Office Space, Office Reality
The current issue of Giant features an interview spread with the cast of the 1999 cult movie Office Space. The first thing the interviewer wants to know is why this movie was such a bust at the box office but such a success on DVD.
Ajay Naidu, who plays the South Asian nerd, answered, "Office Space promotes dignity in a place where people are, for the most part, dead." What an amazing statement! So obvious, almost too obvious to stick: He's saying most Americans are dead.
The cubicle world had never been considered worthy of art, even though it's a far more widely shared horror than Orwell's coal mines. The office world is just too?flat.
That's why Office Space is so dangerous, and so appealing. It gave form to that flat hell that most working Americans experience. The movie bombed precisely because it was such a threat, but in the privacy of their homes, Americans who experienced that hell could safely agree with it.
As the actor who played Michael Bolton noted, "When people express to me how much they appreciate the movie, it's like they're trying to convince me how important it is."
The only flaw in Office Space is its slave-fairytale ending of vengeance and escape, with the cubicle-plantation burning to the ground.
Contrast this with an Office Reality story taken from a personal web site.
Michael Glenn Welter was born in Omaha in 1973, and graduated from Colorado State University in 1996. The next year he moved to Sunnyvale, CA-my hometown-to work for Lockheed Martin.
Michael was required to work over 90 hours per week and didn't have a single day off for over a year. A senior Lockheed manager whom Michael's immediate supervisor labeled "an asshole" rode him hard. Michael told his father, who still lived in Colorado, that he "hated this job and hated California," adding, "Dad, I don't have a life." His father advised him to "stick it out" and "gain some experience."
Michael resigned in early March 1998, and bought himself a Mossberg 500 12-gauge shotgun. At his going-away party, coworkers gave him a plaque with inscriptions like, "Congratulations to be the first one over the wall."
Desperate, Michael visited an old girlfriend, who later said she thought "everything was okay with him."
On March 25, 1998, Michael made his last recorded call to a friend-the one-minute time span suggested he'd reached an answering machine. Ten days later, one of Michael's college buddies couldn't find him and called Michael's dad, who alerted the police. They found Michael's corpse in his bleak Sunnyvale apartment, a note from the landlord pinned on the door. He had shot himself a week before. The college buddy was the last person to speak to Michael before his suicide. He told Michael's father that his son had sounded "upbeat."