From Curtis White's 'We, Robots'
Awhile back I went into JB Hi-Fi looking for something to watch. I couldn’t think of something new to watch, so I was going to grab Fight Club and V for Vendetta. When I asked if they had them in stock, the sales guy Tubes (they all have crazy nick names in there) asked if I was into what he called “uprising movies”. I said, “I guess so, yeah.” He suggested Mr. Robot. I thought I’d give it a go. After watching it I could see why he thought I’d be into it (and on one level I loved it), but there was something about it that bugged me. I’ll get to that later.
Imagination is a powerful, transformative force, yet we limit how we view it and what we allow ourselves to apply it to. We worship ‘knowledge’ and ‘facts’, and forget that we cannot accept, interpret and develop new knowledge without our imagination.
Art, born from the imagination, can be equally as powerful. Equally as transformative. I find it revealing that some of the best, most powerful graffiti around often springs up in times of unrest and discontent (there is some great art popping up in Syria for example). Art inspires us to dare to think things we wouldn’t contemplate in our day-to-day lives. It touches a place that is both personal and common to all of us.
One thing I find grinding about subversive art these days is it has been turned into a product. Pieces that should inspire change are reduced to mere entertainment.
Capitalism’s best defence against rebellious art has been to appropriate it and sell it back to us, and it has been enormously successful. Punk, hip-hop, folk music, hippie culture, even activist culture has been successfully reduced to something worse than ineffective, it has become self-subverting, making our best intentions slaves to the almighty Market.
As Curtis White puts it in his book ‘The Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work’:
“It is almost unhappily the case, however, that the most dramatic examples of our desire for the Good, for spiritual wholeness, are also revealing examples of just how this desire is controlled, frustrated, and made subservient to the Market. Ironically, our desire for wholeness is almost always controlled not by some outside repressive and censorial source but by the artworks themselves. Our artworks don’t need to be censored or repressed; they can be counted on to discipline themselves. They contain a ‘fascist within,’ as Michel Foucault puts it. Even the most minimal attention to what is happening in the work can reveal this self-disciplining, although ever few of us seem capable of or interested in this kind of attention.”
Personally, I think even the sale of certain artworks subverts their message. The movie ‘Fight Club’ for example, is an anti-product product. Be the happy owner of a limited edition Bluray with a message about the things you own owning you for just $19.95.
I feel the same way about V for Vendetta. After the credits roll the Bluray is placed safely back in it’s case, along with any ideas of revolution.
Curtis White uses the example of one of my favourite movies Office Space, and articulates a frustration I had the first time I saw it better than I ever could. Put simply, I loved the first half, but could barely watch the second half. I’ve had a read through to see if I can summarise it, but he does such a beautiful job I think I’ll just put the whole thing, minus a few paragraphs.
“My students have all seen and love Office Space, a movie by Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge. They love it for two powerful reasons. It’s funny and it’s hip. It’s hip because they sense that it is subversive. Office Space is one of the few mainstream movies in which they feel they have been told the unvarnished truth about the nature of work. They feel that it presents the real world that waits for them. Office Space tells them, “In order to live, you will be asked to do what is no good, what is absurd, trivial, demeaning and soul-killing.” Thoreau couldn’t have put it better. Office Space does not describe a world that they want to be a part of, but at the same time they don’t know how it can be avoided. They find the movie funny, but their laughter is nervous. They laugh because, ordinarily, no one talks about “jobs” in this way. Their parents don’t. Politicians don’t. Their teachers don’t. Even their peers don’t. The kind of work depicted in Office Space is supposed to be the good work, the creative work in our new information economy. It is the work we get to do because we sent all those nasty blue-collar jobs to Mexico and Southeast Asia. Yet here, in Judge’s film, this work is depicted as deadening and humiliating, and young people know at some level that this is probably true, and if it’s true, then what has been promised to them as “good” is also “death.” So they laugh. And why not? It’s a state of affairs worthy of Kafka. But there’s also pleasure in this laughter because they have learned something about a contradiction in their world.
…
These are the quandaries that Mike Judge explores in Office Space. He recognises the conflict between a general hatred for the nature of work and a companion fear that it might disappear: Peter, our protagonist, represents hatred for work. His pals, Michael and Samir, represent fear that it might disappear, never mind how much they hate it.
