Murk-Work: On Recent Cinematic Depictions of Professionalism

Things are always bad for you if they’re unprofessional. You always say, oh, that’s so
unprofessional as though there’s some definition of professional that’s also a moral
imperative for how to behave. I don’t even know what professional is anymore.
—Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows (2014), p. 34

Previews

NOWADAYS MOST ADULT AMERICANS are either functional cogs in the labor force,
seeking gainful employment, or undergoing vital interactions with institutions staffed by
professional knowledge workers. The latter can be found in government agencies large
and small; hospitals, clinics, labs, or other health care centers; schools; and various
indispensable offices (some of them currently remote or virtual due to the pandemic). A
basic, practical expectation of “professionalism” informs our varied encounters with such
IT, commercial, or life support systems: the attribute of one who does her job efficiently,
even impersonally. Whatever their field, professionals know their stuff, dress the part,
speak the lingo, and accomplish their assigned tasks without prejudice or fuss.

It doesn’t take too much contemplation, however, to start acknowledging the
concerns of Yolandi in Miriam Toews’ novel quoted above. Everyday business, as well
as the recruitment, hiring, and advancement of new workers, all reveal that standards of
professionalism are oftentimes more honored in the breach than the observance. Dealing
with the “professionals” who staff your medical insurance provider, internet service
company, or any technobureaucratic state agency is like slipping into a Dilbert cartoon;
the frustrating iterations of microaggressions and time-wasting tend towards the
Kafkaesque. Furthermore, multiplied many times over, individual ineptitude, corruption,
and avarice—America’s new unholy trinity—result in the widespread systemic failures of
essential establishments of all stripes. One may turn to local and national branches of
government, education programs, the utilities and deep state responsible for our
crumbling infrastructure, or our skewed, dirty financial sector; there are too many cases
to count. In short, professionals aren’t getting the job done anymore, yet their reach and
ranks seem to be growing. While so-called “competence porn” such as The Martian or
Iron Man presents hyper-focused, diverse squads valiantly solving tough problems with
cool flair and hacks, the appeal seems to be based on wish-fulfillment: if only real issues
were being taken care of!

Consideration of the term’s etymological roots may help us to grasp some of
professionalism’s worrisome underlying contradictions. To profess originally meant
taking the vows to join a religious community; one definition of the noun form,
profession, is “a calling requiring specialized knowledge and often long and intensive
academic preparation” (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, 4a). G.B. Shaw’s caustic,
cynical quip that “all professions are conspiracies against the laity” gets at a key
substantive component of the concept: at some level, professions exert monopolistic
control over their fields. Profess derives from the Latin fari, ‘to speak,’ as does the
related confess. The word itself then contains mixed elements: the professional follows a
calling, or has developed a mental skill with which to earn a living, or is compelled to
pronouncements stemming from her know-how. For example, once upon a time,
university-level instructors professed pearls of wisdom to their eager and attentive pupils.
(Yes, that really happened.)

My claim here is that several thoughtful, challenging films have been doing
interesting cultural work by helpfully problematizing the idea of professionalism at our
present paradoxical moment. It is, arguably, a time when global capitalism has become
ascendant yet exhausted, when institutions are data-driven yet dysfunctional, when
venerable ways of ordering our personal and professional lives are strained to the
breaking point in light of new paradigms and pressures, and work itself may be at a
tipping point. The four mainstream movies I’ll be treating are all action-packed and plotdriven,
to be sure, but they’re simultaneously almost allegorical explorations or
deconstructions of the contested ethos of today’s professional. (Note: the body of this
essay contains plot spoilers.)

