BODY KILLER!!!

Cindy Sherman’s debut feature-length film, OFFICE KILLER, begins with the scattered sounds of corporate America emanating from the darkness. Stacks of paper slap down on desks, telephone rings bombard distracted voices with new and distant conversations, the clump-ding of the elevator unloads half a dozen more pairs of shoes to shuffle through the labyrinth of desks and file cabinets. Then the titles slither mechanically across the screen in flashing fragments. They are accompanied by the thud of a mopey jazz bass line, and then, the small, unsteady voice of a woman eeks out of the darkness. She introduces the corporate mantra of the magazine, Constant Consumer, which dominates her pitiable life. “Get the job done,” she laments, as the first image appears on the screen. It is a tight close up of a letter heading jerking up through a dot-matrix computer printer. Dorine Douglas, it reads—another incarnation of the voice we hear.

Through a series of these tightly cropped shots displaying various body parts and office mechanisms, the setting for the story slowly expands, piece by piece. These tight frames bouncing throughout the space in rapid succession are intercut with a few long, slow shots moving down crowded hallways or zooming in toward the windows from the dark, non-descript exterior of the building. The interior world does eventually cohere, and presents the cluttered, sixties-era office building with dingy cinderblock walls and hazy yellow fluorescent lighting, where most of the action takes place.

The pace of the introductions of Sherman’s players in the opening scene is decidedly clipped. The shots are most often filmed from odd, overhead or below-the-waist angles, offering only fragments of each character at any given time. As a result, the camera always finds them in their most defining postures, so that though the introductions are brief, after the whirlwind, one more or less has a grounded understanding of where all the pieces fit in the complex social structure of the workplace. Sherman uses a young stud pushing a mail cart as the tour guide through her playing space. As he rolls the cart down the narrow passageway between cubicles, a slender pair of legs goes by, peeking out of a high slit up the side of the skirt they’re wearing. This would be Kim, played by Molly Ringwald, who fills the role of office-piece-of-ass. As the mail boy turns to check her out, he slams the cart into another, shorter pair of legs bundled up in a thick wool sweater. This would be Dorine, played by Carol Kane, who, dutifully filling the role of office-doormat, scurries away from the cart, injured and embarrassed, back to her desk in the corner.

The opening sequence establishes a sensibility of controlled confinement that runs throughout the course of the film. The office arena is set up to feel much like a child’s dollhouse; each character that Sherman brings in is relatively one-dimensional, and merely functions as a cog in the plot-driven narrative. This lack of depth early on is reinforced by the film’s rather domineering score—composer Evan Lurie thickly lays in a kitschy, creeping jazz line that I can imagine coming from some sort of vaudevillian puppet show. Along with Sherman’s use of archetypal characters, Lurie’s score gives the film a distinct theatrical quality. In the same vein, Sherman focuses intently separating her office from the surrounding world. Almost every shot in the film is used to expand the interior world, while everything else outside the office is left in total mystery. Only two scenes were filmed outdoors: Dorine’s memory of her father’s death, and that which shows Dorine driving on the freeway away from the city, which is meant to symbolize new possibility there in the last shot of the film. Both of these scenes also part with the usual tight and rigid cinematography of the rest of the film, and instead show more fluid, organic camera work. There are also occasional smoking breaks that take place on a concrete balcony, but which are only filmed facing the building, so no exterior environment can be detected—just a tease of fresh air before the employees have to trudge back to work. Sherman consistently presents her characters through the lens of the office, tying their identities only to their roles in the workplace.

As the film progresses, Dorine’s actions directly reflect this dollhouse sensibility, except that she gets to be the one to move the dolls around for a change. After she accidentally murders an unfavorable editor, Dorine decides to cut loose, Dahmer-style, and expand the operation. As she continues to murder her co-workers, one by one, she actually brings their bodies home to fill roles in her very own make-believe office, in the basement of her mother’s house. She is literally playing with dolls, but in a dollhouse wrought with nauseating violence and perversity.

The gruesome string of events is kicked off by a typical corporate downsizing campaign that sends many of the employees out of the office to work at home, which, in this case, is enabled by the introduction of email technology. By removing their physical bodies from the office, the downsizing in effect obliterates the employee’s identities within the work environment and replaces them with email accounts. In this way, Dorine’s killing spree can be seen as a reaction to the devaluing of the body. She indeed reasserts the body’s importance by actually physically removing it from the office, destroying it via murder, and then managing to assume the person’s virtual identity by simply typing someone else’s name instead of hers at the bottom of her emails, and conducting business as usual. By the time anyone notices, there is no one left alive to run the company. One of the more poignant moments toward the end of the film is Dorine writing a clean, untraceable, email as her boss, Norah, but typing on the keyboard with sticky fingers covered in Norah’s blood.

The film was made in the mid-1990s, which nowadays is easily recognized as a watershed moment in the history of integrating business and technology—the emergence of internet in the economic sphere is now commonly viewed on par with the Industrial Revolution. Given this context, it is all the more reasonable to see Sherman’s film as a piece about the human body and its ever-evolving relationship with the technological landscape. Throughout the film Sherman presents her subjects in fragments, often understandable only as separate pieces of the machine whole—in this case, Constant Consumer Magazine. The breakdown of the body into pieces and the strain that it puts on the identity of the individual even extends beyond the workplace. For example, Dorine comes home from the office to care for her crippled mother, who could be seen as only half of a complete person, depending on Dorine for meals, and an electric rail to carry her up and down the stairs. The infringement of technological dependence upon the self often leads to downfall among Sherman’s characters. Norah (Jeanne Tripplehorn) is exposed for embezzling funds when she fails to transition her operation to the digital realm. The asthmatic magazine owner Virginia is slain when Dorine swaps poison into her respirator. Even the tech-wiz, Daniel, dies because his pager goes off at just the wrong moment. And by enabling Dorine to orchestrate her massacre with the aid of email, Sherman also points out the radical, and often damaging, shift in social structures caused by the chasm between individual consciousness and rapid technological development. In the final scene, a newly made-over Dorine speeds off with her cats and a bag of body parts to find a job as an office manager. The classified ad reads, “Computer Skills A Must!” I can only assume she’ll get the job.

One character who stands out from Sherman’s other players is Kim Poole (Ringwald). First, she is the only major character to survive Dorine’s wrath, despite the fact that she was especially mean to her early on. I find this interesting not because of some disparagement in Dorine’s motives (she did try to strangle her in a stairwell), but because of how Sherman has chosen to use her in the context of the film. At the top Kim seems like another shallow stereotype acting out Sherman’s goofy technorganic thrillodrama. After a string of nasty, unprovoked, and wildly off-base insults thrown toward Dorine, I am certain she will die a gruesome death in no time. But Sherman keeps her alive, even as she grows more and more angry and hysterical. By the end of the film, Kim has transcended the realm of stereotype, and comes across as a real, sympathetic woman in an otherwise cartoonish environment. I think that the deepening of her character was essential in order for OFFICE KILLER to connect with its audience. Although the ways that Sherman addresses the body/technology dialectic with things like tight, rapid cinematography is quite successful, with all its smirking theatricality, the film runs the risk of being an art world in-joke. However, Sherman’s use of Kim—and her ingenious move to cast the beloved 1980s John Hughes it-girl—brings in a necessary dose of fast-paced girl-talk and heartrending sincerity to yank the film out of its perhaps-too-kitschy packaging. In the end, it seems that Sherman would have it that the pieces that don’t fit into the machine are just the ones to make it run smoothly.