American narrative
art has been generally shy about portraying the world of work. Serious modern
American novelists have shown a propensity to dramatize the interior struggles
of their characters through the after-hours quandaries of romance and
leisure—and a reluctance to portray the nitty-gritty details of business,
leaving that documentary task to the best-selling authors like Cameron Hawley
and Sloan Wilson.
On the whole,
American movies have trod gingerly in the office workplace, afraid perhaps of
turning off their tired, entertainment-craving customers with the equivalent of
a “busman’s holiday.” Hollywood has
faced the further problem of how to render cinematic the office world, which
threatens at every turn to become gray, stodgy, static, overfamiliar, and
claustrophobic. In this respect, motion pictures set in business towers bear a
certain resemblance to prison movies: they portray characters trapped in
vertical blocks, scrapping for turf. On the other hand—and it is quite a big
“other hand”—whenever Hollywood has chanced situating a drama in the
corporate-office world, there has often been a surprising payoff: the
ruthlessness, cynicism, and sheer power in this “chromium jungle” 1 all bring an edge. In fact, when the movie
leaves the worksite for domestic scenes or other subplots, there is often a
drop in dramatic voltage. The paradox is that we Americans are fascinated with
the arena of work but can’t seem to admit that to ourselves.
One way that Hollywood
has chosen to cinematize the office world is to divide it into typecast spaces,
where certain activities and tensions ritually collect. One broad division I
would make is between public and private spaces. Perhaps public space is
the wrong term for those areas—building entrance, lobby, elevator, corridor,
lavatory, cafeteria—that are not open to the outside public, just the staff,
but it will have to do. These collective spaces are filled with the opportunity
for romance and ingratiation with higher-ups. American movies love certain
interiors where the classes can collide: these spaces exemplify the American
Dream—not that everyone is equal, but that each individual has the chance to
rise to the top through a lucky break.2
The actor Robert Morse, as Ponty in 1967’s How
to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, bangs into his future
protector, the president of his firm, and his future girlfriend in the corridor
during his first minutes on the job. Conversely, these shared, open spaces may
carry danger: Michael Douglas in Tom Sanders’ character in Disclosure, has only to step into the hallway to be assailed by
viperish colleagues’ rumors about his fall from grace.
A subset of office
public space is the collective workspace: the bullpen or secretarial pool. The
bullpen can provide a haven for proletarian camaraderie, or it can symbolize
the conformity of the drone-worker. Bullpens are dramatically useful for
bringing together diverse characters, as on TV shows like Murphy Brown and NYPD Blue.
Still, the object of every ambitious worker in Hollywood’s
business movies is to get out of the bullpen and into a private
office—preferably,
with a door. It matters whether the glass is frosted or
see-through—in
short, how vulnerable the office occupant’s actions are to the
all-seeing eye of
the corporation. The “comer” with an office of his own has entered the world of
private space, which has many gradations of status, right up to the plush
executive suite. With privacy comes paranoia, however: cut off from others,
encapsulated, the high-status person must now wonder, What are the others
saying about me?
Placing the Hero
The Crowd, the silent-film classic made
by King Vidor in 1928, is not generally thought of as a business movie, but its
handful of office scenes are extremely influential. Its celebrated New
York sequence established a visual vocabulary for the
genre. Here we have the classic setup: the first shot, generally a helicopter
view of the city skyline (usually New York’s), followed by a quick montage of
skyscrapers, crowded streets, and various modes of transport, the camera coming
to rest on a single building, which it will then pan upward to the top or
downward to street level. Sometimes there is also a shot of the lobby, a trip
up the elevator, and into a story proper. Vidor’s innovation was to enter the
building with one flowing cut and dive into the bullpen. It is now the camera’s
business to begin to pick out the individual from the group—the human being
from the conglomerate. So we see our hero, his placard telling his name and
number as he doodles ideas. When the clock signals day’s end, everyone madly
rushes to the exits, and our hero stops off at the washroom. The Crowd’s washroom sequence, with its
repetitious banter, makes explicit the question, Where does individual
personality leave off and mass mentally begin?
Now, before we go
on, why this ritualized setup? Movie after movie about office life—the good
ones and the bad (you can take my word for it)—open exactly with this pattern
of skyline to transport to single building to hero in the crowded office space.
