Office Space

Office Space (1999) is about a man at a software company who stops working, and how it helps his career. Peter's job is meaningless. He reports to eight separate managers who each ask him the same thing separately. A hypnosis session is interrupted and he becomes entirely indifferent. He arrives late, skips meetings, tells his boss the truth. The company mistakes it for confidence and promotes him; his friends are laid off. What the film targets is office culture itself: status reports, motivational badges, a broken photocopier, a form nobody can fill in correctly. Mike Judge had made short animations called Milton, and the character came from there. Milton's red stapler became the film's emblem, and that stapler did not exist. Swingline made no red stapler at the time; ten were spray painted for the shoot. When the film became a cult item on video and television, people started asking for red staplers, and Swingline put a red model into production in 2002. The product was invented after the film. It failed in cinemas. It found its audience on rental and repeat broadcast and became, over the years, one of the most quoted films about working life. The plan in the final section is deliberately incompetent. It runs 89 minutes. Good for: workplace humour, cult comedy, and the nineties. Less good for: the plot is loose and the humour is very dry.