Director: Mike Judge
Cast: Ron Livingston, Jennifer Aniston, Stephen Root, Gary Cole
Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. We all had a good laugh when I started the day job that still drags on 40 hours per week and every cubicle had a brand new red Swingline stapler.
I’m not sure if everyone got the joke at hand…
Did I Like It: As with any cult comedy—and Mike Judge is certainly hit the target twice on that with this and Idiocracy (2006)—it’s the lines people tend to remember. You took my stapler. O face. That’d be great. TPS reports. Even silent moments live in the collective consciousness, like the scene where our heroes exact their righteous vengeance on the fax machine* that had so thoroughly stymied their days.
What we don’t really talk about is how insanely relatable not only the drudgeries of life at Initech are—regardless of whatever field you may have conned into pretending to give you a living wage. Whatever problems I—and, from what I understand, Judge himself—has with the too-tidy ending, there is something profound in the film’s meditation on how not only most people don’t like their jobs, but a job is fundamentally unreliable as a source of any kind of real happiness.
I kind of wish I had internalized that lesson before the proverbial they handed me my own red stapler way back when. Might have made the last fifteen or so years a little easier to swallow. At least I think I’ve worked out what does work about life for what may end up being the next fifteen.
*Because killing Lumbergh (Cole) would have been a lot harder to slink out of in the third act with only a positive attitude and a deus ex machina to guide them.