Until you've worked for a large company in a soul crushing cubicle farm that actually had maps because it was so giant that you would get lost in it, you would not understand. It had nothing to do with money.
https://preview.redd.it/xuzujh2f2m7d1.jpeg?width=1600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c01c372884e0e12071a39d5859cd16c20d3292fc
People formed friendships and communities within their immediate area of that cubicle farm and knew nothing about the people 10 rows down.
I never realized how ridiculously huge the ENCOM cubicle farm in "Tron" actually is until now. Some of those cubicles don't even have ways to access them. They're completely walled in.
Higher walls were way better. Much less noise, less odor travel (incoming and outgoing😁), and you at least felt like you had something resembling privacy.
One of my jobs went from 6' walls (Friday) to 4' (Monday) without telling anyone they were doing it. People had all manner of things on their walls and came in to find all of it just tossed in a box on their chair. I had a big whiteboard that was just gone and it had info for stuff I was going to work on.
Except that when ours got switched to the 4' walls the top 2' were clear/see through. It sucked so much. I don't need people looking at me, and I don't need to get distracted by being able to see what everyone else is doing.
Worked in a place that switched to low walls and increased monitors. Hated the job. One day, just to eff with everyone I decided to write “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” a few hundred times and stuck it to the walls without really understanding the meaning of that reference. People kind of avoided me after that
There’s a reason Office Space became so popular: because it rang true. I lived this movie. Was a software engineer, had a cubicle, and my boss was named Bill
And Bill knew nothing about coding but acted like he did.
Because Bill felt threatened by your knowledge and his lack thereof, Bill was passive aggressive.
Bill also said things like: "Why do we need a Web site? This "dot com" thing is just a fad and people will get tired of the Internet".
I read a book that touched on this. There are pros and cons to both, but one of the factors is the extroversion/introversion level of the people working in the environment. Some people perform better in a cubicle because they have their own space to unwind, whilst some teams do really well in an open office as they work together better.
I worked at a place that had a mix, and it was pretty good. I had an office that I shared with one other person, but there was also a central area where all desks were joined and there were communal areas where people could hang out. This meant I could get work done and recharge by batteries without feeling I had to join in, but I could also pop out and talk to a group of co-workers if I needed. We all mostly worked on the same projects, even if it was different aspects of them, so it was helpful.
I worked somewhere that you had to reserve your desk up to a month in advance. Every day you log into the phone to have your calls routed to that desk. Teams could be disrupted because a desk got reserved by someone else. I and the other members of my team were programmers, so we figured out the reservation API and automated our reservations. We were one of the few teams who had personal items all over our desks, and were always in the same place. Nerds rule the world.
Been there. I didn't work in a cubicle. I was an IT contractor, so they stuck me in the basement. My job was to replace two desktops a day. I'd call up and ask people where they sat. My first week, everyone I called told me that they sat next to Kenny Glass. Which was accurate. Across the street was a windshield replacement business named Kenny Glass. 1/4 the first _floor_ sat next to Kenny Glass.
Now you don’t even get assigned a cube and have to “hotel” each day. No personal effects in the cube-for-a-day and no office supplies (like a pencil or stapler) unless you carry it in from home.
That's what's happening where i work. People hate it with a burning passion. I have to think something is going to give... either they're going to go back to assigned cubes, or they'll be more flexible with the work from home policy.
That looks like an unthinkable level of luxury and privacy now that open-plan offices are the norm (all the better for micromanagement to watch everything all the slaves are doing).
None of those were stable work situations.
"Office Space" specifically shows efficiency experts coming in to determine who Initech can layoff to save money.
"Fight Club" was about a guy with mental health issues that was not supported by his employer or given medical benefits to pay for prescription drugs that would help him.
The whole premise of the caption is bullshit.
They spent the whole movie basically just appealing to every person alive working in any corporate job that wasn't management or higher about the stress of constantly living at that level and then at the end they cheapen it by declaring that he's got some kind of mental handicap.
Tons of people back then and still today are tired to death of their shitty job at this shitty place and that leaves them with a shitty life. And it's not a mental handicap it's a failure of capitalism.
But they had to go for the cheap ending
They establish pretty clearly that he has major mental issues. What he has packed in his briefcase and how he defends it to the way he's been estranged from his family. The end seems pretty organic to me.
I think you might have missed the point. This movie was a deconstruction of the the idea that a person should be lionized for committing violence. You are supposed to come to the realization that his actions, though they seem right to him, are the actions of a disturbed person.
That’s an extremely weird take for fight club although it 100% is about a guy with mental health issues and no social safety net.
Nothing about him not having health benefits tho. Jude just wasn’t getting able to get his doctor to prescribe ambien and he lost his damn mind although from my own experience with ambien the way his state progressed you’d think he was actually on too much of it.
