No Other Choice
The alternative to The Office, where David Brent is made redundant after 25 years but he actually likes the work, it has meaning to him. He doesn’t want to tour in a band.
This is dedicated to Costa-Gavras, but it’s not directly political, at least mot allegorical like Bong Joon-Oh. This is a much more personal story.
After a generic corporate salaryman is fired from a Dunder Mifflin, he and his cohort enter such deep depression that it can only be cured by going back to work somewhere, even if that implies murdering the three other guys above him in the paper engineering corporate ladder.
This is not even the case where his personal life is in tatters and he needs work to fulfil him. It’s pure societal status, comparing himself to no one, since we don’t meet any circle of friends. He has a loving wife, a daughter with special needs he takes care of, and a stepson who doesn’t really know about her mother marrying when he was two. This is no drama either, he says explicitly he’s his son.
Just like Cláudio Valente, we can count on engineers for the crazy ploys: our protagonist takes out an ad for a new paper company, then ranks the CV, comparing to his own. Three of them outrank him, so they meed to die. He has all their information now, just do it!
The first is similar to him. Being fired made him depressed, he slouches in the couch all day, drinking and farting in the general direction of his wife. She’s fed up with him, so cheating with some younger dude is the next step. He is killed in a three-way brawl between the protagonist, the wife and the dead guy.
The next is working as a shoe salesman. The protagonist butters him up, then kills him, bundles him up in a ball, then buries him on his own yard.
The final one is some kind of influencer, our protagonist stalks him, makes him booze up, then buries him until the neck, stuffs him full of more booze and sausages, then gets him back to the couch.
This means he’s all clear to take the job in the new paper mill, but that’s being fully automated, he is managing machines now. That doesn’t matter, he won at capitalism, only had to fuck over his fellow workers. The early talk of unions and all is bunk, he’s not into it anyway, the Americans brush him off.
Peppered amongst all this are hilarious bits (woman being lubricated), slapstick, and a small detour where his son is busted for stealing dozens of iPhones to resell, since his mother needs the money.
As for the wife, she fully participates in The Game, but she knows it cost their soul. She doesn’t cheat on him, and his suspicious hurt her, but still covers up the dead guy buried in the yard, instead of telling the kid that guy is not his “real” father.
The smaller daughter is an orthogonal plot, she doesn’t talk much, besides repeating what other people say, in funny or poignant ways, and devises a 2D colourful music notation system that allows her to play the cello.
There’s less interface trickery than Unfriended, this is a pure time capsule of current trends in interface design.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.