On the whole, American movies have trod gingerly in the office workplace, afraid perhaps of turning off their tired, entertainment-craving customers with the equivalent of a “busman’s holiday.” Hollywood has faced the further problem of how to render cinematic the office world, which threatens at every turn to become gray, stodgy, static, overfamiliar, and claustrophobic. In this respect, motion pictures set in business towers bear a certain resemblance to prison movies: they portray characters trapped in vertical blocks, scrapping for turf. On the other hand—and it is quite a big “other hand”—whenever Hollywood has chanced situating a drama in the corporate-office world, there has often been a surprising payoff: the ruthlessness, cynicism, and sheer power in this “chromium jungle” 1 all bring an edge. In fact, when the movie leaves the worksite for domestic scenes or other subplots, there is often a drop in dramatic voltage. The paradox is that we Americans are fascinated with the arena of work but can’t seem to admit that to ourselves.

One way that Hollywood has chosen to cinematize the office world is to divide it into typecast spaces, where certain activities and tensions ritually collect. One broad division I would make is between public and private spaces. Perhaps public space is the wrong term for those areas—building entrance, lobby, elevator, corridor, lavatory, cafeteria—that are not open to the outside public, just the staff, but it will have to do. These collective spaces are filled with the opportunity for romance and ingratiation with higher-ups. American movies love certain interiors where the classes can collide: these spaces exemplify the American Dream—not that everyone is equal, but that each individual has the chance to rise to the top through a lucky break.2 The actor Robert Morse, as Ponty in 1967’s How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, bangs into his future protector, the president of his firm, and his future girlfriend in the corridor during his first minutes on the job. Conversely, these shared, open spaces may carry danger: Michael Douglas in Tom Sanders’ character in Disclosure, has only to step into the hallway to be assailed by viperish colleagues’ rumors about his fall from grace.

A subset of office public space is the collective workspace: the bullpen or secretarial pool. The bullpen can provide a haven for proletarian camaraderie, or it can symbolize the conformity of the drone-worker. Bullpens are dramatically useful for bringing together diverse characters, as on TV shows like Murphy Brown and NYPD Blue. Still, the object of every ambitious worker in Hollywood’s business movies is to get out of the bullpen and into a private

office—preferably, with a door. It matters whether the glass is frosted or

see-through—in short, how vulnerable the office occupant’s actions are to the

all-seeing eye of the corporation. The “comer” with an office of his own has entered the world of private space, which has many gradations of status, right up to the plush executive suite. With privacy comes paranoia, however: cut off from others, encapsulated, the high-status person must now wonder, What are the others saying about me?

Placing the Hero

The Crowd, the silent-film classic made by King Vidor in 1928, is not generally thought of as a business movie, but its handful of office scenes are extremely influential. Its celebrated New York sequence established a visual vocabulary for the genre. Here we have the classic setup: the first shot, generally a helicopter view of the city skyline (usually New York’s), followed by a quick montage of skyscrapers, crowded streets, and various modes of transport, the camera coming to rest on a single building, which it will then pan upward to the top or downward to street level. Sometimes there is also a shot of the lobby, a trip up the elevator, and into a story proper. Vidor’s innovation was to enter the building with one flowing cut and dive into the bullpen. It is now the camera’s business to begin to pick out the individual from the group—the human being from the conglomerate. So we see our hero, his placard telling his name and number as he doodles ideas. When the clock signals day’s end, everyone madly rushes to the exits, and our hero stops off at the washroom. The Crowd’s washroom sequence, with its repetitious banter, makes explicit the question, Where does individual personality leave off and mass mentally begin?

