Transcript
Speaker: I'm just broken.
Speaker: Hello, hello, and welcome back to Death is a Photograph, Culture at the End of History. Today's guest is Dan Evans. He is a sociologist and author. His latest book, I think, is A Nation of Shopkeepers, The Unstoppable Rise of the Petit Bourgeois, out now with repeated books.
Speaker: He's also a lecturer at Swansea University and has an upcoming book, although correct me if he is this is still upcoming, entitled British Wales, Class, Place and Everyday Nationhood. He has contributed to some of my favourite outlets, including Jacobin, The New Statesman, and Open Democracy. Welcome, Dan.
Speaker: Thanks for having me, guys. ah So, we've got two films today, two Gen X films that kind of deal with the 90s, the end of history, economics, and work, and class, and social class, I should say. ah Dan, what are the two films you picked for us, and where did you pick them?
Speaker: Sure, so the two films are Office Space and then Falling Down. i don't know if i'm not going to go into the technical, like who produced it and directed it or anything like that. When was Office Space made? Is it 98? 1999 is when it came out, so I presume 98.
Speaker: And Falling Down is 93? Yeah. So I picked both these films because they sort of speak to different portrayals or different sides of the character of the white collar worker. um And if you actually look at the sociology of this film,
Speaker: or the history of you know all the the clerical worker or the white collar worker, they're alternatively described as sort of really emasculated, pathetic, um weak you know people because they're sort of ah yeah know they don't organize collectively, they don't ah join trade unions, they're of toady up to the bosses, sort make a real effort to sort of distance themselves culturally and socially from the working class.
Speaker: And then on the other hand, they're sort of portrayed as like ultra-violent lunatics and really like actually formed, you know, especially in Nazi Germany, like a ah really core component of the Nazi party and including like the street fighting element. So it's almost like the two sides of the personality of the white collar man.
Speaker: Oh, should say what actually happens in them as well? Yeah, give us like a quick summary of these these two films. Yeah, sorry. and Well, I'll tell you what, i'll start with Office Space. Office Space is sort of like a whimsical office-based comedy. um It's written by Mike Judge of Beavis and Butthead film, and I think it's actually about, can't remember the name of the character, it's based on a comic book. Milton. About Milton, yes, sorry, about Milton, who's sort of a minor character in in this film.
Speaker: And it focuses basically on this guy, Peter, who has this, dead-end or you know boring job ah in in a tech company called Inertech in which he is extremely alienated from and he absolutely hates. and It's a great send-up of sort of corporate culture, new public management that was coming in in the 90s.
Speaker: And that without any spoilers, him and his friends, they devise scheme to sort of rip off inner tech and you know hilarity ensues, but the whole point of the film is really it sort of exploring the alienation felt by Peter and his colleagues in this white-collar world. and It has some really interesting things about you know the role of bureaucracy, the role of management, um the role of masculinity and productive work, things like that.
Speaker: So Office Space is like the lighthearted side of the white collar character, which I think is really useful. And then ah Falling Down, which stars Michael Douglas, i think Joel Schumacher.
Speaker: It's 1993. So Falling Down has almost become a cult classic because it's so like deeply problematic in very many ways. It's basically about ah a white collar worker, Michael Douglas, who essentially snaps and goes on a rampage across L.A.,
Speaker: um The film starts, he's sort of stuck in traffic. um it gets I mean, it gets... I was re-watched it and forgot how how fast it gets to the rampage. just know There's no messing around. It's just like the guy's stuck in traffic, is boiling, his aircon ah breaks, and he basically snaps and meanders through LA, killing and wounding various people, having all these interactions. And it's basically almost like the id of...
Speaker: right-winger's mind, you know, because he's having all these interactions where everyone's ripping him off. It starts with a an interaction with a Korean shopkeeper who's ripping off, then he has an interaction with, you know, Hispanic gang members who he ends up sort of like really hurting.
Speaker: He hates his ex-wife. I'm trying to think of all the people he kills and hurts. Like, you know, he, again, no spoilers. I mean, the filming, it's funny because I watch i watched them both recently and i'm Falling Down, I think, does not hold up at all. I mean, the acting is, like, comically bad. Like, it's actually terrible. The dialogue is, like, hilariously awful. You know, every character just plays up to these, like, ridiculous stereotypes. You know, like the lu teeth the Latina characters and sound like sort of South Park voices almost. Yeah.
Speaker: it's a But it's that the point is, is about you know it really is about this sort of frustration and rage of the downwardly mobile white-collar worker. Turns out he's being laid off. He's being laid off. He's alienated from his wife. It's really misogynistic as well.
Speaker: and There's all these misogynistic scenes where his wife is like stopping it from seeing his daughter. But yeah, they both speak to very different aspects of the white collar psyche. and And I think, I mean, before I forget, whilst I think falling down does not hold up well is it like in terms of like the acting and things like that, I actually think it speaks to the sort of current political moment a lot better than...
Speaker: Office space, because I was thinking about, you know, various portrayals recently of white collar work and a lot of them, you know, The Office, obviously famously in America and in the UK, I guess films like Fight Club and to an extent Office Space.
Speaker: The white collar worker is sort alienated but stable. And in fact, their alienation stems from, you know, people look at the things that were seen to be alienating and horrible in the white collar worker in like the eighties and nineties. And now view that with like extreme jealousy. Like I'd absolutely love to have a Cuba. I'd absolutely love it. And it's a sign of how rapidly things have gone badly and how rapidly the sort of white collar, ah you know, the unproductive sector, whatever you want to call it has collapsed.
Speaker: And so I think that actually, falling down like the rage experience in falling down is actually more more accurately describes the current political moment and indeed explains why right populism is taken off throughout Europe and the world and it's a and it's an anger and I have to say like I feel it intently every single day and I know that a lot of my friends just don't just don't get it they don't get it I mean so yeah I think that's that's that's my overview Maybe I'm ah ah dupe of right-wing populism, which I hope no one samples that, but I had not seen Falling Down. i mean, I was well aware of it. It's it's quite famous, I would say.
Speaker: My wife hadn't seen it. It was substantially like... I would say less racist than I was expecting. I don't know. like You're led to believe that the movie is going to be like a guy who like it turns out has a Klan hood in the back of his car, but you don't know that at the beginning, goes on like a rampage, killing like a series of Rodney King kind of stand-ins and like Korean grocers. Yeah. When in in reality, it's a movie that seems to contain the ambivalence yeah that we as a society still sort of feel towards a lot of these complaints. So you mentioned that opening sequence where the air conditioning is off or doesn't work.
Speaker: My air conditioning in my car doesn't work because I can't afford to get a new car. And it is currently a heat wave here. Whenever I take my car out, I want to go on a rampage because I'm sitting in traffic. I live in New Jersey, one of the most densely populated states in the United States.
Speaker: But i also laugh at myself and think, you know, why is it that I'm being driven insane? Because like, I think there's a ridiculous bumper sticker on the car in front of me, which is something that that scene returns to over and over again, right? It'll be like, I don't know, a Jesus saves bumper sticker, you know, next to like truck nuts or something like these kind of detritus of a culturally unmoored civilization.
Speaker: and one of the things that really feels like falling down, understands our moment, isn't just... the um the character it chooses to portray. It's the ambivalence which with it treats the Michael Douglas character, who is simultaneously seemingly maybe a wife-beater, definitely not the greatest, has not been the greatest to his wife. We can concede that at minimum.
Speaker: Potentially interested in doing a family annihilation. Again, I wouldn't say that's like 100% settled, but it's certainly in the realm of possibility. But at the same time, he is unemployed.
Speaker: He is being ripped off at every single moment. Most of his complaints are things that people in a consumer society, like we have, largely speaking, in the West where we're net importers,
Speaker: where we want our McDonald's hamburger or whatever sandwich or whatever they call the damn restaurant in the in the movie, that these places like, oh, it doesn't look like the ad. Well, the least you could do in this horrendous life I have is give me the sandwich that looks like the ad.
Speaker: Or if it's a million degrees outside and i have to buy something to get changed to use the telephone, at least don't make me pay you know whatever price was ridiculous in 1993, a dollar for a Coke can, which now you'd be like, I'm going to drown and in Coca-Cola at a dollar a can.
