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 is the office manager: Barbara (Debra Jo Rupp).
And for kicks: Art, the weirdo in charge of the office 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 pure evil. She’s a stock character – think of Prof. Umbrage, 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 position 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 lifted up to a place of security and inclusion. 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 overtly. (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 temporary work – 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. That 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.