Now, before we go on, why this ritualized setup? Movie after movie about office life—the good ones and the bad (you can take my word for it)—open exactly with this pattern of skyline to transport to single building to hero in the crowded office space. I might hazard some guesses. The skyline shots remind us that the corporate movie has been an intensely urban genre. The story seeks to wrap itself in the monumental glamour of “the big city,” in the prestige (high, until recently) of modern skyscraper architecture, before settling down to cases. The pan up or down introduces us metaphorically, as well, to the characters’ soon-to-be-shifting fortunes. Often, voiceovers during these skyline montage sequences (as in Executive Suite, The Apartment, Woman’s World) help orient the viewer to this otherwise overscaled, canyoned world.

The opening of The Apartment (1960)offers an interesting comparison. Again, we see New York skyscrapers from above, come to rest on a single building, pass into the bullpen, pick out our hero, observe him at his adding machine during the final moment of the day, see the clock jump to closing time, and watch his co-workers rush out in droves—only this time, the hero remains behind. All the while, we hear his narrating voice: “On November first 1959, the population of New York City was 8,042,783. If you put all these people end to end, they would reach from Times Square to the outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan. I know facts like this because I work for an insurance

company . . .  ” and so on. 

The hero of The Apartment, C. C. “Bud” Baxter, attempts to rise on the corporate ladder by letting out his pad to higher-ups for their sexual assignations. In doing so, he triangulates the maneuverable space between himself and his bosses by exploiting a site outside the firm. In Cash McCall (1959), the financial tycoon hero displays the extent of his power by not even bothering to show up at the office, but wheeling and dealing from his hotel suite. Sometimes power is centered away from the office.

Office Movies’ Heyday

The pinnacle of the office movie occurred in the 1950s to early 1960s. The 1930s and 1940s had their share of office dramas, but those made less of a conscious impact (unless you count Citizen Kane as a  business movie), perhaps because the depression had cast a pall over big business’s authority.  The thirties and forties did yield a business-film subgenre, career-girl movies, that explored the novelty of women in the workplace: Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face (1933), Loretta Young in Big Business Girl (1931), Ginger Rogers in Lady in the Dark (1944), and June Bride (1948), and Rosalind Russell in almost everything she did. Some of these career-girl stories focused on secretaries, switchboard girls, or bank tellers whose looks enticed their bosses (like Baby Face, in which Stanwyck sleeps her way up the corporate ladder, her ascent marked by shots from outside the building). Other career-girl movies were about superwomen executives who did a “man’s job.” Many times the women were assigned business milieux, such as fashion magazines, considered more acceptable for their gender.

But however compromised these dramas of career versus love may look from today’s feminist standpoint, they were the height of enlightened progressivism compared to the roles women came to occupy in the 1950s office movie. These roles tended to be one of three types.  First was the wife, who was either overly ambitious or resented her husband’s obsession with work and neglect of the family. Often the wife was assigned that dreary role of her man’s conscience, giving or withholding her respect “You’ve lost your guts and all of a sudden I’m ashamed of you!” cries Jennifer Jones in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), while June Allyson declares in Executive Suite (1954) that she will fight anyone who will make her husband into someone she can’t “go on loving.” A second role the spinsterish executive secretary, like Nina Foch in Executive Suite (1954), who protectively hovered over the CEO. And the third role was the trampy bimbo from the stenographic pool or a nightclub chorus line.

The Hollywood version of the 1950 office was, in short, a man’s world—and one of the most curious movies depicting that was the 1954 Woman’s World, (directed by Jean Negulesco). In this movie the president of an automobile company (played by Clifton Webb) sets up a competition to “fill the chair” of number-two man by flying in three contenders and their wives and then watching how the spouses comport themselves socially. He warns the candidates: “Your wife must never compete with the company.” In the end, the job is given to a man who has just kicked out his tarty, ambitious wife, thereby showing his independence from female domination.

