Guest Writer Wednesday: Horrible Bosses and the So-Called ‘Mancession’: A Review in Conversation

Claiming that Horrible Bosses is horrible understates the case and misleads one into thinking the movie is very unpleasant or disagreeable for formalist reasons: incoherent plotting, unsympathetic characters, humorless comedy. No. Horrible Bosses is an ideological atrocity, not just a shitfest farce. It should be titled Triumph of the Will of the Hapless White Male, for here the Great Recession is a ruse exploited to indulge the twin fantasies that white-collar, white men suffer just the same as everyone else during hard times and, in the satirical words of Michael Scott from The Office, “I think the problem is the chicks. The problem is the chicks, and you gotta blame them.” In sum, the movie channels economic frustration into misogyny. Instead of “Jump! You fuckers!” we get “Let’s kill this bitch!”

Isn’t this movie the double-inversion of 9 to 5 (1980)? A progressive flick about exploited women enacting their (pot-induced) revenge fantasies against their bosses becomes, in these times, a reactionary tale about privileged men enacting their (resentment-fueled) revenge fantasies against their bosses. Where Parton and company hate their bosses for exploiting them, Batemen and bunch hate their bosses because they want to be (or fuck) them but can’t.

Am I being too harsh?

Byron’s Take:

Not at all. Your comparison with 9 to 5 is apt: the militantly fun, woman-power message of the earlier film has been replaced with mean spirited and murderous male hijinks. Horrible Bosses represents a kind of unconscious backlash in its portrayal of the economic downturn. We’re presented with three reasonably well-to-do white guys and their suffering. All three men have jobs, and two of them have what seem to be high-paying jobs. (I’m sure those who’ve been laid off and have lost their homes will sympathize.) The sexually harassed dental assistant, Dale Arbus (Charlie Day), is stuck in his less-than-satisfactory position because of his sex-offender status (for urinating in a public playground) and exists mostly as a whining comic foil. The characters played by the two Jasons (Bateman, Sudeikis) actually do have horrible bosses (Kevin Spacey, Colin Farrell), whose onscreen moments are responsible for the film’s few real laughs. The idea that even guys with good jobs have it rough is a bit like millionaire Mitt Romney complaining to campaign audiences that he, too, is “unemployed.”

The most execrable aspects of this star-studded mediocrity radiate from the characterization of Dr. Julia Harris (Jennifer Aniston) as the dirty-talking, sexually harassing dentist-boss. Now have there ever been instances of female-on-male sexual harassment in the workplace? No doubt, but the truth is that women endure unwanted sexual attention from men at an astronomically higher rate. This is yet another example of portraying the danger–as is often the case, beneath a veneer of mirth–of uncontrolled female sexuality (a very old formula indeed), here inflated into physical coercion. It has the effect of seeming to level the playing field: “See, women do it, too!” I’m not saying the makers of Horrible Bosses set out to accomplish this ideological task. They just wanted laughs, but the cumulative effect of such filmic representations has a way of getting into the cultural consciousness. Fatal Attraction (1987) unleashed its depiction of a crazed female stalker into a culture rife with male stalkers of women. Horrible Bosses presents an attractive, oversexed woman essentially stalking her hapless male employee, a scene right out of hetero male fantasy. Both films present female sexual desire as out of control.

Surely the worst moment in Horrible Bosses occurs just after Dr. Harris shows her assistant a series of photos depicting her taking advantage of him while he was under dental anesthesia. It is not clear, but some of the posed pictures may actually involve sex. The assistant (Day) says, “That’s rape!” He may well be right. She replies, “Just hold on there, Jodie Foster.” This can only refer to the 1988 film The Accused, an account of a real-life gang-rape victim whose character was essentially put on trial. (After all, she must have been “asking for it,” right?) Googling the film to get my details correct, I was met with “Jodie Foster Hot Rape Scene Video,” first result. I am not kidding. Try it. (Think we still have a problem?) So, what can Aniston’s line mean? “Don’t be so fast to accuse me like Jodie Foster did in that movie?” Or what? Because Horrible Bosses‘ point of view is that female-on-male sexual harassment is not really so bad (and most men would enjoy it if the woman were “hot”), how can this comparison of what the film sees as merely humorous, or at most embarrassing, with a filmic account of a real-life gang-rape do anything but belittle the seriousness of harassment and rape? Look, I’m not holding up The Accused as some sort of holy object, beyond humor. Laughing can help us deal with horrific things. Given the context, though, I really couldn’t believe my ears. I certainly don’t expect a mainstream comedy to conform to my ideological beliefs, but Horrible Bosses goes beyond the typical misogynistic gross-out humor so popular in recent years and graduates to the realm of the truly offensive.

