What movies tell us about work

Movies, as everyone knows, form a powerful medium. So when we consider movies and the world of work, one thing ought to be obvious: to show a few classic movies at normal workplaces would be a useful innovation. For young people in particular, screenings at work can prompt enlightenment and enthusiasm. Workplaces need that.

A second thing to note about movies and work is that today’s experts in management and the office hardly bother with making films about work.

That wasn’t always true. Consider the case of Frank Gilbreth. Gilbreth was a collaborator of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the early 20th century pioneer of ‘motion study’ in the workplace. Gilbreth made movies about the workplace. His films were not documentaries telling stories about work, in the manner of John Grierson and Night Mail (1936). No, when Gilbreth filmed workers’ movements, he was on a rather different quest: to reorganise labour processes so as to achieve higher productivity at work.

Work as a filmed drama, with technological sets

More recent decades have treated film and the workplace very differently. The workplace doesn’t at all feature as the object of a film devoted to what Taylor called ‘scientific management’. Instead, the workplace forms at least the background subject, and sometimes more, of a number of film dramas. A reasonable point of departure here would be to think about Wall Street, first released in 1987.

Looking back at the office of Gordon (‘greed is good’) Gekko as it was portrayed in 1987, one realises how much the technology of the workplace has changed since then. By today’s standards, there’s an enormous surfeit of paper, Rolodexes and red pencils. And, it being Wall Street, each red pencil comes complete with a rubber.

There’s similar technological nostalgia to be had in Colin Higgins’ movie Nine to Five (1980), which took a cool $100m in the US and is now back, but on Broadway. The theatre version, a musical, stars Dolly Parton; but in 1980, a younger Dolly worked among yet more Rolodexes, as well as lumpy calculators, IBM typewriters with plastic covers, people smoking, and extensive drawers of files. There’s also the ritual clocking-in, and a great scene when a photocopier’s sorting machine runs amok, spewing sheets everywhere.

The meaning of work: from workers’ action to the workings of fate

There’s a paradox here. In movies gone by, it isn’t actually the technological side of the workplace that occupies our attention so much as what movies say about the meaning of work. The technology of the workplace has run through some familiar changes; but what has changed more, and often more imperceptibly, is the substance of social relations at work. Start from that, and there’s room for real insights.

Nine to Five is about sexual harassment and women who get neither job satisfaction nor promotion – despite their great ideas for generating wealth. So the meaning of that American workplace is very different from that evoked by Russia’s Sergei Eisenstein, in his short, sharp but epic Strike (1924). There the story is about how, when workers need to take action, they need to do so with all the ruthlessness deployed by the employers.

Perhaps Eisenstein’s message is as archaic as the Tsarist factory conditions that his footage highlights. Yet at least the old master’s unions are not today’s boring old compulsory workers’ insurance companies, headed by functionaries who moan about the UK’s ‘long hours culture’. At least nobody asked for therapy, or a lawyer, when confronted with that modern scourge, ‘bullying’. Instead, when the workers are eventually defeated, Strike ends with a plea for organisation.

Whichever side of today’s class struggles (what class struggles?) you choose, it’s hard to argue with the Strike ethic. Discipline and determination may have become unfashionable qualities in the West, but that on display in Strike is little short of inspiring.

After Strike, the industrialisation of the West and Stalin’s version in the East altered perceptions of the workplace. Work was less a reactionary regime to be overthrown, more the grinding product of an impersonal high-tech system. That is much of the meaning of work evoked by King Vidor in his classic movie, The Crowd (1928).

Today, people who should know better still prattle on about artificial intelligence. Yet movies such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) had a more realistic perspective. They rightly hinted that it’s easier to turn a man into a robot than a robot into a man. In these movies, workers were less conscious agents, more cogs in a machine.

The Rooseveltian revival of free will

To portray workers as cogs was fatalistic. Yet it wasn’t long before subtle Rooseveltians offered a more fetching alternative to the delightful determinism of Lang and the vulgar Marxism of Chaplin. In Only Angels Have Wings (1939), His Girl Friday (1940) and Air Force (1943), the great Howard Hawks made leadership, teamwork and professionalism his themes with, respectively, the airline and newspaper businesses, and the USAF.  Each of Hawks’s heroines in the civilian movies (Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell) was one of the boys. In mid-level, middle-distance group shots, Hawks suggested that energy and leadership, when combined with a more-or-less democratic division of labour (Wings, Air Force) or unswerving dedication to justice (Friday) could, in the manner of America in the Second World War, conquer all.

Thankfully, teamwork in these kinds of mid-century movies had little to do with team work as it is theorised today. In modern eulogies to teamwork, sporting metaphors and mawkish egalitarianism are broadly the rule. Back in the 1940s, by contrast, what united people at work was not psychobabble, but the bending of wills to a common task.

Mistrust at work, misanthropy in the movies

Preston Sturges’s chain-gang movie Sullivan’s Travels (1941) was a hilarious reminder that humour is a better antidote to bad times at work than all that caring, sharing stuff about culture. Then, from the Cold War left, John Farrow’s noir mystery, The Big Clock (1948), had the US newspaper business as cellular, hierarchical and murderous. In another movie, this time from the Cold War right, Sam Fuller’s Underworld USA (1961) had American capitalism itself as just a larger version of The Mob at work. Perhaps the politically indefinable Don Siegel (Riot in Cell Block 11, 1954; Madigan, 1968) said it all. In Dirty Harry (1971), San Francisco cop Clint Eastwood introduces his new sidekick to The Office. As the lift doors open to usher the two police into a cacophonous chaos, Eastwood mutters: ‘Welcome to Homicide!’.

It’s from this era, perhaps, that visions of work begin to offer what has become today’s specially backward kind of fatalism. Spy movies, often metaphors for work, bear this out. From Martin Ritt’s bleak The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) through to John Irving’s terrific TV series Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979), it’s not machines that encage, but rather human nature. Battered heroes, bare courtrooms and decrepit filing cabinets in even more decrepit workplaces convey a pervasive atmosphere of mistrust at work – the service sector included (not for nothing are Britain’s spies referred to as the Service).

The idea is repeated right up to David Frankel’s The Devil Wears Prada (2006). Here and in other movies, everyone, but everyone, is on the make. Employers are bastards not because of capitalism, but because all people are bastards.

This is a fatalism with strongly misanthropic overtones.

Two political lessons

Past movies about work contain a couple of political lesson, of sorts.

First, today’s moviemakers could do with emulating the unsentimental but creative hard graft of past directors. Attention to the workplace should certainly not be mandatory – though a little bit of such attention would do no harm, given that most of society’s heroes tend to have to work for a living.

Second, today’s moviemakers might usefully take their distance from anti-human visions of work, or the future of it.

Not everything at work is pre-ordained by its physical layout, its routine processes or its IT. Not everyone is a greedy banker, a seedy journalist or a fraudulent MP. With resolve, direction, clear goals, examples set and a bit more grown-up trust in our colleagues, work can be tough, but rewarding.

Even in a newspaper office, work need not be murder.