Speaker: So at least for me, and and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts, a lot of it has to do with that, the stance of the movie, the kind of ryaness, which with Schumacher treats it, the way in which the overacting makes it okay in certain moments to almost laugh at the characters. Whereas his Office Space is like, I think almost hates white collar work more in in a weird way than Falling Down does.
Speaker: Well, was going to say there's this huge cleavage in the two films where the sort of existential dread in office space is sort of endogenous, right? It's like, it's interior to the kind of like networks of work and family like and relationships. Like the main character fucking hates his girlfriend. He hates his immediate boss. He hates his work. He hates the commute. Whereas the sort of fear and loathing of falling down is exogenous, right? Like the things that are sort of torturing the main character, Defense, William Foster, I think is his name is... um Like it's exterior things, right? It's gangs, it's antisocial behavior, it's crime, it's like... Having to live with his mom.
Speaker: Yeah, it's all these like out interior like structural issues, it's divorce, it's whatever. And yeah, I think that is potentially why Falling Down spoke to me much more than Office Space did. Which is interesting, right? like The kind of complaint to the main characters in Office Space, I found it quite hard to connect to them, emotionally at least. But the frustration William imp Foster may be concerning me.
Speaker: Where did he lose his job from? Do you remember? He's a military contractor. Yeah, he's a military contractor, yeah. Which is also like and a classic Californian. like The two industries of California are...
Speaker: maybe's military contract The Cold War has just ended. so i mean he yeah The American dream, the victory of America is why he doesn't have a job. like the ability to like america i mean People forget this, but there was in the early 90s this idea that, hey, maybe we could scale back the military budget because there's no Cold War to justify it anymore. We don't necessarily need to have this.
Speaker: gigantic military in the same way. So it's he's literally like a ah victim of capitalism, you know, like in in the sense that its success is the reason that he can't work.
Speaker: We should say, for that this is a very Gen X film in lots of ways around its sentiments around corporations bureaucracy and capitalism and the system, man. But like, equally, it's it's it's like a...
Speaker: a very boomer film, right? The main character in Falling Down is clearly, I mean, just by the way it's dressed, like his flat top haircut, the short-sleeved white shirt, like he's a very like early 1960s kind of JFK era aestheticized guy. He's obviously like someone born probably in the late forty s early 50s.
Speaker: And in a way, he kind of mimics Mike Judge's Hank Hill from King of the Hill. He's a kind of like radicalised, more extreme version of someone like Hank Hill. He also got of shares his ambiguity. right like He's a conservative kind of Bush voter, but he's deeply moral.
Speaker: He's like both an arsehole and like you know deeply kind and like deeply community-orientated. And you know William Foster in Pulling Down... is both a vessel for sort of like right-wing reactionary rage, but also like and it hates Nazis.
Speaker: you know yeah When he's approached by the Latino gang ah on the Hill in LA, he's initially like quite sort of friendly, kind of conciliatory, yeah like kind of was wants to like understand them. And it's only like later that he erupts into this whirlwind of violent rage.
Speaker: I think, I mean, there's so many points there, but mean, just to pick up on, before I forget, on the defense stuff, and, you know, as you said, because he continually mentions, you know, I helped defeat communism, whatever.
Speaker: Obviously, in the history of the petty bourgeoisie, you know, they're deeply tied up with the nation state, you know they view themselves as the people. And obviously, he has this sense of himself as a moral sort of, you know, American, is the fact that he literally, his job has literally been like, you know, creating or building rockets to protect America.
Speaker: And to go back to the race thing, I don't know if you want to, I don't know if i'm leaping forward. No, and to go ahead. The whole thing is quite funny, I think, because like I said, class is problematic because of the way the, you know, the characters sort of speak and how clunky the stereotypes are. But yeah, in terms of it being a, an out racist film, I mean, it's obviously not. And as you said, the funny thing is, is that he,
Speaker: You have this cartoonish white nationalist, you know, neo-nazi homophobic guy who runs a military surplus um store who is o Douglas is like consciously distancing himself from, you know, because the guy's like, Amy and you were the same. And he's like, i'm not like you. um And he's absolutely disgusted by it. And that guy stands in as like, you know, the...
Speaker: the neo-nazi is bad and I guess it shows that you know Douglas is actually this upstanding citizen and and I think it's interesting because i viewed it in the same as you the interaction with the Korean shop owner I mean the you know the LA riots uh you know very recent you know in the mind of the film you Rodney King things like that and for me like this always sort of reject the idea of racism as like an original sin you know that white people have that you can just unlearn through like training and things like that which is basically what Adolf Reid and Walter Ben Michael sort of say.
Speaker: And racial tension and ethnic tension emerges during you know economic downturns and recessions. um And a lot of it intraclass conflict. I mean, in the LA riots, it was korea you the Korean shop owners were you know having gunfights with black rioters. And it was this longstanding sort of simmering conflict between the Korean shop owners and the African-American communities they served. which sort of That for me is a... is a class conflict between the petty bourgeoisie, the shop owners and the working class communities. And and that's a hostility and sort of an ambivalent relationship which has lasted, you know, it existed everywhere throughout history and it's always been complex because you have, you know, the shopkeeper is suspicious of the community. He thinks they're sort of dangerous and lazy and stealing from him.
Speaker: The community in turn thinks that these people are sort of exploiting them. And then in times of, you know, hardship, you know, in riots, those sort of interclass tensions, which are overlaid by race, sort of explode. And I just think it is funny because I think that there's a modern version of racism, which would see his interaction with the Korean shopkeeper and the gang members at exclusively through the prism of of race, which I don't think is...
Speaker: Well, I think, interestingly, Falling Down, the the interaction with the Korean story, now like I saw it, I don't know if Danny saw it this way but it's On another level, it's kind of like an interaction between two competing elements of the petty bourgeois in the 90s, right? Like it's it's the the corporate public sector, yeah sort of deeply hierarchical um element of the petty bourgeois represented by Defens William Foster yeah and the kind of entrepreneurial small businessmen represented by the Korean store owner, right? yeah Like he even goes into the store and when he's smashing stuff up, he's kind of like, look,
Speaker: I just wanted to buy a Coke can. I wanted it to be this price. like This is the price it's always been. You can price gouging. I just want change to make a fucking phone call. yeah um And then he smashes up the shop and he gives he gives the Korean shop owner the exact money that he he said he was going to give him, right?
Speaker: And it seems to be like this weird clash between these two sort of bits of the petty bourgeois that point in the 90s, right? Which interesting in that it presages and not an inter-class conflict, which we're seeing in Falling Down, but and not but which is an intra-class conflict, but an inter-class conflict, which happens a few months later with the sort of, yeah, the proletariat and the petty bourgeois in the Rodney King riots. it's just a weird, it's a weird synchronicity there, I think.
Speaker: Well, and I have to say that I think that is still with us. I'll give you brief example. Here in New Jersey, we like our pizza, as you probably well aware. And if you go on any of our many glorious pizza pages, you'll find people being like, I can't believe I have to pay $18 from pizza. And there's always, always a guy who owns a pizzeria.
Speaker: who is in the comments saying, you don't think you know what the price of flour is right now. I don't think you have any idea when you're dealing with labor, when you've got to think about overhead. So, I mean, if you're getting $18, I think it's a great deal. like And that's sort of, you know, these people who probably make about the same amount of money probably live like three blocks away from each other, but who are, you know, totally alienated by what amounts to these different class positions within this broader class structure. On the question of race, I also need to add that The Michael Douglas character, one of the few people he identifies with in the movie is a black man who is outside a bank protesting. it The movie doesn't tell us this explicitly, but probably he's been denied a loan for being black, probably.
Speaker: And he's holding a sign that says something like, the obsolete man or you know ruled obsolete, something like this. Not economically viable. Yeah, not economically viable. ah Yes, thank you.
Speaker: And there's this moment of recognition where the man is taken away by the police, and Michael Douglas' character is on his rampage, but still kind of incognito. like They don't realize that he's on the rampage. They don't know that it's him, in other words. And they make eye contact and the guy in the car says, don't you know don't forget me or something like this. yeah So it's a weird... That's why when I saw that moment and I understood the movie to be this like Klan movie or something is when I was like, oh, this is obviously much more complicated than I had been led to believe going in because his resentments are very much the resentments of...