I might hazard some guesses. The skyline shots remind us that the corporate
movie has been an intensely urban genre. The story seeks to wrap itself in the
monumental glamour of “the big city,” in the prestige (high, until recently) of
modern skyscraper architecture, before settling down to cases. The pan up or
down introduces us metaphorically, as well, to the characters’
soon-to-be-shifting fortunes. Often, voiceovers during these skyline montage
sequences (as in Executive Suite, The
Apartment, Woman’s World) help orient the viewer to this otherwise
overscaled, canyoned world.
The opening of The Apartment (1960)offers an
interesting comparison. Again, we see New York skyscrapers from above, come to
rest on a single building, pass into the bullpen, pick out our hero, observe
him at his adding machine during the final moment of the day, see the clock
jump to closing time, and watch his co-workers rush out in droves—only this time,
the hero remains behind. All the while, we hear his narrating voice: “On
November first 1959, the population of New York City was 8,042,783. If you put
all these people end to end, they would reach from Times Square to the
outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan. I know facts like this because I work for an
insurance
company . . . ” and so on.
The hero of The Apartment, C. C. “Bud” Baxter,
attempts to rise on the corporate ladder by letting out his pad to higher-ups
for their sexual assignations. In doing so, he triangulates the maneuverable
space between himself and his bosses by exploiting a site outside the firm. In Cash McCall (1959), the financial tycoon
hero displays the extent of his power by not even bothering to show up at the
office, but wheeling and dealing from his hotel suite. Sometimes power is
centered away from the office.
Office Movies’ Heyday
The pinnacle of the
office movie occurred in the 1950s to early 1960s. The 1930s and 1940s had
their share of office dramas, but those made less of a conscious impact (unless
you count Citizen Kane as a business movie), perhaps because the
depression had cast a pall over big business’s authority. The thirties and forties did yield a
business-film subgenre, career-girl movies, that explored the novelty of women
in the workplace: Barbara Stanwyck in Baby
Face (1933), Loretta Young in Big
Business Girl (1931),
Ginger Rogers in Lady in the Dark (1944), and June Bride (1948), and Rosalind Russell in almost everything
she did. Some of these career-girl stories focused on secretaries, switchboard
girls, or bank tellers whose looks enticed their bosses (like Baby Face, in which Stanwyck sleeps her
way up the corporate ladder, her ascent marked by shots from outside the
building). Other career-girl movies were about superwomen executives who did a
“man’s job.” Many times the women were assigned business milieux, such as
fashion magazines, considered more acceptable for their gender.
But however
compromised these dramas of career versus love may look from today’s feminist
standpoint, they were the height of enlightened progressivism compared to the
roles women came to occupy in the 1950s office movie. These roles tended to be
one of three types. First was the wife,
who was either overly ambitious or resented her husband’s obsession with work
and neglect of the family. Often the wife was assigned that dreary role of her
man’s conscience, giving or withholding her respect “You’ve lost your guts and
all of a sudden I’m ashamed of you!” cries Jennifer Jones in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), while June Allyson declares
in Executive Suite (1954) that she will fight anyone who
will make her husband into someone she can’t “go on loving.” A second role the
spinsterish executive secretary, like Nina Foch in Executive Suite (1954), who protectively hovered over the CEO.
And the third role was the trampy bimbo from the stenographic pool or a
nightclub chorus line.
The Hollywood
version of the 1950 office was, in short, a man’s world—and one of the most
curious movies depicting that was the 1954 Woman’s
World, (directed by Jean Negulesco). In this movie the president of an
automobile company (played by Clifton Webb) sets up a competition to “fill the
chair” of number-two man by flying in three contenders and their wives and then
watching how the spouses comport themselves socially. He warns the candidates:
“Your wife must never compete with the company.” In the end, the job is given
to a man who has just kicked out his tarty, ambitious wife, thereby showing his
independence from female domination.
Why were the 1950s business films such a
man’s world? It is important to remember how recently World War II had ended
and how readily the atmosphere of the battlefield transferred itself to the
boardroom: the hierarchical chain of command, the uniform (from khaki to gray
flannel suit), the code of obedience, the tension of being “under fire” and the
high “casualty” rates. The Man in the
Gray Flannel Suit makes the shadowy presence of World War II explicit by
intercutting flashbacks from the war—when the Gregory Peck character felt most
alive—with his agonized Madison Avenue present, and having him say: “ One day
you’re killing people, and the next you’re riding on a suburban train into
work.” Perhaps the guilt of trading in a rifle for peacetime pursuits made
these movies exaggerate the corporate world’s stresses at the upper echelons,
even to the point of presenting the commanding executive’s burdens as lethal.