I. Leviathan

First Fisherman: I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale; ’a plays
and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devour them all at a
mouthful. Such whales have I heard on a’ th’ land, who never leave gaping till
they swallow’d the whole …
—Shakespeare, Pericles (2.1.29-34)

Blackfish (2013) is a documentary directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite about
captive killer whales, also known as orcas. Much of it consists of interviews with
disillusioned ex-trainers from SeaWorld, a commercial amusement park featuring
assorted marine animals, interspersed with footage of killer whales behaving aggressively
with their handlers. Its tragic protagonist is the male orca named Tilikum. He was taken
from his mother and their Icelandic pod in 1983 at about two years of age and spent the
rest of his days in captivity. During his unnatural confinement, he was involved in the
deaths of three humans, the last being SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau in 2010.
(Tilikum died in 2017; orca males in the wild often live decades longer.)

In their normal ocean habitats, orcas typically live with their extended families.
Different groups in different bodies of water display habits that seem very much like
unique cultures and languages, such as how they communicate and hunt. They’re clearly
bright: for example, they team up to wave-wash in order to tip seals off ice floes, and
they almost certainly have richly emotional inner lives (the scenes of killer whale
mothers mourning calves who’ve been taken away are wrenching). Watching captive
killer whales who experience periods of solitary confinement and inhumane maltreatment
reminds me of nothing as much as slavery.

The trainers, meanwhile, find themselves caught, sometimes literally, between
their sincere, empathetic desire to help take care of these magnificent, intelligent animals
and the diktats of management. As presented in Blackfish through evidence brought up in
the legal proceedings after Dawn’s death (when OSHA, the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration, placed limits on human-whale interactions at SeaWorld shows),
those in charge held thoroughly unrealistic notions about killer whale behavior. Instead,
managers in their corporate suites, beholden to the profit motive, stuck to a party line in
which “lurking problems” didn’t exist and incidents could be papered over as “trainer
error.” This kind of disdain for reality reeks of bath faith. It seems, however, like an
absolutely typical expression of neoliberal capitalist ideology. (In an apt ironic
coincidence, the term used by Iraqis for the shady businessmen and power brokers who
grow immensely rich at their country’s expense is hitaan, meaning ‘whales.’) Workers in
myriad fields go through similar situations all the time, when whistleblowers who call for
reforms or call attention to problems or issues are punitively and severely punished.
Articles about those on the front lines getting fired because they spoke truth to power
about better safety equipment and responsible health measures appear almost daily in the
press—it’s something that’s more olds than news.

Largely because of the notoriety due to this documentary, however, things
changed for the better and orcas are no longer captured in the wild nor swim with humans
in shows. One conclusion must be gratitude for the professional reporters out there
practicing muckraking journalism. In spite of the myriad stories crying out for exposés,
though, they too are fast becoming an endangered species as outlets for serious news
reporting decline. Another, more disturbing conclusion suggests itself as well: at present
we are all swimming with voracious whales.

II. Thar She Blows!

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
—W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” line 3

Another movie based on a real-life tragedy resulting from Man’s Promethean
attempts to control Nature for profit is Deepwater Horizon (2016), directed by Peter
Berg. It dramatizes the events of April 20, 2010, when two key “fail-safe” devices on an
oil drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana failed, and the entire
structure caught fire. Of the 126 people onboard, eleven died, while an estimated four
million gallons of oil were spilled before containment. BP (British Petroleum), who
leased the rig, was found to be recklessly at fault and paid fines and reparations of almost
$20 billion, while Transocean, which owned and operated it, was found negligent and
paid about $2 billion. Two BP supervisors were indicted for manslaughter, but charges
were dropped. The film centers on Mike Williams, the Chief Electronics Technician
(played by Mark Wahlberg). He foresees the dangers and acts heroically after the first
explosion to save others, including the injured rig chief Mr. Jimmy Harrell (Kurt Russell)
and the pilot Andrea Fleytas (Gina Rodriguez).

