American Job (1996)

 

Director: Chris Smith

Screenplay: Doug Ruschaupt, Randy Russell and Chris Smith

Cast: Randy Russell, Matt Collier, Ed English, Gary Ganakas, Dan Layne, Eric Lezotte, Dave O'Meara, Charlie Smith, Tom Wheeler

Ephemeral Waves

 

Some may be aware of American Movie (1999), the follow up to this film from director-future producer Chris Smith, which was a documentary on Mark Borchardt, a micro budget filmmaker from Wisconsin who, in a deadpan humorous tone, strived to produce and make the no budget Coven (2000). Almost no one has likely heard of American Job, a film I openly admit to only seeing finally due to someone leaking a VHS rip online, doomed to a rare ultra obscurity in spite of the follow-up from co-writer/director/producer Chris Smith becoming a cult hit and warranting interest. If Smith however was able to release this again, I would recommend we all pay for a copy, with only the caveat that you have a taste for the bleakest (and blandest) of humours in regards of the existentialism of minimum wage work.

Randy Russell, playing an unnamed character I will just call "Randy" too, is a thin bespectacled young man drifting in his twenties. Job searching, which I can attest to at least many years unemployed trying to even find work, is a nightmare, but even I look to this depiction of minimum wage wincing, more so as unfortunately American Job  decades later has not aged at all in what it depicts barring technological tweaks to work environments. It is difficult to avoid politics in a review like this, but the film is so deliberately beige in tone that it is not really politics based on parties, but a greater existential one of why things work as they do. You will watch the doldrums of work here, and know how little Randy and real people would be paid for similar jobs, and it would force one to contemplate even with a sick humour how society actually functions.

It is weird how minimal paid work can yet be some of the most important that you need to have in a functioning society. Yet here work is purely abstract, even with its listless tone being humoured forcing one to consider half these jobs to feel strange if you were to stop and reconsider why they exist. Randy, as he travels on, is as befuddled by how everything works as much as willingly drifts onto a new job. What you get here, in the netherworld of middle Americana, feels like an exhibition of the strange social mechanisms of the modern day, or frankly even early human civilisation. Even if a telephone marketer for insurance could argue their work is important for society, the job Randy is on in the end, as depicted, is so bland I am glad that it questions the validity of many. Even if fast food is viewed by some as more than just a luxury of the modern day, someone like Randy has to work in one, the image of long hours and the possibility no one has changed the fry cooker as unpleasant as it questions the nature of the work. It is neither a sense of business being inherently evil, unless it directly sacrifices lives or the environments, but when in this context, everyone is doing a job that really does not make sense, does not get paid well or feels like accidental purgatory, as one point Randy does read a book, one which leads to one of the bleakest jokes. This even evokes Franz Kafka, an author arguably bleaker than this film, on one of his more perversely happy days, the first job we see involving a machine, among many using chemicals for plastics likely harmful to person or tree, to make plastic pellets. It is a machine which only allows seconds between action to rest and is apparently making these plastic pieces for "testing reasons" with no further detail. It could a machine for the sake of manufacturing for all we know.

The sense of bleakness, the VHS rip watched adding a further blank inertness, is contrasted by how in the right mood you could find this funny. Director Chris Smith clearly does not paint even the managers in this world as bad in principal, only likely cogs in a machine where everyone is middle age or aimless younger men, and the work is just work without any sense of context. Environments look bland and even if working around what was practical in terms of sets and casting of women, the fact the strip club Randy is taken too at one is a blank room in red light is apt, as men watch aimlessly on at a woman nearby, only seen by her feet and for all we know not even nude. It is with a perverse sense of modern life also being humorously banal in a societal way as well. Randy in his own way defies the world around him as much as follows it as everyone else, from ignoring the money pools among multiple staff for lottery tickets, which he tragically ends the film not doing by being tempted into buying one from a store, to sneaking a trip into the bathroom to eat what looks like a dough-like substance. Considering as well, at the fast food restaurant, we as he looks as surprised as day's food left is deliberately ruined so no one can have it, you do have the moments of seeing business as evil when it is purely mechanical without any grip of reality to it, wasting resources for the sake of a place which, least in this film, the staff are as likely miserable as the customers we never see.

Here the passions are found, in a graveyard shift team, in the guy who feels you can recycle coke bottles by cutting them in half to have funnels and cups, even if he realises there would be less demand for funnels. It is a film, if you said it was a comedy, which would get many blank faces in response to this, with its static scenes being documentary-like to the point of blankness, where even the commentary on an amateur level you can make on its themes feels perverse due to its deliberately inert nature. Based on scenarios by Doug Ruschaupt, Randy Russell and Chris Smith together, you can argue American Job baring little details is a film about nothing, for the prepared compelling and testament to its virtues in how I want to revisit American Movie. Among documentaries I have seen which were praised, only to feel slight when I viewed them, I want to revisit American Movie, and feel these two films by Chris Smith may actually need to exist as a permanent double bill, as one provides the inert day-to-day, whilst American Movie's Mark Borchardt now feels like a person to idolise. Better to make low budget films whose titles are pronounced "oven" when you can, regardless of budget, than to merely drift through life.