Still grim, colorless, and oppressive: What art says about workplace reality: For those who have watched Barbie, one of the most dominant aspects of the film is the excess of pink in all shades. By contrast, the in-real-life corporate headquarters of Mattel Inc. — Barbie’s real-world creators — is a “gunmetal set of office cubicles… colorless and oppressive,” writes Julia Hobsbawm for Bloomberg. Barbie director Greta Gerwig told Insider that the box layout of the Mattel building is a reference to Jacques Tati’s sets from the 1967 comedy Playtime, a film about confusion in an age of high technology, which depicts the office as repeating rows of gray, boxed cubicles within a maze building of endless corridors, elevators, and escalators.

Historic origins: The term “office” is not some capitalist invention, writes Amanda Foreman in the Wall Street Journal, as their existence dates as far back as 3000 BC to when the temple cities of Mesopotamia employed teams of scribes to keep records of official business. Office, Foreman writes, “is an amalgamation of the Latin ‘officium,’ which meant a position or duty, and ‘ob ficium,’ literally ‘toward doing.’”

Portraying the corporate world as the space of dastardly executives and grim realities has been rife in other forms of popular literature — Rebecca F Kuang’s bestseller Yellowface describes an office culture “where the already-successful always have an unfair advantage over the lesser confident and lesser known,” says Hobsbawm, while Barbara Kingsolver sets her Pulitzer Prizewinner Demon Copperhead amongst the monotony and low-paid work of supermarket shelf stacking and mining communities.

Art’s obsession with economic hardship, declining industries, or even hustle culture is nothing new. Hobsbawm herself points to Billy Joel’s “Allentown,” which he performed for fans at New York and London gigs last year, forty years after penning the tune. Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” (listen, runtime: 2:33), Johnny Cash’s “Oney” (listen, runtime: 3:05), the Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night” (listen, runtime: 2:38) or Merle Haggard’s “Workin’ Man Blues” (listen, runtime: 2:36) all tell tales of long hours, hard work and the stress of trying to make a living.

Comprehensible depictions of the rat race: English artist LS Lowry was a full-time rent collector who spent much of his life outside of work painting and drawing scenes of the working lives of mill and dock workers in northern England. In pieces like Going to Work or Mill Gates, workers scurry to and fro or stand in massed ranks against backdrops dominated by industrial landscapes of looming factories and smoking chimneys — the colorless buildings not dissimilar from Mattel’s interiors in Barbie. American artist Edward Hopper looks inside the workplace in his painting Office at Night captures the unease and isolation at being the only person left working in the office late in the evening, a feeling of not being in the right place as the dark draws in.

The Office© obsession: To comprehend the extent of audiences’ love for watching the petty rivalries and mundane day-to-day workplace operations, look no further than the British mockumentary The Office. The show continues to ring true for audiences, as the series saw the launch of its twelfth remake last year when Egyptian director Hisham Fathi released Al Maktab, an Arabic-language version of the series that satirizes office life and relationships within a Saudi context. Other recreations of the show have been produced in Germany, India, Chile, and France, although the US remake remains the most popular.

Don’t believe everything you see on screen: Filmmakers’ view of office spaces is an “unfair depiction” of reality, Mahmoud Riad, director and principal architect of Riad Architecture, told Enterprise. The intense isolation shown in the Barbie movie draws on caricatures that help to create an adverse reaction in the audience, the setting becomes more of a character, Riad said. Mattel’s gray, dimly lit, stifling office cubicles play into the idea of Mattel as the corporate villain, he said, adding that when media or tech companies are portrayed in films they are set in wide offices, full of conversation and activity, indicating their positions as places for ideas, creativity, and openness.

Work-life-automized productivity has already arrived: Google’s hybrid work-play-rest offices were hailed as the future of the creative workspace, The Guardian wrote in 2016, a time pre- ChatGPT and Midjourney. The offices decked out with pool tables and bowling alleys, food at no cost, gym membership — and the famous nap pods — supposedly create spaces that foster feel-good attitudes in employees, stimulate the creation and knowledge sharing, and ultimately boost loyalty, productivity, and workforce retention. Yet just as films tend to overplay the corporate villain, depictions of the Google work-play hyphenate office are also overplayed in the media and on-screen, Riad thinks. Productivity is still at the forefront of office and architecture design, he said, especially in Egypt.

Visuals play a real role inside our office spaces: Architecture and design play a role in productivity, with research showing that a well-designed office can increase productivity by up to 20%, writes AW Spaces. Bright and well-organized spaces contribute to higher energy levels and reduced stress, while stuffy and stifling areas can cause maladies such as Sick Building Syndrome when building occupants begin to experience acute health and comfort effects that appear to be linked to time spent in a building, but no specific illness or cause can be identified.

Tags: