Cubicle Cinema

I was watching some of The Matrix on TNT this morning and realized that I had egregiously left Office Space off my quickly-prepared list of the best movies of the '90s. Man, Office Space is a classic, of course. Flair. "Heard you're missing work lately? Wouldn't say I was missing it." The fax machine. "Why should I change my name? He's the one who sucks." "I love kung fu." "Um, yeah." Gutting a fish on your cubicle desk. The guy who played Oswald on Drew Carey hearing the secret plan to steal the rounding errors through the tortilla-thin apartment walls. Brilliance. Sheer brilliance.

What stuck me watching the first bit of The Matrix this morning is that The Matrix and Office Space are damn near the same movie in different clothes. Cubicle guys get fed up with cubicle culture and start working to subvert it. Neo takes the blue pill. Peter discovers zen through hypnosis by the heart-attack therapist. Same kind of thing. Jennifer Aniston gets inspired by Peter and flips off her boss (Mike Judge, Office Space's director, I believe) and gets fired. Trinity goes with Neo on a purported suicide mission to save Morpheus. Same difference. Peter writes the confession and slips it under Lumberg's door so that Michael and Samir don't go to jail. Neo goes back into The Matrix to save Morpheus. Same deal. Lumberg. Agent Smith. Same basic evil enforcer of conformity. The movies even came out the same year, 1999. I guess that's not much of a surprise given that the zeitgeist at that point in time was all about techie software companies making bucks. It was only natural that the dark side of that would end up in movies.

What strikes me as weird, though, is that playing off the dark side of that made for both brilliant comedy and brilliant drama/action. I guess it's pretty natural for any cultural inspiration to come out as comedy and drama. I don't remember a lot of these kinds of things like led to really good examples of both, though. Watergate led to All the President's Men and other noir-ish dramas (Chinatown, etc.), but I don't remember any comedies coming out of the resulting distrust. Don't really remember any good Vietnam comedies. The early '90s grunge thing led to Singles, which is a pretty good comedy, not as good as Office Space, but I don't remember any decent dramas about it. Can't think of a good civil rights comedy. The Cold War lasted so long that it produced at least one brilliant paranoid drama -- the original Manchurian Candidate (who knew that Angela Landsbury could be so evil?) -- and one brilliantly psycho comedy -- Dr. Strangelove. But the Cold War lasted over 50 years. That's long time for brilliant movies to be made.

The whole over-the-top dot com thing only lasted a couple of years, but Office Space and The Matrix came out of it. Is it because people are more apt to want to share their miseries these days? Don't know. Do know that the Wachowski brothers should have followed Mike Judge's lead and not made sequels. Especially ones with ugly Cadillacs all over the place.