A look at Office Space (1999) and Little Women (2019)

Redwood is a platform for contributors to analyze the political ideas embedded in the entertainment we consume.

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Lumbergh is Your Boss Too

By Davis Allen, Editor of Redwood

5 minute read

Released just one month prior to The Matrix, Office Space makes the case that a dystopia doesn’t need a dark color palette and alien overlords—gray fabric cubicles, fluorescent lights, and TPS report cover sheets are entirely sufficient. The film’s protagonist, Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston), spends his days tediously rewriting software code to prepare for the Y2K transition. He is surrounded by coworkers that simultaneously display forced joviality and a pretense of seriousness, leading Peter into a kind of misanthropic nihilism. As he puts it at one point, every day is the new worst day of his life.

When Office Space was released in 1999, writer and director Mike Judge was most widely known for creating Beevis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, the latter of which had only begun its run two years prior. And there is plenty of that same style of humor in Office Space, from Peter’s home at Morningwood Apartments to a software engineer named Michael Bolton who primarily listens to West Coast hip hop. But the movie also makes a genuine commentary on the nature of work in modern America that is worth considering more closely.

Through the character of Peter Gibbons, the film suggests that liberation from corporate drudgery lies in the total rejection of work itself. As Peter explains, if he was a millionaire and didn’t need to work, “I would sit on my ass all day [and] do nothing.” The arrival of two “efficiency expert” consultants—known collectively as “the Bobs” in an apparent nod to the generic role played by individual consultants regardless of context—suggests why he may believe this. Workers at Peter’s tech company, a bubble-era dot-com called “Initech,” acutely feel the ever-looming threat of layoffs. As a result, they expect to be regularly coerced into working overtime on weekends (seemingly, as salaried employees, without pay) to make up for the fact that Initech is perpetually short-staffed. Peter’s boss, Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole), explains that the company “lost some people this week and need[s] to sort of play catch-up,” but it seems that this kind of corporate catch-up is par for the course at Initech.

Although Peter’s work environment is different from that found on a factory floor, the speed-ups associated with industrial production are still present. While factory owners resort to literally speeding up the machines in order to force their employees to work faster, this must be accomplished through other means in a modern office, many of which are present in this film. Peter is supervised by eight different bosses, which ensures that he is always under observation. The threat of layoffs creates a very real sense of job insecurity for everyone at the company, and Peter’s dependence upon his salary allows his primary supervisor, Lumbergh, to consistently attempt to extract additional unpaid work from Peter.

At the same time, however, the film makes it clear that this exploitation is not the only source of Peter’s existential dread. The corporate consultants, who are tasked with firing workers to trim labor costs, call Peter into a meeting for an evaluation and are so impressed by Peter’s candor  that they decide to promote him. They determine that his performance issues are a consequence of his superiors’ low expectations and his corresponding boredom—as well as recognizing, perhaps, that his ability to evade work makes him well-suited for management. Despite the number of supervisors at Initech, Peter can usually get away with only spending, as he puts it, about fifteen minutes per week doing “real actual work.” As Peter explains to the consultants, the real source of his disdain for his work derives from a problem of motivation. “If I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units,” Peter points out, “I don’t see another dime!”

This is the basic quandary inherent to capitalism since its inception. Workers have little incentive to work harder since they often do not see a substantive share of the profits they helped produce. The market simply does not incentivize Peter to produce more. Still, he has no choice but to work on behalf of someone else because he has no viable alternative. He lacks access to what Karl Marx and other political economists called the “means of production,” and so Peter’s only option, his only means of securing his livelihood, is to sell his labor power to an employer for a wage.

The question, then, is how to make sense of these two seemingly contradictory truths: Peter understands that he “works” all week, but doesn’t actually do anything. And yet, Peter dreams of the day that he can quit his job so that he can spend his days “doing nothing.” Isn’t “doing nothing” exactly what Peter is already doing at work? Under capitalism, most workers regularly experience this tension, feeling the pressure to produce more alongside the sense that their work lacks meaning.

The current pandemic has made it clearer than ever that what most of us want isn’t really to do nothing; we want to do something meaningful and satisfying, which means work that benefits the people around us rather than our bosses and the owners of capital.