Consider the
opening of perhaps the key film in the boardroom genre, Executive Suite (directed by Robert Wise). We are shown the tops of
various skyscrapers while a narrator informs us solemnly that being at the top
is no protection from struggle and conflict. This is followed by a title
sequence over crowded street shots, and then by a curious subjective scene from
the viewpoint of the chief executive, Avery Bullard(played by Raoul Freeman).
The CEO accepts the obsequious greetings of his underlings, gets in an
elevator, sends a telegram off announcing an executive meeting, stops in the
street to hail a cab—and drops dead on the sidewalk, as the camera careens out
of control.
The fifty
seven-year-old Bullard is not the only executive to suffer stress-related
health problems. In Woman’s World, Elizabeth (Lauren Bacall)
warns her husband Sid (Fred MacMurray) that his ulcer and work habits will kill
him eventually. Our first glimpse of the workaholic CEO in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (Fredric March), establishes that he has a bad heart.
“You’ve got to slow down,” whines his doctor. And in Executive Suite, McDonald
Walling (William Holden)
swears “I’m not going to die young at the top of the tower worrying about bond
issues.”
If office
headquarters is the theater of war, the conference room is the killing floor.
Here, grown men are humiliated, made to squirm. Patterns (1956) (directed by Fielder Cook) has a powerful scene in
which a middle-aged, over-the-hill
vice-president (Ed
Begley) is virtually driven to his death by the insults of his heartless chief
executive (Everett Sloan). Patterns
began life in 1955 as a Rod Serling teleplay for the Kraft Television Theater,
and it had so strongly affected viewers that it was made into a movie the
following year. We should recall that, in the mid-1950s, the so-called golden
age of live television drama, teleplays like Patterns exerted an influence on Hollywood business movies to be
more realistic and hard-hitting.
Begley’s massive
heart attack right after the meeting is a sobering moment. But unfortunately,
the more overtly an American film or teleplay from this era attacks the
ruthlessness of corporate capitalism, the more disappointing will be its
denouement. The drama has to find a way to weasel out of its critique and
smooth over the differences between boss and junior executive. So the young
idealist in Patterns, while revolted
by the treatment of his predecessor, stays in the firm, because his “killer”
boss will challenge him, and he will try to change things from within. Endings
like the compromised, mealy-mouthed one in Patterns are, I might add, a
weakness of the genre as a whole, and that may explain why most of these
office-drama movies are not, in the end, great films.
The silly
have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too Cash McCall
(in which the eponymous hero is both a ruthless
tycoon and a flawlessly nice guy) and the sluggish, migrained The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit have
become badly dated, while even some of the better movies, like Executive Suite and Patterns, wind themselves up into a fury and then sputter out with
some empty rhetoric about the need to keep one’s business ideal alive. The main
conflict in Executive Suite is an
interesting one: Who better would shepherd a business into the future—the
creative designer or the marketing department? But the dialogue around business
ethics sounds hollow: “the good company,” “servicing the public,” and so on.
Hollow, too, is the “inspirational” speech William Holden makes in Executive Suite about the need to
recover high standards of experimentation in
furniture-making, which
turns the tide in his favor: the board votes by accla-mation to support his
dark-horse candidacy for the presidency. The climax of Executive Suite transforms the boardroom into a jury room, in
effect, with a very Fifties civic lesson on the workings of democracy. (As in Twelve
Angry Men, one rousing, hammy speech can turn even the most closed minds
into lovers of justice.)
From a performance
point of view, many of these movies are ensemble
pieces—as befits
dramas about corporate life. Executive
Suite, for instance, has a wonderful cast, which includes Louis Calhern,
Fredric March, Nina Foch, William Holden, Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas,
Walter Pidgeon, June Allyson, and Dean Jagger. As long as all the balls are
kept in the air and the piece continues flitting from one subordinate character
to another—as long as it remains ensemble in nature—it has a sophisticated,
adult energy. As soon as it starts to taper down to the fate of one good hero
(in this case, the idealistic designer, played by Holden) confronting one bad
guy (in this case, the bottom-line type,
played by March) it loses its thrilling promise.