Why were the 1950s business films such a man’s world? It is important to remember how recently World War II had ended and how readily the atmosphere of the battlefield transferred itself to the boardroom: the hierarchical chain of command, the uniform (from khaki to gray flannel suit), the code of obedience, the tension of being “under fire” and the high “casualty” rates. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit makes the shadowy presence of World War II explicit by intercutting flashbacks from the war—when the Gregory Peck character felt most alive—with his agonized Madison Avenue present, and having him say: “ One day you’re killing people, and the next you’re riding on a suburban train into work.” Perhaps the guilt of trading in a rifle for peacetime pursuits made these movies exaggerate the corporate world’s stresses at the upper echelons, even to the point of presenting the commanding executive’s burdens as lethal.

Consider the opening of perhaps the key film in the boardroom genre, Executive Suite (directed by Robert Wise). We are shown the tops of various skyscrapers while a narrator informs us solemnly that being at the top is no protection from struggle and conflict. This is followed by a title sequence over crowded street shots, and then by a curious subjective scene from the viewpoint of the chief executive, Avery Bullard(played by Raoul Freeman). The CEO accepts the obsequious greetings of his underlings, gets in an elevator, sends a telegram off announcing an executive meeting, stops in the street to hail a cab—and drops dead on the sidewalk, as the camera careens out of control.

The fifty seven-year-old Bullard is not the only executive to suffer stress-related health problems. In Woman’s World, Elizabeth (Lauren Bacall) warns her husband Sid (Fred MacMurray) that his ulcer and work habits will kill him eventually. Our first glimpse of the workaholic CEO in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (Fredric March), establishes that he has a bad heart. “You’ve got to slow down,” whines his doctor. And in Executive Suite, McDonald Walling (William Holden) swears “I’m not going to die young at the top of the tower worrying about bond issues.”

If office headquarters is the theater of war, the conference room is the killing floor. Here, grown men are humiliated, made to squirm. Patterns (1956) (directed by Fielder Cook) has a powerful scene in which a middle-aged, over-the-hill

vice-president (Ed Begley) is virtually driven to his death by the insults of his heartless chief executive  (Everett Sloan).  Patterns began life in 1955 as a Rod Serling teleplay for the Kraft Television Theater, and it had so strongly affected viewers that it was made into a movie the following year. We should recall that, in the mid-1950s, the so-called golden age of live television drama, teleplays like Patterns exerted an influence on Hollywood business movies to be more realistic and hard-hitting.

Begley’s massive heart attack right after the meeting is a sobering moment. But unfortunately, the more overtly an American film or teleplay from this era attacks the ruthlessness of corporate capitalism, the more disappointing will be its denouement. The drama has to find a way to weasel out of its critique and smooth over the differences between boss and junior executive. So the young idealist in Patterns, while revolted by the treatment of his predecessor, stays in the firm, because his “killer” boss will challenge him, and he will try to change things from within. Endings like the compromised, mealy-mouthed one in Patterns are, I might add, a weakness of the genre as a whole, and that may explain why most of these office-drama movies are not, in the end, great films.

The silly have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too Cash McCall (in which the eponymous hero is both  a ruthless tycoon and a flawlessly nice guy) and the sluggish, migrained The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit have become badly dated, while even some of the better movies, like Executive Suite and Patterns, wind themselves up into a fury and then sputter out with some empty rhetoric about the need to keep one’s business ideal alive. The main conflict in Executive Suite is an interesting one: Who better would shepherd a business into the future—the creative designer or the marketing department? But the dialogue around business ethics sounds hollow: “the good company,” “servicing the public,” and so on. Hollow, too, is the “inspirational” speech William Holden makes in Executive Suite about the need to recover high standards of experimentation in

furniture-making, which turns the tide in his favor: the board votes by accla-mation to support his dark-horse candidacy for the presidency. The climax of Executive Suite transforms the boardroom into a jury room, in effect, with a very Fifties civic lesson on the workings of democracy.  (As in Twelve Angry Men, one rousing, hammy speech can turn even the most closed minds into lovers of justice.)

