Office Space at 20: How comedy has spoken at an anxious workplace | Movie

MAybe it was the anxiety of the year 2000. Maybe something was in the water of Hollywood. Whatever the reason, 1999 gave rise to a plethora of films about angry and ordinary men, getting rid of the shackles of society and finding something extraordinary in themselves.

Fight Club and The Matrix claimed to go beyond blinkers to keep everyone in line and rebelled against the sinister forces (the capitalizing robots and the parasitic cerebral robots, respectively) exerting their invisible control. In American Beauty, a perverted husband has pulled himself apart by rejecting the suburbs for a simpler existence of weightlifting, pot smoking and skirt. But the most revealing film of this period, on the stifling influence of work and the evolution of manners of masculinity, must be Office Space.

As a deeply unmotivated system programmer, Peter Gibbons, Ron Livingston and his shrug of shoulders who fear nothing have given the generation a hero. Screenwriter-director Mike Judge has devoted his entire career to the indignity of work and found Peter the perfect ship for his contempt. He knocks the clock at the oppressively gray headquarters of Initech, a company whose ill-defined mission could just as well break the soul of its employees. This is the most mundane vision of hell: deadly doses of boredom, an endlessly chirpy customer relations repre- sentative, an inefficient management flow so dense in bureaucracy that even Kafka would have hit the head. Other irritants are more personal, such as the careless pleasure of the boss, Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole, Gordon Gekko), informing his subordinates that, yes, they will have to enter Saturday.

Peter's and his colleagues' ill-conceived stratagem to enrich themselves by skimming corporate kitty's pennies gives a semblance of direction to the loose and shaggy plot, but Office Space would be more accurately framed as a study. of character on a man who refuses to take no more. Livingston's usual aggression gives power to anyone who shares his or her average income – not easy enough to love being rich; not poor enough to have difficulty reporting on her misery – to contact her as a surrogate mother, turning her strokes against the coffee-thirsty lords into a slower realization fantasy.

His version of disconnecting from the matrix comes when a hypnotherapist falls dead in the middle of his session, leaving Peter in a state of new enlightenment. This means that all he has to do to change direction is simply to decide to do it. He starts working with flannel shirts and jeans, ignoring memos telling him things he already knows, and eventually jumping out completely to adopt absenteeism as a philosophy. His willingness to think beyond the compliance of zombies striding down the halls attracts the attention of his supervisors and is worth a promotion – perhaps the judge remembers the feeling that when he's out realized that the hatred of authority that made him unemployable could mean success in entertainment.

While this critic is relieved to confirm that two solid decades of incessant "I believe you have my stapler", the stammering of men without bars did nothing to hinder the hilarity of this film, but some aspects have aged.

Early in the night, during a night session with Peter, one of his pals suggests that the stability and consistency of their work can have its merit and are summarily dismissed. The fact that Peter and the film itself consider a reliable paycheck as a worse fate than death could baffle an 18-year-old, raised in a world characterized by few jobs for young people, inhumane conditions in the world. largest companies in the world and a millennial depletion. A new generation is leaning towards socialism to put an end to widespread poverty and abusive business practices. The idea of ​​Peter's suffering is to get bored – have we ever had it so good? Take a step back and a spectator can see people becoming more and more desperate, aware and politicized in their rebellion.

The other element that links this film to its time is the distinctly masculine connotation of Peter's metamorphosis at its best. He finds happiness by reconnecting with his physical instincts from which eight hours under fluorescence can move a man away. He ends up giving up his unfaithful girlfriend and rubs shoulders with a local waiter played by Jennifer Aniston, an example of cool for Peter who shared his apathy. He ends up getting a new position on a construction team, which Judge claims to be honest and quality work. At the risk of over-specifying the point, the judge even swears a few shots of Peter catching a fish. The film imagines its transformation not as an evolution, but as a devolution in the direction of our primitive hunter-gatherer origins.

Although defined by his lack of extraordinary qualities, Peter is as well chosen as his contemporary Neo. He takes it upon himself to wear the cloak of his fellows, left unclear and sterilized by the comfort of sweet prosperity. His crusade against the tyranny of 9-5 would refine its social component to end manhood, and the economic stakes would increase significantly in the following decades. But Peter remains a man of all time for his particular moment, an incarnation of the Generation X ideal, a true soul standing against capitalism – the dream of the '90s.