The 1950s
business-film cycle reflected the extraordinary allure, the mystique that
white-collar work, organization men, and corporations like IBM had for American
society at that time. (The 1957 film Desk
Set is tantamount to an extended featurette for IBM.) Added to that allure
was Hollywood’s own nervous obsession with corporate takeovers. The reins of
power were dropping from the hands of the old studio moguls, the Goldwyns,
Warners, and Cohns: these Jewish ex–shmata makers with a nose for American
dreams were turning over power to the
“moneymen” back
East, the bankers who, it was said, knew nothing about making pictures. What
made these repressed goyim
tick? In a sense, the business films were Hollywood’s exploratory probe of its
new masters.
From a design
standpoint, the fifties offices in these movies hovered between the retro look
of the Woolworth building’s cathedral of commerce or Chrysler’s art deco and a
more sleek, impersonal, but progressive modernism. Executive Suite clearly demonstrates this schism: the big boss’s
offices are done in a neogothic, stained-glass, plush-leather, men’s club
style. The furniture that the firm had designed in its heady days appears
Eames-Mies modernist, appropriate to the
Museum of Modern Art’s design collections. In contrast, its current shoddy
stuff, the despised K-F line, has a watered-down Queen Anne or French Empire
look, for yokels who wouldn’t know any better.
Executive Suite is essentially a film
about monarchical succession, and the lavish gothic set for the CEO, this
aerie, invokes unmistakable echoes of royalty. Continuous references to the
“man in the tower,” that lone, lofty presence, suggest a king. Since CEOs are
not given to showing off their sovereignty with ermine robes—dressing, instead,
much like their gray-flanneled minions—they must evince their status by the
size of their desk, their chair, and their window view.
One constant of Hollywood
business films, from the 1920s to the present, has been that the boss possesses
a magnificent vista of the city, which demonstrates symbolically the reach of
his command. The window is also a giddy reminder of fickle plunges in fortune,
as we witness in all those depression-era movies with financier suicides, such
as John M. Stahl’s elegant tearjerker, Only
Yesterday (1933). The
relentlessly postmodern 1994 movie The
Hudsucker Proxy (written by Ethan
and Joel Coen), full of campy
fascination with 1930s clichés, makes the temptation for CEOs to jump out the
window a central dramatic point. Finally, windows are, well, windows of
opportunity—points of entry for the ambitious, as for the window-washer played by Morse in How to Succeed.
Sixties Transformations and Beyond
The 1960s, with its
more debunking, antiestablishment ethos, brought an irreverent note to the
business film. It started with Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, in which
Bud circumvented the dead end of getting stuck in the bullpen by turning his
desk into a residential pimping agency and phoning executives all around the
building to readjust his apartment’s loan-out schedule.
The Apartment also made much of
elevators, as the Jack Lemmon character chats up the elevator girl, played by
Shirley MacLaine, in a number of memorable sequences. Elevators offer ideal
opportunities for flirtation, since interactions hinge on a ready wit and occur
in a limited time and space. (They can also be devilish holding pens for
embarrassing encounters with enemies or ex-wives.) The lobby in which one waits
for the elevator has also been a favorite dramatic space for romantic
confrontation or status discrimination. In Patterns,
Richard Kiley, the new man of the team, realizes he has “arrived” when the
lobby captain directs him away from the hoi polloi and into the private
elevator for executives. And in How to Succeed in Business without Really
Trying, there is an especially lovely trio number, “It’s Been a Long Day,”
about the hesitancies surrounding a pickup, in which a third party interprets
the thoughts of the shy boy and girl (“Now he’s thinking . . . and she’s
thinking”). The fact that the elevator may arrive at any moment heightens the
moment’s poignancy.
