Show me your O[ffice Space] face.

Alas, I was working on my final paper, and for some technical reason (I'm sure of NO fault of mine), I lost some of the oh-so-profound analysis on page 7 and the revised "clever" title I created last night. As a distraction, I thought I'd return to the blogger, which seems to autosave even the most pathetic of my ideas.

However, because I'm a bit angst-ridden towards technology right now, I find it highly appropriate that we are watching Office Space on Monday. The music "Damn, It Feels Good to be a Gangsta," coupled with the image of three nerdy guys clubbing a copy machine with a baseball bat, embody what I'd like to do to my old-school HP laptop--and its screen which only works 70% of the time. But the film's image itself with suffice for me...

Oh, Office Space. It seems to encompass a variety of the theoretical stances toward comedy we examined throughout the semester. At its most basic, the film is a satire of the American work place; however, it's laden with amazing catch-phrases ("Riiiiiight...that would be greeeeat," "Sounds like somebody has a case of the Mondays," "The Bobs," "Have you theen my thtapler?," "Showin' me her O face," etc.), frighteningly accurate character parodies/caricatures (Milton, the waiter w/excessive flare, etc.), moments of heightened incongruity (via the character who attempts suicide, and, while in a body cast, says "this is the best thing that ever happened to me" and means it, Peter's preference for construction work over the American ideal of a 9-5 job, a rap soundtrack which contradicts expectations for the characters' music choices, etc.), and, finally, Grawe's survival patterning (the protagonists survive: Peter wins the girl, Milton wins the money, and the co-workers return to their comfort zone in an identical position at a nearly identical company).

Still, though Office Space is a satire, it's 10 years old. Initially it worked to mock the present workday and point out how it potentially leads to frustration and insanity. A decade later, can we evaluate if anything, at all, has changed? The reason I ask this is because, with Idiocracy, we discussed how it works as both an exaggeration of the present and a warning about the future: if we "do nothing" and are "not sure" about anything, we will become--and live amidst--abject.

Office Space is still a relatively recent film, but I think, on some level, it did evoke a call to change, albeit a subtle one. Office Space carved a space for more workplace comedies. The Office(s) came out. Parks and Recreation is a new comedy that explores local government offices. 30 Rock shows the dynamics of work when producing a TV show. Waiting, a film, depicts the ridiculous interpersonal dynamics of a restaurant. Though this may be a stretch, I would venture to say that by more and more media pointing out and making fun of the day-to-day idiosyncracies that frustrate us in our non places of leisure, the more likely we are to note our own annoying qualities when we interact with others at work, school, and so on. And we can laugh about them rather than destroying our copy machines...or HP laptops.