From a performance point of view, many of these movies are ensemble

pieces—as befits dramas about corporate life. Executive Suite, for instance, has a wonderful cast, which includes Louis Calhern, Fredric March, Nina Foch, William Holden, Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, Walter Pidgeon, June Allyson, and Dean Jagger. As long as all the balls are kept in the air and the piece continues flitting from one subordinate character to another—as long as it remains ensemble in nature—it has a sophisticated, adult energy. As soon as it starts to taper down to the fate of one good hero (in this case, the idealistic designer, played by Holden) confronting one bad guy  (in this case, the bottom-line type, played by March) it loses its thrilling promise.

The 1950s business-film cycle reflected the extraordinary allure, the mystique that white-collar work, organization men, and corporations like IBM had for American society at that time. (The 1957 film Desk Set is tantamount to an extended featurette for IBM.) Added to that allure was Hollywood’s own nervous obsession with corporate takeovers. The reins of power were dropping from the hands of the old studio moguls, the Goldwyns, Warners, and Cohns: these Jewish ex–shmata makers with a nose for American dreams were turning over power to the

“moneymen” back East, the bankers who, it was said, knew nothing about making pictures. What made these repressed goyim tick? In a sense, the business films were Hollywood’s exploratory probe of its new masters.

From a design standpoint, the fifties offices in these movies hovered between the retro look of the Woolworth building’s cathedral of commerce or Chrysler’s art deco and a more sleek, impersonal, but progressive modernism. Executive Suite clearly demonstrates this schism: the big boss’s offices are done in a neogothic, stained-glass, plush-leather, men’s club style. The furniture that the firm had designed in its heady days appears Eames-Mies modernist, appropriate  to the Museum of Modern Art’s design collections. In contrast, its current shoddy stuff, the despised K-F line, has a watered-down Queen Anne or French Empire look, for yokels who wouldn’t know any better.

Executive Suite is essentially a film about monarchical succession, and the lavish gothic set for the CEO, this aerie, invokes unmistakable echoes of royalty. Continuous references to the “man in the tower,” that lone, lofty presence, suggest a king. Since CEOs are not given to showing off their sovereignty with ermine robes—dressing, instead, much like their gray-flanneled minions—they must evince their status by the size of their desk, their chair, and their window view.

One constant of Hollywood business films, from the 1920s to the present, has been that the boss possesses a magnificent vista of the city, which demonstrates symbolically the reach of his command. The window is also a giddy reminder of fickle plunges in fortune, as we witness in all those depression-era movies with financier suicides, such as John M. Stahl’s elegant tearjerker, Only Yesterday (1933). The relentlessly postmodern 1994 movie The Hudsucker Proxy (written by Ethan and Joel Coen), full of campy fascination with 1930s clichés, makes the temptation for CEOs to jump out the window a central dramatic point. Finally, windows are, well, windows of opportunity—points of entry for the ambitious, as for the  window-washer played by Morse in How to Succeed.

Sixties Transformations and Beyond

The 1960s, with its more debunking, antiestablishment ethos, brought an irreverent note to the business film. It started with Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, in which Bud circumvented the dead end of getting stuck in the bullpen by turning his desk into a residential pimping agency and phoning executives all around the building to readjust his apartment’s loan-out schedule.

The Apartment also made much of elevators, as the Jack Lemmon character chats up the elevator girl, played by Shirley MacLaine, in a number of memorable sequences. Elevators offer ideal opportunities for flirtation, since interactions hinge on a ready wit and occur in a limited time and space. (They can also be devilish holding pens for embarrassing encounters with enemies or ex-wives.) The lobby in which one waits for the elevator has also been a favorite dramatic space for romantic confrontation or status discrimination. In Patterns, Richard Kiley, the new man of the team, realizes he has “arrived” when the lobby captain directs him away from the hoi polloi and into the private elevator for executives.  And in How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, there is an especially lovely trio number, “It’s Been a Long Day,” about the hesitancies surrounding a pickup, in which a third party interprets the thoughts of the shy boy and girl (“Now he’s thinking . . . and she’s thinking”). The fact that the elevator may arrive at any moment heightens the moment’s poignancy.

