004 - Permanently Out of Office
Is this you: you come home after 8 or 9 hours at the office, you fix up some food, and then you sit down to watch something. Something easy, something that isn’t going to feel taxing. Somehow you end up with the American version of The Office. An office worker coming home to watch a parody of office life. I’ve done it.
What makes the American version of The Office so curious, despite moments of awkwardness, is the undertow of saccharine optimism. Compared to the British original—which seemed so real that it made me squirm from discomfort—the US version subtly promotes the office as a vision of one big happy family. The promotion of white-collar office life as some kind of goofy, loving, and forgiving utopian setting reached its pinnacle with Parks and Recreation. But it was not always this way.
I’m old enough to remember when Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club was adapted and released as a film in 1999. That same year—perhaps the best ever cinematic indictment of office life—graced the screens: Office Space. It’s alluring to imagine oneself as Peter, doing and saying all the things that you know would get you fired. Office Space offers a little bit of revenge fantasy. Yet it also is realistic in the tedium that working in an office brings. These pre-Y2K cultural offerings did not put white-collar life on a pedestal. If anything, they reinforced the desire to get away, pursue one’s passion, to retire.
Perhaps the fact that Ricky Gervais’ version aired in July 2001 is a key factor in the British version maintaining a degree of disdain for office work. When the September 11 terrorist attacks happened in New York, much of the world watched in awe and trepidation of what would come next. A stable, boring office job—along with its annoyances and endless birthday parties for colleagues—became extremely appealing. And so Michael Scott—the King of Adorable Cringe—was created, soon followed by his female doppelgänger (with admittedly a much better work ethic), Leslie Knope. It’s not that I hate Parks and Rec or the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company. I just don’t like how easy they are to consume; the near-comatose exposure to a subtext that appears to repackage the Arbeit Macht Frei concept as something purely harmless.
But it turns out that people cannot do without office life either. When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down physical office spaces, a different kind of madness ensued. Severance aired during this period. I have to admit that I watched it at 2x speed because no one has that much time on their hands to watch relatively well-dressed characters walk around corridor after corridor (the only show that could pull this off without inducing utter boredom was The West Wing). And suddenly, we’re back to office life depictions being not only dystopic and eerie, but simultaneously aesthetically seductive. This is not new. Lars Tunbjörk’s 2001 photobook Office was republished in 2024; so deep is the nostalgia for bygone eras of office spaces that had not yet been decimated through hybrid work and gig culture.
The duality—of having an office "self" and a real self—underpins Palahniuk’s anonymous narrator, Peter, and the entire team at the Macrodata Refinement (MDR) department. Fight Club was an offering borne out of experiences gathered from blue-collar work; perhaps that’s why the unnamed protagonist is engaged in so much physical activity: whether hugging a sweating, sobbing, cancer-riddled Bob, splicing and loading projectors with actual reels of film, or punching someone’s face into a pulp. He doesn’t glamorize work; work doesn’t fill his life with meaning. Work is simply a means to an end.
Of the many facets of white-collar work that I don’t like, the inherently uncomfortable, bland clothing is a big factor. All office workers have to arrange themselves to fit the needs and tempo of the office’s demands, as if it were some sort of god in need of appeasement. Somewhere along the crowbarring of one’s personality into awkward politeness and other expected norms, there comes a point where workers forget who they once were and become whatever their job title is.
Even their clothing and style choices reflect a continuity of this professional self. They begin to worry about retirement because it is an inevitable loss of identity. They do not know who they are anymore without the scaffolding of office life. That’s why the unnamed character played by Edward Norton in Fight Club is dressed like shit, while Tyler Durden looks cool in bold prints, colors, and textures.
Lars Tunbjörk – Office / LA Office || Published by Loose Joints, 2024
Where does pop culture take us from here? With the rise of AI and the supposed impending extinction of white-collar work, will there be a new wave romanticizing office attire and open workspaces? Or will the AI bubble burst, paving the way for a new generation of fresh graduates to experience the tedious delights of water-cooler conversations? I have no idea what the future holds. I do know that holding on to yourself matters.