One of the things
that make How to Succeed such a refreshing
office movie is the way it transcends the genre’s cant with its sardonic
attitude. Here, one of the central dilemmas of the fifties corporate movie—Will
our hero face up to the boss, or will he fawn and be a hypocrite?—is
triumphantly resolved from the start: he will
fawn, and he will be
hypocritical. And so what? The settings
reflect the attitude, too. The mailroom,
where Ponty (the hero) starts off, is potentially a dead end for careers, but
it is also by legend the necessary first rung for any ambitious young man. In
Hollywood business films, a mailroom is not quite part of the physical office
setup—it’s more like the boiler room or some other mechanical space. It is here
that Ponty is treated to the wisdom of the mailroom supervisor about how to
merge one’s own thoughts with that of the company brain and how to cover one’s
ass. How to Succeed also has a
riveting washroom sequence, which pinpoints how easily the men’s room lends
itself to macho competition and narcissism. While the group of executives plots
an end to Ponty’s ascent with the rhythmic song-and-dance number “Gotta Stop
That Man,” Morse sings sweetly to himself in the mirror “ I Believe in You,” a
tune originally sung to him by his girlfriend.
Somewhere around
the late 1960s the washroom of the Crowd
and How to Succeed turns into a john,
with toilet stalls and urinals. In Robert Downey’s 1969 Putney Swope (depending on one’s taste, either zanily irreverent or
sophomoric) there is a “pioneering” scene of two office workers sitting on
adjoining toilet seats, discussing changes in the firm. Since then, we have had
dozens of corporate bathroom sequences, all loaded with subtext. In The 1994
movie Wolf (directed by Mike Nichols),
Jack Nicholson’s character, infected by a wolf bite, shows he has passed
beyond the bounds of civilized behavior by peeing in the shoe of the man next
to him. The man happens to be his back-stabbing underling, who has plotted to
take his job. There is also some suggestion of homoeroticism in these bathroom
peeing scenes, an inevitable side effect of the fear and desire produced by the
corporate jostlings for pecking order in this “man’s world.”
Wolf is, by the way, set in a publishing
house, as have been several other recent office dramas. It’s curious how
overrepresented media businesses are on film, compared to their actual market
share. Why so many movies about advertising firms, publishers, television
stations, and newspapers? Aside from any potential glamour inherent in the
media, the main reason is that screenwriters have had more experience with
these milieux than with other corporations.
Lifestyle, Architecture, and Viewpoint
The 1970s proved
not to be an especially rich period for office films. Business seemed to be in
a lull, less glamorous. The eighties were a different story, however: the
economic boom pushed to the fore a new kind of tycoon, who made millions not
from manufacturing but from financial manipulations. Eighties business films
rarely worried about the questions of corporate destiny and product development
that had so obsessed their fifties counterparts. Rather, the focus shifted to
lifestyle: business was assumed to be an amoral undertaking, and the choice was
no longer between finding a moral high ground within the corporate structure
and selling out, but between selling out and dropping out.
Given the emphasis
on the trappings of success, eighties business movies were an art director’s
dream. It should be noted that, ever since the mid-seventies, movie art
directors had started to become stars in their own right—the closet auteurs of many films. (The pressroom in
the 1976 All the President’s Men, for example, had upstaged the drama
of politics.) The weaker the script, the more chance for the art director to
leave his or her mark. And since that time, scripts have been getting
progressively weaker.
Art directors of
the eighties business films showed a preference for real locations, as opposed
to studio sets, and they used hip, late modernist or postmodernist décor as a
trope for menace. Cultural Critic Pilar Vilardas, in her article “Good Guys
Don’t Live in White Boxes,” noted this pattern: “Hollywood equates modern
architecture and interiors with youth, ambition, new money, power and—more
often than not—evil. Modern architecture has irresistible star quality, all
right, but it isn’t for nice people.”
The eighties art directors made this abundantly clear by setting their Faustian
dramas of yuppie ambition in chic, ultramodernist, highly stylized sets. This
was true not only of the characters’ workplaces but of their chosen domiciles.
Diane Keaton’s character in Baby Boom (1987) showed how ill-prepared she
was for motherhood by residing in a Bauhaus condo. The high-stakes trader
played by Mickey Rourke in 9½ Weeks (1986) demonstrated his sadistic
character partly through the cool elegance of his loft.
This
“sinisterization” of the business world can be traced back to the 1960s, when
Hollywood’s countercultural hostility toward corporate power equated big
business with the Mafia. In Don Siegels’s 1964 The Killers, the hit men are dressed like corporate middle
managers, except they carry rifles with telescopic lenses in their attaché
cases. This metaphor of the syndicate as a Fortune 500 company, run by
accountants instead of colorful rogues, has been repeated in dozens of action
movies since. Arnold Schwarzenegger crashes into the backroom of the casino to
find not the old bordello wallpaper and chandelier of Edward G. Robinson movies
but chaste designer-gray walls and austere Brice Marden–ish paintings.