One of the things that make How to Succeed such a refreshing office movie is the way it transcends the genre’s cant with its sardonic attitude. Here, one of the central dilemmas of the fifties corporate movie—Will our hero face up to the boss, or will he fawn and be a hypocrite?—is triumphantly resolved from the start: he will fawn, and he will be hypocritical.  And so what? The settings reflect the attitude, too.  The mailroom, where Ponty (the hero) starts off, is potentially a dead end for careers, but it is also by legend the necessary first rung for any ambitious young man. In Hollywood business films, a mailroom is not quite part of the physical office setup—it’s more like the boiler room or some other mechanical space. It is here that Ponty is treated to the wisdom of the mailroom supervisor about how to merge one’s own thoughts with that of the company brain and how to cover one’s ass. How to Succeed also has a riveting washroom sequence, which pinpoints how easily the men’s room lends itself to macho competition and narcissism. While the group of executives plots an end to Ponty’s ascent with the rhythmic song-and-dance number “Gotta Stop That Man,” Morse sings sweetly to himself in the mirror “ I Believe in You,” a tune originally sung to him by his girlfriend.

Somewhere around the late 1960s the washroom of the Crowd and How to Succeed turns into a john, with toilet stalls and urinals. In Robert Downey’s 1969 Putney Swope (depending on one’s taste, either zanily irreverent or sophomoric) there is a “pioneering” scene of two office workers sitting on adjoining toilet seats, discussing changes in the firm. Since then, we have had dozens of corporate bathroom sequences, all loaded with subtext. In The 1994 movie Wolf (directed by Mike Nichols), Jack Nicholson’s character, infected by a wolf bite, shows he has passed beyond the bounds of civilized behavior by peeing in the shoe of the man next to him. The man happens to be his back-stabbing underling, who has plotted to take his job. There is also some suggestion of homoeroticism in these bathroom peeing scenes, an inevitable side effect of the fear and desire produced by the corporate jostlings for pecking order in this “man’s world.”

Wolf is, by the way, set in a publishing house, as have been several other recent office dramas. It’s curious how overrepresented media businesses are on film, compared to their actual market share. Why so many movies about advertising firms, publishers, television stations, and newspapers? Aside from any potential glamour inherent in the media, the main reason is that screenwriters have had more experience with these milieux than with other corporations.

Lifestyle, Architecture, and Viewpoint

The 1970s proved not to be an especially rich period for office films. Business seemed to be in a lull, less glamorous. The eighties were a different story, however: the economic boom pushed to the fore a new kind of tycoon, who made millions not from manufacturing but from financial manipulations. Eighties business films rarely worried about the questions of corporate destiny and product development that had so obsessed their fifties counterparts. Rather, the focus shifted to lifestyle: business was assumed to be an amoral undertaking, and the choice was no longer between finding a moral high ground within the corporate structure and selling out, but between selling out and dropping out.

Given the emphasis on the trappings of success, eighties business movies were an art director’s dream. It should be noted that, ever since the mid-seventies, movie art directors had started to become stars in their own right—the closet auteurs of many films. (The pressroom in the 1976 All the President’s Men, for example, had upstaged the drama of politics.) The weaker the script, the more chance for the art director to leave his or her mark. And since that time, scripts have been getting progressively weaker.

Art directors of the eighties business films showed a preference for real locations, as opposed to studio sets, and they used hip, late modernist or postmodernist décor as a trope for menace. Cultural Critic Pilar Vilardas, in her article “Good Guys Don’t Live in White Boxes,” noted this pattern: “Hollywood equates modern architecture and interiors with youth, ambition, new money, power and—more often than not—evil. Modern architecture has irresistible star quality, all right, but it isn’t for nice people.” The eighties art directors made this abundantly clear by setting their Faustian dramas of yuppie ambition in chic, ultramodernist, highly stylized sets. This was true not only of the characters’ workplaces but of their chosen domiciles. Diane Keaton’s character in Baby Boom (1987) showed how ill-prepared she was for motherhood by residing in a Bauhaus condo. The high-stakes trader played by Mickey Rourke in 9½ Weeks (1986) demonstrated his sadistic character partly through the cool elegance of his loft.

