolerable symbolic expression of its 2199 real. For all its stark lines and modern appurtenances, its whirr of data in mid-process, it too is an archaicism, two centuries behind the times. In the desert of the real, the architecture has reached its apotheosis, not as frozen music but frozen life. The work-week is 168 hours; the cubicle has been reduced to a pod the worker need never leave – may never leave – where rudimentary needs are accounted for with maximum efficiency, immersion is total, and payment is delivered in appearance value.
The nightmare haunting "The Matrix" is that 1999’s expanding construct – the working week and the workstation, the economy, the corporate sphere – can’t be stormed at all. Architecture can only stand in its place. It’s a mass of systems, agreements, leverages and interlocked interests of a complexity no individual can encompass, codified by documents no one sees. It’s not a place, really, just a set of codes...
Thus the Matrix, that set of codes that has flowered into totality. It is not something added to the real world – not a decorative element, so to speak. On the contrary, it is the very heart of society's real unreality, capable of infinitely executing itself, and endlessly dissimulating the absence of the real. How then do we come to its edge?
It’s not clear that we do. That is, there’s no walking out of the Matrix, out of Truman’s false town or Murdoch’s Dark City, no stairway departing the Thirteenth Floor. There is the fundamental act of recognising that this is not the world as it is. This is easier said than done, and "The Matrix" knows it. On the deck of the rebel craft, when Neo first catches sight of the Matrix code, light through screens, the more experienced (and corrupted) rebel Cypher is blind again: "I don’t even see the code." What sounds at first as a deep gracefulness with the mechanics of reality is instead a willful return to the nightmare; no wonder he manages to look like he’s laboring, isolated, at yet another workstation.
We save a spoonful of sympathy for Cypher: he wants it back, the sensual world of stuff. He requires only basic things: "I don’t want to remember nothing. Nothing. You understand? And I want to be rich." There is a pleasure in just sliding back into it, out of the shuddering ambivalence, letting the edge of it fade from view, letting the rain be nothing more than rain, not some green system raining down.
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