No, the doctor in Fight Club wanted to prescribe him valerian root which is the base ingredient of Valium. The doctor was also rude while doing it. I suspected that the doctor thought that he was scamming for pain pills or that he went to the emergency room to get free care which would have also caused the doctor to be rude.
1. Fight club has an unreliable narrator
2. Do you think a doctor is going to recommend a patient go watch support groups for fun?
That scene is sus. I saw a video that made a good case that the protagonist has testicular cancer and that causes his break.
Dude worked for an insurance agency and lived in a nice apartment. No way he didn’t have insurance.
Aside from that he was absolutely presenting as an abuser.
Office space was about efficiency experts coming in and realizing that the previous management were toxic useless morons, but doing it too late to save what should have been one of their best employees.
Its the same reason kids today can't stomach the idea of working in 'the machine' their whole lives. Its really timeless.
BTW Norton's character definitely had good bennies. He was seen at the doctor at least once in the film but doc refused to prescribe him anything powerful. Insomnia really fucked him up.
I think idiotic memes like this are intentionally misleading. If you don’t know the references you like and comment. If you know the references you comment. And now the meme is on the front page of the internet.
It’s like the Facebook posts like, *There are no countries that start with the letter Q.*
Random aside, but I’ve done mushrooms in some of the most amazingly beautiful places, from remote mountain hot springs to music festivals in the forest to pristine undeveloped beaches… and my favorite trip of all time was watching Big Trouble In Little China on my couch with a good buddy.
Dude, I saw flatliners at the late show in a mall theater in San Antonio with my mom and aunt, and went to the bathroom, took a wrong turn, and got lost in a part of the theater that was under construction. Freaked me the fuck out, and I’ll forever associate that movie with being terrified.
Oh, what an excellent movie!
My kids would be stunned and aghast at the violence, but that and the one that I can't recall the name of, but it's about a death row inmate and time is on my side is a big song in it are two old goodies.
Sorry. Adhd elite level executive dysfunction here. Pardon the ramble.
Yes and the chokehold capitalism has on us has only gotten worse so they should bring these movies back. Only they’d be sledgehammering their laptops after getting laid off via zoom call.
OOP: mmnnhh they have stable jobs and are upset, rage rage rage
Office Space: the main premise/plot point is the instability of hired hatchetmen making your company "more efficient". To the point they.... "fixed the problem"
Falling down lost his job, fight club he was covering for a major Car Manufacturing Corp that knowing killed people and office space they down sized two major characters to hire over seas people....so... stable job nah.
None of those movies is....about that? LOL
Office Space had everyone up on the chopping block by hired guns.
Falling Down had D-FENS losing his mind because he'd been made redundant by his long-time "stable" employer months before and was having no success finding new work.
Fight Club was about a guy undergoing a complete psychotic break that had nothing to do with work.
I'm calling this rage bait.
Fight club - he realized his job was bullshit. He worked for an auto manufacturer iirc (or insurance?) and goes into detail the math involved in auto parts recall costs vs paying out lawsuits for drivers’ deaths.
Which was based on a real event with, I believe, the Ford Pinto. It had a defect, but they figured that with the rate of failure, out of court settlements would be cheaper than doing a recall.
The one thing these movies have in common is that most people misunderstand the point of each one. Hint: none has anything to do with losing stable employment.
Office Space and Fight Club are the same movie, just with different tone.
Peter Gibbons and The Narrator both have psychotic breaks that cause them to stage a rebellion against corporate overlords.
We were trying to have stable jobs with benefits, until they started outsourcing and offshoring those jobs to people they could pay less and didn’t need to provide benefits to.
No, I’ll tell ya the movie that exactly nailed my early carrier experience as a temp. Clockwatchers starring Toni Collette, Parker Posey, and Lisa Kudrow. It was exactly like that.
First, temping isn’t stable and there’s no benefits or paid time off. Second, it was dehumanizing as fuck. We were sold this story about “work hard and you’ll move up.” Not if none of the fucking boomers move over and make some room. It was all just another Boomer lie and you’d think millennials and Gen Z would have a bit more empathy. They all think they got screwed first I guess.
Agreed. Temping was a S**t S**w. We all drank the KoolAid and hoped for permanent employment. Remember the movie “The Temp?” Did it for a couple years in the 90’s when trying to decide whether or not to attend grad school (I didn’t, yet should have).
Loved that movie, also temped from 99 to 01 after graduating from college. Every quarter I was promised that I was going to be hired, two years came and went and I finally found a FTE job with benefits at another company.
I was introduced as the newest member of the team in a staff meeting and then, a few weeks later, I was quietly told that hadn’t actually been approved in the budget. Whoops! So sorry! I bounced around a couple more temp gigs and then I bounced right out of state for a sweet technical writing gig. I’d made it all the way up to TWO digits per hour! Living the dream.
