2 July 2009 | Facilities Management World

What movies tell us about the workplace

The history of the cinema reveals much about how people have interpreted the world of work

The news is that Michael Douglas is once again to star for Oliver Stone as Gordon ‘greed is good’ Gekko in a second, credit-crunch version of Wall Street , first released in 1987. That’s impetus enough for me to consider how movies have treated the world of work over the past 85 years. Looking back at the office of Michael Douglas, one realises how much has changed: by today’s standards, there’s an enormous surfeit of paper, Rolodexes and red pencils - each complete, it being Wall Street, with an eraser.

There’s similar nostalgia to be had in Colin Higgins’ Nine to Five (1980), which took a cool $100m in the US and is back on Broadway - with Dolly Parton - as a musical today. Apart from more Rolodexes, lumpy calculators, IBM typewriters with plastic covers, people smoking, and extensive drawers of files, there’s the ritual clocking in, and a great scene when a photocopier sorting machine runs amok, spewing sheets everywhere.

Yet it isn’t the physical side of the workplace that arrests in movies gone by, so much as what they 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 those things, rather from lists of services or tasks, and there’s room for real insights.

Anyway, movies are powerful. Showing a few of the classics at your workplace would be an innovation and, for young people in particular, a revealing one. What’s more, Frank Gilbreth, the collaborator of FW Taylor, the early 20th century pioneer of ‘motion study’ in the workplace, made movies of workers’ movements in his search for higher productivity. How many experts in work do that any more?

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

One might find that message as archaic as the Tsarist factory conditions that the movie highlights.  Yet at least Eisenstein’s unions are not today’s boring old compulsory workers’ insurance companies, with 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 Leninist plea for organisation.

Whichever side of today’s class struggles (what class struggles?) you choose, it’s hard to argue with the Strike ethic of discipline and determination - unfashionable though these qualities have now become.

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

That was fatalistic; but it wasn’t long before subtle Rooseveltians, rather than the vulgar Marxism of Chaplin, offered a more fetching alternative. In Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and His Girl Friday (1940), the great Howard Hawks made teamwork, professionalism and biting wit his themes with, respectively, the airline and newspaper businesses.  Each of Hawks’s heroines (Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell) were one of the boys and, in mid-level, middle-distance group shots, the director conveyed the idea that a democratic division of labour (Wings) plus unswerving dedication to justice (Friday) could, in the later manner of America in the Second World War, conquer all.

Here teamwork had, thankfully, little to do with the sporting metaphors and mawkish egalitarianism touted by hip, modern theorists of the office. The task, not psychobabble, was what united people.

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. From the Cold War left, John Farrow’s noir mystery, The Big Clock (1948), had the US newspaper business as cellular, hierarchical and murderous; oddly, 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.

It’s from this time, perhaps, that visions of work begin to offer what has become today’s specially backward kind of fatalism. From Martin Ritt’s bleak The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) through to John Irving’s TV series Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979), it’s not machines that encage, but rather human nature. Battered heroes, bare courtrooms and decrepit offices 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.

What past movies about work really show today is the need to follow the unsentimental but creative hard graft of their directors - and the need to be hostile to anti-human visions of the future. Not everything at work is pre-ordained by layout and IT, and not everyone is a greedy banker or MP. With resolve, leadership, clear goals, examples set and a bit more grown-up trust in our colleagues, work can be tough, but rewarding.

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