1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 75: Clockwatchers

Four office temps, clockwise from top-left: Paula (Lisa Kudrow), Jane (Alanna Ubach), Margaret (Parker Posey), and Iris (Toni Collette, in her wallflower mode).

Here’s the office manager: Barbara (Debra Jo Rupp).

And for kicks: Art, the weirdo in charge of the supplies.

The standouts are Margaret and Barbara. Margaret is the most spirited of the temps. She’s the quickest to criticize the company. Her clothing mocks the “business casual” style.

Barbara is evil. She’s a stock character – think of Prof. Umbridge, of the Harry Potter series. But don’t we all know someone like this, so sugary, so cruel? The niche fills itself.

There’s no glory in landing a mid-level job in this corporation. Look at Barbara; look at Art (I haven’t even mentioned the loathsome Bob Balaban character). Who in his or her right mind would aspire to that? This only makes the temps’ plight more poignant. They long for permanent employment. They’ve clocked in and out, for years, for this or that company. Some have worked diligently; others, not so much. It has made no difference either way. For them, “tenure” is beyond reach, as if by unspoken decree: These four shall not be gathered in. Permanency, at least at the level just above temp-hood, is for the Arts and Barbaras of this world: mediocrities’ mediocrities. If you’re female and dowdy (Iris), desperate (Paula), old-fashioned (Jane), or clever (Margaret), that elevator is closed. If you’re incapable of titanic complacency, the elevator is closed.

The four temps may not be happy with this state of affairs, but at least their common plight makes them friends.

Their comradery is tested when another young woman joins the company to do permanent secretarial work.

The temps are baffled. This new worker (Helen FitzGerald) is evidently dowdy, desperate, and old-fashioned (her cleverness is impossible to gauge; she barely speaks). How did she get the job?

A spate of thieving begins in the office. The higher-ups suspect the temps. They ask who else would be poor enough to resort to stealing, as if money were the sole incentive.

The temps suspect the new worker. Then, as the mystery drags on and this new uncertainty compounds their chronic anxiety, they suspect each other.

I’ve seen it written that Clockwatchers, unlike most movies, is about what work is actually like. That must be qualified. It’s less about what goes on at work than about temporary employment as a state of mind. The “work” in this movie is stylized. The workplace is overly sterile. The walls are too bare. The muzak is Les Baxter – only the blandest Les Baxter (no Ritual of the Savage). The workers swivel in their chairs a little too demonstratively, stare a little too hard at the clock, abuse the office supplies a little too grimly. (White-Out becomes nail polish; markers are used to induce chemical highs.) That’s no knock against the movie, which doesn’t aspire to realism on the physical level.

What isn’t stylized, what’s brutally accurate, is what the limbo between non-work and permanent work feels like. The longing for security, for inclusion, is warping. Is it more warping than the low-level insiders’ determination to keep the outsiders out? Perhaps not. But this movie is about the outsiders, not the insiders. It’s about those who don’t just watch the hours. They also watch the clock measuring one’s prospects of attaining the lowest level of “success.”

The same thing happens in universities. There are permanent faculty, who, ideally, form some sort of community; permanent staff; and temporary workers: adjuncts and tutors, who are pretty well out in the cold.

I was a university temp for seven years. (I don’t count the previous seven years of graduate study, which was genuine apprenticeship. The grad school timeline is more definite, and its occupants are treated as honorary community members.) I enjoyed good relations with my fellow temps, especially in the last three or four years. Actually, no, I enjoyed good relations with the writing tutors. There was another group tutors whose misbehavior, like the petty thievery in the movie, became a consuming distraction. I didn’t blame them so much as certain higher-ups who seemed wilfully oblivious.

But enough about me; that time of my life is over. The point is, the movie resonates.

The accidental Hoosier

I guess it’s all right, now, to disclose that Ana, David, Ada, George, and Russell (the dog) have sold their house in Texas and will move to South Bend this weekend. So, we siblings – John-Paul, David, Mary, and Stephen – and our respective households, as well as our parents, will all have settled in the same metro area (two adjacent cities) for the first time since 2000 (the previous millennium). Odd to think that South Bend/​Mishawaka, and not, say, Quito, Esmeraldas, Guayaquil, or even Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas, should have proved our stubbornest anchor. It’s not as if our ancestors hailed from this part of the state. My dad’s dad grew up closer to Lafayette; my dad’s mom, closer to Fort Wayne. They never lived together in the South Bend area. (Neither of my mom’s parents was a Hoosier.) My parents got together as students in Chicagoland. They became missionaries, moved to Ecuador, had their children, and spent furloughs in Illinois (twice) and Missouri. They – we – never all lived together in Indiana.

