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gordonzolaSo I just got back from seeing an matinee of "One Hour Photo" and I thought it was amazing.*
First off, I should mention that I worked in a one hour photo lab for many years. I have many horrible stories to tell (Here’s one). And I have to say, they captured a large part of it in the movie. Though the above entry mentions some of my least favorite customers, OHP manages to depict the insurance agents, the pet people and the amateur porn guys pretty well. In addition, I got chills when seeing some of the equipment they used which I haven’t seen since I quit (the little tape thing that gets the leader of film out of the canister etc.). I winced when Robin Williams cut through a negative by accident.
But the what the first 2/3 of the film does amazingly well is depict the condition of retail work in our modern post-industrial society. Until the predictable and dumb ending, it’s actually a big budget movie about class.
One of the most characteristic and classed elements of retail work is the lack of privacy. Managers and office workers often have private places to go to take care of personal issues that come up in one’s life, in fact it’s often a mark of one’s place on the food chain. Retail workers do not. Many times I’ve gone into stores and watched the person working the register try to deal with a child care crisis, a break-up, an ill relative, etc. while ringing people up, unable to take a break. I’ve been caught the same way myself. Working in a service job means possible severe penalties for not being isolated and out of touch with one’s emotions. As the choice, more and more, is simply about where to go to buy the exact same crap, subservience and good attitude is what is actually being sold.
OHP recognizes that from the first scenes. Robin Williams is the printer at a one-hour photo lab inside a big-box Wal-Mart type store. Mirrors are emblazoned with phrases like "Check Your Smile". Slogans are painted on the walls of employee areas, "We are in business for our customers. Without them, we are nothing". This isn’t done didactically, it’s all background.
When Robin Williams is fired** though, his lack of privacy is dramatized beautifully. There’s a close shot of him, despondent, sitting on a huge beautifully made up bed in a tastefully decorated room. We’ve seen it a million times whenever a lawyer in a movie loses a case or something tragic happens in a middle class family. The camera backs off though and we see he’s still at the store and in the bedroom department as people continue their shopping around him.
It’s also no accident that he works in a big box store "a really long drive" from downtown where he lives in a one-bedroom apartment. While his isolation is also a plot device, it does underline a lack of human contact accelerated with the decaying downtown/suburban under-taxed mall combo that is a cornerstone of modern development.
But Robin Williams also depicts a working class character trying to find meaning in his meaningless job. While this is done to make him seem a little old-fashioned (which helps foreshadow his unhappiness with infidelity in "his" chosen family) it’s also another factor of post-industrial work. When one is selling service, is the product just a means to that end? His character gets in trouble for calling out a service tech to fix the automatic color corrections*** because he actually cares about the quality of what he’s producing. Caring about quality gets him nothing but trouble. Rendered meaningless, it’s no wonder he’s a little unhinged.
Typically, I laughed out loud twice during the movie when no one else made a sound. The first time came after Robin Williams puts evidence of the husband’s infidelity into the wife’s roll of film and she, after a short breakdown, serves dinner like nothing happened. "What is wrong with these people?" he asks. If only he took a moment and followed his own logic . . .
The other was when Robin Williams drops off a roll of film after being fired. His boss is shown the pics. With a telephoto lens Williams has taken photo after photo of the bosses daughter as she plays on the lawn of her home, getting closer (not physically but photographically) with each frame. Now, I know that sounds fucked up. But at that point we know he wouldn’t actually harm her and is just pushing the boss’s buttons through his superior knowledge of photography.
I laughed because it hit pretty close to home. I can’t say some of my older co-workers wouldn’t have done something similar if they had they been fired. There’s only so much degradation one can take. Even then I could see that being over 35 and working retail in that type of young person/mall environment was driving them desperate and crazy. There were a number of days in that mall photo lab when it was only going to take one more boss insult or crazy customer to make someone snap.
**His firing was the only photo lab depiction that didn’t ring true. No photo lab printer EVER gets fired for making a few extra photos. "There are hundreds of unaccounted for prints" Uh, huh. That’s about $5-10 worth if that. In a less busy photo lab, I’d fuck up at least 100 prints a day due to having wrong settings, unbalanced film channels, creachy customers and simple mistakes. And my work was considered very good.
