Who’s the Boss?
Office Space: Special Edition20th Century Fox
“Mike Judge has ‘Fuck you’ money,” says actor Ron Livingston of his Office Space director on this DVD’s making-of doc. “When they say, ‘You have to change that,’ he has the ability to say, ‘Fuck you.’”
Unfortunately, Judge’s fortune — accrued from creating Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill — got him only so far. Judge hated the Office Space poster, its tagline (“Work Sucks”) and even the film itself, which subsequently tanked at the box office before establishing itself as one of the bestselling DVDs of all time.
Alas, none of these travails are examined in the documentary, although with the exception of Jennifer Aniston, all the principals are interviewed, including Judge, Livingston and Gary Cole, unforgettable as the odious boss, Lumbergh. But the deleted scenes are the big-ticket items here, with one alluding to the previously unsuspected death of a central character, while another suggests the happy ending granted Livingston’s character may not be that happy after all.
The film itself remains a work of superbly cast comic genius. Livingston in particular is perfect as a white-collar drone whose post-hypnotherapy revolt against corporate culture inspires innumerable laugh-out-loud moments, not least his Geto Boys–soundtracked gutting of a fish on Lumbergh’s beloved “TPS reports,” whatever the hell they are. The real shock, watching the film again, is how angry it is — pretty much everyone seems close to snapping and, as fans will know, the baseball bat–assisted destruction of a hated fax machine is just the beginning of the mayhem that commences when they finally do. All in all, it comes as no surprise to hear Livingston’s assertion on the documentary that the film running through his character’s head is not Office Space at all but 1999’s other flop-turned-cultural-phenomenon: Fight Club.