This has major implications in the present moment. The notion that workers are lazy and really just want to “do nothing” lies at the heart of the Right’s rejection of socialism and social welfare programs, including stimulus checks and federal supplements to unemployment benefits during the current crisis. Reactionaries argue—despite extensive evidence to the contrary—that if people’s needs were met they would not have any motivation to work. After all, who would want to punch in at the corporate matrix of Initech’s real-world equivalents and alter a few lines of code day after day? But this kind of work is precisely what “doing nothing” really looks like, and it is soul-crushing in much the same way that working for our entire lives only to produce wealth for a small privileged class is demotivating. Neither of these options can be the answer. Fortunately, they don’t have to be.

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Little Women Isn’t Just For Women

By Gabo Murcia, Editor of Redwood

8 minute read

Little Women is a classic in American literature. First published in 1868, its many adaptations into film have been a staple across generations. The most recent iteration is a 2019 film written and directed by Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird). Despite immense praise, the film only won one Oscar for costume design. The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and Forbes reported that the surprising lack of nominations was due to low male viewership. In other words, men were not watching the film because they believed it was for women. This is a shame, since the film is as much about men finding their place in the world as it is about women finding theirs.

At its core Little Women is a story about family, and as bell hooks argues in her work, we are first taught about gender and what it means to be a man or a woman from our family. Our political system privileges men, framing them as dominant and superior to women. Through this framework, men are perceived as the strong and valiant protectors of homes, as well as the violent enforcers of discipline. Women, meanwhile, are expected to be homemakers: they cook, clean, and raise children all the while behaving submissively to their husbands. Boys aren't supposed to cry or show weakness, because as adults they will be expected to serve as the patriarchs of their households. At the same time, girls are expected to be polite and gentle so they will be the most suitable mothers and future wives of these manly men. 

Every single human being is incredibly multifaceted and unique, but these rigid identities reduce us to caricatures of who we really are and want to be. While men reap the rewards of this patriarchal system, they also suffer from the repression that perpetuates this system and keeps people from being able to behave as their fully realized selves. If society is going to progress past these outdated and harmful binaries, we need to envision a world where men and women can live and love together as equals freed from the gendered constraints imposed on them. Little Women invokes a more liberated vision of gender by showing us a family whose love is so strong that they can overcome these dogmatic roles. The emotional connection we feel with the film is due to the hope that it imbues in us that one day we may be able to overcome them as well.

Many women have written more eloquently than I could about Jo, Amy, Meg, Beth, and Marmee and what these characters mean for women. By contrast, the male characters in this narrative and their roles in creating a world of gender equality, have received less attention. In Gerwig’s rendition, Theodore Lawrence/Laurie (Timothee Chalamet) and Father March (Bob Odenkirk), are meaningful representations of boyhood and fatherhood. 

We are first introduced to Laurie at a cotillion-like party where he is struggling to find his place. Jo finds him in a dark room completely removed from the game of courtship that everyone else is playing in the ballroom. As Jo swears and laments her fate of being a woman, Laurie only becomes more interested in her. He’s not put off by her unladylike conduct; he’s drawn to her. Laurie asks Jo to dance and comes up with a way to dance together so that no one can see them. As they bound up and down the porch, we see in every aspect of their exuberant dance, that in each other they have found a partner in rebellion against the gender roles that they were assigned to play at the party and in life. Laurie, perhaps inspired by Jo’s resentment of her gender, doesn't lead in the dance as many men are taught when dancing. Instead, as they parade around in jubilation, he twirls around like a ballerina. The dancing scene conveys he is attracted to Jo not because of any physical style that she presents, but the freedom of expression that their friendship provides.

After the dance, Laurie takes Jo and her sister home and when they arrive, they are warmly greeted by Jo’s mother, Marmee March (Laura Dern). Rather than perceive Laurie as a wealthy suitor for her daughter, a conventional narrative in these kinds of scenes, Marmee treats Laurie as a lonely boy in need of familial love. Marmee eagerly welcomes Laurie into her home and invites him to join in the plays her daughters put on, remarking, “You'll have to fight Jo for the male roles, or you could play a girl.” Marmee doesn't care that Laurie is a young man and an heir. She simply treats him as a young person who would benefit from joining her daughters in their ensemble. This joyous exchange ends with Marmee letting Laurie know that he’s been accepted into a less traditional home, waving goodbye and saying, “Just call me mother or Marmee, everyone does.” As Laurie leaves the warmth of the March household to return to his empty mansion, bereft of a mother or father, we get a glimpse of what Laurie must be feeling. When he turns around and gazes at the March residence there is a profound appreciation in his eyes. Greater than his desire for Jo is his wish to experience the festival of love a family can offer. 