***Ok that didn’t ring true either. He should have been able to do it himself or develop a correction code to manually put in each film channel. But anyway. . .
*Keep in mind that I have a very specific way of looking at big budget Hollywood movies. I ignore the last 15 minutes to half hour. That’s when the main point is to recuperate any unpleasant messages that they’ve set up in the previous hour and a half and make sure that the idea of Family and Capitalism are triumphant. I find that assuming that going in makes me less disappointed and lets me appreciate the good bits. "One Hour Photo" is no exception to this rule.
First off, I should mention that I worked in a one hour photo lab for many years. I have many horrible stories to tell (Here’s one). And I have to say, they captured a large part of it in the movie. Though the above entry mentions some of my least favorite customers, OHP manages to depict the insurance agents, the pet people and the amateur porn guys pretty well. In addition, I got chills when seeing some of the equipment they used which I haven’t seen since I quit (the little tape thing that gets the leader of film out of the canister etc.). I winced when Robin Williams cut through a negative by accident.
But the what the first 2/3 of the film does amazingly well is depict the condition of retail work in our modern post-industrial society. Until the predictable and dumb ending, it’s actually a big budget movie about class.
One of the most characteristic and classed elements of retail work is the lack of privacy. Managers and office workers often have private places to go to take care of personal issues that come up in one’s life, in fact it’s often a mark of one’s place on the food chain. Retail workers do not. Many times I’ve gone into stores and watched the person working the register try to deal with a child care crisis, a break-up, an ill relative, etc. while ringing people up, unable to take a break. I’ve been caught the same way myself. Working in a service job means possible severe penalties for not being isolated and out of touch with one’s emotions. As the choice, more and more, is simply about where to go to buy the exact same crap, subservience and good attitude is what is actually being sold.
OHP recognizes that from the first scenes. Robin Williams is the printer at a one-hour photo lab inside a big-box Wal-Mart type store. Mirrors are emblazoned with phrases like "Check Your Smile". Slogans are painted on the walls of employee areas, "We are in business for our customers. Without them, we are nothing". This isn’t done didactically, it’s all background.
When Robin Williams is fired** though, his lack of privacy is dramatized beautifully. There’s a close shot of him, despondent, sitting on a huge beautifully made up bed in a tastefully decorated room. We’ve seen it a million times whenever a lawyer in a movie loses a case or something tragic happens in a middle class family. The camera backs off though and we see he’s still at the store and in the bedroom department as people continue their shopping around him.
It’s also no accident that he works in a big box store "a really long drive" from downtown where he lives in a one-bedroom apartment. While his isolation is also a plot device, it does underline a lack of human contact accelerated with the decaying downtown/suburban under-taxed mall combo that is a cornerstone of modern development.
But Robin Williams also depicts a working class character trying to find meaning in his meaningless job. While this is done to make him seem a little old-fashioned (which helps foreshadow his unhappiness with infidelity in "his" chosen family) it’s also another factor of post-industrial work. When one is selling service, is the product just a means to that end? His character gets in trouble for calling out a service tech to fix the automatic color corrections*** because he actually cares about the quality of what he’s producing. Caring about quality gets him nothing but trouble. Rendered meaningless, it’s no wonder he’s a little unhinged.
Typically, I laughed out loud twice during the movie when no one else made a sound. The first time came after Robin Williams puts evidence of the husband’s infidelity into the wife’s roll of film and she, after a short breakdown, serves dinner like nothing happened. "What is wrong with these people?" he asks. If only he took a moment and followed his own logic . . .
The other was when Robin Williams drops off a roll of film after being fired. His boss is shown the pics. With a telephoto lens Williams has taken photo after photo of the bosses daughter as she plays on the lawn of her home, getting closer (not physically but photographically) with each frame. Now, I know that sounds fucked up. But at that point we know he wouldn’t actually harm her and is just pushing the boss’s buttons through his superior knowledge of photography.
I laughed because it hit pretty close to home. I can’t say some of my older co-workers wouldn’t have done something similar if they had they been fired. There’s only so much degradation one can take. Even then I could see that being over 35 and working retail in that type of young person/mall environment was driving them desperate and crazy. There were a number of days in that mall photo lab when it was only going to take one more boss insult or crazy customer to make someone snap.
