Office Space: A Must See Film
I want you to travel back with me to 1999 -- under the employment-boosting Clinton administration, productivity was sky high, the tech-crazy stock market was booming, and paranoia was similarly rampant. Y2K, anyone? For business film buffs, it was also the year a clever little film called "Office Space" was released.Office Space is a movie about work. The modern office: where one spaces out within the space they're alloted. If you've ever read the cartoon Dilbert, and enjoy it, you'll absolutely love this movie. I doubt there is a better expose of the mundaneness within the modern office. The film has a lot to say about managerial inefficiency -- if anything, redundancy is Initech's most conspicuous trait. The film also treats subjects like motivation -- what incentives do workers need in
order to go beyond the bare minimum? Hell, this quirky film should be part of the MBA cirriculum.
Roger Ebert called the film "a comic cry of rage against the nightmare of modern office life...It is about work that crushes the spirit. Office cubicles are cells, supervisors are the wardens, and modern management theory is skewed to employ as many managers and as few workers as possible....the ways corporations standardize office routines, so that workers are interchangeable and can be paid as little as
possible." Standardization is the best way to control your worker bees. I think what the director wants us to take away is that things are like this at ALL companies; Initech -- the name of the company at the center of this film -- sure sounds like Any Tech (Company).
However, some workers can't controlled. The pivotal character of this film is arguably Milton, who is literally imprisoned by his cubicle. Milton is avatar of the Old Economy breaking out of the modern corporate straitjacket. Milton, presumably named after the 17th century Renaissance poet who brought us Paradise Lost, has a diabolical scheme up his sleeve and once his angst plateaus, Initech meets its long-deserved comeuppance.
Watch this movie.
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