I like the claim that “Horrible Bosses represents a kind of unconscious backlash in its portrayal of the economic downturn.” The movie is not about the downturn directly but a latent reaction to it. Nevertheless, it makes passing references to the recession. The most overt one involves a former acquaintance of the main characters from Yale who used to work as an executive for Lehman Brothers but who is now reduced to offering hand-jobs to men for money. Director Seth Gordon explains that “We needed to put a fine point on the fact that these guys didn’t have other options.” Horrible Bosses reminds heterosexual white men that capitalism makes of us all prostitutes or, as Spacey enlightens Bateman, “I own you. You’re my bitch.” YET, within the misogynistic and homophobic kaleidoscope of this motion picture, the “fine point” is that “real men” must fight back against being treated as pieces of meat. This threatened species has one of three choices: be fucked by bosses (read “exploited by capitalists for labor power”); be fucked by gay johns (read “exploited by perverts” (because, according to the movie, homosexuality = perversion, e.g., the whole “wet work” scene writ large)); be fucked by prisoners (read “you might as well try breaking the law by murdering your boss because you are already being fucked, so what do you got to lose?”). Of course, within the fucked-up-world of this film, all three choices are the same. The only way out is serendipity, i.e., the writers-as-gods-in-the-machine sweep down and save you via a racist plot device involving an outsourced super-Garmin.

As you rightly note, these three downtrodden amigos hold not just jobs but careers, and they enjoy disposable income. For example, while brewing up the idea to kill their bosses, Sudeikis mentions paying someone to clean his apartment and cut his hair. This line of thinking informs their plot to kill their bosses by hiring a hitman. Although they gripe about their jobs, any dirty work (housekeeping or murder!) is beneath them and within their means to outsource (to black men who are stupid (Jamie Foxx), but wait, might be smarter than they seem to be. Essentially, what we have is two privileged white men (Batemen and Sudeikis) whose exasperation derives from being unable to take the next step up the corporate ladder because the economy has turned sour right when they were in line for a promotion, but since the dominant ideology peddled by Hollywood cannot represent the true culprit of their thwarted desires, it displaces responsibility onto the figure of the “horrible boss.” It’s not the perverted (rotten-to-the-core) capitalist system that is to blame for your unfair treatment, it’s the perverted (bad apple) capitalist.

The logic of the third guy’s (Day) “occupational” ressentiment, as you allude to, seems different than his buddies’. Day’s character is not “trapped” because he can’t get as sweet of a position as the one he already holds within this busted economy. No, he’s trapped because he is getting married and wives-to-be are expensive commodities (and untrustworthy, cheating whores, e.g. Spacey’s character’s wife). Perhaps, however, this plot line simply serves to amplify the ever-so-slightly-less-explicit misogyny of the other two.

Perhaps too, we have reached a point in the post-ironic, late capitalist, culture industry where we need as many words for “sexism” as the Inuit have for snow. Horrible Bosses does its very best to showcase them all. Explicit misogyny: Jennifer Aniston’s character is introduced with white-lettered words that fill the screen: “Evil, Crazy Bitch.” Patronizing sexual harassment: Sudeikis’s character’s treatment of the “FedEx girl” who delivers to his company. Objectification: Sudeikis leaves a sports bar stool so he can “see that girl about her vagina.” Homophobia-as-misogyny: Aniston calls Day a “little pussy” and “little faggot” when he won’t sleep with her. Reverse-sexism-is-traditional-sexism: Aniston’s character is meant to imply that men can be sexually assaulted at work like women, but all it really reinforces is that men have a right to hate women for not fulfilling their fantasy images of them. Meta-misogyny: the outtakes include Sudeikis looking directly at the camera to remind the frat row yahoos of the film’s takeaway absurdist joke: “bend her over and show her the fifty states.” That’s not even to mention the relentless rape-is-hilarious misogyny.
 
Byron’s Take:

Indeed, this movie–in terms of contemptible messages of all kinds–makes uniquely explicit the old phrase about “an embarrassment of riches.” I couldn’t agree more with your “bad apple capitalist” point. (After all, it wasn’t the system as such that failed us back in 2008, just a few dishonest swindlers who made the other Wall Street paragons look bad!) Sutherland’s brief portrayal of the environmentally responsible, good-guy CEO is meant to reinforce the idea of capitalism-with-a-human-heart and occlude the amoral, monopoly-tending behemoth as it really is (absent sound regulatory restraint), a smokescreen at least as old as Frank Capra’s sentimental masterpiece, It’s A Wonderful Life (1946). For every evil Mr. Potter, there’s a kindly George Bailey. (Yeah, maybe in the days of mom & pop savings and loans.) The TV show Undercover Boss serves a similar function. It seems only necessary that “the big guy” lower himself to the loading dock for a couple of weeks to see what wonderful human beings those little people actually are. (Why, they have feelings and dreams and everything!) At the end they all have a good hug-n-cry, the peons receive a slight raise, and the boss is whisked back to his smoked-glass penthouse office suite, a better, humbler millionaire. As for the former Lehman Brothers employee having to do humiliating gay stuff to survive– is Seth Gordon fucking kidding me? Almost no one actually got dumped from the worst offending banks that helped precipitate the crisis, at least not without sumptuous bonuses, and then kicking and screaming the whole way as if they’d been the real victims. I suppose some lower-level people who were “just following orders” may have been downsized out of their jobs at such firms (though I heard nothing about it), but the film makes no distinctions. We only have a guy from Lehman Brothers selling hand-jobs, as if he were representative of those greedy law-breakers finally getting their comeuppance. Please.

The use of “little faggot” and “little pussy” as companion terms of abuse (as you observe) unites misogyny and homophobia in one neat “little” package (pun intended). On broadcast television where the explicitness of those words calls for a cleaner alternative, the admonition “Man up!” encompasses both notions. (Why are we getting so many examples of women ordering men to be more masculine lately?) Horrible Bosses goes out of its way to police male affect, from the insufficiently masculine dental assistant (Day) to the automatically-masculine-by-virtue-of-blackness ex-con (Jamie Foxx) and his fellow bar patrons. There is, however, a moment of slippage. It occurs in the scene that follows the trio’s consultation with “Motherfucker Jones” (Foxx), their presumed hit-man. The two more successful–and in the film’s gaze, seemingly more attractive–guys (Bateman, Sudeikis) begin to argue about which of them would be raped the most if they went to prison. This works within a constellation of rape references in the film as yet another way in which white guys (with good jobs) can (potentially) get fucked (or fucked over) by someone or something. Allow me to overlay another reading. Psychological surveys suggest rather strongly that the most virulently homophobic males tend to be haunted by same-sex desire; hence, they project their loathing outward. They unconsciously know something about themselves, something that gnaws at them. This scene could be the film (or its screenwriters) expressing its/their unconscious gay desire. Additionally, the scene explores a blurring of subject positions; that is, it depicts desire and gender performance as a continuum rather than an either/or. While the film berates “faggots,” it nonetheless depicts hetero males displaying an affect that the culture defines as “feminine” (“Will they find me attractive?”). There’s a moment of complexity here, as if the film (like a human mind) knows more about itself than it thinks it knows. Still, this knowingness is itself part of a regressive network of references whose overall messages you’ve summed up perfectly, to which I would add the cultural acceptance of men being raped in prison as an eventuality that can’t–or needn’t–be avoided. (After all, they’re mostly black, right? Don’t even get me started on our rapacious prison-industrial-complex and how the “justice” system so ably feeds it).

There will probably be those who say we’re making an awfully big deal about a throw-away comedy, something that’s “just entertainment.” Unfortunately, contemptible crap like Horrible Bosses teaches the culture to affirm its worst negative stereotypes beneath a veneer of farce. (If only it were smart enough to satirize them at the same time.) Leaving these complaints aside, in the plainest terms of bang-for-the-bucks multiplex entertainment, this film is still a dismal failure. The considerable talents of Spacey, Farrell, Bateman, and Foxx are wasted, and Aniston, who can be very effective in the right role, hits an all-time low. (I guess we’re supposed to find it progressive that Aniston, at the advanced (Hollywood) age of 42, can still be displayed as a sex object. Granted, but she’s playing young, not “cougar,” which is another issue altogether.) Bateman’s character alone is marginally sympathetic, and mostly because one associates him with better material. Arrested Development is a comedic project that pushed the limits of taste, dealt with a character going to prison, presented a female character who satirized sluttiness, explored sexual orientation for laughs, had characters contemplating violence, and mixed a great many other over-the-top situations together for the sake of humor. That show illustrates how topics like these can be the occasion for genuine belly laughs, and at the same time be thoughtful and smart and not at all mean-spirited. Nearly everybody I know who watched Arrested Development–people of diverse ideological outlooks–found the show hilarious, and it was anything but safe or tame. Neither of us is asking for politically-correct comedy (which would suck), just comedy that makes us laugh without adding overtly to the negative aspects of our culture. Lately, this seems too much to expect.

Kirk Boyle is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Asheville. He previously contributed pieces about The Day the Earth Stood Still, Revolutionary Road, and Good Dick to Bitch Flicks.