But, soon, we shall.

I’ve lived some fifteen years, off and on, in the state. Hoosiers still seem strange to me. Not as horrifying as Missourians – whom I think I actually understand better – but less relatable than, say, Upstate New Yorkers, and not nearly as endearing as Minnesotans or Wisconsinites.

I look at the institutions and positions that confer prestige here, and think, that doesn’t appeal to me at all. But then, I might think that anywhere.

I look at what people here do for enjoyment, and think, that doesn’t appeal to me, either. That’s worse.

I think how, last year, a chicken trapped itself in our yard, and the officer who removed it told me it was a gamecock. This weekend we had friends – Michiganders I’d known in Quito – in the yard. We heard roosters crowing, and I thought, I may not approve of cockfighting, but my heart is warmed to know it’s practiced in the neighborhood where I now live.

Pigling Bland

More misdeeds – worse ones – but I won’t bore you with them.

Tonight I became acquainted with a lovely book of romance … suspense … pathos … and rural dystopia – one that stands with other European narratives of displacement (war narratives, in particular) – Beatrix Potter’s “Tale of Pigling Bland.”

A well-dressed, polite young pig walks down the road (as one does). Do passersby treat him with respect? No, they halt him and demand to see his papers. We are but a step or two from Spiegelman’s Maus.

I read out loud to Daniel. He fell asleep, but I continued on and was touched.

I am less ill now, but the boys have been having colds and fevers. Karin seems OK.

Misdeeds

The boys and I didn’t stay long at the library this morning.

Daniel kept trying to sneak out of the building. He would open the front doors by pushing the buttons meant for disabled people.

There was nothing for it but to drag him home, and Samuel too – just when he was occupied with the library’s Lego collection.

The protestations!

Samuel can be so quiet, one forgets that he has no sense of decorum. It’s usually all right to take him places, but, occasionally, one regrets it.

They really like it here, I told the librarians who watched me pull my shrieking children past the circulation desk.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I viewed soccer this afternoon and came away from the TV to find Samuel “cooking” grits. It was his idea to add the taco seasoning.

Here is a more flattering depiction of the brothers. They supped at Karin’s dad’s house last night and managed to pose for him, more-or-less obediently.

Karin & I were busy celebrating our anniversary. We got haircuts and ate salad. We like the salad bar at Macri’s. It’s simple, but the ingredients are good: I especially like the beets.

We usually can’t finish the entrées we order with the salad, so we eat them the next day. They taste better after cooling and reheating.

Having eaten our salad, we went to a hardware store and looked at some macabre weeding tools.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Today I have a cold. I feel as though my nose will fall off.

I’ve begun reading a book I swore I’d never touch: Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel. As I age, I have less and less appetite for camp, but after the 8,392nd TV reference, the urge got the better of me.

I’ve also been reading Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread; various previously mentioned books (Tolkien’s dwarves keep reminding me of the twelve tribes of Israel); and some Platonic dialogs I hadn’t gotten to (more on them later).

As I type, Samuel threads a USB cable through a grate in the floor of our house.

Toads

Now viewing Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1988) with Daniel, a.k.a. Toad. He likes movies with “little animals.” We rotate through various David Attenborough productions. The reptiles-and-amphibians series (Life in Cold Blood) has been an especial hit. Hence my search for more toad-content. Cane Toads, dir. by Mark Lewis, is basically what an animal doc would be if helmed by Errol Morris. (I guess Morris has made a couple of near-animal docs: Gates of Heaven, and one-third of Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control.) The toad movie has talking heads (politicians, scientists), historical “re-enactments,” dramatizations of humans’ encounters with toads, and sentimental old Queenslanders on their back lawns waxing lyrical and tearful about the cane toad’s essential decency.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The next stop on my fantasy reading tour is The Hobbit, to which I’m returning after some decades. The first 120 pp. have been pretty much as I remember them, almost line-for-line. Disappointing, in a way. But then comes the “Beorn” chapter with quite the wittiest passage so far:

“If you must know more [said Gandalf], his name is Beorn. He is very strong, and he is a skin-changer.”

“What! a furrier, a man that calls rabbits conies, when he doesn’t turn their skins into squirrels?” asked Bilbo.

“Good gracious heavens, no, no, NO, NO!” said Gandalf. “Don’t be a fool Mr. Baggins if you can help it … He is a skin-changer. He changes his skin: sometimes he is a huge black bear, sometimes he is a great strong black-haired man with huge arms and a great beard …

There is a fearful hour – 9:30pm, more or less – when, his brother having dozed off, Daniel – normally so sweet, so docile – a virtual Dr. Henry Jekyll – transforms into someone (or something) more like the wicked Mr. Edward Hyde.

That hour is now upon us.

Body-text fonts, pt. 27: JY Alia

Rain … all week, pretty much. Last night was dry. I and the neighbors had the same idea at the same time: mow the grass.

Everyone mowed except the guy who works nights.

The guy who works construction mowed his back yard wearing his high-visibility safety vest. It must feel wrong for him, laboring while not wearing it.

The grass was wet, heavy, and long. I mowed my front and back lawns, the latter to the nub (it has been growing too fast this season). Mowing can take as little as forty-five minutes; this took eighty.

I fell asleep two hours earlier than usual.

It rained again today.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’m sorry this entry is … underwhelming. The children kept me busy tonight. They are tricky, voracious little creatures, like their father.

It is fitting, perhaps, that this month’s font sample should be taken from Jay Nordlinger’s fine book Children of Monsters.

The typeface, JY Alia, is interesting for being so uninteresting: a nondescript blending of Bembos, Garamonds, and Jansons (in which manner it’s like the more famous Hoefler Text). I might not have identified JY Alia but for the lowercase italic “y”: look at “Daily Mail” above, and compare it to this professional specimen. I’ve never seen JY Alia in anything else.

May’s poem

My precious History of Art by H. W. Janson remained intact for one month. Samuel climbed the bookcase yesterday and hauled it down, ripping off its cover.

Our superglues have all dried out.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Our household, minus kitties, went to the zoo with Karin’s mom, who is making the most of her grandparental season-pass (she went again the next day). In the African section, the wild dogs were in fine form, running laps, in contrast to our by-then-unenthused children. Lions, gators, snakes, and sloths practiced immobility. Kangaroos stirred more than usual.

My favorites are the huge animals: the bison, the rhino, the giraffes. The latter, in zoos, often languish down in some ditch, on the same eye-level as their observers; but at our zoo, one can walk up to their feet and let oneself be towered over.

This month’s poem, in honor of Mother Karin’s Day and our wedding anniversary (May 21), is “Pharaoh Story”; the lyrics are by Tim Rice. I’ve come, reluctantly, during our marriage, to like it.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Pharoah, he was a powerful man

With the ancient world in the palm of his hand

To all intents and purposes he

Was Egypt with a capital “E”

Whatever he did, he was showered with praise

If he cracked a joke, then you chortled for days

No one had rights or a vote but the king

In fact you might say he was fairly right-wing

When Pharoah’s around

Then you get down on the ground

If you ever find yourself near Rameses

Get down on your knees

Down at the other end of the scale

Joseph is still doing time in jail

For even though he’s in with the guards

A lifetime in prison seems quite on the cards

But if my analyis of the position is right

At the end of the tunnel is a glimmer of light

For all of a sudden indescribable things

Have shattered the sleep of both peasants and kings

Strange as it seems

There’s been a run of crazy dreams

And a man who can interpret could go far

Could become a star

Strange as it seems

There’s been a run of crazy dreams

And a man who can interpret could go far

Could become a star!

Could be a star!

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Library “storytime”; Ninja Turtles; Chaplin; Fargo; a philosophy teacher

I took Samuel and Daniel to “storytime” at the local library branch. It was our third session. Thirteen or fourteen children attended: the largest number in two years, the librarian told us.

Strangely, there was just one little girl, and she was the first I’d seen at any of these gatherings. 🤷

Afterward, a few parents hung around while their children read, played, colored, or used the library’s electronic tablets.

One friendly little boy showed me a book about the Ninja Turtles. “What are their names?” he asked. I pointed to each in turn: “Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Donatello.”

He went to his mother. “That grandpa knows who the Ninja Turtles are.”

“Well, lots of people do,” she explained.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Karin was unavailable for supper, so I put on Chaplin’s Gold Rush (the 1920s version, not the 1940s re-edit). Samuel and Daniel liked it pretty well, especially when the very hungry gold prospectors eat Chaplin’s shoe for their Thanksgiving dinner.

One prospector, who is a little too hungry, imagines that Chaplin is man-sized dinner-fowl. The boys were astounded. “Not a chicken! Not a chicken!” Daniel kept saying.