Early on, a scene at the Williams household foreshadows the actual catastrophe.
Helping his daughter prepare for her class presentation about her father’s job, Mike
inserts a straw into a can of pop and pours honey down into it, analogous to how oil
drillers pump a special kind of mud into their wells to prevent blowouts. Unfortunately
the pressure buildup is too much and pop spews out. Probably because I’m a former
chemical engineer and now by trade a scholar of early British literature, where such
emblematic scenes were common, I really liked this bit. The actual disaster moved
President Barack Obama, the nation’s technocrat-in-chief, too: his memoir of his first
term, A Promised Land (2020), reveals that he viewed the catastrophe as something of a
controlling metaphor for our toxic political ecosystem.

The entire film, I contend, functions like a medieval morality play—a clear-cut
drama of good vs. evil. The subcontractors running the rig calmly tackle problems headon
and stay at their posts even as the flames are encroaching. (The infernal conflagration
verges on being a symbolic hellscape.) Before the explosion, in marked contrast, the BP
corporate executive Mr. Vidrine (John Malkovich, in a performance oozing slime),
ignores warnings, safety protocols, and “good oil field practices.” Beholden to the
corporate imperative to extract maximum profit, he and the other suits rely on “hope as a
tactic” as one blue-collar laborer remarks.

That is not enough, and the second half of the movie follows a basic rescue plot.
Viewers are likely to wish that the irresponsible BP executives won’t be saved; that
frontier justice will prevail and they’ll be left behind or tossed overboard. As institutions
shed their legitimacy and the structural biases of the justice system are revealed, this may
turn out be not so much wish-fulfillment as foreshadowing of extralegal vigilantism vs.
the intolerable, excessive kleptoplutocracy of the 1%. Time will tell. The very end of the
movie shows pictures and video of some of the actual crew on the Deepwater Horizon
who perished that day—a reminder that simply doing a good job has increasingly become
a dangerous occupation.

III. El Que No Transa, No Avanza

Yet where it is said, that man is appointed to a warfare upon earth, it is seconded with
that, ‘His days are like the days of an hireling.’
—John Donne, Sermons (Feb. 29, 1627/8; P&S VIII.vii, p. 176; Job 7.1)

While ostensibly an action thriller, Sicario (2015), directed by Denis Villeneuve
from a screenplay by Taylor Sheridan, may be the most thought-provoking of the films
discussed here. The term “sicario” is Mexican slang for a hitman; it derives from Sicarii,
the zealous Jewish freedom fighters who opposed imperial Roman forces and stabbed
their enemies with sicae, small daggers. The sicario of the film is Alejandro Gillick
(Benicio del Toro). He is a former Mexican prosecutor whose interests in revenging his
family’s killing by the Sonoran cartel dovetail with those of a U.S. government task force
fighting the war on drugs, which is led by Matt Graver (Josh Brolin). The heart and soul
of the drama, though, is young FBI Agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), who is “volunteered”
to provide support to the team. Her rude awakening, I’d suggest, amounts to a
parable of 21st-century professionalization.

Some of Sicario’s depth starts to appear early on in a great, weird scene where
Kate is interviewed and recruited. It is as fraught and nuanced as the de facto job
interview Beowulf undergoes at Heorot Hall (see lines 320-641). Along with her partner
and backup Reggie Wayne (Daniel Kaluuya; both English actors have impeccable
American accents), she’s called in for a meeting with her supervisor and several other
unidentified authorities. Out of their hearing, we learn that Reggie won’t be considered
because he has a law degree. Running through her training and experience, Graver asks
her if she is married and if she has children. She replies she’s divorced without kids. Such
prying personal questions are now strictly forbidden during job interviews. Nevertheless
they’re still posed more or less overtly all the time, as anyone who’s been on the market
will attest. In fact many incisive commentators argue that the entire hiring process largely
entails a fan dance in which ideological fit, appropriate class status, and the right sort of
diversity, rather than actual merit per se, are what are actually being considered. (These
practices are common enough to have been eponymized in unofficial sociological codes:
Simpkin’s Law holds that workplace neophytes are mainly evaluated not by their abilities
but by their willingness to suck up to and flatter their veteran colleagues and supervisors;
Weil’s Law states the top-notch tend to hire other experts, but second-raters hire thirdraters,
third raters pick fourth or fifth, and so on until quality diverges towards minus
infinity.) Of course, advancement still largely depends on nepotism and connections, as
numerous commentators have shown. In this case the lawyer Reggie was disqualified
because the squad will be engaging in illegal activities, while Kate’s single status is
desirable because of the dangers involved. Lastly Kate notices that unlike the other suits,
Graver is wearing flip-flops, an ambivalent signifier of independent individuality,
perhaps, but also indicative of a certain cavalier attitude about workplace norms. (The
first view of Graver in the sequel is not coincidentally a close-up of his sandals.) The
importance of wardrobe with respect to professionalism cannot be overstated, and almost
all establishments enforce dress codes, even if they stress bohemian, counter-culture
uniqueness. Up-and-coming professionals always learn to dress the part.