Speaker: this person who's been conditioned by being mid-20th century American to expect certain amenities, to expect certain, frankly, just habits of consumption that are being disrupted by changes in the economy and that are now coming out in this kind of schizophrenic rampage where he is both not a Nazi and also kind of racist, but doesn't think of himself as racist, which is like 35% of Americans are something at this point, maybe more so.
Speaker: the i mean The ideology that shines through, I mean, it doesn't shine through so much in office space. and it In fact, I think probably it's the opposite now. flatner is So, you know, Douglas is, I mean, again, going back to like, you know the core of petty bourgeois ideology is this the idea of, you know, producerism, right? You the Hofstadter concept of, you know, there's this hardworking productive members of the society who follow the rules, do the right thing. And they just get screwed by people who are lazy and unproductive. And that cuts across,
Speaker: you know, race in that, you know, he identifies with this black guy who's not economically viable because the guy's being screwed for trying to do the right thing. Same as him. And that's, but that's why it's funny if you look at the people who he hates, you know, like there's, I think the the film is sort of seen as problematic because, you know, when it's sort of,
Speaker: I won't call it the mise-en-scene, but it's almost like a taxi driver when he's looking at his like hippies as those are homeless people you know there's like The implication is like these people are absolute scum. you know You've got the bohemians and then you've got homeless people. and two things that two There's two funny scenes. you know like One is that there's like a fake beggar. The guy's like, hey man, give me money, like whatever. Oh yeah. He basically, Michael Douglas, you know, he sort of grills him, you know, like the guy says something like I've lost my wallet or something. And then, you know, it turns out, you know Douglas grills him and answers every one of his questions. It turns out the guy doesn't actually want to, he doesn't need money for bus fare. He's just using it like, you know crack whatever, which is like this thing of, and Douglas says, I think, get a job, you know, basically. um And then from there, you know, so that guy's a parasite and who's taking the piss out of everyone. And then,
Speaker: not long after this, he goes, he walks through a golf course where he comes across the other set of parasites, which are obviously the mega rich who tell him to get off, get off the golf course. Um, and again, he, he goes, he goes crazy. Uh, I won't spoil ah one of the good bits, but you know, it's just like, it, it just shines through and it's so clunky, you know, this guy is following the rules. I mean, But it's interesting because he but he does make an exception for a certain level of paratism, which is like or what he what might be perceived as paratism, which is where he hops the the fence past the golf course into the ultra-rich mansion, oh yeah and he catches the janitor or the caretaker or whatever, using like his employer's massive pool to like let his children play in it right yeah and he kind of goes like you won't tell won't tell my like he he has a shotgun and they're terrified of him yeah and he kind of goes don't worry about it like you guys seem cool like and you know just ones i'm not going to tell your employer that you were using his pool like yeah solidarity to another working stiff basically i mean i think there's a scene which you know he says something i've actually got it written down he says something like i did everything they told me to
Speaker: Did you know I build missiles? Yeah. help to protect America? You should be rewarded for that. Instead, they gave it to the plastic surgeon. You know, they lied to me. And really that is how I feel in my life, you know, I mean, and I'm sure a lot of other sort of precarious Downey Mobile graduates, whatever, the people who've probably voted for Zoran and and stuff at the moment and Sanders and Corbyn feel exactly the same way. You know, you you do get encouraged to do, you know, social mobility and... Well, yeah, I was going to ask, I mean, how do you think the kind of...
Speaker: the habitus of the the lower middle class, say at the end of history in the 1990s, has changed to to today, right? So like the the frustrations of someone like William Foster or the kind of office drones and office space who, you know, i'm I'm sort of like...
Speaker: spitballing here, but like probably went to like low-level colleges and they come from sort of like similar lower-middle-class backgrounds. Those frustrations, I think, were seen as very particular to a particular sort social class at that point in the 90s. I would say that by the time you get to the late 2010s, that kind of... like systemic set of of frustrated economic and social frustrations has branched out massively right to the point where like you know you could have like an elite, don't know, someone from UCL or Cambridge in the UK who came from like a very PMC background sharing this William Foster's frustrations. I mean see i wonder how that kind of like lower the class habitus has transformed Well, I think one of the i mean one of the more important things to note is that, you know, this was previously probably seen as quite a marginal experience when it was these were made in like the 90s. Or, for example, you know, Pulanças talks about the new Petit Bourgeoisie, the expansion of like the white-collar work in the 70s.
Speaker: And it's now, it's it's an absolutely enormous it's huge. And obviously, proletarianization or downwind mobility is almost like the the defining trait of this class. You know, numerous attempts to sort of theorize it, you know, or just standing call at the precariat.
Speaker: You know, Mike Savage, the emergent service worker. I go back and pronounce that. But it's now enormous. You know, in the UK, there's something like, you know, 5 million graduates stuck in non-graduate jobs, you know, and it's just not going get...
Speaker: And there was a story on BBC Wales the other day, and it was like a girl from Swansea has counted the amount of jobs she applied for. I think was 650 jobs. And then she got, you know, so this this is like the new normal. But yeah, it's it's it's not, it doesn't really capture the cultural imagination.
Speaker: I don't know. It's just, yeah like I mean, apart from that one you said about perfection, I can't really think of many. modern you know ah films or books or whatever which capture this sort of um experience. So I think the first thing to say is it's it's now a lot larger than it was. And in terms like that, I mean, politically I think the interesting thing is that this group is go has broken like left to a degree under Corbyn and then Sanders. I mean, and because historically that that really wasn't the case with white-collar clerical workers. And actually I think
Speaker: I think more and more, you know, you're actually going to I mean, you know, the Nicholas Dirty Ant, the meme, you know, as Yeah. Chase, are you aware of Nicholas Dirty Ant? <unk>t I don't think so, no. Because you're not European.
Speaker: So basically, Nicholas Sturdy-Ands is a guy, you know, it's a social contract, right? And it's producerism in a a meme. So there's this guy, a white-collar worker who's gone to college, who was working in a city, and it's showing his wages going to...
Speaker: immigrants, old people, you know, basically everything in society has been taken off this guy. And I think what's significant is that it's been made by young white-collar males, clearly, who maybe, like, five years ago would have been swept up in Corbynism, but are now...
Speaker: breaking to the right. And I think, mean, that's one, but that's one of the think problems I always had with like the, you know, generation left sort of analysis about, you know, that this generation is sort inherently like, you know, left wing because their precarity, because history shows that, you know, like if there's no left alternative, you know, a lot of these people will sort of break, break to the right. and But in terms of the habitus, I don't, I don't really, it just hasn't been explored really. It hasn't been explored in terms of the cultural traits I wonder if we could dial it back to kind of historicize what you're talking about in the 90s itself. um
Speaker: One thing, well, maybe there's two things here I'll try not to get too lost in my own sauce here, but one of them is that An interesting change is that i I don't know that the equivalent of the Michael Douglas character now can be as reliant on this idea that there are a bunch of kind of mooches and scammers out there. I think that for the generation that the Douglas character comes from, probably up through Gen X, who, let's be clear, when they first saw this movie, were like, this guy' this guy's got the stuff. He's right. you know like That was the reception of the film, right? So it kind of taxi driver style. Yeah, yeah. you know So for those people who are socialized in that context, there is still this idea that, you know yes, there are welfare queens out there, there're you know this kind of Clintonite 90s idea.
