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Ben Stiller, workplace auteur

The director of Reality Bites, The Cable Guy, Zoolander, and Severance is a consistent critic of how American labor works

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August 10, 2023

But it might surprise you to learn that Ben Stiller has directed several culturally significant films about the American workplace, and particularly about creative labor, spanning the past three decades.
Reality Bites (1994) focuses on the beginning of the student loan crisis, centering on a group of recent college grads who're in the familiar jam of being financially strapped and overqualified for most jobs. Most of these grads are under no illusions that they'll get a job that allows them to be creative, but Lelaina (Winona Ryder) believes she'll be the exception to the rule and translate her filmmaking skills into a career.
As part of the brainwashing, fashion designer Mugatu (Will Ferrell) explains the benefits of using child labor to manufacture his clothes. Here, Stiller is doing nothing short of critiquing the labor conditions of fast fashion, implicating modeling as part of that exploitation.
Severance (2022) brings together classic Stiller themes: alienated creative labor and the physical comedy involved in working too hard. In another self-read, Stiller's making a show for Apple, while at the ametime lambasting the tech industry's tendency towards exploitation. Severance is a dystopian vision of the much coveted "work-life balance" made literal. What would it be like to actually leave your memories of work at the office? Well, it would be a nightmare.
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