WORK SUCKS: Fight Club

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, men: no purpose or place. We have no great war, no great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives.”

Thus spake Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). Tyler Durden is the –

No, wait, back up. Bob. Bob had bitch tits –

No, wait, back up a bit further. There’s this guy, Cornelius (Edward Norton), assumed name, but what the hell, he’s the guy telling the story so let’s just call him The Narrator. Corporate guy, suit, briefcase, flight coupons, condo full of designer furniture, by his own admission “a slave to the Ikea nesting instinct”. He works for a car manufacturer, our boy, and his job involves travelling the length and breadth of the States examining car wrecks to determine if the number of similar models in the field times the possibility of the fault recurring times the average out-of-court settlement is less than the cost of a recall; if so, no recall.

The Narrator, uh, narrates this job spec to a fellow passenger during a domestic flight. She looks alarmed. Our boy, in the meantime, banks on the plane banking as a prelude to a mid-air collision. And why not? “Life insurance pays out triple if you die on a business trip.” Fortunately (or otherwise) our boy doesn’t cark it during a routine flight. Instead, he meets pragmatist, soap manufacturer and wannabe pugilist Tyler Durden.

After a conflagrant misadventure afflicts his Ikea-lined condo, our boy moves in with Durden. Chez Durden is a des res for people who deem “shithole” more important in estate agent (ie. realtor) terms than “no upward chain”. This is immaterial. The terms and conditions of relocation to said locale is that our boy hit Tyler as hard as he can. Our boy’s hesitant. Tyler’s insistent. The rationale? What do you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight.

They trade blows in a pub car park. This leads to mass brawling in said pub car park. The whole scene goes underground (literally) in the basement of said pub. The landlord, Lou, objects … briefly. Next thing you know, everyone who’s working a shit job and getting no satisfaction out of life is turning up, losing the tie, adhering to the no shirts/no shoes rule, and finding more than a soupçon of validation in beating the ever-loving shit out of each other.

“No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.”

Next thing you know, there’s homework assignments and priests are being provoked into exchanging blows, corporate art is desecrated, computer shops blown up, tower blocks with smiley faces daubed on their glass-fronted façade belch flames, hoardings are appropriated for public (mis)information sloganeering, and roof-top pigeons are overfed so that the BMW dealership below is beset with guano all over its top of the range models.

‘Fight Club’ is a hyper-stylized, brilliantly constructed, funny as fuck howl against the general piss-awfulness of modern life. It is agit-prop and protest art. It is the big fungoo administered to the false gods of contemporary culture, a corrective to the slavering press panting over celebrity scandal and the profusion of reality TV non-entities. Put the latest ‘X Factor’ media whores up against Norton and Pitt and I guarantee a no-contest smackdown.

“You’re not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank, you’re not the car you drive, not the contents of your wallet, you’re not your fucking cactus. You are the all-dancing, all-singing crap of the world.”

For me, the film turns (in the sense of switching from I-hate-my-job wish-fulfilment to something more meaningful; the switch from audience perception to late-in-the-day revelation comes significantly later) when Durden bursts into a convenience store and bustles the clerk out back at gunpoint. He demands the poor unfortunate’s name and wallet. Both are given over post haste. Durden queries the clerk over an out-of-date student card; turns out the lad wanted to be a vet but dropped out because the course required too much studying. “I’m gonna check in on you,” Durden informs him; “if you’re not on your way to being a vet in six weeks, you’re dead.” It’s a pivotal scene both in terms of how the narrative develops (it gets progressively darker) and in gauging audience complicity. Your appreciation of ‘Fight Club’ depends on your response to this scene: do you wince at the Tyler Durden’s treatment of the poor, gibbering unfortunate? Or do you applaud that Tyler Durden has rescued him from a life of subservient drudgery; has in fact liberated him

I fall into the latter category. This may have something to do with having watched the film last night, a good few drinks under my belt, after a shit day at work that included a royal shafting courtesy of the management. Hence the wish-fulfilment aspect of ‘Fight Club’. The scene where The Narrator beats himself up during a one-to-one with his prissy company-man boss is at once the greatest scene of physical comedy this side of a Charlie Chaplin movie and perversely inspiring. Indeed, the whole of ‘Fight Club’ is perversely inspiring. Even when some of The Narrator’s sloganeering is quite obviously that – sloganeering (and whiny with it) – it touches enough of a nerve that you can understand exactly where Pitt and Norton and David Fincher and Chuck Palahniuk (whose debut novel it is based on) are coming from.

I have read reviews by intelligent commentators on film, many of whose opinions I wholeheartedly agree with, who find ‘Fight Club’ juvenile, facile, puerile and emotionally and intellectually hollow. I’m guessing they’ve never wanted to take a swing at their boss, trash their office and shrug off the responsibilities that keep the majority of us tied to our desks and our cubicles and our contracts of employment. I have – on more than one occasion. But because of those aforementioned responsibilities, I’ve kept myself in check.