Speaker: But I think for people, even right-wing people in, their or 20s,
Speaker: The scammers tend to be a little more either structural or at least higher up. So for the right, it's the various sort of like, I don't know, the consultants from office space or something, right? It's these figures who come in and, you know, maybe they're DEI coordinators, they're whatever. But that's sort of the scammer for the right winger today. It's not the homeless person in the right wing imagination is not a scammer. Now, the homeless person is an element needs to be removed from society. They're not they're not scamming. they're just They just don't belong, right? Yeah, they just need to be killed. and Yeah, exactly. And the left version of that is maybe something more like, you know, I don't know, a dropshipper or a Bitcoin guy or something like this. Someone who has found a way to kind of like, or or a right-wing person who sells dietary supplements and like pickup artistry, right? Like these kind of scammers who are
Speaker: usually very online, kind of um have developed this like informal economy that relies on kind of parasocial stuff and convincing people things are wrong with them. But it's not at all like, I walk outside my house and immediately accosted by a homeless man who tries to lie to me, right? That version of the scammer exists, I think now, only really in the minds of the boomer and Gen X, which really puts this movie in a particular moment, And I think we can see that that stereotype remains for those generations. The second thing, I guess, is that you said something very interesting, which is that the by the 1970s, you're already seeing this deindustrialization process that's going to result in the emergence of the white-collar worker as a major force.
Speaker: So what's interesting is that a movie like Falling Down or a movie like Office Space is actually just existing at the moment in which this comes into the clear consciousness of the culture. It may reach its apogee now, right, to the point where i can do a PhD and end up hosting a podcast.
Speaker: um Right? Like that's a thing that can happen now. And probably in a nineties movie, you wouldn't see that. But I think the fact that these movies are interested in that figure shows that unlike in the late seventies or early eighties, when this was already happening, it's becoming prominent enough that now the culture needs to think about it. It's cultural object. These represent these problems. And that means that it's saying that's been with us a long time, I was was going to say the kind of earlier sort of what you might call rationalisation of the workforce, the de-industrialisation the kind of manual working class, which happens much more in the 70s and 80s.
Speaker: I mean, obviously it is represented in film and stuff, but I think it feels a lot less discourse-making than the sort of um disinheritance of the sort of white-collar clerical worker that you get in the ninety s right?
Speaker: Like, sure, you get films like, don't know, Billy Elliot or something, don't know. But it's it's it's much... I so it's more nostalgic and it's less seen as as this kind of like deeply individualistic way. It's much more sort of seen in this kind of historic sweep.
Speaker: Whereas, yeah, that sort of disinheritance to the the white collar clerical worker feels, I'd say, much more like a sort of betrayal. Well, because it it's the thing that is promised, right? Like, in other words, I mean, this is really a later ninety s into the 2000s phenomenon, but you certainly see a version of it in these movies, right? if you know Let's use Office Space as an example since we've really been... Just quickly, mean, Office Space is deeply prescient, and...
Speaker: of a kind of Gen X attitude that's filtered down to Gen Z, obviously Gen Z being the children of Gen X, which is that at the end of the film, the protagonist, Peter Givens, trades in his, as we would now call it, email job, then white collar job for a blue collar job trade. yeah He ends up working with his hillbilly mate on like a building site. And, you know, Mike judges sort of summation of this this switch is that this is all for the best.
Speaker: um Well, he's a known blue collar fetishist, I would say. i mean, I think. ah ah but But yeah, no, you're completely right. I was just going to make the point that I forget if it's the Michael Bolton character or the other character whose name is continuously mispronounced. Yeah. But, you know, where I think one of them basically makes the point that, you know, I went to college, i became a software guy, became this thing that is supposed to be what the 90s and early 2000s are going to be about, which is what what we now know is the dot-com bubble, which, of course, retrospectively, the name kind of tells you that things did not work out maybe as well as they would have hoped. But the point is that even in this moment, there's already this idea that the white collar will inherit the earth. Yeah. That sort of, you do these things, you go to college, you learn to work with
Speaker: you know as our president in America would say, computer, and you you you work with computer and do good job with computer, then everything will be okay. Even by the late 90s, that's beginning to fracture. And I think if anything is interesting to me about thinking that experience in relationship to now, it's why did it take until like 2017 for that to become clear again? like we In other words, yeah I attended college from 2011 to 2015, Yeah.
Speaker: right And at that point, even though it was post-financial crisis, I would still say there was a general idea that you could kind of go study something, you'd get out, it would be more or less okay.
Speaker: ah That makes me, for those keeping track, kind of a ah lower millennial, right? By 2017, 2018, 2019, certainly, that is very clearly no longer the case. So in a way, it's like, why is it that these movies from the 90s already seem to be able to see this, but we don't admit it to ourselves as a culture until, is it Clintonism? you know like what is it is it you know is it Great Britannia? Is it blur? like what Why is it that we we couldn't see this?
Speaker: I was going say, like as ah late as like i say the Theresa May administration, or was it Johnson? There are these famous job adverts in the UK of a picture of a ballerina taking off her ballet shoes and like learning to code. It said, your future could be in cyberspace. But wait, I'm sorry. i I want to let you talk to him, but I just have to say that is such a funny version of the ad because usually the idea is, you know, yeah, Billy Elliot, it's that the coal miner, you know, sort of like takes off his gloves and like, you know, i don't know, puts on like puts an ergonomic keyboard in front of himself and starts typing or something.
Speaker: but The ballerina is like already such a rarefied profession that it's like, oh, no, no, no, we're destroying the arts. yeah like Artists need to go become coders. It's such a crazy... It's like a minuscule portion of the workforce like to the point where it's not even... Why would you target them? But yeah, sorry. Yeah, but it's very telling on a cultural level about the kind of cultural anxiety of...
Speaker: you know we i Beginning in maybe the early 2000s, you have discourse around Mickey Mouse degrees, yeah media studies discourse. um And then later it becomes like, learn to code, bro, learn to code.
Speaker: And obviously all of that has now collapsed and it's like, get a trade. There's obvious there's always a like there's always a lag though. I mean, i mean speaking as someone who you know is involved in sort of recruitment of students and employability and stuff, I mean...
Speaker: There's almost like a conscious, I mean, there's almost a conscious effort from the university industrial complex. And even basically in schools is the problem because the kids, despite despite that there's this reality, you know, of this destroyed, this barren landscape of like the service sector, you know, kids are still told. point blank by teachers, like go to university and you will get like a job. That stuff just hasn't. um And in fact, in the UK, it's only like in the last year or so that people have actually started to unpick the idea of the graduate premium and just show like, whoa, this is like lift the lid on it and be like, this is an enormous scam. Like, you know, and in some places of the UK, the graduate premium
Speaker: The graduate premium, i don't if you call it that in America, know the idea that if you go to university, that over your lifetime you're going to earn hundreds of thousands of more than if you didn't, has now been exposed to be a total sham outside medicine, law, things like that. and But new there are people actually having to fight to to sort of expose this like reality, and it's very recent that this stuff is. And even now, like there's this bizarre To go back to what like Sam was saying about learning to code and stuff, i mean in the university, you know you've got this AI and stuff, which is clearly destroying everything. you know like It's absolutely destroying people's ability to do X, and Z. You have these administrators and and sort of people in charge who will just keep saying, this is good. This is good because it's seen to be tech. As you said, it's like this weird thing of a computer.
Speaker: i wish I had like a cheering soundbite I could be playing right now. is i Because Twitter's going have you back on. He's very happy. well but is this There's this ridiculous um ah you know like cognitive dissonance where we know that this stuff isn't working. you know And Starmer keeps saying like you know it's almost like you know Blair was talking about the knowledge economy. That's like a Potemkin village in the UK. It just didn't work. i mean In Wales now, you've got people saying like like the Welsh Government, Cardiff Council, they'll set up like a call centre for Monzo or a bank and then they'll say, this is fintech. you know You're working in financial tech. you know And it's just But like, you know, that but that's they just rebadging it. But I think, you know, there's there's a conscious effort to sort of suppress this.
Speaker: I mean, that was a question I was going to ask you, Dan, and you, Chase, as well, probably, which is that, just talking on that graduate premium thing, like the Financial Times has done an investigation, i've done various pieces recently on. I'm sure you've seen like the John Murdoch Burns stuff about the fact that Not only is the um graduate premium in the UK massively flatlined since at least 2008, but it's also like divulged from the US graduate p premium massively. nice But there's like a 20%, 30%, 40% gulf now um between the graduate premium US workers get and the graduate premium premium British workers get.
Speaker: So there's clearly this kind of like... you know bottom end of the PMC, precarious worker, graduate petit bourgeois class is, I think, a fact across the entirety of the Western world, right?
