By Dahlia Schweitzer
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Cindy Sherman, 'Office Killer,' 1997
Last year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a retrospective of the works of American photographer Cindy Sherman that then made its way to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Best known for her Untitled Film Stills, Sherman’s work since the 1970s that is judged to be some of the most successful work produced by any American photographer. She has quietly uprooted conventional understandings of portraiture and art, questioning a range of issues from identity to feminism. Critics around the world have examined Sherman’s photographs in great depth. However, when it comes to discussing Office Killer (1997) – which, as her only film, arguably plays a significant role in Sherman’s body of work – there is only silence. Not only does a close analysis of the film allow us to appreciate the messages underlying all of Sherman’s work, but a survey of Sherman’s work leading up to the release of Office Killer demonstrates an evolution which demands the insertion of her feature film in its rightful place.
The story of a lowly and modest copywriter who wreaks havoc on her workplace at Constant Consumer magazine, killing off those who upset her (or the status quo), Office Killer is truly the tale of underdog makes good. However, on a much more complex level, Office Killer also reflects the major cultural and social shifts which were taking place in America during the late 1990s, combining our fears of technology and contagion with the noir aesthetic. The film’s noir-ish opening credits blend violins with modem dialing tones, projections of names over printing presses and office paraphernalia, ashtrays, marked up articles, and computer keyboards, interspersed with bits of indeterminate red goo, the lurid type rippling across the screen, as if a projection from a copy machine. The lettering doubles and mirrors, fading away and lighting up, shifting and swirling beneath red liquid. The sequence here is tense and lurid, with a definite sense of drama and foreboding, ‘as if the titles themselves were on the hunt for yuppie prey’ as critic David Geffner put it. Right from the start, the titles are indicative of contagion, as well, morphing like a virus adapting to a new host. They may not preview the plot, as some titles do, but rather, they act as a preface, setting the tone for the rest of the film.
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Poster for ‘Office Killer’ (1997)
Office Killer shares many characteristics with noir, but it is not stereotypical of the genre. If 1940s noir represented insecurity about people’s places in the workforce and at home during a time of great transition, in the 1990s things were even more dire. Bodies were literally and metaphorically disappearing as a result of AIDS and technological developments. Communication became abstract, anonymous. A pervasive sense of isolation began to spread, exacerbated by a growing realization of the vulnerability of human boundaries to contagion and contamination. What makes Office Killer a noir film is not only its tale of exploited workers and a vengeful protagonist in a bleak and oppressive urban environment, but its depiction of a complex anti-hero searching for her place in the world, avenging the wrongs done to the things and people she cares about, preserving and rearranging bodies in an environment that speaks to warmth, nurture, and order rather than cold, productive, anonymous uncertainty.
Sherman uses these same motifs of noir to depict the troubled world of Constant Consumer magazine, and, by proxy, America of the late 1990s. We have the skewed angles, the dominant darkness and shadow, and, lastly, the intoxicating lure of crime. It is not just any kind of crime, though, but one common to film noir, a crime perpetrated by an antagonist who commandeers funds at the expense of the exploited worker. In Office Killer, Norah, the magazine’s manager, is the antagonist embezzling funds from the magazine as the staff is laid off and downsized, workers disappearing into their cubicles or their ‘home offices.’
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Cindy Sherman, ‘Office Killer,’ 1997
Before the 1990s Sherman had already built an important body of work examining the fundamentals of appropriation, identity, and gender. By the time she reached 1997, her work had not only explored certain elements of femininity and physicality, but she had grown comfortable enough with these elements to remove and destroy them, to toy with and manipulate them. Sherman, like an expert puppeteer, controls and plays with these fundamental aspects of society and behaviour in order to explore our core dynamics. Her first major series, the Untitled Film Stills, examines 1950s female iconography from the viewpoint of the 1970s. The 1950s were a decade of significant change and cultural shift, defined by issues ranging from civil rights to women’s liberation, the Cold War and the Korean War, and a climate of general conservatism and fear, so it is of no surprise that it would play such a pivotal role in her artistic development.
Born in New Jersey in 1954, Sherman spent her childhood in Long Island, immersed in the television and culture of the era. The 1950s combined worries of nuclear war with dreams of a better life, conformity with capitalism, amidst a growing blitzkrieg of images that sold everything from washing machines to cigarettes, bras to Cadillacs. What better time to be watching (and absorbing) television? What better to way to understand the constant consuming at the heart of American life? What better way to sow the seeds that would germinate into the Untitled Film Stills? The context of her early years not only influenced the Untitled Film Stills but also all of Sherman’s later work. Key aspects of what it means to be a woman – established in our cultural vernacular in the 1950s – are evident in Sherman’s work today.