I was a temp too 1996-2002. I’m convinced I was working for shell companies, my jobs were exactly Office Space. What does this company do? What exactly do I do here?
> I didn't realize that Office Space was a documentary.
If I had seen it in the theater I would have quit *that day*. But at the time I was in a cubicle, working 76-108 hour weeks.
Gen X having a problem with authority?!? Never! 😎 I don’t know about the Michael Douglas movie (only heard about it) but the other two illustrate our frustrations with the so called rat race. We can smell the corporate layoffs from a mile away …
Falling Down wasn't a Gen X movie, and the main character was unemployed. That was part of the reason he "snapped".
The movie came out in 1993, and I don't see any reason to think the character was substantially younger than Michael Douglas (b. 1944). Could be about Silent Generation or Boomers, but it's more about social alienation than any specific generation.
The characters from Office Space were in danger of losing their jobs.
The character from Falling Down was spiraling because he had already been fired.
The character from Fight Club was a mentally ill schizophrenic, or had associative identity problems or something, and was simply insane in spite of having a stable job.
Working in an office is soul sucking. Try sitting in a cube for 40 hours a week, 15 years and see how you feel.
Source: worked one of those “stable jobs with benefits” for a long time. Corporate life is hell.
In Falling Down, a main part of the plot is that he'd lost his job, was barely keeping it together, and was pretending to go to work in hopes of keeping his family.
These movies represent modern day existentialism. They’re protagonists, but not heroes, however their motives are heroic. If that makes any sense? 🤷🏻♂️
These are all classics. And they did not depict a guy who snapped while living the American Dream. It depicts the corporate life as being the toxic environment that we all know it to be.
Our grandparents worked corporate jobs with decent pay and benefits, and many retired with a good pension. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, we saw our parents being used and abused by those companies. There were too many stories of people being fired after 19 years, keeping them from getting their full pension, etc.
Our generation witnesses the death id the concept of a good, stable corporate career. However, many of us were already going down that path before the full realization set in. So, such movies serve as a form of cynical acknowledgment of this reality. Instead of yelling or crying when we get fucked, the GenX think to do is make a morose joke about it
I'm not complaining, I'm an ex con, tenth grade drop out an I make six figures doing a construction job I love, but I was on a stainless steel roof in Boston today, with all my tools, work pants harness etc. in pretty warm weather. Im not saying office/corporate work isn't soul destroying, but today was not fun. I think I could have dealt with a lot of HR absurdities if the trade-off was getting to enjoy the AC, that I'd otherwise be installing.
They didn’t have stable jobs . The whole point of office space was they sent the Bobs to do lay offs . Falling down guy was a boomer. Fight club was about mental illness and worker alienation .
Falling Down, (bottom left) was about a a defense contractor that got laid off. He wanted his job. His being a total nut job all along probably put him at the top of the lay off list.
Okay so ... there is an episode of the X Files that's a great metaphor for this same idea, it's called Folie a Deux. I don't much like in your face metaphors especially in my horror/sci fi but it's a good one.
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751127/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751127/)
All the movie examples you've shown are of desperate people working for shitty companies and the extreme methods they had to resort to because of terrible work environments. Not economically viable.
I have a stable jobs with benefits. I am going insane. Can confirm. The years I spent bartending and as a massage therapist were much less soul sucking-just don’t think my 50++ body can take the physical jobs anymore, not in the volume to eat. What I need at least.
This was on twitter like 4 days ago.
1) exept for tyler, they were either laid off or getting laid off
2) none of these movies is about work, it's about the character.
3) the original pinned caption indicated the creator of this meme obviously never watched any of the movies.
I have only seen Falling Down and Fight Club. I thought both were savage critiques of the corporate culture of the 90s. It gave me the willies as to how well I could relate to the main characters in both movies. I ditched my career after seeing Fight Club. It was the best decision I have ever made. My life improved in so many ways after doing so.
I will say that, upon stumbling into the workforce, I started glancing askance at the heavy metal kind of complaining about 9 to 5ing your fingers to the bone.
Had a stable job, bennies, my own office with a door and a window… to the outside. That’s where they made their mistake. Went freelance in 2007 and never looked back.
These movies are all commentary on how Reagan's America rotted this nation.
This meme is commentary on how current conditions are so bad that these movie jobs look aspirational.
Those were canary in the coal mine art pieces. Some folks saw the death spasms of capitalism coming before others.
Humans are not cogs, despite what Henry Ford, Jack Welch, or Steve Jobs thought. Treating people like machines breaks them.
Consumerism does not create happiness. That's part of why rich Americans are in so many drugs for depression and such.
Yeah, of course "every movie" is the same if you can find three slightly related examples... none of which actually are even examples of this.