Later, we see how Laurie becomes an extended member of the March family when he joins the girls’ theater club. The club meetings are a chance for the sisters to roleplay as high society gentlemen who wear top hats and smoke pipes, aka the gendered 1%. When Laurie jumps out of his secret hiding spot to join the girls in their subversive fun, he hops and stomps around the room, viscerally breaking out of his constrained Latin-filled boys education and tapping into a more universal form of childhood. It’s in our nature to rebel against the gendered system we are born into. Boys would rebel more frequently if they were not disciplined so quickly for doing so and denied the chance to explore other ways of being. As Laurie spends more time in the March home, he discovers a space where he has the liberty to act as free as a child wishes. Later in the film, we see moments where Laurie displays an emotional vulnerability which is typically difficult for men who do not feel secure enough to express their emotions. Laurie is more capable of communicating his emotional self, because of the freedom he found in childhood as part of the March family who loved him unconditionally.

Where does this love within the March home originate from? Marmee is obviously a focal point but Father March is equally as important. Past film adaptations have discussed Father March’s progressive politics more explicitly. In this film, Gerwig decides to subtly indicate Father’s values through anecdotes told by his family and friends. Amy’s classmate remarks, “You Marches love a cause” in response to Amy’s support for the abolition of slavery. More significant than allusions to Father March’s politics is the commentary by Aunt March about what he hasn't accomplished in life. Aunt March openly resents Father for sacrificing wealth in favor of fighting for equality, and she acts as a stand-in for the sort of patriarch that she feels Father should be. In multiple scenes, Aunt March commands Amy and Jo to fulfill their duty of marrying into a well-to-do family. The irony of this order is that Aunt March never married. It is probable that she can accept patriarchy, because she has not had to deal with the pain that comes with living alongside a patriarch. 

Whenever we see Aunt March and Father together, the contrast between their approaches is unmistakable. As we learn that Father March is away volunteering for the union army, Marmee reads a letter by Father in which he wishes his daughters will “fight their enemies bravely and conquer themselves so beautifully that when I come back to them, I may be fonder and prouder than ever of my little women.” The importance of this letter is twofold: First, the language Father uses demonstrates that he wants his daughters to take on the world as any boy would. In films and in life, fathers tend to grant their sons freedoms they deny their daughters.  They shelter their daughters, seeking to protect their supposed innocence. Father March isn’t this kind of father. He’s not a controlling patriarch. He practices a progressive style of parenting that empowers his daughters. Second, in his letter, Father March emphasizes that good behavior will only be rewarded with love and pride. So much of the unnecessary pain in our domestic system derives from patriarchal punishment and the threat of violence. “Wait until dad comes home” are words that define our fearful childhoods. Father March knows that children do not need to fear their fathers in order to develop into mature adults. While Father March only appears in a few scenes in the film, his unconditional fatherly love radiates throughout the whole story.

In the last scenes of the film, we see Jo inheriting Aunt March’s large estate, which captures the feminist message of the film. That is, just as women need to take on patriarchy, so do men, and they can only do so effectively by working together. Jo channels this outlook when she declares her plan to transform the estate into a coeducational school that would make her aunt “turn in her grave.” If Aunt March represents a resigned acceptance of patriarchy, then Jo embodies a powerful challenge to it. A less ambitious plan would be for Jo to start a girls school to equalize gender imbalance. Instead, she creates a space where children can explore what it means to be complex humans together, a vital step towards equality.

The film ends with a stroll through Jo’s blissful school. As she proudly strides down the stairs, we see a wall covered in the work of her students. Jo walks past a room where Father and John Brooke are teaching a room full of girls and boys at a chalkboard. She then passes Friedrich showing students how to play the violin. We next see Laurie fencing with his students, and Meg giving acting classes. Finally, we see Amy returning to her art and teaching girls and boys how to paint. It may not appear revolutionary but the protagonists teaching art and sport to integrated groups of boys and girls sends a powerful message, because these activities that are so critical to the development of children are often prescribed to us along gendered lines. Superimposed onto this scene are images of the Little Women book as it is bound together. Weaving in the book-binding scenes suggests that the school is laying the foundation for a new kind of story, a story in which little boys and little girls can be writers, fencers, actors, painters or whatever they wish to be and, in so doing, succeed in surpassing the antiquated gender rules that constrain us to this day.

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Redwood Recommends

Black Panthers (Premiered in France in 1968) directed by Agnes Varda - 31 min. 

This documentary highlights the efforts of the Black Panther Party to free one of their leaders, Huey P. Newton, from jail and includes especially insightful interviews with Newton himself and Kathleen Cleaver.

Watch it now for free on the Criterion Channel.

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