I recently saw The Corporation, that documentary from a couple of years ago that uses the DSM-IV psychological manual to diagnose the modern corporation as psychopathic. The film was interesting — kind of long, kind of all over the place, but a nice compendium of a lot of very complicated issues and problems attendant on our late capitalist situation. (By the way, I think “late capitalist” is a bullshit phrase reeking of moldy Marxist determinism, but I also kind of love it, with a raised eyebrow of course.)

Corporations are freaky things, largely it seems because their current legal structure essentially forces them to seek to maximize shareholder value to the exclusion of all other priorities. All you lawyers please correct me on this, but I gather that shareholders can actually sue a corporation if it consistently does something that doesn’t maximize value, even if that something is refraining from slashing jobs through massive layoffs or gouging consumers for widgets or whatever. The whole scenario gives you the impression of these rapacious automatons prowling the earth, guzzling natural resources, emitting pollution, and crushing workers underfoot as they single-mindedly pursue their only goal: profit.

One aspect of corporate activity that The Corporation didn’t really cover to my satisfaction, though, was what it’s like on the inside of a corporation, not as a great titan of industry but, like most of us are or have been or will be, as a worker bee in the cubicle hive. That aspect of corporate life was covered by another movie, of course, one that is far more classic than The Corporation: Office Space (or, as IMDB tells us it was known in Spanish-language release, Cubiculos de la oficina).

What’s awful about the world of Office Space, of course, is the absence of individuality in the workplace, the place where the characters spend most of their waking hours. Through mechanisms of control, from TPS reports to scowling bosses and secretaries to the threat of being downsized by a management consultant, Initech keeps its employees’ behavior as beige as the cubicle walls. It’s only slightly different for Jennifer Aniston’s character, a waitress at a TGI Friday’s-like chain who must wear a minimum number of tacky pins on her uniform for the correct impression of “flair.”

While The Corporation explores the scary consequences of unaccountable corporations for those of us who are not part of them, Office Space is about the slow horror of selling your soul for a steady paycheck inside one of these beasts. In a way, it’s the same issue of power, control, and accountability that lies behind both sets of problems. Corporations, accountable only to the profit imperative, often engage in vile behavior: exploiting workers, pillaging the environment, bribing government officials, what have you. But the same profit imperative drives them to seek a high degree of control over their workers: Well-ordered workers are efficient workers, and efficiency = profits.

In 1914, Henry Ford decided to more than double what he paid his factory workers, from $2.30 to $5 a day. He did this to reduce turnover and its associated costs. And because he paid more than twice what his competitors did, he could demand more control over his workers’ lives. Ford’s infamous “Sociology Department” made home visits to his workers to make sure they were sober and upright, with the proper kind of nuclear family and the proper consumer products.

No more home visits for today’s workers, of course. But a friend of my friend Andrew’s was recently fired for some offhand, sarcastic venting about her job on her MySpace blog. And that’s just a repeat of the famous Dooce (who used to come over to my apartment in college to watch the latest Blur videos on MTV), who was fired and became a blogland celebrity for writing about her job.

The blog-related firings are just another example of corporate control of employees speech. Most of it is not so dramatic. I had a job once that was remarkably like Office Space, down to the Indian (actually Bangladeshi) coworker and the boss who was always hounding us to file these insignificant weekly reports. What was at first surprising and then freaky to me was the extent to which we had to mouth our company’s (and our client’s, a large federal agency’s) sad mythologies: We and our client each had a “mission statement” and  “vision statement” (I could never remember which was which) as well as a raft of shibboleths that no thinking person could mouth with a straight face. You wouldn’t get fired for failing the frequent tests of your willingness to give lip service, but you could certainly get reprimanded and eventually passed up for raises or promotions. The top-down structure of this kind of speech (and subtle policing of speech) reminded me of nothing so much as a rather authoritarian religion.

The speech control is of course just a proxy for mind control, which is why Office Space is so frightening, especially when you have reason to think your fate might be your very own Initech cubicle somewhere.