The wary Chaplin takes the hungry prospector’s rifle outside and buries it in the snow, kicking a few drifts over it like a chicken scratching the dirt. The prospector comes out with an axe and chases him around the cabin. I got déjà vu. This is Fargo, I thought. Chaplin is Steve Buscemi; the other prospector is Peter Stormare; Buscemi buries something in the snow; a person runs out of a cabin, face covered, hands behind her … like a headless chicken. All for a little money.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Re: the philosopher Charles Parsons (decd.). His student, Peter Ludlow, has written an amazing remembrance. I’d quote my favorite passages, but they would amount to almost the whole essay.

Read it.

Reading report

My reading year has just ended; it goes from May to April, with a day of grace, May 1, because stuff happens.

I had two targets. I met the easier one: completing 51 books. I needed this number to replenish my yearly average, which had dipped.

I almost met the harder target (52, or 1⁠/wk) and was tearing through William Morris’s Wood Beyond the World (1894), a sex-fever of a book, when I fell asleep.

Earlier, I had finished Don’t Tell Alfred, Nancy Mitford’s last novel. This year I’ll read her biographical writings (1/mo): Madame de Pompadour, Votaire in Love, The Sun King, and Frederick the Great. A heavy dose of France-love. (Don’t Tell Alfred also is set in France; the narrator’s husband, an Oxford theology don, is made ambassador.) I may or may not read Nancy’s edited volume, Noblesse Oblige. Then, two books by Jessica Mitford; a volume of the Mitford sisters’ letters to each other; and, if I am still keen, the writings of Diana, one of the Mitford Fascists.

I still read Fielding and Shakespeare in light doses. The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, with annotations and critical essays, will be tallied as one book. A volume by Michael Frayn, Plays: 4, consisting of Copenhagen, Democracy, and one other play, is on the docket. It will be counted as one book. I intend to read all of the Little House books in order for the first time. My edition is in two volumes. I’ll record the series as nine separate books. The arbitrariness is obscene.

I don’t count the very short children’s books I read to Samuel and Daniel.

I am some ten cantos from the end of the Paradiso after all these years. I am dragging booty. I get through about a canto a month. The poem seems more and more alien to me, the further up into Heaven I get; Purgatory was more my level.

Learning in protest-time

Whatever you think of the recent campus protests, now is a good time to read about old ones.

I used to hear about old protests at Cornell. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” But the way the old protests were talked about, it seemed the best of times, morally speaking. At least it was better than the late 2000s and early 2010s, a period characterized by routine alternations of study and debauchery.

Middle-aged, I now see the obvious rightness of the study-and-debauch routine inside a university. (Well, yes, the routine could do with less debauching.)

“A university is a society for the pursuit of learning,” C. S. Lewis says, echoing many, many other university people since the dawn of (at least) the modern university. This is an obvious truth … or was for a long time.

But, but, the present urgency!

Well, there’s always a present urgency; if nothing else, people need their souls saved. (It’s usually other people, isn’t it?) But that’s not what a university is for. “A university is a society for the pursuit of learning.” So, one (a) leaves the university and does whatever seems urgent, or else (b) stays in the university and pursues learning. No distractions, please.

(The old Cornell protests may actually have been justified since they were about how to pursue learning. This is an important point. Alas, it is not a neglected one. “How learning is moral to pursue” has been trotted out as the concern behind much gratuitous scholarship⁠/activism. The result has been the blending of two endeavors that university people, of all people, should take pains to distinguish.)

I do take issue with Lewis’s second sentence: “As students, you will be expected to make yourselves, or to start making yourselves, into what the Middle Ages called clerks: into philosophers, scientists, scholars, critics, or historians.” Fine, if being a clerk is (a) temporary or (b) lifelong but avocational; but a natural reading of the passage, for us if not for Lewis’s Oxford students, is that it’s a career. The truth is, students are not expected to make themselves into lifelong professional students. Well, some are, but very few.

Lewis (p. 49):

A mole must dig to the glory of God and a cock must crow. We are members of one body, but differentiated members, each with his own vocation. A man’s upbringing, his talents, his circumstances, are usually a tolerable index of his vocation. If our parents have sent us to Oxford, if our country allows us to remain there, this is prima facie evidence that the life which we, at any rate, can best lead to the glory of God at present is the learned life.

Good, good. And if one is so excited by the present urgency that one can’t devote oneself to learning or let others get on with it in peace, that is prima facie evidence that membership in the university isn’t one’s vocation – that one should leave. There is wiggle room, of course. Michael Dummett put aside his Frege for a while to decry racism. He kept on decrying racism the rest of his life. He also wrote about tarot cards. But he did get back to Frege, in a big way.