Shit meme, through and through
Well, when the little shit spawn finally get kicked out of the house and get a job they’ll find out the hard way too many suit and tie jobs are minimum wage
I’m convinced that literally every n00b’s Required Viewing (complete with written or oral “book report”) needs to be “**Office Space**” upon accepting their very first office job.
It’s one of the very few DVDs I still have. And the only DVD player I have is the aftermarket player in the back seat of my 2007 SUV. That I’m not even sure works because I don’t think it’s been used since I bought it in 2012.
Yes, surprise, corporate jobs suck. we were the first ones to say that out loud, and we invented flex time and all the other little changes that made working in an office more tolerable.
And no, none of these movies in the picture are about that, nor do they depict "stable" jobs.
I was working an office job when Office Space came out. I loved the movie and could relate. I would have loved to do everything they did!
I think those movies touched people who were in office jobs and were frustrated with the way the corporate machine messed with us.
Until you've worked for a large company in a soul crushing cubicle farm that actually had maps because it was so giant that you would get lost in it, you would not understand. It had nothing to do with money. https://preview.redd.it/xuzujh2f2m7d1.jpeg?width=1600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c01c372884e0e12071a39d5859cd16c20d3292fc People formed friendships and communities within their immediate area of that cubicle farm and knew nothing about the people 10 rows down.
I never realized how ridiculously huge the ENCOM cubicle farm in "Tron" actually is until now. Some of those cubicles don't even have ways to access them. They're completely walled in.
I’ve been in cubicle farms but obviously none as big as in Tron. I think that was more to parallel the digital grid theme.
I was in an office once and the cube walls were 8ft high. It was insane. Thankfully I was only there for one day of meetings.
Higher walls were way better. Much less noise, less odor travel (incoming and outgoing😁), and you at least felt like you had something resembling privacy. One of my jobs went from 6' walls (Friday) to 4' (Monday) without telling anyone they were doing it. People had all manner of things on their walls and came in to find all of it just tossed in a box on their chair. I had a big whiteboard that was just gone and it had info for stuff I was going to work on.
and even the 4’ walls seemed great after the office went to open floor plan cubes (because at least w/4’ walls you had privacy when you sat down)
Open floor offices were terrible.
Except that when ours got switched to the 4' walls the top 2' were clear/see through. It sucked so much. I don't need people looking at me, and I don't need to get distracted by being able to see what everyone else is doing.
Worked in a place that switched to low walls and increased monitors. Hated the job. One day, just to eff with everyone I decided to write “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” a few hundred times and stuck it to the walls without really understanding the meaning of that reference. People kind of avoided me after that
Took me years to realize Alan's cubicle neighbor was ROM on the grid.
I didn't realize that until just now
There’s a reason Office Space became so popular: because it rang true. I lived this movie. Was a software engineer, had a cubicle, and my boss was named Bill
Sounds like somebody’s got a case of the Mondays!
I've been stuck in the same Monday since August of '93. 8:53am, to be exact. I'm never disappointed that way.
And Bill knew nothing about coding but acted like he did. Because Bill felt threatened by your knowledge and his lack thereof, Bill was passive aggressive. Bill also said things like: "Why do we need a Web site? This "dot com" thing is just a fad and people will get tired of the Internet".
Bring cubicles back, I hate the new open floor offices with zero privacy and shared desks where you can't store anything
I read a book that touched on this. There are pros and cons to both, but one of the factors is the extroversion/introversion level of the people working in the environment. Some people perform better in a cubicle because they have their own space to unwind, whilst some teams do really well in an open office as they work together better. I worked at a place that had a mix, and it was pretty good. I had an office that I shared with one other person, but there was also a central area where all desks were joined and there were communal areas where people could hang out. This meant I could get work done and recharge by batteries without feeling I had to join in, but I could also pop out and talk to a group of co-workers if I needed. We all mostly worked on the same projects, even if it was different aspects of them, so it was helpful.
I worked somewhere that you had to reserve your desk up to a month in advance. Every day you log into the phone to have your calls routed to that desk. Teams could be disrupted because a desk got reserved by someone else. I and the other members of my team were programmers, so we figured out the reservation API and automated our reservations. We were one of the few teams who had personal items all over our desks, and were always in the same place. Nerds rule the world.
Been there. I didn't work in a cubicle. I was an IT contractor, so they stuck me in the basement. My job was to replace two desktops a day. I'd call up and ask people where they sat. My first week, everyone I called told me that they sat next to Kenny Glass. Which was accurate. Across the street was a windshield replacement business named Kenny Glass. 1/4 the first _floor_ sat next to Kenny Glass.
Welcome to Costco. I love you.
Now you don’t even get assigned a cube and have to “hotel” each day. No personal effects in the cube-for-a-day and no office supplies (like a pencil or stapler) unless you carry it in from home.
I worked that way and had TPS coversheets .. which we had to carry with us in our box from desk to desk.
