Workplaces don’t get a lot of love in pop culture; most movies portray workplaces as a life sucking environment where dreams go to die. Fictional characters are either beaten down by their overbearing boss, cloying office culture or photocopy machines that break down just as they need to rush a report.
For now, let’s be grateful that our work lives are nothing like these movie protagonists.
Office Space
If you screen 'Office Space' to a class of accounting or engineering students, you may traumatise them enough to cause them to consider a career in the creative arts instead. This movie stars Peter (Ron Livingstone) as an office drone in a dead-end, white-collar job. The company he works for is called Initech, but it is faceless enough to be any corporate organization.Peter’s life is a constant stream of mission statement discussions, office memos, staff meetings, birthday celebrations and fax machines with its paper jam warnings. His boss Bill (Gary Cole) is a caricature of middle management who hovers around his employees’ desk with his coffee cup and demands pointless paperwork from them. Sound familiar? We hope not, for your sake.
The Apartment
If you think your office has politics, try dealing with sexual power play in 'The Apartment'. C.C Baxter (Jack Lemmon), is a meek insurance executive who rents out his apartment to his supervisors for their extra-marital affairs. In return, they help him move up the corporate ladder. This works out quite well for him until he falls for Fran (Shirley McLaine), who is an elevator operator in his office and also the mistress of one of his supervisors, Jeffrey (Fred MacMurray).C.C’s love and career problems are now all intertwined yet he is too far below the food chain to stand up to Jeffrey. This movie pushed boundaries and showed how an office can be a hotbed for extra marital affairs, suicide, blackmail, bribery, abuse and exploitations. Not an ideal workplace.
Devil Wears Prada
Although this was a movie about the glamorous world of fashion, the office politics and bullying of associates can be applied to any sector. Andy (Anne Hathaway) works as an assistant to the infamous Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), who is known as a cold-hearted devil and the epitome of a bully boss. The movie also shows how the workplace can stand in the way of personal life, family and relationships.Miranda merges personal and work life and expects Andy to keep up with the long and unpredictable hours. As a result, Andy constantly sacrifices her personal life to be fully present for her job but even that is barely enough. Looking good does not equate to feeling good. Shoes won't save your soul.
High Fidelity
Sometimes, it is not always the lowly-paid employees who suffer in the workplace. In 'High Fidelity', Rob (John Cusack) is the owner of a vinyl record store. Most people would consider this a dream job, but Rob has a few things stacked against him. His business is dying because people have moved on to cassettes/ CDs and prefer to buy it in the mall. His music-elitist employees Dick (Todd Loiso) and Barry (Jack Black - in his best onscreen performance) refuse to sell records to people who do not meet their musical standards and he has to keep an eye open for young punks with skateboards who try to shoplift. Who said it's easy being the boss?
Clerks
This movie shows us that a depressing workplace is not always a white collar, corporate environment. Dante (Brian O’Halloran) is a convenience store clerk who agrees to temporarily cover his boss’ shift only to find the store’s shutters won’t fully open, a customer ridicules his lack of fitness and an old man masturbates in the employees’ toilet and collapses from a heart attack.Dante’s friend Randal (Jeff Anderson) works as a clerk in a shabby video rental store next door and despises his customers. Unlike Dante, Randal has no qualms about berating his customers or making them uncomfortable, which provided for some of the best lines in the movie.