From the 1950s to
the 1980s another shift occurred—a movement back to the “evil” city, from which
there now seemed no escape. The ordinary-Joe executives of the fifties films
had invariably haled from places like Muncie, Cincinnati or Kansas City, and
when they left their Manhattan office towers, they repaired to a suburban house
in Westchester or Connecticut, where the June Allyson wife played catch with
the son. This separation was strictly observed: as far as Hollywood was
concerned, there were no native New Yorkers who held executive jobs or
out-of-towners who chose to live in Manhattan. In the eighties, however,
characters began taking the subway to downtown Manhattan from the outer
boroughs (like Melanie Griffith in 1988’s Working
Girl), while those who had already made it were the proud possessors of an
arty, shiny co-op in Manhattan. Bud (Charlie Sheen) in 1987’s Wall Street is first seen taking a
subway from the Upper West Side; after he has made it, he frets about the
“ruin” motif of his new digs’ décor and limos to work from the East Side.
Wall Street was the key work in the
1980s business film cycle. It had a brash, insolent energy when it was released
in 1987, and if anything, has improved with age. Certainly it is director
Oliver Stone’s best film. It jazzes up the (potentially static) office habitat
by moving the camera constantly and twitchily, using expressionistic lighting
and distorting lenses, and making us want to “whistle the sets” when we leave
the theater. The art direction is nothing if not self-conscious. Even if Gordon
Gecko (Michael Douglas) had not told us his motto was “Greed is good,” we would
know he was a moral sleaze by the impeccably cool furnishings of his office,
complete with blue-chip contemporary art on the walls. This sleek, open-plan
office is a far cry from the gothic sanctuary of Executive Suite. Whereas the old executive manifested power by
maintaining the privacy of his working quarters, Gecko does everything in full
view of his underlings. When we first encounter him, he is taking his blood
pressure (shades of Fredric March in The
Man in the Gray Flannel Suit). Otherwise,
it is startling how many conventions of the business-movie genre are respected
in this otherwise innovative film: We are shown Manhattan buildings, scenes of
transport, and the subway. Then we see our man, Bud, (Charlie Sheen) picked out
from the crowd, squeezed into a crowded elevator, and deposited in the bullpen
(now festooned with computer screens). One major difference from earlier business
films is that the workplace has become decentralized: in the information age,
the goal is to acquire inside information, which means Bud must often run from
place to place.
One of the problems
with Wall Street is that we are
supposed to root for the conscience-stricken young go-getter, Bud, when our
real sympathies are with the sacred monster, Gecko, who has the vitality,
courage, and confidence of a Vautrin, Balzac’s master criminal. Just as many
supposed anti-war movies inadvertently have a pro-war effect by enlisting the
audience’s blood lust, so most filmic exposes of the evils of corporate
capitalism end up appealing, like it or not, to our wildest consumerist
desires. (We’ll take the Mazerati and Darryl Hannah, thank you, and somehow
figure a way to finesse the ethical issues.) Symptomatic of the film’s morality
problem is that it must go outside the financial office world it is portraying
even to find a moral point to argue.
I am referring to the schematic subplot involving Bud’s noble union-leader dad
and his beleaguered airplane company.
The eighties and
nineties office film developed a stock company of performers. Just as Gregory
Peck, Fredric March, June Allyson, and Nina Foch had once seemed de rigueur for boardroom movies, so
now Michael J. Fox stepped into the Robert Morse part of the irresistibly cute
yuppie with good-ambition (as in The Secret of My Success 1987 and the Bright
Lights Big City 1988), while the evil yuppie was played time and again by
James Spader ( Wolf, Less than Zero, Wall Street).
Meanwhile, Michael Douglas went from a charming shark in Wall Street to a struggling middle manager victimized by Demi Moore
in Disclosure, the Executive Suite of the nineties.
Since the 1990s
Hollywood, in telling a business story, has seemed torn between using the
viewpoint of the rising young lead or that of the middle-aged, embattled star.