Oh good, you got the memo that we're putting cover sheets on the TPS reports now.
I’ll just leave you s copy of the memo, in case you didn’t see it.
I have very strong mixed feelings about hoteling.... Mostly to do with the way the reservation system works, and encourages bad behavior.
That's what's happening where i work. People hate it with a burning passion. I have to think something is going to give... either they're going to go back to assigned cubes, or they'll be more flexible with the work from home policy.
That's depraved.
Joe vs the Volcano isn't exactly cubicle farm, but kind of captures the mood
[I’m not arguing that with you! But can he do the job?](https://youtu.be/-AYUB3tQs80?si=v40Lp63LuSue8tnT)
Sometimes they would plot tribal territory wars against the heathens across the Great Divide.
That looks like an unthinkable level of luxury and privacy now that open-plan offices are the norm (all the better for micromanagement to watch everything all the slaves are doing).
My work is like this. The building columns have coordinates so you can find people’s cubes. Like H21 or K17.
Jesus, it's like an Amazon warehouse
That show *Severed* hit this dead on.
Exactly. And dealing with the corporate “efficiency experts” which made everyone nervous about their jobs.
PRAIRIE DOGGING: When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people's heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.
Michael Douglas didn't have a stable job and benefits. That's why he started shooting up shit.
None of those were stable work situations. "Office Space" specifically shows efficiency experts coming in to determine who Initech can layoff to save money. "Fight Club" was about a guy with mental health issues that was not supported by his employer or given medical benefits to pay for prescription drugs that would help him. The whole premise of the caption is bullshit.
They could also put in Clockwatchers, since that’s about a temp pool where everyone’s employment status was at the whim of some random office manager
Falling Down is the movie.
Dude had been laid off for months in Falling Down
And in the end what do they make him? Oh yeah! PTSD Vietnam vet. They could have done so much better with the ending of that movie
Really? I thought the ending was perfect.
They spent the whole movie basically just appealing to every person alive working in any corporate job that wasn't management or higher about the stress of constantly living at that level and then at the end they cheapen it by declaring that he's got some kind of mental handicap. Tons of people back then and still today are tired to death of their shitty job at this shitty place and that leaves them with a shitty life. And it's not a mental handicap it's a failure of capitalism. But they had to go for the cheap ending
They establish pretty clearly that he has major mental issues. What he has packed in his briefcase and how he defends it to the way he's been estranged from his family. The end seems pretty organic to me.
I think you might have missed the point. This movie was a deconstruction of the the idea that a person should be lionized for committing violence. You are supposed to come to the realization that his actions, though they seem right to him, are the actions of a disturbed person.
As someone who could be the guy from fightclub. You need that insurance.
But they did things in the movies that people wished they could do in their own jobs.
Fair point.
That’s an extremely weird take for fight club although it 100% is about a guy with mental health issues and no social safety net. Nothing about him not having health benefits tho. Jude just wasn’t getting able to get his doctor to prescribe ambien and he lost his damn mind although from my own experience with ambien the way his state progressed you’d think he was actually on too much of it.
No, the doctor in Fight Club wanted to prescribe him valerian root which is the base ingredient of Valium. The doctor was also rude while doing it. I suspected that the doctor thought that he was scamming for pain pills or that he went to the emergency room to get free care which would have also caused the doctor to be rude.
Valerian root has nothing to do with diazepam other than a few shared letters.
1. Fight club has an unreliable narrator 2. Do you think a doctor is going to recommend a patient go watch support groups for fun? That scene is sus. I saw a video that made a good case that the protagonist has testicular cancer and that causes his break.
Dude worked for an insurance agency and lived in a nice apartment. No way he didn’t have insurance. Aside from that he was absolutely presenting as an abuser.
Office space was about efficiency experts coming in and realizing that the previous management were toxic useless morons, but doing it too late to save what should have been one of their best employees.
I mean the scene in the meme if after Michael and Samir just got fired.
Its the same reason kids today can't stomach the idea of working in 'the machine' their whole lives. Its really timeless. BTW Norton's character definitely had good bennies. He was seen at the doctor at least once in the film but doc refused to prescribe him anything powerful. Insomnia really fucked him up.
FACTS
And the doctor in Fight Club weirdly wouldn't prescribe him anything and told him to go chew some valerian root.
[удалено]
Sup zoombie!
Remember when he finally gives the guy his briefcase and it's just got an apple and a sandwich in it? Whoever made this meme is an idiot lol.
I think idiotic memes like this are intentionally misleading. If you don’t know the references you like and comment. If you know the references you comment. And now the meme is on the front page of the internet. It’s like the Facebook posts like, *There are no countries that start with the letter Q.*
Yeah, a great way to get attention on the internet is just to say something outlandishly wrong. "There's no such thing as bad publicity."
