Only in Hollywood would the release of July 8’s abysmal jobs report be reason for celebration. But for the makers of “Horrible Bosses,” the modestly budgeted comedy that hit theaters the same day, the report might have looked a lot like good luck.
“What should the sequel to ‘Horrible Bosses’ be?” producer Brett Ratner asked on Twitter over the weekend, as the film was in the process of earning $28 million and on the way to placing second at the box office. “Horrible Parents? Horrible Children? Horrible employees? Let me know what you think?”
“Horrible Bosses” is a white-collar revenge fantasy in which three mid-level employees, played with various degrees of realism by Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis, plot to murder their cartoonishly evil superiors.
For all its good timing, the movie’s claim on the zeitgeist is dubious: Much of the film’s appeal is in its retrograde, slapstick humor, which leans toward the misogynistic, homophobic and just plain silly. The majority of the action takes place outside the office, as the three men stake out their respective bosses’ houses and speculate on who will be raped first in prison.
Work functions in funny ways in American cinema. Audiences are conditioned to expect and reward escapism. Especially at a moment in which employment, long an ugly necessity, has become a wishful fantasy for many Americans, the last thing a savvy executive might want to do is put the grim realities of the average workplace onscreen.
But Hollywood’s stance toward work has historically been more complicated.
As much as audiences look to movies for respite, they also crave the affirmation that they are right to participate in the grind in the first place. It is no coincidence that in script after script, we are presented with dissatisfied hit men pulling one last job, cops craving retirement, relationship experts growing cynical about their own advice, and high powered lawyers deploring their isolation and empty success.
The standard Hollywood story about employment generally involves a crisis of faith — a once-heartless corporate executive tiring of laying off the underclass, for example, as in Jason Reitman’s 2009 film “Up in the Air” — followed by its eventual resolution, usually provoked by the love of a good woman or discovery of a higher cause. The revelation, whatever its specifics, provides the character with the incentive needed to go back to work and once again become a productive citizen.
Not coincidentally, this was and is the story of most Americans, who have to get up each morning after their trip to the movies and go to a job they might well hate. The movies tell us to do it for love, or for our families, or for the greater good, and so we do, bolstered in our belief that whatever our misgivings about our jobs, we are doing the right thing.
But what does Hollywood have to say now, in 2011, with an unemployment rate of 9.2 percent and an economy that seems to reward its wealthiest denizens at the expense of everyone else? We have been living in an era of “recession cinema” since, give or take, the loathsome “Up in the Air,” which pretended to sympathize with some notion of a laid-off working class before throwing its loyalty behind George Clooney’s handsome face and the existential plight of the frequent-flying executive.
Last year’s “The Company Men” at least had the good graces to sneer at the corporate jobs lost by its three main characters (played by Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper and Tommy Lee Jones) and suggest that they find might happiness building things with their hands instead. (“We used to make something here,” Jones says mournfully while surveying an abandoned shipyard; Affleck starts learning how to work with drywall and becomes a contractor’s assistant.) But the film, whatever the extent of its blue-collar awareness, was still very much about putting its main characters back to work, if in slightly more happy configurations.
This dim glimmer of class consciousness is reflected in “Horrible Bosses,” which suggests that rather than contorting ourselves to find ways to go to work in the morning, we might think about changing the conditions of employment instead. That the method in “Horrible Bosses” is murder — or the fact that the movie, in its broad-stroke satire and puerile punch lines, is not a particularly good film from a critical standpoint — is incidental.
The movie’s primary insight is that work in the current American economy can be bad in ways that are not redeeming or ennobling. This reality is one that almost never makes it to theaters, outside of a few notable exceptions like Mike Judge’s “Office Space.”
In “Horrible Bosses,” Bateman’s character Nick, tormented by a cruel and dishonest superior played by Kevin Spacey, craves a promotion at his financial services company, mostly so that he can get out from under his boss’ sadistic thumb. Day’s Dale is a dental assistant who can’t get a better job because of his (erroneous) inclusion on a sex-offender list and so must tolerate the improbably lascivious advances of his employer, Jennifer Aniston. And Sudeikis’ Kurt, an accountant, is crushed when his boss, a man he adores, dies and his psychopathic son — a majestically coked-up and combed-over Colin Farrell — takes over.
They want to kill their bosses because their superiors are awful. But the true injustice of their situations is structural: The three men have limited to no mobility or volition as far as leaving one position for another. Their future prospects at their current jobs (which by most standards are relatively good ones) are modest at best.
When they finally — spoiler alert — rid themselves of their torment and slink back to work, it’s presented less as a triumph than as an accommodation. Nick’s new superior keeps a former assistant locked in his car’s trunk. Dale blackmails his dentist boss into keeping her hands off him, but he still has to work with her every day. Kurt returns to the exact same position he occupied before, though with another, kinder man in the top spot.