Kate does “volunteer” for the spot, which take her into intense, murky situations:
first, seizing a human source in Juárez, Mexico, who’s brought back to Texas for
waterboarding, then a bit later placing a block on the narcotraficantes’ American moneylaundering
in Arizona. At this stage, the aims are thoroughly unclear. Kate asks “What
the f*ck are we doing?” and later states that “I want to follow some semblance of
procedure.” Her superiors mollify her concerns somewhat, mostly by assuring her they’re
playing a deeper game with higher-value targets at the end of the road.

These Machiavellian machinations lead to another turbid, labyrinthine chapter.
Reg, Kate’s quondam partner, platonic friend, and “six” (he watches her back, or 6:00
position), takes her out for a drink and some decompression. (The film probably could
have added more scenes with the über-gifted Kaluuya in the supporting role; his rapport
with Ms. Blunt is both enjoyable and believable.) At a country and western bar they meet
a mutual acquaintance, Tad, a Phoenix Police Officer. Kate takes him home but stops the
hook-up when she notices that the wrist band in his pocket is the same kind the money
launderers use to wrap up large bundles of cash. Tad, it transpires, is a corrupt cop on the
narcos’ payroll. They fight and Alejandro (who’s been tailing Kate and staking out her
apartment) intervenes and rescues her. Afterwards Tad is lowkey tortured by Alejandro
and Gravers for key information regarding the cartel’s infiltration of local law
enforcement.

This complex sequence intrigues me for the ways it blurs boundaries between the
personal and professional. (It also gets props for moving beyond 20th-century clichés
such as the ingénue having to fend off banal advances from creeps in power, or having
the bright, attractive young female underling either sleep her way to the top or fall for her
corrupt, compromised, and married boss.) Here the stress and uncertainty of the illdefined
mission are taking a toll on Kate; Reg mocks her inattention to personal hygiene
as only a good friend can: “I think the bra situation is the least of your problems. Because
you look like shit. What? One t-shirt a week?” And her drunken encounter with Tad is
mostly just a way to let off some steam and relax a bit, nothing like an actual romance
brewing. But it also ties in to her professional identity in ways that are both intimate and
problematic. She was “used as bait,” as she complains; not only is it damaging to her
physically—Tad was in the process of beating the snot out of her when Alejandro crashed
in to save her—but it also causes an uneasy mixing of nominally distinct elements of her
personhood. Her fragile sexual attractiveness coexists uncomfortably next to her role as
“good team player.” And her status as blindly manipulated, expendable object to her
leaders, as a potentially replaceable part of a machine, should unsettle those who pay
attention to how humungous multibillion corporations (or titanic government entities)
throw wage-slaves under the bus if they have the gall to ask for safe working conditions
that would minutely decrease their exorbitant profiteering or smooth operations during
the global covid-19 pandemic. Most of our jobs do not actually put us in the crosshairs of
international drug cartels (I presume), but we are probably working in offices or other
institutional spaces where “private lives,” things logically without any bearing whatsoever
on competency or achievement, probably do affect our work both on a day to day
basis and when it comes to promotions or advancement. In fact that’s so much the norm
that it’s honestly hard to think of places where it isn’t a major factor.