Speaker: Like Australia, Canada, France, Germany. And it's leading to both the growth of the populist right and the populist left. But it's also like geographically like different. And I think just like economically different to be a member of this class in the imperial hegemon, in the superpower,
Speaker: Like, to be defense, right? To be, like, working and building rockets to destroy the fucking Soviets and to be, like, the equivalent of this man in the same era. So, like, I guess 1993, John Major, right? John Major's Britain. Like, being one day, oh man, or Worcestershire woman, being this kind of low middle class figure in Thatcher at Britain, I think is a very different subjectivity. Like, you're kind of like this cog in a similar machine, but this machine is, like, breaking down much quicker.
Speaker: 100%. 100%. And I think the radicalization of this class is, like... is developing at a pace that no one can really understand because it's just the experience of downward mobility is so visceral. um I just wanted to Before, i mean, if we've only got an hour, I wanted to go to one of the things I think both of you guys asked, which is about like gender. um And as Chase sort of said earlier, there's this this funny scene where Michael Douglas's wife is basically intimating strongly to this police officer that like you this guy might be on the way to kill me and my daughter. And the guy's like, you stupid woman. Like, he's just like, you know, did he hit you? And she's like, no. And he's like, oh my God, why are you complaining? You know? And there's this real like misogynistic undertone, but it's, it's really interesting because one of the biggest, you know, features as a way of sort of understanding like the internal life world or the habitus whatever you know,
Speaker: the white collar worker is this idea that they have been emasculated. You know, they, whether deliberately or whether they're forced out of it, you know, if you reject working class masculinity, if you reject working with your hands, and if you take on a feminized role, working in an office, being deferential, then that has, know,
Speaker: Yeah. And there's there's, there's a long back history to this, right? Like the the the rise of like clerkships, white collar work in like late 19th century Britain coincides with eugenics and the sort of imperialist like worries about like the sort of the stock of the the British sort of worker being sort of diminished by all these like people sitting at desks. and Becoming more locked. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. exactly but also I think it's, it's, I wanted to ask you, Dan, like, that that kind of question of masculinity and gender, like you get these outbursts of violence in both films, right? One from the Boomer character, William Foster in Falling Down, and you get an outburst of violence in Office Space from Michael Bolton, ah Peter Gibbons, and I think the other guy's name is Shamir, isn't it?
Speaker: but like And they both feature baseball bats. yeah but they're both both Both sets of films feature angry guys in suits with baseball bats. But in Falling Down, it leads to bazookas and tanks and massive explosions. by Mass death of like thousands of like Los Angelinos. And in ah Office Space...
Speaker: The violence is contained in one single scene where the three guys from the software company beat the shit up at Brent over the baseball app One of my favorite scenes just in general. yeah It's a great scene. I think it's like set to NWA or gangstar music, right? yeah it's It's really, really funny, but I think it's super interesting the Boomer character is able to sort of like, has this mastery of violence. like yeah yeah He is this emasculated white-collar worker, but at the same time, he has this capacity to unleash awesome violence. yeah Whereas by time you get to Gen X and like Peter Gibbons... Yeah, he'd able to folk up, yeah.
Speaker: It's all contained within this kind of like, you know, like rage rooms, like in the UK and on the high street, you get like the rage room. You can take an ax to a computer or whatever. Like it's really pressing of that kind of very like therapized, very controlled yeah sort of violence. um Like punching a pillow when you're angry or something. I think there's a really interesting shift there between the two. There's a scene in Office Space where he says, you know, I'm not going to say anything because I'm a pussy. And then they all say, well, speak for yourself, I'm not a pussy. But it's just like that you really couldn't sum up the those sort white-collar experience. And, like, there's actually loads of... I mean, I'm reading this Welsh author at the moment called Alan Richards, and he talks about, you know... And and also it's it's in, you know, the uses of literacy by Hargart, you know, of the scholarship boy, the people from the working-class background or area who reject...
Speaker: the hegmonic, you know, protest masculinity of the working class area, you know, um you don't get into fights, you know, you have to be good in school. You know, it takes its toll. You learn your position in the class structure, that you're different because you are a pussy. um And in the Alan Richards novel, you know, he's like, he's going, he's on a scholarship to the grammar school and all the lads who have gone down the mines at 14 are like,
Speaker: essentially giving him abuse. and and it And it happens in, i mean, there's an amazing book, which I should have mentioned earlier, actually called Little Man, What Now?, which is by Hans Valade, who was the guy that wrote Alone in Berlin. And that that sort of captures this sort of like horrible,
Speaker: situation of the white collar worker being squeezed and emasculated as well. You know, this idea that like they they're they're not i can't even stand up for their rights. You know, they're not in a union. They're not like this, the proud sort of like um militant proletariat that's standing, you know, with his sort of comrades in arms. You're just this pathetic little worm who can't even stand up to your boss, you know. And it's an ongoing trope of sort of white collar based I mean, it's also in Breaking Bad that, you know, you actually, you find redemption and you find your masculinity by undertaking, like, terrible acts of violence and or crime. Or in, like, office space, you know, he becomes a blue-collar worker, you know, and and that's sort of like this big liberating thing because he's he's in touch with his masculinity. He's not having to be, like, deferential every day.
Speaker: But it's this idea of suppressed rage which comes with white-collar work because, you know, it is deferential. who i was going to say, like, have we traded... security for freedom somewhat. Like, are we the sort of, like, unwilling victims of, like, Peter Gibbons' rebellion?
Speaker: In the sense that, I don't know about your work, but my work, I i felt, and maybe it's that it's it's a slightly different class position, but the kind of, like, stifling, slightly existential, temporal sense of, like, wasting your life, um and the kind of arbitrary authority of this kind of unaccountable idiot manager.
Speaker: um Yeah, I find it quite hard to sympathize or, like, empathize with those in the sense that, like, like my working life is very much like those aren't the problems that I deal with on the daily. Like i but I'm fairly autonomous. I can kind of work from where I want, when I want.
Speaker: um The things I worry about are like money, like progression, stability. Am I going to get fired? um There's a bit of that in an office space with the consultants, but like on the whole, like security isn't the issue. The issue is boredom. the issue is arbitrary authority.
Speaker: um Yeah, I just have to come in and and and say, i mean, I think what you're describing, if we can kind of filter through this back through the lens of the podcast and and think about this in in terms of Gen X, is that we live on the other side of this great kind of like entrepreneurial revolution that gives us, you know, the dropshippers I was talking about earlier that gives us the crypto, bro.
Speaker: There's a book from, I think a couple of years ago. Oh no, this year, earlier this year, ah by Eric Baker called Make Your Own Job, How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America. ah Perhaps it also goes for the, um you know, for for the UK.
Speaker: And I mean, the argument in the book is basically that this kind of like Dale Carnegie, that's the guy who did How to Make Friends and Influence People, um you know This kind of self-help ethic that's tied to this idea of being your own boss, being in charge of yourself, ah not answering to anyone else as much as possible, that that sort of becomes the summit of the American worker self-conception.
Speaker: So for example, I remember during COVID, I felt like an insane person because when remote work, there was sort of this push from especially left-wing people to say, no, we want more remote work. And I was like, i mean, at some level, of course I understand. On the other hand, I can really imagine...
Speaker: nothing worse for solidarity in the workplace than a bunch of people who never see each other or talk to each other, right? Like, it just seemed to me that that very obviously would be bad for developing any sense of self-consciousness as a laborer of any kind, right? But I was the freak because, no, the freedom involved in being remote is a good thing, and I find myself on the same side, quote-unquote, as like,
Speaker: you know corporate landlords in New York who don't want to stop making money on making businesses rent their space, right? And I think that what you're identifying there, Sam, is this final victory of that ideology that comes out in these movies in different ways um that is probably more obvious in something like Office Space, where it's like a bigger problem. All Peter wants to do is work from home. like He can't articulate that because it's it's it's anachronistic to the the point in time, but like...
Speaker: Peter Givens deeply just wants to fuck it. He wants to work from home That's what wants to do. He wants to watch kung fu movies like while doing his bullshit job. like He knows his job is meaningless, so he would rather just be doing it on his laptop while screen maxing and watching like a Bruce Lee movie.
