(Cindy Sherman, USA, 1997,
82 minutes)
Cindy Sherman has been photographing herself in various cinematic modes since the 1970s, so it only seemed fitting when she turned to directing in the 1990s, but Office Killer, her first and only feature film, defied expectations in ways that weren't especially welcome at the time.
First of all, she turned to horror, and instead of something hip and arty, like Michael Almereyda's Nadja from just a few years before, she made a smart, if lurid B picture, the kind that might have played on a grindhouse bill in the 1960s or '70s--and that's hardly a knock. In retrospect, the lack of pretension seems refreshing, but that isn't how critics saw it in the 1990s.
As a film critic, I'd rather evaluate films than criticism, but whether you consider hers a smashing success or not, 25/100 ("splat!") at Rotten Tomatoes and 5.2/10 at the Internet Movie Database just seems mean.
as a younger woman
Fortunately, the tide has been turning over the past 30 years, and screenings of the new 4K restoration have expanded from the art house to arts venues, like the Museum of Modern Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art--in addition to the expected theatrical suspects--the same institutions that have displayed Sherman's photography in the past.
Unlike those photographs, though, she cast someone other than herself in the lead. In light of Carol Kane’s filmography, especially Joan Micklin Silver's Abraham Cahan adaptation Hester Street--for which she received an Oscar nomination--it seemed wise to cast an experienced actor, unlike the director, who has never attributed her varied characterizations to "acting." It could be seen as a step in that direction, though the expressions in her work tend to be ambiguous, the better to let observers decide for themselves what she's saying and what her characters might be thinking.
Granted, Office Killer, like some of her photographs, is as much satire as horror, though critics responded more to the blood and guts than to the perceptive take on office politics.
On the other hand, if she had released the film after Office Space or the original UK version of The Office, she might have also been dinged for unoriginality. Instead, she beat them to the punch, though something similar could be said of Jill Sprecher's 1997 non-horror Clockwatchers, which also focused on female office workers and garnered more respect on the festival circuit than in regular release.
Just as Sherman didn't cast herself, she didn't write the screenplay, but hired notable talents to transform her story idea into a feature. Tom Kalin, who made a splash with the Leopold and Loeb-inspired Swoon in 1992, co-wrote the screenplay with journalist Elise MacAdam and Todd Haynes, another architect of the New Queer Cinema, though only Kalin and MacAdam receive on-screen attribution; Haynes is credited with "additional dialogue," even as several reviews and film listings describe him as a co-writer.
By 1997, Haynes had already directed two full-length features, Poison and Safe, while Kalin wouldn't direct another until Savage Grace, another deadly drama, with Safe lead Julianne Moore.
Christine Vachon--and Pamela Koffler--who named Killer Films after Office Killer, produced all four features. If I wouldn't describe Office Killer as a queer film, it absolutely would not exist without these queer collaborators.
Sherman's debut begins as Constant Consumer magazine, beset by declining ad sales, cuts costs by reducing full-time jobs to part-time and distributing computers for remote work. Kane's Dorine, caretaker for her mobility-impaired mother (Alice Drummond), isn't exactly thrilled about spending even more time at home–"I hate her!," she declares in voice-over.
This part of the film reminded me of Daniel Mann's Willard in which Bruce Davison also plays a bright, hard-working loner with a demanding, bedridden mother (Elsa Lanchester!) and an asshole of a boss. Like Dorine, he's a ticking time bomb, but while she's a cat person, he's…a rat person.
While some, like Norah (Jeanne Tripplehorn, who had recently appeared in Waterworld), the office manager, treat her with respect, others, like Kim (Molly Ringwald, relishing her bitchy role) and Virginia (Fassbinder ensemble player Barbara Sukowa), the publisher, make little effort to disguise their contempt.
Dorine proceeds to divide her time between home and office. She's working after hours one night when Gary (Cyndi Lauper's guy David Thornton), another of her more condescending colleagues, is accidentally electrocuted while trying to stop her new computer from buzzing. Anyone else would be horrified, but Dorine isn't anyone else. "You are not a very pleasant man!" she upbraids the newly-minted stiff. Though she does call 911, she hangs up without saying a word, shoves his body onto a cart, takes it down to the garage, puts it in her car, and drives away, presumably to dispose of it.
Unlike her gossipy, bed-hopping colleagues, Dorine masters email in a flash–to the extent that she can imitate other people. They express concern when Gary stops coming into the office, so she finishes his assignments and sends updates from his address, assuring them that he's just working from home.
Though she inadvertently contributed to his demise, it emboldens her to take a more direct approach going forward, and she proceeds to eliminate most everyone who has ever done her or the magazine founded by her late father wrong.
Granted, Dorine gets so fired up, she even takes out a few innocent bystanders. Sherman handles this in a way I found more humorous than not, but it might have been a bridge too far for some 1990s viewers.
There's also a victim that doesn't fit any of these categories, and it's his interest in pornography that appears to set her off. In flashbacks, Sherman introduces Dorine's problematic father (played in a persuasively lascivious manner by Eric Bogosian). He has everything to do with her skittishness around men, women, and even the most innocuous physical contact, since she visibly flinches when anyone touches her on the arm or shoulder.
In taking charge of her environment, after a lifetime of ill treatment from colleagues and family members, Dorine changes both inside and out. At first, she sports dorky buns on each side of her head and crookedly drawn-on eyebrows--Sherman, who drew them on each day, expresses regret in the exclusive Vinegar Syndrome interview that she didn't do a better job.