This “sinisterization” of the business world can be traced back to the 1960s, when Hollywood’s countercultural hostility toward corporate power equated big business with the Mafia. In Don Siegels’s 1964 The Killers, the hit men are dressed like corporate middle managers, except they carry rifles with telescopic lenses in their attaché cases. This metaphor of the syndicate as a Fortune 500 company, run by accountants instead of colorful rogues, has been repeated in dozens of action movies since. Arnold Schwarzenegger crashes into the backroom of the casino to find not the old bordello wallpaper and chandelier of Edward G. Robinson movies but chaste designer-gray walls and austere Brice Marden–ish paintings.

From the 1950s to the 1980s another shift occurred—a movement back to the “evil” city, from which there now seemed no escape. The ordinary-Joe executives of the fifties films had invariably haled from places like Muncie, Cincinnati or Kansas City, and when they left their Manhattan office towers, they repaired to a suburban house in Westchester or Connecticut, where the June Allyson wife played catch with the son. This separation was strictly observed: as far as Hollywood was concerned, there were no native New Yorkers who held executive jobs or out-of-towners who chose to live in Manhattan. In the eighties, however, characters began taking the subway to downtown Manhattan from the outer boroughs (like Melanie Griffith in 1988’s Working Girl), while those who had already made it were the proud possessors of an arty, shiny co-op in Manhattan. Bud (Charlie Sheen) in 1987’s Wall Street is first seen taking a subway from the Upper West Side; after he has made it, he frets about the “ruin” motif of his new digs’ décor and limos to work from the East Side.

Wall Street was the key work in the 1980s business film cycle. It had a brash, insolent energy when it was released in 1987, and if anything, has improved with age. Certainly it is director Oliver Stone’s best film. It jazzes up the (potentially static) office habitat by moving the camera constantly and twitchily, using expressionistic lighting and distorting lenses, and making us want to “whistle the sets” when we leave the theater. The art direction is nothing if not self-conscious. Even if Gordon Gecko (Michael Douglas) had not told us his motto was “Greed is good,” we would know he was a moral sleaze by the impeccably cool furnishings of his office, complete with blue-chip contemporary art on the walls. This sleek, open-plan office is a far cry from the gothic sanctuary of Executive Suite. Whereas the old executive manifested power by maintaining the privacy of his working quarters, Gecko does everything in full view of his underlings. When we first encounter him, he is taking his blood pressure (shades of Fredric March in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit). Otherwise, it is startling how many conventions of the business-movie genre are respected in this otherwise innovative film: We are shown Manhattan buildings, scenes of transport, and the subway. Then we see our man, Bud, (Charlie Sheen) picked out from the crowd, squeezed into a crowded elevator, and deposited in the bullpen (now festooned with computer screens). One major difference from earlier business films is that the workplace has become decentralized: in the information age, the goal is to acquire inside information, which means Bud must often run from place to place.

One of the problems with Wall Street is that we are supposed to root for the conscience-stricken young go-getter, Bud, when our real sympathies are with the sacred monster, Gecko, who has the vitality, courage, and confidence of a Vautrin, Balzac’s master criminal. Just as many supposed anti-war movies inadvertently have a pro-war effect by enlisting the audience’s blood lust, so most filmic exposes of the evils of corporate capitalism end up appealing, like it or not, to our wildest consumerist desires. (We’ll take the Mazerati and Darryl Hannah, thank you, and somehow figure a way to finesse the ethical issues.) Symptomatic of the film’s morality problem is that it must go outside the financial office world it is portraying even to find a moral point to argue. I am referring to the schematic subplot involving Bud’s noble union-leader dad and his beleaguered airplane company.