Speaker: Yeah, or he wants to like have his laptop... You know the famous clip on Twitter that went viral of the... um Yeah. The two girls in swimsuits doing product management, like in a pool, work from home. I was thinking of the itty bitty titties and a bum. Itty bitty titties and a bum. Yeah, similar. I mean, I think it was about two years ago, two sort of 27 girls, product managers, some large silicon tech company.
Speaker: Obviously lots of people were like, you know, the the credit credit's out of sync, we need higher interest rates, this is this is ridiculous. but I think that that that was the video that like prompted people to actually stop, with companies to stop working from home, I think. I think they ruined it for for everyone, you know? Yeah, but like Peter Gibbons is the swimsuit girl in the pool, right? Like if he could, he would bring his light laptop and and fish.
Speaker: Well, i'm with I'm with Chase all the way. mean, I'm like one of you, I'm one of the freaks, I'm like anti-work from home. Yeah. I personally start to go insane if I work from home. Like I have to be working. I don't, I mean, I think there's and there's a lot of interesting things there. i mean, I don't want, I didn't want to get sucked into this podcast as sort of criticizing quote unquote, like the left, but in terms of like the visceral reaction people always have, you know, towards when someone says, Hey, I don't think you should be allowed to work from home. I think you should come into the office and sort of socialize and talk to people. For me, like like you were sort saying there, Sam, I'm Chase, that I think there is this final victory of this sort of Thatcherite individualism and and or at least one ah element of it where you just want to be...
Speaker: Forgive me if this is a total tangent, I think you can see in the way the left talks about crime or doesn't talk about crime, and it's almost like this valueless libertarianism where you don't actually want to live in a society of of where people are cohesive and you know strong communities where people actually have shared values. It's almost like this...
Speaker: I don't know, not like a Hobbesian, but it's almost like this free-for-all, like I should be free to just totally withdraw from society. It's like a cryp kind of crypto-libertarianism. Yeah, almost. And I see it, i mean, i see or what I perceive to be some variant of that on the sort of modern or online left.
Speaker: Maybe I would just spend too much time on Twitter. It seems to me that people don't actually want, you know, they don't actually think about society in terms of, you know, I like order, i like, you know, people who work produce. Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting...
Speaker: In a sense, the main characters in Falling Down in Office Space, right, like, they have been atomized in almost every sense of their life, like family, like none of them have nuclear families. yeah They live in kind of like very car-dependent suburban units. And the only like collective space left in their lives, well, there are two kind of collective spaces left in life. One is work. Yeah. And the other is like the third space, to the bar or the restaurant, right? Yeah. And yeah, I think it's interesting that by the time you get to now, for the kind of lower middle class worker,
Speaker: all of those other things that were atomized in the 1990s are still atomized, majoritively, and also work in the third space are also massively in decline, right? Yeah, absolutely. I think what I want to ask you is, and we'll probably have to explain this one for Chase, but how do you relate the Dino as a UK archetype, and whatever the US equivalent is of the Dino, the Jason, to the much more corporately...
Speaker: you know, the salary man of the 1990s, right? These are two very different figures occupying a similar sort of run in the class system. And yet they're they're kind of qualitatively, they're maybe quantitatively quite similar, qualitatively like massively different.
Speaker: Yeah, it's interesting because, I mean, i guess, ah funny enough, I was just reading Poulant's House again today because there's a couple of reviews that have come in in my book. um One by my friend, Matt Thompson, he talks about these different splits within like the new Petit Bourgeoisie. And I guess, you know, Poulant's House basically says that within the, you know, the the the new Petit Bourgeoisie, or let's say for our purpose, is this white collar, you know,
Speaker: service class or whether you call the middle class, whatever, just says obviously there's going to be splits within that class. And a lot of it is based on their you their market position. So I think that you know anyone who services capital, you know if you work in finance or if you're sales whatever, you still you can still make a pretty decent sort of life based on like consumerism. And I think, so to explain, so Chase, there's basically, i don't know, would just have to describe a Dino. But basically it's a guy who lives in a new build, what we call a red road type estate who, have you seen Love Island? It's basically a guy with like fake teeth, you know, tanned airhead, you know, no real politics, just a normie, basically like the ultimate, like,
Speaker: So is this anti-Italian racism? indian it's actually It's actually quite close to the guys on Jersey Shore, like Paulie D. Right. So they're they're from Essex or something. That's exactly it. Yeah, that's exactly it. They're like the modern iteration of Essex Man or whatever. And there's this is sort of empty life through consumerism and sort of you know making money or having a flash car and a hot girlfriend and things like that. And on the UK, there's been sort of like, you know, there's sort of a...
Speaker: They so symbolize this sort of vacuity. But I always think they're two, they're fractions of the same class. You know, they're just one part of the new white collar strata that has actually done okay because of the type of work they do in like finance. Whereas if you work in creative sector or like academia, those sectors like particularly degraded. So again, it comes back to this idea of maybe that's like intra-class warfare.
Speaker: If I can take this to like the the the kind of Gen X moment that we're thinking about here and then connect it back to what you're saying, These movies are two different moments in the 90s. And in one moment, you have this character who still kind of wants to recover a version of community, right? so Absolutely. actually he does just want to be married.
Speaker: He does want to have a daughter. He wants to, like, I don't know. wants his job back. Yeah, he wants his job back. Anyway, 98, Office Space. Yeah, we've already gotten to the point where now the young person kind of just like wants to be a slacker. like There's a sense in which the slacker archetype, which we've discussed before on this podcast, is actually the vision, is sort of where he wants to land, where the characters want to be. Yeah, he wants to be the dude he wants to be the dude on Big Lebowski, doesn't he? Yes. beside like And it's quite interesting that we've gone from the slacker to the hustler.
Speaker: Exactly. no Now, there's almost been this fusion of the two, which is to say, okay, I want the um work part that comes with the Michael Douglas thing. I want a sense of subjectivity that is in some way dependent on what I do.
Speaker: But in union with the rejection of society, the rejection of the idea that I need these institutions as anything more than these purely utilitarian ways for me to actualize myself. So it's, you know, in other words, like you get the sense of fulfillment that Douglas is seeking in that movie, but compared with, or or sort of united with this idea of being, um you know, someone who stands on their own, who doesn't necessarily need to be part of these institutions.
Speaker: And I think that what's interesting about what you're describing in this Dino character, I don't know that we have like a single, a singular word for that person. um but they definitely do exist in the United States. I think the main difference might be that,
Speaker: there's something kind of gauche about what you're describing. I feel like the yeah the American version of that is actually almost like provides stability. I know that might sound kind of strange, but like I know Americans in finance, and it's like they're the last people who are wearing like Ralph Lauren you know ah button shirts and who are still wearing like slacks with a belt, whereas the version you're talking about culturally would be like a guy who is in crypto and yeah has had like you know the Turkish special, has you know had hair implants, his legs broken, and all of that. like That's a slightly different kind of guy. But in both cases, you've got this kind of ubermensch who makes his way in the world on his own. let's selfact like It's a kind of recuperation of 1960s self-actualization a way, right?
Speaker: Like and a movement from a kind of therapeutic or political self-actualization 60s, new age self-actualization to something much more aestheticized for Gen Z millennials. And it's weird that you have this kind of interregnum between those two periods, which is Gen X, which feels like it just it rejects self-actualization entirely, right?
Speaker: I think it thinks it does, but it's clear to me that like you know how is it that Peter, the main character in Office Space, comes to peace? He's hypnotized, and then the spell is not broken because the obese therapist who's doing it dies in the middle of the hypnosis, right? So it literally takes a deus ex machina to like deprogram him.
Speaker: But I think the thing he's not reading like schlocky self-help books to get there, right? Like it's a deus ex machina. It's an act of God that leads him into this kind of fully self-actualized human being. It's none of own effort.
Speaker: No, no. Well, but that's that's my point, is that it's not that he doesn't want self-actualization. It's just that the only way to get there is to, you know, be sort of released by this force that's outside society that then kind of allows him to get back to the point the boomers were at.
Speaker: where you could be like, yeah, screw work, man. like i you know like He needs basically like God to do that for him. that mean that That scene is amazing because he gets hypnotized, and obviously what I take from that scene is that by being hypnotized and basically stopping caring about work, it's like a great... And obviously, for those who haven't seen the film...
