By recreating classic movie moments that look so cathartic onscreen, Eliza Janssen hopes to improve her own life, here blowing off some steam via the Office Space printer beatdown. This is…I’ve Always Wanted To Do That.
Two decades after the release of box office flop and cult favourite comedy Office Space, there’s much about our working life that has changed from its cynical depictions. The Great Resignation, the work-from-home revolution, nice open co-working spaces that promise a funky sense of freedom and community whilst suspiciously resembling Bentham’s nightmare of the Panopticon.
Printers, however? Somehow, they continue to suck absolute donkey schlong. Still.
Even if you haven’t seen the Mike Judge movie (as was the case with two of my participants in this month’s stunt), you may be familiar with the slow-motion scene showing protagonist Peter (Ron Livingston) and his two downtrodden work buddies taking an office printer into a field and giving it what it deserves, first with kicks and then with a Louisville Slugger bat.
Peter and Samir (Ajay Naidu) are able to keep their cool, living up to the cold-blooded gangsta rap of the Geto Boys’ soundtrack choice, but the unfortunately Michael Bolton (David Herman) has to be held back from raging against the machine, knuckles bloodied.
As a piece on Flicks suggested last year, the much-memed moment is pure wish fulfillment: “We’ve all been mad at a printer at one point or another, and it’s a safe bet it stemmed from simmering job resentment. While it’s funny, there’s genuine anger too.” For the office printer is an appliance of pure capitalistic synecdoche, representing the cruelty of forcing organic matter through an uncompromising, unfeeling system.
Engineers say that’s a reason printers still seem to be so behind, whilst phones and computers race ahead into the future. It’ll always be blood-boilingly difficult to get a piece of mass-processed machinery to play nicely with nature, in this case the wood pulp in paper. Judge tapped into something primal with this scene by showing us—the pulp—attacking the textile frames that would profit from our supplication, whilst also ticking off the 90s comedy trope of nerdy white guys getting down to hardcore rap.
Rewatching Office Space, I can’t say I identify with Livingston’s grouchy hero much. I’m bound to an evil nasty laptop all day, sure, but I basically love my job (and not just because my editors/bosses will read this) and work from the comfort of my own home. Mostly I feel the pain of Jennifer Aniston as Peter’s love interest. She works at a tacky TGI Fridays-esque chain restaurant, where her manager (Judge, as basically a King of the Hill side character) mincingly reminds her that she needs to feign enthusiasm for her crappy job through “flair” on her employee lanyard. Man I don’t miss working in hospo and retail, where the customer is always right.
Still, I was able to draw on every past frustration I’ve had with printers to recreate this beloved moment. Plenty of poor Facebook Marketplace users were desperate to get rid of ancient, dysfunctional printers, and I was only too happy to pick one up for free from a lady in St Albans. “It only needs a new cartridge”, she said nicely: “you should be able to get some use out of it”. Oh I’ll get some use out of it alright.
Did me and my friends feel guilty at all for senselessly destroying a piece of equipment that could be recycled or fixed, to maximise sustainability? Nope. That thing was so damn slappable, big broad pieces of plastic just asking to be angrily smacked whenever they display a maddeningly vague error message (“PC load letter? What the f**k does that mean?”). Two of my Geto Boys, Ying and Max, work in high-flying law firms, making even the most up-to-date, Wifi-enabled printers their natural enemies. And my partner Corey likes baseball, so we were all good to go.
I raised my leg high to get the first good kick in at the printer, and its top shield snapped with a satisfying sound. After a few communal kicks we all noted that it had a solid steel core, and worried for a moment that we might end up damaging ourselves more than the machine. But the baseball bat (a child-sized, $10 orange deal from Kmart) relieved our concerns, bursting each side of the printer open to reveal its pretty insides.
It was genuinely intriguing to see all the minute and sophisticated parts that go into a machine like this: a marvel that can turn your digital plans into something tangible, how neat. As time went on, though, those intricacies only fuelled my rage. How do these things still f**k up every time, with so many working parts involved?! By the time a shard of plastic flew off and drew blood from my wrist, the thing was just begging for death.
Unlike in the anarchic movie scene, we then had to crouch down and meticulously pick pieces of plastic out of the grass, since we wouldn’t want any cute dogs to get impaled on them or anything. It definitely took away from the gleeful hysterics of destruction, as Ying agreed below.
Office Space ends with Peter finding the happy medium of working as a tradie, free from office bureaucracy. And I have to admit, getting a bit sweaty on a nice sunny day with pals was a wonderful break from my usual, subdued duties at Flicks. I don’t feel quite the same hatred of printers as before, even noticing some lingering guilt at turning something that could conceivably be used for parts into rubbish. But I do recommend this as a fun end-of-financial-year barbecue activity.
Here’s what the other Geto Boys had to say on whether our melee lived up to the catharsis of the original scene.
“It felt as cathartic as the film. I released on that printer all the anger that has built up since my wife left with the kids.”—Corey
“It was much more cathartic than I had anticipated. Felt good to bash things. But picking up the pieces of plastic out of the mud afterwards felt ironic—there’s gotta be a metaphor in there somewhere.“—Ying
“7.5 out of 10, would do it again.”—Max