If it chooses the former, the tone verges on the optimistic; if the latter,
elegiac. Part of the sour charm of Wolf,
a movie with a good first half, was Jack Nicholson’s wearier-than-thou
performance as Will Randall, a veteran executive who gets sacked. He reminded
me of John Wayne in his last valedictory Westerns, which were as much about a
dying movie genre as a dying way of life. When Will Randall, who has gained
supersensitive hearing powers from his wolf bite, ventures into the atrium
stairwell of his building, he hears all of his colleagues maliciously
whispering about him from behind closed doors. The building’s public space has
become a megaphone for verifying the Randall’s paranoid suspicions.
Though it is still
too early to assess the nineties fully, I have detected a trend in Hollywood
toward portraying the office world as a locus of trepidation rather than
opportunity. The faltering economy’s job insecurities no doubt have contributed to that uneasy atmosphere. But it
has to do with set design as well: Increasingly, the characters in contemporary
office movies have had to traverse large glass corridors behind mirrored glass
facades. They work in huge open floors, always exposed, caught in the
crosshairs of some larger scrutinizing force. There are fewer and fewer places
(besides the lowly mailroom) to duck into and hide. Permeability promotes
paranoia. This seems to be the real message in Disclosure, a movie purportedly about sexual harassment in the
workplace but energized mainly through a magnificent retro/futurist set design.
The main character, Tom Sanders (Michael Douglas) despite his relatively high
status in the corporation, seems a sitting duck behind glass partitions. Not
only can he be spied on physically, but his e-mail can be picked up at any
time.
Vulnerable as he is
to disinformation, he chooses high-tech weapons to fight back into the boss’s
good graces. This detective solves the crime in question by sitting behind a
computer screen and communicating with Asia, and he also braves a trip into
virtual reality to bring back a missing piece of the story’s puzzle (don’t ask
me how; none of it makes sense). Viewers are left with an impression of a new
kind of hero, whose decentralized sense of location and destabilized sense of
self leave him “free” to wander through cyberspace. No longer is the office
worker attached to the city; no longer is he even necessarily urban; he resides
in the “city of bits”—predatory place, to be sure. But with a little luck and a
decent, forgiving, long-suffering wife tucked away safely in the suburbs, even
the “new” worker can make out all right, according to this movie.
We are also seeing
more films in which the hero works out of his house: the freelancer, hooked up
by modem to his clients, who takes a break by warming his coffee in the
microwave and having an earnest chat with his wife about their nanny problems.
This is a shame: a kitchen island is not nearly so cinematically intense as a
skyscraper lobby, and I begin to get cabin fever watching this domestication of
the workplace. Besides, if the truth be known, I prefer the formal orthodoxy of
gray flannel suits to the informal conformity of blue jeans—not to mention the
old, formal power of office headquarters. Must we imagine a time when a
business movie will no longer begin by panning up a tower’s facade, but by
laterally moving room by room through a tycoon’s beach house?
The larger issue is that the power of place seems to be
diminishing. What began with a decline in the power of public space has shifted
to that formerly secure bastion of architecture, the office building. To do its
job properly of dramatizing human conflict, Hollywood needs places redolent
with memory to build stories around—public places to collect the crowds and
office buildings replete with aspiration and futility, shared work and jostling
interests.
1 One character
uses this phrase in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.
2 I am indebted
to Donald Albrecht for this and many other ideas in this paper.
Pull Quotes:Lopate
1.
. . .we Americans are fascinated with the arena of
work, but can’t seem to admit that to ourselves. (p.1)
2.
. . .the object of every ambitious worker in
Hollywood’s business movies it to get out of the bullpen and into a private
office – preferably with a door. (p.2)
3.
If office headquarters is the theater of war, the
conference room is the killing floor. Here, grown men are humiliated, made to
squirm… (p.7)
4.
The 1950s business film-cycle reflected the
extraordinary allure. . . that white collar work, organization men, and
corporations like IBM had for American society… (p.8)
5.
…the economic boom [of the 80s] pushed to the fore a
new kind of tycoon who makes millions not from manufacturing but from financial
manipulations. (p.12)
6.
Even if Gordon Gecko had not told us his motto was ‘Greed
is good’, we would know he was a moral sleaze by the impeccably cool
furnishings of his office. . . (p.14)
7.
. . .most filmic exposees of the evils of corporate
capitalism end up appealing. . .to our wildest consumer desires. (p.15)
8.
…I have detected a trend in [1990s] Hollywood toward
portraying the office world as a locus of trepidation rather than opportunity.
(p.16)