What's So Fascinating About Office Politics?

In Good Company

The New York Sun, December, 29, 2004

In Soviet movies in Stalin's day, peasants sang and factories hummed. In America, by contrast, a country where the economic system has actually delivered the goods, Hollywood's hymns to the glories of office or factory are, with occasional exceptions, either off-key or nonexistent. Just as "Tucker - The Man and His Dream," possibly the finest movie ever made on the American auto industry, was about failure, so films about the American workplace tend to be dyspeptic, depressing, and filled with resentment: Chaplin's "Modern Times" is a parable of alienation, Billy Wilder's "Apartment" becomes a sty for management swine, and no salesman can watch David Mamet's "Glengarry Glen Ross" without drink in hand or razor blade on wrist. As for "The Man in a Gray Flannel Suit" - well, you get the picture.

In fact, with the dubious exception of those creepily contented employees in the current Wal-Mart commercials, the happiest laborers ever seen on American screens are those seven little fellows who used to whistle while they worked. Cartoon characters. Foreigners, Germans, as I recall.

None of this should be a surprise. Artistic types have never been too fond of capitalism, and they like turning up for a regular job even less. That said, the most striking aspect of movies about the workplace is not their content, but their rarity. Millions toil five days a week, but you wouldn't know it from the fare at the local multiplex. Exotic locations (Outer space! Ancient Rome! High school!) are used again and again, but films about the office are more difficult to find than laughs in a Chevy Chase comedy. The office isn't box office.

Some movies even may take place in the office, but they are not about the office. Law office and newsroom are movie perennials - "In Good Company" is a variation on the latter - but the 1980s, like the 1950s, generated movies set in the world of big business. "Working Girl," while hardly a careful exposition of the investment banking profession, was (like the equally fluffy "The Secret of My Success" ) a cheery reflection of the pro-business, can-do spirit of America under Reagan - a president whose greatest movie role, it should be remembered, was in the remarkable "King's Row," where he played a man who lost his legs but found happiness in real estate.

"Wall Street," meanwhile, was not about, well, Wall Street so much as it was a tale of the temptation, fall, and redemption of one man, a variant on a fable that has been around ever since that unhappy day in Eden; indeed, it is repeated in the Clinton-era "Boiler Room," a tale of the temptation, fall, and redemption of, yes, yet another young stockbroker.

But it was always going to be difficult for cinema to capture the essence of employment, which is its repetitiveness, the daily grind repeated year after year after year. Except, perhaps, in the more arid areas of the avant-garde, feature films need a story, a hero, and a clear narrative arc. Office life is not like that.

The most successful workplace film in recent years, "Office Space" - "Dilbert" on 35 mm - played corporate angst for laughs. Without the filter of humor, its tale of despair, cynicism, incompetence, and ennui would have been impossible to watch - at least by anyone with a cubicle to report to. "In Good Company," starring Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace, and Scarlett Johansson and opening today, has more than a little in common with "Office Space."

Both are portrayals of the way in which modern corporations cloak age-old greed in new age sentiment and meaningless business school procedures - with the implicit message that this is typical of much of American capitalism. The difference, reflecting another half-decade of restructuring, globalization, and general white-collar mayhem, is that "Office Space" describes a company that was already dysfunctional, while "In Good Company" relates the history of a decent corporate culture overwhelmed by the demands of Globecom, its appalling - and unsubtly named - new owner.

The film is mostly enjoyable, though its tacked-on happy ending leaves something to be desired. But the need for such unrealistic interpolations, it seems to me, is one of the reasons office life has always been most effectively portrayed in television series - and, again, often as comedy. By allowing the viewer to return to the same location and the same characters week after week, a series generates a sense of routine (very) roughly analogous to showing up to work.

Unconfined by the constraints of the Hollywood hundred minutes, television's format allows for greater detail, slower plot development, and a depiction of more complex relationships than the Sturm und Drang of the silver-screen workplace. A researcher trying to get a sense of how young investment bankers spent their time in the 1980s would do far better to watch "Capital City," a British financial soap from that era, than return to the study, yet again, of Gordon Gekko's fortune cookie aphorisms.

Under the circumstances, it is no surprise that it is a television series, the BBC's "The Office" (you can catch it on BBC America, or on DVD) that is perhaps the finest depiction of the hopelessness of corporate life. Once again it's comedy, a brilliant, brutally observed, brutally funny "Spinal Tap"-style mockumentary about a dreary office, a drearier workforce and a boss so lost in ego and management babble that you wouldn't wish him on Donald Trump.

Appropriately enough, the series ended on a note so bleak that, by comparison, a suicide note would read like a script for "Friends." The show's creators later relented, producing a "special" episode that provided something approaching a happy ending. Wimps.

Why To See It

The destructive takeover of a nice local business by a rapacious outsider has been a staple of American cinema for years, long, long before the onslaught of Globecom, Larry the Liquidator ("Other People's Money"), and long, doubtless, before that dismaying crisis at George Bailey's shambles of a building and loan (you know what movie I'm talking about). What makes this film worth watching are three performances.

There's Dennis Quaid in the cliched, but still effective role of Dan Foreman, the veteran manager forced to compromise his principles to stay in a job that has become a penance, the reliably sinister Malcolm McDowell as "Teddy K," the charismatic boss of Globecom, cheered and feared by the employees he will inevitably "let go," and Topher Grace as the jargon-spouting young manager, in charge, but out of depth, brought in to boss Foreman around.

Like Peter Gibbons, the hero of "Office Space," Mr. Grace's character, Carter Duryea, comes to understand that he is an apparatchik trapped in a system in which he no longer believes. I don't want to tell how the movie resolves his dilemma, but like Gibbons, and like Melville's proto-slacker Bartleby before him, it becomes clear Duryea may simply decide that he prefers not to continue working for Teddy K or, for that matter, in any other office. He's left with a choice: wicked big business or free-spirited "authenticity."

I think you can guess what he decides to do.