They are lucky to have jobs and so can go back. But at least the movie doesn’t bother to suggest that there’s anything greater waiting for them than still more bosses.
“What should the sequel to ‘Horrible Bosses’ be?” producer Brett Ratner asked on Twitter over the weekend, as the film was in the process of earning $28 million and on the way to placing second at the box office. “Horrible Parents? Horrible Children? Horrible employees? Let me know what you think?”
“Horrible Bosses” is a white-collar revenge fantasy in which three mid-level employees, played with various degrees of realism by Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis, plot to murder their cartoonishly evil superiors.
For all its good timing, the movie’s claim on the zeitgeist is dubious: Much of the film’s appeal is in its retrograde, slapstick humor, which leans toward the misogynistic, homophobic and just plain silly. The majority of the action takes place outside the office, as the three men stake out their respective bosses’ houses and speculate on who will be raped first in prison.
Work functions in funny ways in American cinema. Audiences are conditioned to expect and reward escapism. Especially at a moment in which employment, long an ugly necessity, has become a wishful fantasy for many Americans, the last thing a savvy executive might want to do is put the grim realities of the average workplace onscreen.
But Hollywood’s stance toward work has historically been more complicated.
As much as audiences look to movies for respite, they also crave the affirmation that they are right to participate in the grind in the first place. It is no coincidence that in script after script, we are presented with dissatisfied hit men pulling one last job, cops craving retirement, relationship experts growing cynical about their own advice, and high powered lawyers deploring their isolation and empty success.
The standard Hollywood story about employment generally involves a crisis of faith — a once-heartless corporate executive tiring of laying off the underclass, for example, as in Jason Reitman’s 2009 film “Up in the Air” — followed by its eventual resolution, usually provoked by the love of a good woman or discovery of a higher cause. The revelation, whatever its specifics, provides the character with the incentive needed to go back to work and once again become a productive citizen.
Not coincidentally, this was and is the story of most Americans, who have to get up each morning after their trip to the movies and go to a job they might well hate. The movies tell us to do it for love, or for our families, or for the greater good, and so we do, bolstered in our belief that whatever our misgivings about our jobs, we are doing the right thing.
But what does Hollywood have to say now, in 2011, with an unemployment rate of 9.2 percent and an economy that seems to reward its wealthiest denizens at the expense of everyone else? We have been living in an era of “recession cinema” since, give or take, the loathsome “Up in the Air,” which pretended to sympathize with some notion of a laid-off working class before throwing its loyalty behind George Clooney’s handsome face and the existential plight of the frequent-flying executive.
Last year’s “The Company Men” at least had the good graces to sneer at the corporate jobs lost by its three main characters (played by Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper and Tommy Lee Jones) and suggest that they find might happiness building things with their hands instead. (“We used to make something here,” Jones says mournfully while surveying an abandoned shipyard; Affleck starts learning how to work with drywall and becomes a contractor’s assistant.) But the film, whatever the extent of its blue-collar awareness, was still very much about putting its main characters back to work, if in slightly more happy configurations.
This dim glimmer of class consciousness is reflected in “Horrible Bosses,” which suggests that rather than contorting ourselves to find ways to go to work in the morning, we might think about changing the conditions of employment instead. That the method in “Horrible Bosses” is murder — or the fact that the movie, in its broad-stroke satire and puerile punch lines, is not a particularly good film from a critical standpoint — is incidental.
The movie’s primary insight is that work in the current American economy can be bad in ways that are not redeeming or ennobling. This reality is one that almost never makes it to theaters, outside of a few notable exceptions like Mike Judge’s “Office Space.”
In “Horrible Bosses,” Bateman’s character Nick, tormented by a cruel and dishonest superior played by Kevin Spacey, craves a promotion at his financial services company, mostly so that he can get out from under his boss’ sadistic thumb. Day’s Dale is a dental assistant who can’t get a better job because of his (erroneous) inclusion on a sex-offender list and so must tolerate the improbably lascivious advances of his employer, Jennifer Aniston. And Sudeikis’ Kurt, an accountant, is crushed when his boss, a man he adores, dies and his psychopathic son — a majestically coked-up and combed-over Colin Farrell — takes over.
They want to kill their bosses because their superiors are awful. But the true injustice of their situations is structural: The three men have limited to no mobility or volition as far as leaving one position for another. Their future prospects at their current jobs (which by most standards are relatively good ones) are modest at best.
When they finally — spoiler alert — rid themselves of their torment and slink back to work, it’s presented less as a triumph than as an accommodation. Nick’s new superior keeps a former assistant locked in his car’s trunk. Dale blackmails his dentist boss into keeping her hands off him, but he still has to work with her every day. Kurt returns to the exact same position he occupied before, though with another, kinder man in the top spot.
They are lucky to have jobs and so can go back. But at least the movie doesn’t bother to suggest that there’s anything greater waiting for them than still more bosses.