Speaker: He comes in and speaks the consultants who are about to lay everyone off, and because he doesn't give a shit, um and the more carefree and at ease he is, which obviously is the defining feature, as Bourdieu says, of like the the true middle classes or the professional classes, that they are like a fish in water in professional settings, they're not wracked with anxiety. So he's almost made...
Speaker: like part of the elite by having this and then obviously the less he cares the more he's seen to be like management material and it just expose of like how you know the bullshit of management you know like it's all just this big act you know like it's just about an act it's not about what you do it's about how you present yourself and so there's that but I think the deeper point you made Chase is about the the split in the 90s the fact that you know Peter wants to withdraw surely it's about the end of productive or meaningful work, right? So, you know, like he's working in defense. Well, whether you think defense or building rockets is like you meaningful whatever, it's certainly something which is would be classed in a market center as productive. You know, he's he's actually doing something meaningful. He's probably like less alienated than most people. Whereas by the end of the 90s and even now, most people do work in what, you know, Graeber says are bullshit.
Speaker: A lot people do work in bullshit jobs. The TPS reports. Yeah, exactly. The TPS reports just sums up the ridiculous managerialism, like the bureaucracy, and just the pointlessness of a lot of modern white-collar work. And I think because it's so meaningless, that naturally lends itself to people wanting to withdraw work from home because what's the point in any of this? And I think that's the more...
Speaker: That's the more worrying thing. And it's actually like, it is about this, you know, bowling alone society, the fact that, you know they're driving to work, they're atomized. But it's also the fact that work itself just has absolutely, you're not doing any, you you may as well be digging holes in a desert and filling them back up. you know what mean?
Speaker: but Do we know what Initech actually does? is that at any point? I don't know if it's actually... I don't know if they talk about it, but I mean... We don't even really properly know what Peter does. like His friends are like clearly like technical programmers. yeah yeah Peter seems to be in this kind of weird, amorphous position where he's sort of dealing with paperwork.
Speaker: Well, he says at one point, but I mean, the description is sort of purposefully, you know, unintelligible. You know, he basically, because I think um the, we haven't even talked about her, but the, um oh God, Jennifer um Aniston character.
Speaker: Yeah. Who works at basically TGI Fridays where she's being made to put on, you know, extra flair, which are basically these, you know, pins and stuff. And she asks him, what is it that you do? And he just you know takes like two or three lines to be like, you know I like look at spreadsheets and I kind of like move numbers around. like And it's clearly meant to signal you know signify... like it He does something that clearly is going to be you know made obsolete by like of some kind of software within like six months.
Speaker: But i Dan, I need to say just before i forget... You make a really great point about the fact that the more sort of like dude-like he becomes, the more he's going to you know rise in the company. And there are these great scenes where he's brought in to talk to the consultants, played by like the doctor from Scrubs, if you guys remember that American TV show of of yesteryear, and then this sort of like portly man with a mustache.
Speaker: He gets in there, and everyone else has just been like roasted. like Michael Bolton's in there and is pretending that he likes Michael Bolton, the singer, when in reality, like if he could murder one person on Earth, it would definitely be him. There's the dude with the Polish last name who's just terrified of being fired, and is just in there like... like No, well I mean, I don't go downstairs and tell them about it. I send my secretary to do that. But, you know, I still, you know, basically like, you know, clenching onto like the last inches of rope, you know, in his hands, knowing he's slipping into hell.
Speaker: And then you see, you assume that Peter's going to go in there and just get, you know, mowed over because he's barely coming to work. He's wearing flip-flops. He's totally out of things. But his totally laissez-faire attitude is precisely what um gets him there. And that is an interesting contrast to, if I can draw in ah another movie we've mentioned, The Big Lebowski, which is a movie in which the war's over. The bums lost Lebowski. won. We won. We won. Yeah. And the goal point there is like gumption. You know, we did it. The gumption went out and now to be like, yeah, There's something prescient about Peter's nonchalance. It's prescient in what like five to six years' time, that kind of nonchalance, that kind of breaking of the kind of corporate code is that you see in the 60s is entirely recuperated by Silicon Valley, by Fang, by Google, by Facebook, by Mark Zuckerberg. It's beanbags, it's pillows, it's slides, it's flip-flops of work, it's hoodies. like All of that has become symbolic of the new elite.
Speaker: And like Peter's doing that like 10 years prior. But it's like, it's a weird fusion because you're entirely right about the cultural signifiers. Like it becomes very uncool to care. Like my wife and I are now of a generation where we actually like enjoy getting, I know it doesn't look like it because how I'm dressed because I'm at home, but like we like dressing up for work because we've grown up in a time where wearing just like the most awful clothing imaginable is considered somehow a statement, right?
Speaker: um So you're hundred percent right there, Sam. But the attitude part doesn't totally win out, right? Like, one of the great paradoxes or ironies of the last, like, 10, 15 years is that, like, it would be Lumberg coming up to you with the same, like, bile and evilness that Lumberg has in the movie. But yeah, he's going to be wearing not just the casual Friday jeans or the Hawaiian shirt or whatever. Yeah, he's wearing the hoodie. So it's like you need the grit and the cunning and the entrepreneurial sort of Satanism of someone like a Lumberg or a similar character, but swathed in the clothes of a Mark Zuckerberg.
Speaker: And Peter, for whatever else might happen to him in that movie, the point is precisely that he becomes a slacker, that he doesn't care about work. that he he actually is unplugged, and they just can't identify that properly. They don't understand that that's what's happening, you know?
Speaker: And I think that is, if we want to talk about class differences, an emerging class difference of a kind. Like, I'm friends with, and this might map to some extent onto kind of an aristocratic versus non-aristocratic thing in the UK, but here in the US, like, I have friends who are lawyers and own companies and things like this, and what do they do? They golf, and they enjoy it, and it has this sort of like, oh, we're drinking, we're hanging out, we're we're doing the the the slacker thing, even if we're doing it in you know brightly colored pants.
Speaker: But then there are other people I know who are much more a part of the um the Dino space, if I can put it in those terms, for whom like if they were to be on a golf course, it would purely be for the Instagram picture. like They're hustling even when they're on the golf course, whereas the other guys are yeah hustling by like slapping backs and drinking handles of vodka on the course, which is a very different...
Speaker: So there is, that there remains, I think, a habitual difference in in parts of that that class position even now. Yeah, well, I think if you go, actual aristocrats, like, wouldn't even go, they would just be, like, shooting small animals.
Speaker: Well, actual aristocrats don't work. I mean, like, the whole question of work and the habitus of work is entirely taken out of out play. so I mean, then that's always that's always been the alliance between, you know, the idea that the middle class, you know,
Speaker: The idea that the aristocrats in the working class can actually get on and because they sort of appreciate leisure. um And in fact, they do actually have some shared, you know, pastime, particularly things like i horse face racing. Like if you look at Epsom or Cheltenham races, like it's it's like it's like the younger sons of Gentry getting absolutely sloshed with like car salesmen from Essex. Yeah, and it's actually the middle class, ah the sort of ah uptight morality of the middle class who like don't, you know, Presbyterians or, you know, Puritanism, who don't actually like, you know, leisure, that sort of both the rich hate them and the poor hate them as well. and But I think the idea that Peter's slacker, you know, sort of aesthetic gets recuperated into...
Speaker: management is actually chilling when I think about it because obviously Lundberg is the standing for like you know that type of boss maybe if you're making it now you know office is two I don't know how you do it but Peter would be Peter would be the boss you know and he's just like doing exactly the same things as Lundberg but he's doing it in a a charming sort of laid-back laid-back way they need to do an updated I think they do need to do an updated yeah I think you're completely right, Dan, that like an exploration of the kind of, especially the work habitus, if we're going to call it that, as like millennials and Gen Z hasn't really been produced.
Speaker: In the sense of like, or even like a coming of age story about you know graduating from an elite university, ending up at home for four years, applying for flight two thousand jobs i like and all the bars around you being closed. yeah But that kind of experience hasn't really been rendered in art in any kind of discourse-shaving way, and all that I can think of, like the last probably like generation on Touchstone was what, like girls on HBO or something from Millennials?