Thoreau once said “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”. ‘Fight Club’ is the movie that recognises every one of Thoreau’s faceless, nameless, disaffected masses. ‘Fight Club’ speaks out for them, flips off authority on their behalf, and offers catharsis without the detrimental side effects of getting sacked or spending a night in the cells.

(Having said that, I reserve the right to turn up to a Senior Management Team meeting one of these days in a state of bruised dishevelment and bare bloodied teeth in a horrible gargling hiss at some cornflower-blue-tie wearing dweeb of a boss.)

WORK SUCKS: Office Space

Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) isn’t very happy with his life. He works for Initech, a software company that suffers from that endemic late-twentieth-century corporate problem: too much frickin’ management.

The management culture at Initech is personified by Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole), a man whose ingratiating conversational opener "So, [staff member’s name], what’s happening" is inevitably a prelude to dumping on said employee. Lumbergh has a yuppie haircut and wears coloured shirts with white collars. His tie and braces seldom match. He wanders round the office, coffee cup in hand, leaning up against water coolers and partitions while he doles out bollockings for minor things or ruins your plans for the weekend ("yeah, uh, I’m gonna need you to come in on Saturday"). He’s like David Brent gone to the dark side and not bothered about wanting people to like him.


Lumbergh and Initech are the main reasons Peter isn’t very happy with his life. Mind you, his colleagues are equally put-upon. Michael Bolton (David Herman) is saddled with the same name as a singer he doesn’t even like (he tries, ineffectually, to get people to call him Mike instead). Samir Nagheenanajar (Ajay Naidu) has a bad case of nerves and gets agitated at the constant mispronunciations of his surname. Milton Waddams (Stephen Root) is a mumbling, complaining, "not my job type" who gets het up whenever he’s asked to move desks and obsesses over his stapler.

Adding to Peter’s woes are relationship problems with his girlfriend Anne (Alexandra Wentworth) and impending cutbacks signalled when Lumbergh brings in downsizing consultants Bob Porter (Paul Willson) and Bob Slydell (John C. McGinley) – chummily known as "The Bobs". The Bobs stage a round of interviews designed identify suitable candidates for redundancy. The first victim is Milton. The Bobs discover he was actually laid off years ago but kept turning up for work; a payroll error whereby he continued to be paid is swiftly "corrected" in the hope that he’ll take the hint and vamoose.

Anne insists on Peter attending a hypnotherapy session. When the therapist suffers a heart attack while Peter is still under hypnosis, the result changes his life. He sleeps soundly and placidly through an entire weekend while Lumbergh jams up his answerphone with messages cordially reminding him he was supposed to be at work. Peter awakes to a clarity of vision: he decides not to bother with work, or waste anymore time on his relationship with Anne. He chats up coffee shop waitress Joanna (Jennifer Aniston), then moseys into the office to collect his personal belongings.

Nobody takes his declarations that he’s quit seriously, and he finds himself steered into a meeting room for his tete-a-tete with the Bobs. They mistake his insouciant and sarcastic attitude for creative, outside-the-box thinking and mark him down as management material.

Peter responds to his new role by committing minor acts of vandalism around the office and stealing Lumbergh’s parking space. Unfortunately, though, his ascendancy through the Initech ranks isn’t enough to safeguard Mike and Samir from redundancy, so the threesome forge a plot to defraud the company.

‘Office Space’ was released in 1999 (to very little interest at the box office). It could have been made a decade earlier and succeeded as a spoof of/corrective to ‘Wall Street’. It could have debuted a decade later and still scored points about corporationism, downsizing and management culture. I’m surprised nobody re-released it at the height of the "credit crunch" media hyperbole a year ago.

Written and directed by Mike Judge – of ‘Beavis and Butthead’ fame – and expanded from his ‘Milton’ cartoons – ‘Office Space’ has a small-scale look to it which perhaps accounts for its poor performance on the big screen. There was criticism in some quarters that it was too episodic, particularly in its first half where the script resembles an interlinked sequence of sketches rather than an actual narrative. Personally, I prefer the narrativeless vignettes of the first half, particularly a gleefully cathartic bit of wish-fulfilment where Peter, Mike and Samir vent their frustrations on a malfunctioning printer by taking it outside and beating seven different kinds of circuitry out of it. Scored to ‘Still’ by the Geto Boys, the scene proved iconic enough to merit a ‘Family Guy’ parody.





Judge’s portrait of office life may be painted in broad strokes on a small canvas, but it’s nevertheless wincingly accurate. From Milton’s interminable whining (his complaints invariably meaningless) to the caffeine-addled temp who responds to anything less than full-on perky enthusiasm with a cry of "Someone’s got a case of the Mondays"; from the oleaginous Lumbergh (every inch the company man, but whose job requires that never actually does anything) to the Bobs trying to present an affable front when everyone knows they’re hatchet men; from the boxy little cubicles to the wasteful circulation of pointless memos, ‘Office Space’ nails the bland, bureaucratically-blinkered aesthetic of the contemporary workplace. It doesn’t have the desperation or the biting anger of ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’, but that’s not Judge’s remit. ‘Office Space’ is a work of satire, and its director is savvy enough to know that sometimes just observing can be satirical enough.