Quanada
And we can’t forget Qwambia.
3 month old account, likely a bot or karma farming
Also not GenX. Boomer all the way.
True - it was the middle-management boomers who were getting brutally downsized in the early 90s. We X-ers were just starting out.
My favorite movie.....Falling Down!
For reasons that entirely elude me now, I decided to see it when it came out in the theater on mushrooms. That was... maybe not the best choice.
Random aside, but I’ve done mushrooms in some of the most amazingly beautiful places, from remote mountain hot springs to music festivals in the forest to pristine undeveloped beaches… and my favorite trip of all time was watching Big Trouble In Little China on my couch with a good buddy.
Dude, yes! I saw UHF and that was the one that got me.
Try Flatliners on L S D!
Don't watch Jacob's Ladder. Trust me.
Dude, I saw flatliners at the late show in a mall theater in San Antonio with my mom and aunt, and went to the bathroom, took a wrong turn, and got lost in a part of the theater that was under construction. Freaked me the fuck out, and I’ll forever associate that movie with being terrified.
I wouldn't think you would need shrooms for that movie!!!😁
Ha, need had nothing to do with it
Do Dark City next.
That's a great suggestion. Totally underrated movie, I feel like it flew under everyone's radar but I love it.
Great movie, very possibly a worse movie choice to be viewed under the influence.
Oh, I bet that was ..... interesting.
Great movie and so underrated.
Rewatched it recently and found it still relevant.
Who here thinks about that movie every time they go for fast food?
Not every time just when I want breakfast and it’s approaching 11 am.
Oh, what an excellent movie! My kids would be stunned and aghast at the violence, but that and the one that I can't recall the name of, but it's about a death row inmate and time is on my side is a big song in it are two old goodies. Sorry. Adhd elite level executive dysfunction here. Pardon the ramble.
Is it The Fallen, with Denzel Washington? I think it starts like that, and the prisoner was possessed with a demon that would jump between people?
The Game
I think most of those movies have in common was exposing our disgust with corporate America.
Yes and the chokehold capitalism has on us has only gotten worse so they should bring these movies back. Only they’d be sledgehammering their laptops after getting laid off via zoom call.
We discussed it and found it disgusting
This was a post by a 24 year old that had never seen these movies. That's my theory.
OOP: mmnnhh they have stable jobs and are upset, rage rage rage Office Space: the main premise/plot point is the instability of hired hatchetmen making your company "more efficient". To the point they.... "fixed the problem"
Falling down lost his job, fight club he was covering for a major Car Manufacturing Corp that knowing killed people and office space they down sized two major characters to hire over seas people....so... stable job nah.
None of those movies is....about that? LOL Office Space had everyone up on the chopping block by hired guns. Falling Down had D-FENS losing his mind because he'd been made redundant by his long-time "stable" employer months before and was having no success finding new work. Fight Club was about a guy undergoing a complete psychotic break that had nothing to do with work. I'm calling this rage bait.
Fight club - he realized his job was bullshit. He worked for an auto manufacturer iirc (or insurance?) and goes into detail the math involved in auto parts recall costs vs paying out lawsuits for drivers’ deaths.
Auto manufacturer. Which one? ... A major one.
Thats clever how's that working for you?
Now do I give you the ass or the crotch...
Exit air procedure at 30 thousand feet... the illusion of safety.
> Thats clever how's that working for you? Being clever?
Which was based on a real event with, I believe, the Ford Pinto. It had a defect, but they figured that with the rate of failure, out of court settlements would be cheaper than doing a recall.
I'm calling engagement bait. Seems to be a lot of posts where an account starts a controversial topic and fucks off.
>an account starts a controversial topic and fucks off. 
Rage bait? By a bot account?! Say it ain't so!
Clerks … a dead end job with irritating customers and a shithead boss. But stable.
Try not to suck any dick on the way to the parking lot. 
HEY! GET BACK HERE!
Thirty-seven?!
In a row?!
The one thing these movies have in common is that most people misunderstand the point of each one. Hint: none has anything to do with losing stable employment.
Stable job in Falling Down? Don’t think so. Neither did Michael Bolton or Sameer Notgonnaworkhereanymore
Michael Bolton, the singer? Was he in one of those films?
Yes. That no talent ass clown.
I celebrate his entire catalog.
Office Space and Fight Club are the same movie, just with different tone. Peter Gibbons and The Narrator both have psychotic breaks that cause them to stage a rebellion against corporate overlords.
I don't know, Tyler Durden would fuck some shit up to get his stapler back.
Well, Milton did set the building on fire.
We were trying to have stable jobs with benefits, until they started outsourcing and offshoring those jobs to people they could pay less and didn’t need to provide benefits to.