Speaker: In terms of Gen Z and the kind of like everyday prosaic experience of Gen Z at work, I can't think of anything. thing It's that erasing of the future, and i mean, shame to admit it, but obviously, when I think when you asked me to pick a film, I was like, well, the canon of like you know the early teen comedies, like American Pie, Road Trip, all that sort of stuff, because you know obviously it's incredibly lowbrow.
Speaker: i love them. But yeah, they're amazing and like super bad and things like that, but the films that I saw... when I was a teenager. And the reason I i wanted to talk about them purely was because in those films, there was still some optimism about, you know, you're going to go to college, everything's going fine. You it's like, there's this, the assumption that your life is going to go up and up and basically get better. And I don't think that the reality has been captured at all culturally. um I think we're sort of crying out for some cultural represent and, but maybe that's why, I don't know, maybe that's why everyone just loses himself in sort of the CGI blockbusters. I don't know.
Speaker: I wonder if there's not like a formal dimension to that. i was watching a movie, I think it's from 2008, that is criminally underseen called Assassination of a High School President. It's a very, very funny movie about this high school kid at a Catholic school in New Jersey, which I did not realize when I first saw it, to be clear, as someone who went to an all-boys Catholic school in New Jersey.
Speaker: ah who is obsessed with being a sort of Woodward and Bernstein sort of 60s style reporter and finds himself sort of, like he's the butt of the joke throughout the movie. He's this sort of figure out of time. And it's it's a movie though in which there's at least this dream that you can like look to the 60s, inhabit an archetype, and like use it to get to college. And you know, there's ribbing throughout and it's not entirely serious about it. like Now, if you made that movie, like it would end with the main character like not getting into college. They would like sue the the University of California system for discrimination. They would, you know I don't know, 50 million Twitter followers and end up selling creatine supplements.
Speaker: ah to make your brain really big for taking the SATs or something. like I think part of the problem is that it's hard to know how you how you depict work that is as alienated and online and um you know not even in quote-unquote meat space as it so often is now. The thing about office space is one of the things I haven't seen in years. I've probably seen office space seven, eight, ten times over my life, but The cubicle. When I watched that movie as a younger person, nothing about the cubicle stood out to me. It was just like, oh yeah, that's what an office looks like. Now I was like, I don't think I've seen a place like that in a decade.
Speaker: um you know Maybe that's incorrect for where you work. I don't know. But even just the spaces themselves have changed so much. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, how do you show like...
Speaker: Yeah, you would have to show the Itty Bitty Titty and a Bob video or something. And you'd have to do like, you the camera would have to be shooting them shooting the Itty Bitty Titty and a Bob video. You know, like I don't even, i you know, you couldn't, in other words, you would have to be showing them filming themselves. It couldn't just be them filming filming themselves. I don't even know how you begin to to figure.
Speaker: No, and and I don't think you can almost, it's a level of anime, which is very hard to which is very hard to capture. Lads, I'm going have to shoot off very soon.
Speaker: I was just wondering if there's anything that like hot we haven't covered or whatever that you originally wanted. i I just want to clarify that I don't hate the A-B-A-T-A-N-A-Bob girls. I brought it up like four times now. I was just unemployed when the video came out, and it it made me... I just wanted to job very badly. Some of the reactions to it were so visceral. It was absolutely... it just Even for Twitter, it just... I don't know. I mean...
Speaker: But I think it was telling of the kind of breakdown of that life trajectory that so many people expected, right? Like it's it's it was a deep sort of resentment at these people. But Dan, it's been it's been an absolute pleasure. It's been really entertaining, a great podcast. No, thanks. I really enjoyed it.
Speaker: Is there anything you want to plug? ah No, I mean, when will this be going out? I mean, I've got some academic articles coming up. um One hopefully in Tribune and then one journal article, I think in...
Speaker: in work, employment and society, which is actually about the degradation of ah of a meaningful job in the postal service. Oh, interesting. I really appreciate opportunity to come on here because it's really sort of opened my eyes to the sort of film...
Speaker: um um sort And sort you know, pop culture in general is is such a rich way of understanding sort of class. And I just just didn't discuss it at all in my book. So it's ah a lesson learned for me. What's the ah what's the Tribune piece? It's going to be on Reform and Decay. I've not written it yet, but I did a talk recently in Naples on... them Right. Populism. Oh, before I forget, actually, you know, you said about the the producerism and like the boomers chase. There's a, there's a really um great article i was reading about the tea party where they ended interviewing all these boomers who were railing against like the parasites and people who don't work for a living. And then when they get asked,
Speaker: Who is it you specifically who's like taking the piss and not working? Like almost every single one is like either, I don't know, it's like my grandson who's in college. And it's like, you know, and then it's like put to them, isn't he just on like summer break?
Speaker: You know, and so there isn't actually this like tangible sort of like parasite. It's just like this, this specter of their imagination, which is driving their entire politics, which is really interesting.
Speaker: i Yeah, and I'll just say very briefly on top of that, ah that it bears underlining, I think, that one of the things that's come out of this conversation for me is that Gen X, even now getting older, becoming the bosses, you know, kind of maybe introducing slackerdom into the culture of being in an office. Yeah, yeah. That they...
Speaker: Because of their position vis-a-vis boomers, I think don't tend to think as much in terms of the the scammer figure, the parasite figure, as you know the way that the boomer does there. like it's It's less Gen X to you know get on Facebook and be mad at your you know maybe grandchildren that might exist by this point. Maybe that will change with time, who knows?
Speaker: But it is this it is sort of the beginning of this... this change from this popular figure that still seems to haunt our imagination just because of how big boomers are and how we think, that like what drives right-wing resentment is the figure of the mooch who is you know a homeless person or a welfare queen. And what those things are has changed, I think, deeply. And maybe that will you know fit into your your piece coming out in the Tribune on a plea to vote reform, I'm sure, is the the thrust of the argument. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: i mean I feel like Gen Z has picked up some of that William Foster, um especially the Gen Z right, I'll end on this, has has picked up some of William Foster's anime. And so you you think about Pimlico Journal, or you're accused, talking about motability payments. So like Chase, it's probably all foreign, agreed to you, but motability...
Speaker: the rate of like foreign-born people in social housing in London, like all of these things that are sort fetishized, big fetishizations of the right at the moment, especially the Gen Z right, are all actually very much to do with the kind of like innate sense of unfairness.
Speaker: But that's racialized, right? like The boomers, and you see this in the william in the in hit the his figure, they don't think of themselves as as racist or anti-immigrant for the most part. right like That's why when Trump started deporting their like nanny or whatever, they were like, wait minute, what do you talking about? Yeah. Like, they they exist in this weird space where you can simultaneously be really anti-immigrant, but like not be racist about it in some way. Whereas I think the kinds of figures you're talking about are owning that. They're a little more like the owner of the military surplus store. And when you get chance to about this, I don't got to go down. I'm sorry, I promise to be quiet now. I'm
Speaker: the figure of the 1990s military surplus Nazi, because it's in The Simpsons, right, as this character, in a way... Yeah, that's right. Yeah, didn't even think of it. It's very true, yeah. The John Goodman character, Walter in Big Lebowski is a version of this character, the kind of vet who is obsessed with being in the military and is kind of like...
Speaker: Like the far right in the world of the early 90s, least in cities and big towns, is reduced to the like disgruntled veteran or maybe even fake veteran who is obsessed with the military. Whereas now, yeah, it's like guys who write online articles and are like, you know, think that Nick Land is like the greatest thinker of the past 40 years or something like that. You know, it's different. big fall from Grace, from Timothy McVeigh to...
Speaker: Timothy McVeigh of Nick Land, you know, the story of the late 20th, early 21st century. but mean we We might even be able to call it the gentrification of the right, to a certain extent. Yeah, that's what it is.
Speaker: ah All right. With that, but we will sign off. Patreon.com slash deathphotopod. Thank you so much, Dan. I'm sorry I've kept it. No, thank you so much. i Honestly, um I really enjoyed talking to you and chatting you both. So I'm looking forward to listening to it when it comes out.
Speaker: Take it easy now. Ciao. See you.
