Читать книгу Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies - Hadley Freeman, Hadley Freeman - Страница 8

Along with Manhattan and Paris, the office is one of only three places on earth that looks EXACTLY how it is portrayed in the movies. The Apartment, Working Girl, Being John Malkovich, Wall Street, Office Space, Lost in America, The Secret of my Success: all these movies are not just set in offices but are pretty much predicated on the fascinating dynamics thereof. Not always in a positive manner, admittedly, but still. Do you know how hard it is to break into the movies?

The filmmakers do not prettify or uglify the offices as they do to, say, London, but rather keep them looking wholly realistic and utterly recognisable, meaning, ergo and thusly, that the office is inherently perfect. Any of those offices could be your office, if your office had people in it who look like Harrison Ford and with the comic timing of Jack Lemmon.

But whereas the synchronicity between the cinematic and the reality is seen as proof of Manhattan and Paris’s miraculous aesthetics, with skyscrapers that twinkle in the night like promises and elegant cobbled streets lit by Beaux Arts street lamps, it is seen in a somewhat less affirmative light in regard to the office, with its aisles of filing cabinets bedecked with three-month-old Styrofoam coffee cups with odd semicircle chunks ripped out along the rims.

Whenever a location scores a long-term gig to appear onscreen, this is generally considered an enormous compliment to the venue. So great, even, that it may become something of an annoyance to those who dwell there in real life, judging from the sign outside the house in New York that was used as the setting for Carrie’s apartment in Sex and the City. Across the beautiful high steps that front this elegant brownstone house is a long thick chain and on which a sign hangs that snarls, pit bull-like: ‘Tourists: FUCK OFF.’ I paraphrase, but only slightly.

Yet even though the office setting has appeared in more films than desert islands, no one ever stands in the middle of an office, arms akimbo, digital camera at the ready and says, ‘Wow, it’s just like being in a movie!’

So the office slogs on. It is the location equivalent of one of those great character actors who everyone dimly recognises but no one appreciates, who gets steady work but never a good table at Spago’s. Really, what does a location have to do to get some validation in this town?

This outrageous double standard is a tragedy, not just because it has blinded that ultimate peddler of visual clichés, Woody Allen, to the obvious idea of making an office-based movie;⁵ it also means millions, nay, BILLIONS of people fail to realise, daily, that, far from throwing their lives down the plughole of monotony, they are living the Hollywood dream. Mia Farrow in Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo had to wait for an invitation from Jeff Daniels before she could step into the world of cinema. You, on the other hand, get to do it effortlessly five days a week, every week, until the day you die. Isn’t that awesome?⁶