Sicario also hinges on a certain structural duality. Kate’s fall from innocence
provides the main emotional focus and much of the plot, but in the end Alejandro is the
title character (similarly Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Julius Caesar has Brutus, “the noblest
Roman of them all” at its heart; the Emperor is assassinated halfway through.) In the final
act the team clears a border tunnel used by drug smugglers in order to infiltrate Alejandro
along the supply chain where he can proceed to shoot the cartel’s leader, Fausto Alarcón,
the kingpin responsible for the murder of Alejandro’s wife and daughter. Kate finds out
about this extralegal targeted killing and that her purpose all along has been to have an
FBI agent involved since the CIA can’t run domestic ops on its own. Again, she has been
used. In the mop-up afterwards, Alejandro holds a gun to her head and advises her, “You
would be committing suicide, Kate,” by refusing to sign a statement affirming that
“everything was done by the book.” Finally he warns her to leave this line of work and
seek out a quieter life: “You will not survive here. You are not a wolf, and this is the land
of wolves now.” She does not appear in the sequel, in fact, in which Alejandro’s
commitments are further strained and tested, and which ends with him recruiting the
border rat who almost killed him into the trade: “So you wanna be a sicario? Let’s talk
about your future.”

Interestingly enough, some researchers such as Rebecca Biron suggest that in
Latin America, one result of the global drug trade has been to make sicarios a growing
profession. In fact, in the cultural or cinematic imaginary, movies featuring assassins
have often taken up questions about the principles of professionalism. Hired killing is, in
a way, free market exchange refined to its quintessence. As Biron notes, murder work
“takes the form of poetic justice for those who reduce all value and values to capital and
raw power. And in a social field where murder has become a way of life ‘that’s life’ also
refers to perhaps the only way in which the fully human—understood as radical freedom
and creative performance—comes alive … when the sicario kills his capitalist bosses.” It
is the ultimate transactional, liminal, zero sum game.

The literal and symbolic borderlands of the drug trade may well be as shadowy
and gray as depicted here. Acknowledging the level of dramatization, it may be that
ordinary professionalism now takes place in a similarly murky, treacherous, dangerous,
and hostile landscape. If there is an implicit moral, it may be that successful professionals
have become amoral predators.

IV. It’s a Ho’ Wide World

The question isn’t if you’re a prostitute; the question is, Who’s yo’ daddy?
—Noelle Van der Tuin

The last film, to be touched on only briefly here, might be the weakest
aesthetically, but it and others of its ilk nonetheless have a significant underlying
message. Like Deepwater Horizon, this one, Hustlers (2019; directed by Lorena Scafara
and based on an article by Jessica Pressler), depicts true events. In this case a group of
strippers and prostitutes in New York, led by Ramona (Jennifer Lopez) devise a scam
whereby they drug and fleece their clients, many of whom are rich, jerky princes of Wall
Street, by sprinkling ketamine and MDMA in their drinks and stealing from their credit
cards, usually by charging vast sums and giving their club a kickbacks. While their rise
and inevitable fall—the classic arc of the American crime flick—provide narrative
structure, Ramona’s maternalistic tutelage of her young protégée Destiny (Constance
Wu) supplies the emotional center. (It’s also significant that the dancers are subcontractors,
like the blue collar operators of the Deepwater Horizon, reflecting the casualization
of labor where the surplus value of the gig economy flows upwards to fat-cat investors
and financiers.)