The eighties and nineties office film developed a stock company of performers. Just as Gregory Peck, Fredric March, June Allyson, and Nina Foch had once seemed de rigueur for boardroom movies, so now Michael J. Fox stepped into the Robert Morse part of the irresistibly cute yuppie with good-ambition (as in  The Secret of My Success 1987 and the Bright Lights Big City 1988), while the evil yuppie was played time and again by James Spader ( Wolf, Less than Zero, Wall Street). Meanwhile, Michael Douglas went from a charming shark in Wall Street to a struggling middle manager victimized by Demi Moore in Disclosure, the Executive Suite of the nineties.

Since the 1990s Hollywood, in telling a business story, has seemed torn between using the viewpoint of the rising young lead or that of the middle-aged, embattled star. If it chooses the former, the tone verges on the optimistic; if the latter, elegiac. Part of the sour charm of Wolf, a movie with a good first half, was Jack Nicholson’s wearier-than-thou performance as Will Randall, a veteran executive who gets sacked. He reminded me of John Wayne in his last valedictory Westerns, which were as much about a dying movie genre as a dying way of life. When Will Randall, who has gained supersensitive hearing powers from his wolf bite, ventures into the atrium stairwell of his building, he hears all of his colleagues maliciously whispering about him from behind closed doors. The building’s public space has become a megaphone for verifying the Randall’s paranoid suspicions.

Though it is still too early to assess the nineties fully, I have detected a trend in Hollywood toward portraying the office world as a locus of trepidation rather than opportunity. The faltering economy’s job insecurities no doubt have  contributed to that uneasy atmosphere. But it has to do with set design as well: Increasingly, the characters in contemporary office movies have had to traverse large glass corridors behind mirrored glass facades. They work in huge open floors, always exposed, caught in the crosshairs of some larger scrutinizing force. There are fewer and fewer places (besides the lowly mailroom) to duck into and hide. Permeability promotes paranoia. This seems to be the real message in Disclosure, a movie purportedly about sexual harassment in the workplace but energized mainly through a magnificent retro/futurist set design. The main character, Tom Sanders (Michael Douglas) despite his relatively high status in the corporation, seems a sitting duck behind glass partitions. Not only can he be spied on physically, but his e-mail can be picked up at any time.

Vulnerable as he is to disinformation, he chooses high-tech weapons to fight back into the boss’s good graces. This detective solves the crime in question by sitting behind a computer screen and communicating with Asia, and he also braves a trip into virtual reality to bring back a missing piece of the story’s puzzle (don’t ask me how; none of it makes sense). Viewers are left with an impression of a new kind of hero, whose decentralized sense of location and destabilized sense of self leave him “free” to wander through cyberspace. No longer is the office worker attached to the city; no longer is he even necessarily urban; he resides in the “city of bits”—predatory place, to be sure. But with a little luck and a decent, forgiving, long-suffering wife tucked away safely in the suburbs, even the “new” worker can make out all right, according to this movie.

We are also seeing more films in which the hero works out of his house: the freelancer, hooked up by modem to his clients, who takes a break by warming his coffee in the microwave and having an earnest chat with his wife about their nanny problems. This is a shame: a kitchen island is not nearly so cinematically intense as a skyscraper lobby, and I begin to get cabin fever watching this domestication of the workplace. Besides, if the truth be known, I prefer the formal orthodoxy of gray flannel suits to the informal conformity of blue jeans—not to mention the old, formal power of office headquarters. Must we imagine a time when a business movie will no longer begin by panning up a tower’s facade, but by laterally moving room by room through a tycoon’s beach house?

The larger issue is that the power of place seems to be diminishing. What began with a decline in the power of public space has shifted to that formerly secure bastion of architecture, the office building. To do its job properly of dramatizing human conflict, Hollywood needs places redolent with memory to build stories around—public places to collect the crowds and office buildings replete with aspiration and futility, shared work and jostling interests.