Texas hasn’t gotten its due as a major piece in the complex puzzle of American art. We’re here to rectify that. Every three weeks, H. Drew Blackburn will conduct a thoroughly scientific analysis of the 254 integral (one for every county) books, movies, tv shows, albums, podcasts, songs, and magazine articles — you name it — that best exemplify the Texas spirit. These texts, products of immense talent, dig into the marrow of our being. When it’s all said and done and we’ve built The Texas Voyager collection, we’ll (figuratively) head to the Johnson Space Center in Houston and shoot it beyond the atmosphere, into the cosmos. A wise person once posed the question: “What if the aliens are hot?” Hold onto that hope — this is our chance to impress ‘em.
I don’t like to call them panic attacks. I prefer to call it “Tony Mode.”
This is in part because I don’t feel panicky until the attack’s underway, and when it’s commenced, the panic is the feeling I’m taking a battering ram to death’s door. Also, this anxiety that manifests with hostility in the body, like a spindly creature with a vice grip on your chest, does not occur in a vacuum. The chief architect of anxiety is stress. Financial stress. Romantic Stress. Family stress. Traumatic stress. I have been touched by all of the above, but my main culprit is work stress. Anybody else? Can’t I get a witness? What about an amen? I can only imagine the state I’d be in if my job duties included whacking a dude who is like a brother to me.
One of the marquee prestige television shows of the moment, “Severance,” plays with separating personal and work stress and explores the spurious authoritarian nature of corporate culture. It’s a dark, dystopian, and funny program. But, 23 years before the world got acquainted with innies and outies, there was another workplace treatise called “Office Space.”
In 1999, when the film — which was shot in Texas, primarily in Austin — hit theaters, its writer and director, Mike Judge, was riding high as one of the people responsible for shifting cultural attitudes about cartoons. His creations “Beavis and Butthead” and “King of the Hill” were hits, firmly pushing adult animation into the mainstream. Judge’s feature film debut, 1996’s “Beavis and Butt-Head Do America,” was a huge financial success, grossing $63 million domestically against a $12 million budget. “Office Space” didn’t fare as well, earning a mediocre $12.2 million against a $10 million budget. “The expectations were really high for Mike Judge to pull another rabbit out of his hat,” Marjorie Baumgarten, film critic at the Austin Chronicle, told The Barbed Wire. “When you’re just looking at it from a bean counter’s perspective, it didn’t do well, but it obviously speaks to the culture.”
There were the early adopters like Baumgarten who gave the film a glowing review upon release (three and a half stars out of five; Baumgarten considers this an A-) and accurately predicted that the scene where the guys brutalize a copy machine while “Still” by the Geto Boys soundtracks the moment would become a classic. Craig Jenkins, a critic at Vulture and 2021 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, reminisced about the film to The Barbed Wire: “every second was quotable. I know every second. It was branded onto my brain.” It’s true, “Office Space” has no shortage of iconic scenes or moments. There’s “show her my oh-face,” all the talk about flair, TPS reports, Stephen Root constantly mumbling under his breath, Lumbergh’s monotone delivery. But “Office Space,” at the turn of the century, was a cult classic.
20th Century Fox pulled the film from the majority of its theaters just a month into its run, effectively rendering it dead on arrival. “Office Space,” however, caught its second wind with VHS and DVD sales, along with reruns on Comedy Central, and started to enmesh itself in American culture. “It’s a two-way street,” Baumgarten said. “Judge pulls in from popular culture to put those things in a movie, but then they resonate with an audience who further amplifies it.” Jenkins said what makes a piece of art a cult classic is sensibilities that are a little askew. “It’s got to be a little weird. A little dark. A little too on the nose to be received smoothly by the mass public. People aren’t necessarily partaking in pop culture to pay close attention to it. Often, it’s a distraction, so stuff’s gonna get missed.” Pop culture’s often a distraction from things, like, well, work life.
What “Office Space” does better than any other workplace satire is that it captures how the nature of meaningless work can dim a person’s light, chip away at their mental health, and lose their sense of worth to become just another cog in the capitalist structure. Early in the film, Peter (Ron Livingston), the movie’s protagonist, visits a hypnotherapist and says something that’s both hilarious and heartbreaking: “Every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, that’s on the worst day of my life.” It’s at this point that he also wonders if the hypnotherapist could “zonk” him out so much that he isn’t aware he’s at work — sounds a lot like “Severance.” His wish is made true. Peter gets hypnotized and never snaps out of it. He lives the rest of his days carefree.
The film raises some questions about work that were timely during its release and prescient for contemporary life. “It’s (having this) kind of man vs. machine art conversation that was happening culturally in the late ‘90s. You had this “what is my place in the universe” thing running through Radiohead records that was really touching that generation,” Jenkins said.
“This film is like, yeah, you have to come out of college and take a job somewhere and figure out how to advance yourself, but what are you sacrificing in the process?”
Baumgartern pointed out that “Office Space” came out when Austin’s life as a tech hub was in its infancy. “All the suburban corporate centers, office parks, a contradiction in terms, something of an oxymoron,” she said. “It just brought that into the wide open. A few years later, Austin’s burgeoning tech culture started capsizing. It really started hitting home for locals a lot more at that point.”
Judge is the preeminent satirist of Texas, our version of Mark Twain, even if he likes to keep his personal politics close to the vest. “King of the Hill” is one great inside joke for Texans about very specific types of Texans, and “Idiocracy,” Judge’s 2006 film, has warped from something that was definitely too weird, dark, and on the nose into a bit of a cautionary tale. But “Office Space” is his crown jewel.
In 2019, “Office Space” was honored by the Texas Film Hall of Fame, and in 2024, its 25th anniversary was celebrated at SXSW. We’re living in the age of a rising anti-work movement where, according to Forbes, one-third of Americans say work is “adversely impacting their mental health, and 80% say they feel stress at work.”
The workers of America are unhappy, I think we’re all about ready to make like Peter and “zonk” ourselves out for good. Or maybe like Milton… and set the whole system on fire.