[COLUMN] Office Space is a Perfect Slice of 1999's Existential Ennui | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Hey there! Consider this a companion to the columns we wrote about The Blair Witch Project and Blast from the Past a few weeks back. 1999 was arguably one of the greatest years in the history of the cinema. We’re running a series of retro articles looking at the movies of the year with 25 years of distance, coinciding with the anniversaries of their original release dates.

Pop culture can serve as a time machine, a snapshot of a given moment or feeling. This doesn’t have to be literal; the original Star Trek might be set in the distant future, but it also captures the mood and ambience of the late 1960s. It also doesn’t mean that a particular work can’t also be timeless; Star Wars is an epic saga that endures across generations, but the first trilogy is very much a product of 1970s anxieties. This is part of what is magic about movies, and part of the joy of a retrospective.

1999 was a great year for cinema. It has been canonized and mythologized as one of the best years in movie history, alongside contenders like 1939 or 1974. Just consider some of the year’s big releases: The Blair Witch Project, The Matrix, Fight Club, Go, 10 Things I Hate About You, Election, Cruel Intentions, Rushmore, The Virgin Suicides, The Iron Giant, Eyes Wide Shut, Galaxy Quest, The Sixth Sense, The Mummy, Being John Malkovich, The Insider, Magnolia and many more.

Some of those movies were beloved at the time. Some were reclaimed in hindsight. Even some of the movies of that year that weren’t stone-cold classics are worth digging into. This could easily be a weekly column marking the 25th anniversary of this annus mirabilis, going through the films of 1999 week-by-week. There’s certainly enough to sustain it. However, there’s also some value in revisiting these movies with the benefit of hindsight, looking at what they say about the year itself.

Mike Judge’s Office Space is the kind of success that doesn’t really exist anymore and speaks to the larger structural buttresses that made it possible for 1999 to produce such esoteric films with such long cultural tails. Everybody involved in Office Space will concede that its initial release was mishandled. It arrived in theatres at the end of February, a dumping ground for movies that studios don’t really know how to handle.

Office Space was arguably so far ahead of contemporary pop culture that 20th Century Fox didn’t really seem to understand what they had. The marketed campaign was a disaster, with a poster that Judge conceded looked “like an ad for Office Depot” selling a movie that Judge acknowledged was “a hard movie to make a trailer for.” The film underperformed financially, opening eighth at the box office and grossing just over its $10 million budget.

Reviews were broadly positive, often singling out the satire’s razor-sharp depiction of contemporary office life. However, the film really found its audience on home media, coinciding with the DVD boom. By May 2003, Entertainment Weekly trumpeted the narrative of Office Space as the tale of “a box office loser [that] gets promoted to cult classic.” As recently as January 2019, former Fox President Tim Rothman stated that, “Office Space is still one of Fox's most consistently-selling DVDs.”

A quarter of a century later, Office Space is still a delight. It’s genuinely hilarious, packed with a charismatic cast and some brilliant gags. The film is still a source of memes, with internet audiences eagerly imagining blue-collar Lawrence’s (Diedrich Bader) enthusiasm for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two. Its commentary on office culture – right down to its juxtaposition of white-collar anxieties with gangster rap – still resonates after all these years. At the same time, it’s undeniably of its time.

It’s interesting to revisit 1999 from the perspective of 2024. Cultural critic Kurt Andersen observed that a lot of contemporary aesthetics seemed to freeze in time during the 1990s. Put somebody from 1967 next to somebody from 1977 next to somebody from 1987, and it’s easy to tell which person is from which decade. It would be a lot harder to tell the difference between three people from 1997, 2007 and 2017.

As such, 1999 seems closer to 2024 than 1974 did to 1999 or that 1949 did to 1974. In terms of aesthetics, there’s very little to mark Office Space as a period piece outside of Bill Lumbergh’s (Gary Cole) suspenders, tie and glasses. Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) might have a flatter television these days, but he’d dress similar to how he does in the film. While Joanna (Jennifer Aniston) might have a mobile phone today, her “flair” is still a feature of modern chain restaurants.

Instead, Office Space feels more philosophically rooted in its moment. In 1999, it seemed like the worst imaginable was to be trapped in a well-paying white-collar job. Fight Club offers a darker take on this premise with its narrator (Edward Norton). In The Matrix, Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) escapes from a world of office cubicles into an epic struggle for humanity’s future. In American Beauty, Lester Burbank (Kevin Spacey) blows up his office cubicle job as part of his midlife crisis.