With each kill, Dorine's confidence grows, and she incorporates items from each female victim's wardrobe, like a pair of chunky gold earrings and a pearl necklace. She even lets her hair down in all senses of the term, while wearing her new acquisitions brazenly. The fact that no one notices proves just how invisible she has been to her coworkers for the past 16 years.
If you've seen J. Lee Thompson's Happy Birthday to Me, you can guess what she does with all of the corpses. I won't give the game away, other than to say that, as Covid-19 proved: some people aren't meant to work from home, which wasn't common in 1997, but now makes the film seem prescient, especially in conjunction with a dying print publication, an overburdened caretaker spending more time on a relative than herself, and the replacement of phone calls and in-person conversations with email. Just add Slack, Zoom, smart phones, and laptops, and this could be today.
If Office Killer were a different kind of film, cops might come sniffing around, but before things get to that point, Dorine comes up with a solution. Granted, Kim suspects her from the start, but she can't prove it, not least when Dorine finds a way to keep her as far from the action as possible.
The epilogue borrows a trope from 1944's Double Indemnity–though it could be coincidental–except Billy Wilder was limited by the production code. Even Daniel Mann, in Willard, provided the kind of ending with which the censors would approve, but Sherman, by way of her collaborators, provides an ending for a new era, specifically the one that gave us Cypress Hill's "How I Could Just Kill a Man," Nick Cave's Murder Ballads, and Sonic Youth's Goo with its Raymond Pettibon-designed spree-killers cover.
Another 1990s phenomenon: Sherman's shift from fine art to commercial filmmaking around the same time as several other NYC gallery stars. Robert Longo, her former partner, adapted William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic in 1995, David Salle adapted the play Search and Destroy the same year, and Julian Schnabel wrote and directed Basquiat, a portrait of the late graffiti artist-turned-painter, in 1996. Coincidentally enough, Longo and Barbara Sukowa--though now divorced--were married during the Office Killer shoot.
All four attracted experienced actors, producers, and distributors, but poor reviews and box office results doomed three, whereas the Oscar-nominated Schnabel, a better filmmaker than fine artist, kept going, and his new Netflix film with Oscar Isaac, The Hand of Dante, opened in Seattle on Friday.
I don't believe it benefited Sherman, the only woman in the group, to be associated with other feature films that were described variously as "trash," "shabby," "desultory," "off-putting," "slack and derivative," "undramatic and unexciting," "breathtakingly derivative," and "a disaster in every way," but that's what happened.
Thirty years on, it's easier to appreciate her film for what it is rather than what it isn't, and it bears closer comparison with other chillers about lethal loners, like Willard, George Romero's Martin, and especially Lucky McKee's May than anything with pretensions towards grand artistic statements.
Not everything works perfectly, but a talented, game-for-anything cast goes a long way. Kane, Tripplehorn, Ringwald, Sukowa, and Michael Imperioli as a kindly computer tech all deserve credit for taking chances on an inexperienced director, especially after working with heavy hitters, like Hal Ashby and Martin Scorsese, though Tripplehorn, in her open-hearted interview, acknowledges that she approached Sherman to let her know she would do literally anything to be able to work on her film. She says she loved working on it, and has maintained a friendship with her ever since.
The other extra features include a freewheeling conversation between Sherman and Ringwald, a detail-rich interview with cultural critic Dahlia Schweitzer (Cindy Sherman's Office Killer: Another Kind of Monster), a superfan like Tripplehorn--who once wrote to the artist for career advice and proceeded to take it--and a commentary track from programmer and film historian Heidi Honeycutt (I Spit on Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies).
It's a great package, well worth your time and money, though I regret that none of the other principal players got involved. I hope it's because they were too busy, and not because they regret their participation in the film.
Carol Kane, above all, really delivers, since it's always clear through her body language and vocal inflections what Dorine's thinking, a quality she's brought to such diverse roles as the sweet, timid Gitl in Hester Street--who also loosens her hairstyle by the end--and the sensual, forthright Carla in Between the Temples. She's also consistently entertaining, frequently quite funny, and among few performers able to master a character who so fully transitions from a "freaky little mouse," to quote Kim, into something else entirely--and if you really want to see Kane get freaky, Kier-La Janisse favorite The Mafu Cage, also directed by a woman, is the film for you.
In Sherman's conversation with Ringwald, with whom she appears to have forged another long-term friendship, she lets it slip that she might finally be open to directing another feature. Whether she does or not, I'm glad she's finally getting the accolades she deserves. Not all one-shot directors have been so lucky, and if you've ever worked in an office, you're likely to relate to Dorine on some level, whether you care to admit it or not--and it's probably for the best that you don't. At least not on the company Slack.
Office Killer is out now on Blu-ray/UHD via Vinegar Syndrome. Additional features include an interview with cinematographer Russell Lee Fine (Pamela Koffler's husband) and video from Jeanne Tripplehorn's personal archives.
Images from the IMDb (Carol Kane in closeup and with Alice Drummond plus Eric Bogosian, Molly Ringwald, and Barbara Sukowa), International Center of Photography (Cindy Sherman; no photographer credited, but presumably a self portrait), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Daniel Schlachet and Craig Chester in Swoon), Stephanie Berger / The Hollywood Reporter (Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo at the Kitchen), and R.L. Terry ReelReview (guess who).
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