This Av CLub feature continues to impress me with their spot-on selections like Mike Judge's Office Space:
There have been many portraits of cubicle culture before and after Office Space—The Office, Clockwatchers, Dilbert, and the early scenes of Joe Versus The Volcano immediately spring to mind—but none have laid out the parameters of this soul-sucking modern world quite so comprehensibly. With that in mind, it's easy to see why the film was such a dud at the box office. For data processors and middle-managers across the country, the prospect of seeing your personal hell projected on a big screen is the furthest thing from escapist fun. But as legions have discovered on DVD, the experience is thrillingly cathartic; finally, someone who understands how a desk job can, in fact, be worse than logging time doing the drywall at a new McDonald's. There, at least, nobody's saying, "Looks like somebody's got a case of the Mondays!"
For my money, the signature shot in Office Space finds four employees at Initech—a technologies firm with the vaguest of mission statements—trudging across the lot at an industrial park. As they chatter anxiously about the company bringing in efficiency experts to clean house, they walk down and stumble back up a drainage trench dug out between the parking areas. Judge catches the moment from a medium-to-long distance, and the effect is like an anthropologist observing his subjects from afar, trying to get a feel for how they interact with their habitat. The shot underlines howunnatural their occupations are: Here are four of today's hunter-gatherers, each in a dress shirt and a bad tie (no jacket required), trudging through this banal piece of sculpted landscape in order to get back to a job that yields nothing of tangible value. There's no dignity to it.
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