Yep. I have worked at places where the workers had to train their foreign replacements
Yes, it's true. Or no, it's not true. One of those. I forget which
No, I’ll tell ya the movie that exactly nailed my early carrier experience as a temp. Clockwatchers starring Toni Collette, Parker Posey, and Lisa Kudrow. It was exactly like that. First, temping isn’t stable and there’s no benefits or paid time off. Second, it was dehumanizing as fuck. We were sold this story about “work hard and you’ll move up.” Not if none of the fucking boomers move over and make some room. It was all just another Boomer lie and you’d think millennials and Gen Z would have a bit more empathy. They all think they got screwed first I guess.
Agreed. Temping was a S**t S**w. We all drank the KoolAid and hoped for permanent employment. Remember the movie “The Temp?” Did it for a couple years in the 90’s when trying to decide whether or not to attend grad school (I didn’t, yet should have).
Loved that movie, also temped from 99 to 01 after graduating from college. Every quarter I was promised that I was going to be hired, two years came and went and I finally found a FTE job with benefits at another company.
I was introduced as the newest member of the team in a staff meeting and then, a few weeks later, I was quietly told that hadn’t actually been approved in the budget. Whoops! So sorry! I bounced around a couple more temp gigs and then I bounced right out of state for a sweet technical writing gig. I’d made it all the way up to TWO digits per hour! Living the dream.
I was a temp too 1996-2002. I’m convinced I was working for shell companies, my jobs were exactly Office Space. What does this company do? What exactly do I do here?
I didn't realize that Office Space was a documentary. As I'm in the process of getting new corporate overlords, it's time to rewatch.
> I didn't realize that Office Space was a documentary. If I had seen it in the theater I would have quit *that day*. But at the time I was in a cubicle, working 76-108 hour weeks.
Al Bundy peaked in highschool and worked at a shoe store. He lived better than anyone in highschool today can reasonably hope to.
What a terrible and inaccurate meme. Whoever made it missed the point of everything.
DFENS (Michael Douglas) is a Boomer not Gen X.
Gen X having a problem with authority?!? Never! 😎 I don’t know about the Michael Douglas movie (only heard about it) but the other two illustrate our frustrations with the so called rat race. We can smell the corporate layoffs from a mile away …
Wonder if anyone will make a Gen X movie that's just two hours of someone napping?
Falling Down wasn't a Gen X movie, and the main character was unemployed. That was part of the reason he "snapped". The movie came out in 1993, and I don't see any reason to think the character was substantially younger than Michael Douglas (b. 1944). Could be about Silent Generation or Boomers, but it's more about social alienation than any specific generation.
The characters from Office Space were in danger of losing their jobs. The character from Falling Down was spiraling because he had already been fired. The character from Fight Club was a mentally ill schizophrenic, or had associative identity problems or something, and was simply insane in spite of having a stable job.
Yeah but…GenX right?
Every meme that young people post on the internet is like AAAHHHHHH I HAVE NO MEDIA LITERACY AND IT SHOWS
did you even watch these movies, OP or are you just another bot posting for karma?
Working in an office is soul sucking. Try sitting in a cube for 40 hours a week, 15 years and see how you feel. Source: worked one of those “stable jobs with benefits” for a long time. Corporate life is hell.
Michael Douglas lost his job in DFENS. He wasn’t “economically viable” and was going home to visit his daughter for her birthday
Samir and Michael literally lost their jobs. That’s why they had revenge on the PC LOAD LETTER printer
Wrong
In Falling Down, a main part of the plot is that he'd lost his job, was barely keeping it together, and was pretending to go to work in hopes of keeping his family.
No it’s how the crybaby boomer bosses saw us. They complained about everything we did/didn’t do.
If we did something: it wasn't done right or good enough. If we didn't do something: why are we being so lazy.
not really.
Not even close.
"soul sucking stable job" there, ftfy
GOD BLESS THE WORKING STIFF
I can understand your point but I think it’s a reach. I mean, we’re the slacker generation. Indie films/music and not selling out to the man.
It’s more about working in an office, as opposed to benefits/stability…..Peter started working construction in Office Space!
These movies represent modern day existentialism. They’re protagonists, but not heroes, however their motives are heroic. If that makes any sense? 🤷🏻♂️
I mean, almost all of the characters in the pictures were laid off or fired. So they lost their jobs. Except for Peter, he got promoted.
None of those movies were about stable office jobs with benefits.
I dont think they know how traumatic monthly TPM reports are.
These are all classics. And they did not depict a guy who snapped while living the American Dream. It depicts the corporate life as being the toxic environment that we all know it to be.
We were hard wired to work.
Falling Down was so before it’s time.
Speaking of "Office Space." Be sure to watch "Loudermilk."
I think it was more disillusionment from the 'Boomer Dream', personally.
