Titles
at the beginning the film Bartleby tell filmviewers
about the strange life of Herman Melville, who was born in
1819, achieved fame by writing adventure stories, and then
lost favor with the publication of his novel Moby Dick
(1851), and his literary genius was also unrecognized in Bartleby:
The Scrivener (1856). Since he could not earn money as
a writer, he was for nineteen years a clerk for the New York
Customs House, and he died unknown in 1891. Directed by Jonathan
Parker, who updated the noir tale to the late twentieth century,
the film remakes two earlier films of the short story--a 1970
American film and a 1976 French film version. In the 2002
version of Bartleby, the Boss (played by David
Paymer), manager of a Public Record Office that principally
files and doublechecks public documents, provides numerous
voiceovers. His office is a small zoo of employees, notably
a secretary Vivian (played by Glenne Headly), who tries to
seduce men; macho man Rocky (played by Joe Piscopo), who brags
of female conquests; and overweight Ernie (played by Maury
Chaykin), who prefers an honest answer to the conventional
"Fine" when asked, "How are you doing?"
As the workload of the office is increasing, one day the Boss
decides to take on an additional worker. After dictating a
snappy help-wanted ad, he asks Vivian what she thinks of the
ad; when she says that the ad does not properly describe the
job, he asks her to rewrite the ad and send it to the newspaper.
However, her ad so demeans the position that only one applicant
shows up-Bartleby (played by Crispin Glover). When the Boss
interviews well-dressed and well-groomed Bartleby, he discovers
that the unusual man formerly worked at the dead letter office
of the post office and became out of work when the office
closed. Bartleby is hired. He appears to be the first to report
to work, exemplarily files 9-5, and is still at work when
everyone else has left for the day. However, one day the Boss
assigns a simple task to Bartleby, who declines politely,
saying, "I prefer not." Thereafter, while filmviewers
laugh uproariously, Bartleby says a lot of "I prefer
nots" at the Boss. What does Bartleby prefer? He enjoys
staring at the air conditional vent in the ceiling for long
periods of time. The Boss tries every possible strategy to
get Bartleby to snap out of his strange behavior, to no avail.
He even finds that Bartleby is sleeping at the office and
living on small amounts of snack food. Ultimately, the Boss,
desperate to shake Bartleby without summoning the police,
decides to move the office, thereby marooning Bartleby. But
Bartleby, who had been using the office as his home, now shifted
to the public toilet in the same building as the original
office. When the new tenants encounter Bartleby, they call
the police, who evict him bodily and drop him off near a soup
kitchen. When the Boss finds out where Bartleby has been taken,
he realizes that the man could not possibly cope on the streets,
so he goes to rescue Bartleby. By the time he arrives and
brings him some food, Bartleby drops dead. But the film has
a coda to make the story more autobiographical of Melville.
The Boss next decides to write up the story, which he refers
to a literary critic. The critic tells him that the story
is unpublishable, but the Boss insists on the literary merit.
Finally, the literary critic insists that he leave her office,
since she has an appointment, whereupon the Boss says "I
prefer not," and the Kafkaesque story ends. Clearly,
Melville was a genius who crafted the prototypic hero (and
antihero) for modern dramatic films--the obsessive-compulsive.
He started with Captain Ahab, then Bartleby, but of course
Melville must have known introspectively that he was himself
obsessive-compulsive. Several profound themes run through
the story. First, we see that the modern office, a creature
of the Second Industrial Revolution, has relatively boring
work, which either creates deranged personalities who enjoy
the routine or those who sublimate their ennui with extracurricular
sex connected with or bragged about at work, an insight anticipating
Freud. Second, we get a glimpse of the life of the homeless,
who are helped only if they, too, conform to bureaucratic
channels that put them on the street in the first place. Third,
the unexciting labor, filing at the Records Office, is a paradigm
for the capitalistic age of specialization and division of
labor, begging for a Marx to lead an overthrow of those who
would create such occupations of alienation, which are the
majority of jobs that enable most ordinary people to survive.
But perhaps Bertrand Russell summed up the message best when
he said, "Man is the only animal with an infinite capacity
for boredom." MH
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