The office is still an object of fascination in contemporary pop culture. The Office is a huge hit on streaming, and there’s an argument to be made that a lot of sitcoms like Brooklyn-99 and broadcast television dramas like Grey’s Anatomy are understood as workplace shows. However, these shows don’t tend to treat the workplace with the same raw contempt and even anxiety as something like Office Space. If anything, The Office is “comfort TV”, gentler than the original British show.

There are still movies and shows about the horror of the modern office, but the horror of these shows tends to be more visceral and primal than that of Office Space and its contemporaries. Severance is perhaps the closest contemporary, but it straddles the line between surrealism and terror. Netflix had a breakout hit with The Conference, which is a slasher movie at an office retreat. Films like The Report and The Assistant turn offices into sites of mundane terror and brutality.

It can be hard to quantify, but it is just a very different atmosphere. None of the characters in Office Space, Fight Club, American Beauty, or even The Matrix feel a sense of existential terror underpinning whatever it is their employers do. They aren’t scared, they are bored. The real threat is tedium. “What if we're still doing this when we're 50?” Peter asks his co-workers over lunch. Samir Nagheenanajar (Ajay Naidu) replies, “It could be nice to have that kind of job security.”

This may explain why the depiction of office work in pop culture has shifted in recent years. The 1990s were a period of economic prosperity and stability in the United States. Wages were trending upward, with the period between 1995 and 2000 seeing “gains for all wage levels.” Studies towards the turn of the millennium found that workers believed their jobs to be stable, with “many enjoying the one-company careers widely regarded as anachronisms.”

That is a climate that breeds the sort of dread that underpins movies like Office Space or Fight Club. The characters in those movies don’t really have to worry about being fired. Indeed, Peter’s acts of insubordination against his employer ultimately serve to get him promoted. Instead, there is a deeper fear that this is all that there is. These characters live in comfort and security and stability, but they don’t feel happy or satisfied. They are trapped in stasis, grappling with existential ennui.

Throughout Office Space, Peter wrestles with a rhetorical question. “What would you do if you had a million dollars?” he asks various characters. He explains the logic, “Our high school guidance counselor used to ask us what you would do if we had a million dollars and didn't have to work. And invariably, whatever we would say, that was supposed to be our careers.” The idea is that having to work – even in this stable and well-compensated job – is the impediment to self-fulfillment.

Of course, things are very different in the modern workforce. Millennials lack the sort of job stability that defined earlier generations. They are a “job-hopping generation”, and they aren’t afraid to “quiet quit.” One-company careers no longer seem viable, with younger generations far more likely to work multiple jobs than their predecessors. This isn’t necessarily by choice; these younger workers are being told that attempting to pursue a single-company career is “probably wrong.”

Indeed, many younger professionals want the job security that characters like Peter Gibbons and Lester Burbank dread. A November 2022 survey of new workers found that the top priority for almost three-quarters of new college graduates is stability. While the economy is strong, young workers report that it is increasingly difficult to find jobs “that provide a middle-class income and don’t come with an expiration date.” This may be why The Office has become comfort viewing.

To be fair, both Office Space and Fight Club are somewhat cynical about their protagonists. In both films, there’s a recurring sense that the lead character’s frustrations say more about the individual than the job. Peter isn’t angry at his job, specifically, he’s upset at his own failure to find meaningfulness and happiness despite his ostensible prosperity, endangering his friends and alienating Joanna. In Fight Club, the narrator responds to the emptiness inside himself by founding a terrorist organization. (In contrast, American Beauty is ultimately less critical of Lester.)

Many of these 1999 movies are rooted in a sense of prosperity and security that doesn’t really exist today. The 1990s were “the end of history”, with America emerging triumphant at the end of the Cold War. In The Matrix, Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) warns Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) that 1999 was “the peak of your civilization.” With stable jobs, healthy incomes, and no external threat, there was room for introspection. Characters could grapple with a more spiritual struggle.

Of course, the satire of movies like Office Space and Fight Club still resonates, along with the escapism of The Matrix. These feelings are universal. Even younger people bouncing between temp jobs will recognize some previous boss in Bill Lumbergh’s well-observed mannerisms or empathize with the employees justifying their jobs to consultant Bob Slydell (John C. McGinley). However, Office Space speaks to something universal in the human condition, it is undeniably a product of its time.