How "Office Space" got the modern workplace just right

The office could be any office. Cove fluorescents on a dimmer, modular shelving, the desk practically an abstraction. The whisper of sourceless ventilation. You are a trained observer and there is nothing to observe.
—David Foster Wallace, “The Pale King”

After the stock market crash, which emptied out the lofts and warehouses of San Francisco, eroding in an instant the frictionless, cloud-kicking fantasies of the dot-commers, another white-collar recession slung into place, and the office seemed to resume its role as the workplace everyone loved to hate.

Few cultural objects expressed this miasma of ill will better than the film “Office Space,” which appeared in 1999 at the very peak of the boom. Its theatrical run was a modest failure, but in retrospect it’s no surprise that a film so relentlessly dark and nasty would be overpowered by the delirium that gripped the end of the millennium. (From a reporter visiting a Microsoft annual meeting in 1997: “‘Why are we at Microsoft? ’ bellowed billionaire Steve Ballmer, then the company’s executive vice president, to a crowd of nine thousand employees packed into the Kingdome, Seattle’s indoor stadium. ‘For the money! ’ he screamed. ‘Show me the money! ’ The crowd responded with a roar: ‘Show me the money! ’ ”) Running gags about staplers, misplaced memos, “Hawaiian Shirt Day,” and the specter of working lives wasted in dead-end, purposeless jobs for a gray tech company: no one appeared ready for that sort of humor in an era of raging exuberance—and anyway, the cubicle was dead, right? Then the bubble burst; people woke up the following morning with their stock options erased; the beanbag chairs were gone, and they were in a cubicle again or unemployed and desperately searching for a cubicle. “Office Space” found new life on the small screen, a medium that suited the office worker existence depicted in the film: long days huddled in front of a computer, followed by short nights exhausted on the couch, staring at a television. In 1999 it barely recovered its $10 million budget in box office receipts; by 2003, it had become a cult classic, with more than two and a half million copies sold on video. (It screens on Comedy Central with the sort of mindless regularity that suggests a bored television office staff behind it all. “What do we fill the 2 to 5 p.m. slot with? ” “Fuck it, let’s just put on ‘Office Space’ again.”)

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