**His firing was the only photo lab depiction that didn’t ring true. No photo lab printer EVER gets fired for making a few extra photos. "There are hundreds of unaccounted for prints" Uh, huh. That’s about $5-10 worth if that. In a less busy photo lab, I’d fuck up at least 100 prints a day due to having wrong settings, unbalanced film channels, creachy customers and simple mistakes. And my work was considered very good.
***Ok that didn’t ring true either. He should have been able to do it himself or develop a correction code to manually put in each film channel. But anyway. . .
*Keep in mind that I have a very specific way of looking at big budget Hollywood movies. I ignore the last 15 minutes to half hour. That’s when the main point is to recuperate any unpleasant messages that they’ve set up in the previous hour and a half and make sure that the idea of Family and Capitalism are triumphant. I find that assuming that going in makes me less disappointed and lets me appreciate the good bits. "One Hour Photo" is no exception to this rule.
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no subject
Date: 2002-11-04 05:23 pm (UTC)I HATE customer service ... because I have to deal with customers ... who always think they are right and entitled to golden service on a silver platter.
Ever read the zine Eat and Get Out?
no subject
Date: 2002-11-04 06:14 pm (UTC)No, but I can tell I'd love it just by the title. Do you have the ordering info.
And hey, I just read in someone else's journal that Lydia Lunch is moving to Louisville. I tell ya, I was only there for four days and I still lust for that abandoned downtown . . .
no subject
Date: 2002-11-05 12:54 pm (UTC)And why the hell would Lydia Lunch move here???
no subject
Date: 2002-11-04 07:50 pm (UTC)But now I'm totally curious about the recuperative moment(s—15? damn, that's a lot of the movie; with It's A Wonderful Life you only need to turn it off before the last eight) at the end. What do they do to stitch up the discomfort of facing a service-work world for the viewers? Who is the presumed audience, and does it switch? Ah, but that's truly spoiling the end, isn't it? You can just email/tell me.
no subject
Date: 2002-11-05 09:45 am (UTC)It's not like "Falling Down" that Michael Douglas movie where the laid off white guy goes around LA shooting at every ethnic group because of his displacement in the food chain.
And the movie never makes us hate RW. He's still the most sympathetic character even if he's "Crazy"
excellent review focusing on an aspect
Date: 2002-11-05 05:24 am (UTC)I like yr 15-minute rule, but could never live by it, as endings of movies are my favourite part. Sort of th opposite of th 15-min. rule: I find that terrible movies are sometimes redeemed by a great ending. Repo Man (Cox, 1984, 5.5 stars out of 10) comes to mind.--mza.
Re: excellent review focusing on an aspect
Date: 2002-11-05 09:51 am (UTC)But seriously, how old are you? 'cuz it was definitely a time and place thing. I tried to show it to my housemates who were about 10 years younger than me and they didn't get it either. Maybe you had to live through the whole Reagan cultural revolution to understand why "Let's get sushi and not pay" is funny, poignant and meaningful at the same time.
generational thing mebbe
Date: 2002-11-12 09:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-11-05 10:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-11-05 07:26 pm (UTC)I wanted to see "Secretary" too. And while I love attending movies alone when everyone else is at work, I would have felt lame going solo to that matinee. Just me, the old folks who walked into the wrong theater, and the trench coat guys. . . no thanks.
Re:
Date: 2002-11-05 07:40 pm (UTC)I saw Secretary alone, but an elderly couple decided to sit right next to me with open seats everywhere. Very disconcerting.
no subject
Date: 2002-11-05 09:20 pm (UTC)I loved the "do you have a lab or do you send them out?" question. Especially since the lab I worked at did the local police photos.
The abuse stuff. ugh. so tacked on. "(meaningful sigh) I guess that's why he was so fucked up and weird." And thus RW becomes the aberration and the workplace analysis becomes inividualised.
And I'm guessing the old couple was looking for their own "secretary". Did it seem like they'd seen it before?
Re:
Date: 2002-11-06 03:55 pm (UTC)I was trying not to give the old people any eye contact. Especially when I started crying. Lord knows what their dinner conversation was like that night.
no subject
Date: 2002-11-05 11:16 pm (UTC)