PETER: “What if we’re still doing this when we’re fifty?”
SAMIR: “It would be nice to have that kind of job security.”
The feelings about work that Judge gives to his characters have not been so broadly and powerfully expressed since Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd (1960). We recognise Peter’s despair as our own, or we see it with a dread as our future. How else to explain the way this movie has resonated with it’s young audience?
PETER: “Every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every day that you see me, that day is the worst day of my life.”
Peter is relieved of his anxiety about losing his job when he is accidentally left in a state of total relaxation after his therapist has a heart attack before withdrawing him from a hypnotic state. Peter is suddenly and weirdly transformed. He doesn’t care about his job, paying bills, or much of anything else. But there’s something peculiar about his new, relaxed state. He doesn’t have the zombie-like qualities that movies usually attribute to hypnosis. Rather, he seems mellow. He seems stoned. Judge is plainly making an allusion to the 1969’s process of “feeding your head” or getting “experienced” as a preamble to dropping out of the corporate rat race.
Now, the power of these images of loathing for work and getting stoned and doing nothing may be so central to the experience of the movie that it doesn’t matter what other narrative logic is present. What we remember of the movie is the awfulness of the work space, and the convincing awfulness of the boss (Bill Lumbergh, played perfectly by Gary Cole), and the battered and grotesque awfulness of the most abject victim, Milton, who stands as a moral exemplar to us all: this could be you! Nonetheless, Judge, like most Hollywood filmmakers, seems as much terrified as inspired by his own social vision. In most ways, the film’s narrative logic demands that it back away from it’s own insights. And furiously backpedal it does.
Hatred of job, stoned vision, and slacker freedom firmly established, Judge begins to retreat in earnest when Peter has an interview with the “Bobs,” two outside consultants brought in to downsize Initech’s payroll. Peter has confessed to them that he does “maybe fifteen minutes” of real work each week. He then expresses an about-face on his own desire to do “nothing at all.” It’s not that he’s a slacker. He simply lacks that hoary old capitalist incentive to work: profit motive.
PETER: “It’s not that I’m lazy. It’s that I just don’t care. It’s a problem of motivation, right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don’t see another dime. Where’s my motivation?”
Judge here retreats from what at first appeared an uncompromising opposition to the corporate world. The movie seems not to believe in its own most fundamental social convictions, odd as that should sound. Peter doesn’t want freedom, apparently. He doesn’t want creativity or personal autonomy. He wants “profit sharing.” Are we supposed to imagine that the horror of life under boss Bill Lumberg all goes away if we get profit sharing?"
It would be nice to think that this is some sort of false step or illogic in the film. Unfortunately, it is merely a familiar betrayal. After an early moment of truth telling, we are now firmly on the road to a happy ending, all reconciled to the world as it is.
[Added later while reading Guy Standing's 'A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens':
It occurs to me that this betrayal does worse than simply backpedal from the movies initial values; it throws it's full support behind an idea that is making life harder for those experiencing drudgery and insecure labour (those who the film is supposedly championing), the precariat. Profit-sharing is one of the many non-wage benefits that detach the precariat from the salariat.
As Guy Standing puts it:
"While the precariat has lost non-wage benefits, the salariat has gained them, increasing the income and psychological distance between them. The salariat has increasingly benefited from equities, which derive from profits, rather than wages or salaries. One-third of American workers derive part of their income from shares...A related trend is that many firms have converted themselves into worker-owned businesses. About one in ten workers partly owns the firm for which they labour, and the number is rising. To classify these workers as in the proletariat would be misleading, as would calling them 'capitalists'.
Other countries may not be so extreme, but the trend to receiving more from non-wage sources is the same...As this trend becomes more pronounced, the salariat will become more detached from the precariat beneath it."
And so by encouraging the idea of profit sharing, the film puts a positive spin on one of the factors which is making life for those in the precariat worse. That means less rights, less benefits, less stable work...basically more of what the film initially sets out to demonise.]
The next step in this process of retrenchment in the comfort of the established order concerns the nerdy white boys posing as high-tech gangstas. With the rhythms of rap in the background, Peter, Michael and Samir concoct a plot to steal money from Initech by planting a virus in the payroll software that will transfer fractions of pennies to a secret account (accessible through Peter’s ATM?!-That sounds foolproof). This money will allow them to live free of Initech forever. Peter tries to justify his scam by explaining that he has had a vision, an epiphany:
PETER: “It’s not just about me and my dream of doing nothing. It’s about all of us together...”
But as Peter’s girlfriend (Joanna, played by Jennifer Aniston) points out, it’s just stealing. He’s just saving his own skin while the rest of us rot. He’s just another corporate criminal as even he seems to understand in the film’s biggest laugh line.
SAMIR: “I’m not going to do anything illegal.”
PETER: “Illegal? Samir, this is America!”
But the ultimate betrayal that the film has to offer is, strangely, generic. The audience, especially its young audience, is consistently wondering as it watches, “Just how seriously do I have to take this movie?” At a certain point, with the introduction of Jennifer Aniston as Joanna and the beginning of the film’s romantic angle, Judge makes it clear that they don’t have to take any revolutionary theses seriously, the “Lord, it feels good to be a gangsta” rap is all hype, just as sold out as gangsta rap in general is these days, and what we really have here is a profitable Hollywood romantic comedy. In complete and abject submission to the usual polite formulas and properties. Peter explains at the film’s noxious conclusion: “I may never be happy with my job. But I think that if I could be with you that I could be happy with my life. I’ve been a real asshole but...” Joanna then hushes him with a kiss, much as leading ladies have done to their Hollywood beaus for decades. For some of us who actually remember seeing a film or two with real subversive intent (Melvin Van Peeble’s Puntey Swope comes to mind), this scene provokes [as it did for me] the nastiest welling up in the esophagus of the mother of all acid reflux: copout! Betrayal!
This betrayal is confirmed at the film’s end when Peter resolves the problem of work by getting a job in the happy world of the construction worker, the carefree and curiously prosperous life of the unskilled labourer. Judge romanticises the working stiff. Peter can just shovel crap, eat lunch with Joanna, and shoot the bull with his pal Laurence. That’s happiness.
PETER: “Makin’ bucks, gettin’ exercise, workin’ outside.”
LAURENCE: “Fuckin’ A.”
PETER: “Fuckin’ A.”
The cynicism of multimillionaires like Mike Judge and Jennifer Aniston telling us to find happiness with a shovel is monstrous. All of the trust generated early in the film through damning depictions of work go spiraling away in disgust. The only answer the film provides to it’s big question, “What should we do about alienation in work?” is “Nothing - give up; find a way to conform.”
As I said earlier, it may be that the film’s real impact is in its potent images of work and that the rest is irrelevant. But the narrative logic is there. At best it serves to so muddy the issues that the viewer is left confused. What does this film think? Is it suggesting that anyone actually do anything? Should we quit the jobs we hate? No. It suggests that you slink back to work like Michael and Samir, and if the pain gets really bad, just crank the gangsta rap up a notch. Or you can join the happy, healthy world of unskilled labour, where your millionaire girlfriend sits beside you as you eat your lunch from a pail. Or you can fix it all the American way by cheating, embezzling, and scooting off to some Caribean island, as Milton does, to do that ugly American thang and complain about the pina coladas. But do something wild like figure out what a real human life might look like? Nah. The worldview of Office Space allows corporate capitalism to go on with its monstrous and sterile “creativity,” while its subjects remain merely abject. Dead.”
This reflects exactly how I felt watching Office Space.
I had similar feelings about the series Mr. Robot. It’s assessment of the world as it is is spot on. The population as debt slaves, the sterility of corporate life, the moral vacuum left in the pursuit of profit. What it suggests as a solution almost suggests that there is no solution. Rather than seeing a collective uprising of the people pushing for practical reform, we are asked to pin the hopes of the world on a troubled vigilante super-hero. The image it paints of our protagonist Elliot Alderson is one of an unstable drug addict, the consequences of his actions dangerous and unpredictable. The public, rather than being depicted as a powerful force when united, are depicted as mere pawns in a game being played by people with powers they don’t understand. Elliot is no better than the corporations in this regard. He thinks he knows what is best for the people, and is as willing to play with their lives to achieve his goals as the corporations he hates. This series says don’t mess with the system unless you want chaos. At best it’s pop culture fantasy, at worst it demonises the very idea of trying to do something to change the way things are.
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