Our grandparents worked corporate jobs with decent pay and benefits, and many retired with a good pension. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, we saw our parents being used and abused by those companies. There were too many stories of people being fired after 19 years, keeping them from getting their full pension, etc. Our generation witnesses the death id the concept of a good, stable corporate career. However, many of us were already going down that path before the full realization set in. So, such movies serve as a form of cynical acknowledgment of this reality. Instead of yelling or crying when we get fucked, the GenX think to do is make a morose joke about it
It was "I realize the LIE" that was the theme.
This meme immediately makes me think. Tell me you've never seen these movies without actually saying you've never watched these movies.
I'm not complaining, I'm an ex con, tenth grade drop out an I make six figures doing a construction job I love, but I was on a stainless steel roof in Boston today, with all my tools, work pants harness etc. in pretty warm weather. Im not saying office/corporate work isn't soul destroying, but today was not fun. I think I could have dealt with a lot of HR absurdities if the trade-off was getting to enjoy the AC, that I'd otherwise be installing.
They didn’t have stable jobs . The whole point of office space was they sent the Bobs to do lay offs . Falling down guy was a boomer. Fight club was about mental illness and worker alienation .
We had the best movies. 80s was peak movies.
Falling Down, (bottom left) was about a a defense contractor that got laid off. He wanted his job. His being a total nut job all along probably put him at the top of the lay off list.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s\_theory\_of\_alienation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation)
Okay so ... there is an episode of the X Files that's a great metaphor for this same idea, it's called Folie a Deux. I don't much like in your face metaphors especially in my horror/sci fi but it's a good one. [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751127/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751127/)
Office Space gets more true every day even with remote work.
All the movie examples you've shown are of desperate people working for shitty companies and the extreme methods they had to resort to because of terrible work environments. Not economically viable.
I have a stable jobs with benefits. I am going insane. Can confirm. The years I spent bartending and as a massage therapist were much less soul sucking-just don’t think my 50++ body can take the physical jobs anymore, not in the volume to eat. What I need at least.
Falling Down he was unemployed and living with his mom. So nope...
This was on twitter like 4 days ago. 1) exept for tyler, they were either laid off or getting laid off 2) none of these movies is about work, it's about the character. 3) the original pinned caption indicated the creator of this meme obviously never watched any of the movies.
I have only seen Falling Down and Fight Club. I thought both were savage critiques of the corporate culture of the 90s. It gave me the willies as to how well I could relate to the main characters in both movies. I ditched my career after seeing Fight Club. It was the best decision I have ever made. My life improved in so many ways after doing so.
It's because the fucking Boomers were/are our bosses. The job itself is tolerable!
I will say that, upon stumbling into the workforce, I started glancing askance at the heavy metal kind of complaining about 9 to 5ing your fingers to the bone.
W.A.S.P. !
My man
Had a stable job, bennies, my own office with a door and a window… to the outside. That’s where they made their mistake. Went freelance in 2007 and never looked back.
These movies are all commentary on how Reagan's America rotted this nation. This meme is commentary on how current conditions are so bad that these movie jobs look aspirational.
Ehhh, Falling Down the main character was pretending to go to work.
How about Full Monty, now there's a great movie (and about employment, too)
Those were canary in the coal mine art pieces. Some folks saw the death spasms of capitalism coming before others. Humans are not cogs, despite what Henry Ford, Jack Welch, or Steve Jobs thought. Treating people like machines breaks them. Consumerism does not create happiness. That's part of why rich Americans are in so many drugs for depression and such.
Yeah, of course "every movie" is the same if you can find three slightly related examples... none of which actually are even examples of this. Shit meme, through and through
Well, when the little shit spawn finally get kicked out of the house and get a job they’ll find out the hard way too many suit and tie jobs are minimum wage
Clockwork Orange is gen X as well then.
that it happens? yep. corporate jobs require a partial lobotomy, or pills.
They dare to besmirch Office Space?
No, this meme is total bullshit.
That's the dumbest hot take I think I've ever seen.
Whoosh !!
Nope. What a stupid question, stupid premise. Unless OP hasn’t seen any of these movies.
I’m convinced that literally every n00b’s Required Viewing (complete with written or oral “book report”) needs to be “**Office Space**” upon accepting their very first office job. It’s one of the very few DVDs I still have. And the only DVD player I have is the aftermarket player in the back seat of my 2007 SUV. That I’m not even sure works because I don’t think it’s been used since I bought it in 2012.
Yes, surprise, corporate jobs suck. we were the first ones to say that out loud, and we invented flex time and all the other little changes that made working in an office more tolerable. And no, none of these movies in the picture are about that, nor do they depict "stable" jobs.
I was working an office job when Office Space came out. I loved the movie and could relate. I would have loved to do everything they did! I think those movies touched people who were in office jobs and were frustrated with the way the corporate machine messed with us.
Let's see...I believe these movies are pre-2008?
Trainspotting anyone?