In 1980, Sherman’s aesthetic underwent two significant changes. She began shooting in colour, and she began using projected images of locations behind her, rather than shooting in actual physical locations. The effect of the projections not only created a shallower depth of field, thus flattening the image, but it also began Sherman’s move towards isolation and alienation, another trend which would surface later in Office Killer. Her women were no longer allowed outside, much as the characters in Office Killer also appeared trapped indoors.
A year later, another significant change occurred – Sherman’s images went horizontal, like a movie screen. Commissioned by Artforum magazine, this series was called the ‘Centerfolds.’ These images were explicitly internal and indoors, claustrophobic and dramatically lit. There was no pretense of an outside world, however artificially implied. Sherman’s facial expressions throughout the series were also more intense and more emotional than in her earlier work. Unlike our conventional expectations for centerfold-type imagery, Sherman often looked lonely, upset, afraid. A darkness was creeping in.
This darkness would take a firm hold in her next series, a set of fashion images commissioned by fashion designer Dianne Benson for Interview magazine and by French fashion house Dorothée Bis for French Vogue. These images were also atypical for their intended use. Described as ‘silly, angry, dejected, exhausted, abused, scarred, grimy and psychologically disturbed,’ they were a response by Sherman to the confines and expectations placed on women by the fashion world. Sherman herself says about the experience: ‘From the beginning there was something that didn’t work with me, like there was friction. I picked out some clothes I wanted to use. I was sent completely different clothes that I found boring to use. I really started to make fun, not of the clothes, but much more of the fashion. I was starting to put scar tissue on my face to become really ugly.’
It is not simply that the photographs were shot with overly bright, unflattering light, or that the poses were awkward and sometimes angry. What makes this series stand out is the model herself. Sherman’s role, the characters she was playing, was evolving. Not only did she grotesquely parody the kind of image normally found in fashion magazines, subverting restrictions commonly imposed on women in terms of their appearance and behaviour, but she began to suggest that the perfect body which had appeared in her earlier work, the perfect body on the pages of every fashion magazine, was only one half of the equation. The other half was the other extreme – the grotesque, the disgusting, the imperfect — the internal. The faces we normally see on the cover of Vogue, the models in their editorial spreads, Photoshopped and styled to perfection, are nothing more than a shell concealing what lies beneath. This surface, still present in Sherman’s early photographs, was now ‘dissolving to reveal a monstrous otherness behind the cosmetic facade.’ In Sherman’s own notes to herself for the series, she wrote phrases the opposite of what we would expect to find in connection with a fashion spread, like ‘throwing-up, drooling, snot running down nose, bag-lady like; end of bad night; fat person; shooting up, snorting coke; bleeding, dying, etc.; but clothes perfect looking.’ It is clear that Sherman’s fascination is with the tension between extremes, between the messy and the neat, between the impeccable outside and the bloody inside, with the struggle to conceal our humanness with fashion and cosmetics.
The journey that began in the 1970s would take a pronounced turn with the ‘Disasters’ series, as Sherman abandoned the figure completely in favor of ‘the disgust of sexual detritus, decaying food, vomit, slime, menstrual blood, hair. These traces represent the end of the road, the secret stuff of bodily fluids that the cosmetic is designed to conceal.’ The body had deteriorated, the façade had been destroyed, the internal made fully external. Sherman had finally exposed the messy reality of not only what it meant to be a woman, but what it meant to be human. Sherman had removed the mask, chipped away at the armour, and taken a hard look at the wounds, guts, and gore that make us real.
This, in so many words, is the road to Office Killer. A journey that began with the neat black and white 8×10s of the Untitled Film Stills grew more and more graphic as the images got larger and larger, until they filled an actual movie screen. Insides were turned outside as we moved from depictions of heartbreak, loneliness, and longing to body parts and gore. Bodies were sliced open to expose the reality of their insides. The cosmetic facades evident in Sherman’s earlier work are eviscerated in order to reveal the raw authenticity beneath. Sherman not only moved from the outside in, but from the abstract and conceptual to the real and tangible, from the metaphoric equivalencies of femalehood to a literal depiction of the body’s collapse, from frozen moments in time to eighty-two minutes of narrative, character, and metamorphosis.
The decaying corpses in Office Killer are bodies literally turning inside out, the ultimate internal exposed without the pretense of perfection, an uncomfortable confrontation with everything we hope to conceal and avoid. It is not only that the bodies got bigger, but that in Office Killer we get the sound and the movement, the before, during, and after – and we get to watch the decay.
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