After a while the girls are caught and themselves “charged” with crimes. It turns
out that there have been a plethora of films about call girls, strippers, ecdysiasts,
courtesans, and other kinds of sex workers, from the “classics” Pretty Woman and Risky
Business to The Girlfriend Experience, Perfect Date, Byzantium, and The New Romantics
more recently, plus the workplace comedy Support the Girls about the working/class
struggles of waitresses in tight, skimpy outfits at a fictional restaurant like Hooters. (As
an aside, a favorite recent screen moment was the scene in The Big Short [2015] of a
thoroughly incensed Mark Baum [Steve Carrell] haranguing a half-naked dancer about
prudent, fiscally responsible mortgage investments during his firm’s fact-finding mission
to Florida prior to the 2008 housing market collapse.)

Besides providing obvious titillation, this batch of movies resonate because they
imply that at some level prostitution serves as the most apt metaphor for professionalism
today in our new Pornutopia. This isn’t totally new, either. In the early twentieth century,
during another iniquitous, inequitable Gilded Age, American intellectual William James
lamented “the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess
Success. That—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success—is our
national disease.” Many may well ask themselves: What is complete professionalism if
not wholesale selling out? At the end of Hustlers, Ramona delivers a little speech on this
theme: “This city, this whole country, is a strip club. You got people tossing the money,
you got people doing the dance.”

Conclusion

Sir John Falstaff: ’Tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation…
—Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part One (1.2.210)

All of these mainstream movies challenge the status quo insofar as they reveal
how the global economy depends on the exploitation of people and natural resources. Not
everyone, of course, plugs away in such unfair, unhealthy, and stressful environments.
Some, like teachers in Finland, still enjoy the privilege of doing rewarding jobs in healthy
environments. Such positions, however, are becoming a diminishing minority. And it’s
also no doubt true, first, that many watched these films—except for Blackfish, which is
obviously agenda-driven—simply to be entertained by the action, and second, Hollywood
directors and screenwriters are not academic cultural critics of the Frankfurt School.
(Actually, though, so many Jewish-German émigré intellectuals and filmmakers,
including Theodor Adorno and Billy Wilder, settled in Los Angeles during Hollywood’s
Golden Era after World War II they called it “Weimar on the Pacific.”) Nonetheless,
people who make movies are attuned to hot-button societal conflicts.

Hence, as the conditions under which millions toil worsen, and the version of
capitalism in place here and now grows harder to justify and more obviously subject to
searing critique, such depictions seem increasingly relatable. In an age of pandemics,
swathes of hopelessness, and deregulation, the evidence is all around us that workplace
concerns have truly, literally, turned into matters of life and death. Likewise, everyday
encounters with clueless yet credentialed professionals (or P.I.N.O.’s, professionals in
name only) who are defined by their deficiencies are increasingly laying bare the
structural weaknesses of our post-merit labor market, where ineptitude and systemic
failures at the micro and macro levels are fast becoming normative. We should certainly
be thankful for and appreciative of the stalwart, redoubtable efforts made by countless
health care providers, scientists, educators, and others doing critical jobs, but we should
not neglect to notice that it’s all turning into a cracked funhouse mirror of a functioning
society. We should not, that is, ignore how the system likewise leads to computer
engineers tracking and monetizing our personal info for Big Data monopolies, sales
teams marketing opioids to drive up stock prices for Big Pharma, or hypocritical and
overpaid administrators developing the new corporate university by aggressively
marginalizing academics.

Indeed, professionalism has become a Janus word, an Orwellian term that actually
frequently signifies unprofessionalism. These films ask us to think about what’s working,
or not.

Further viewing

The Apartment (1960); The Devil Wears Prada (2006); The Favourite (2018); His Girl
Friday (1940); Hot Fuzz (2007); How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying
(1967); In the Company of Men (1997); Inside Job (2010); The Man in the Gray Flannel
Suit (1956); 9 to 5 (1980); Office Space (1999); Set It Up (2018); The Silence of the
Lambs (1991); Silkwood (1983); Training Day (2001); Working Girl (1988).