The professional travails of Friends' Chandler Bing, played by late actor Matthew Perry, were an acute reflection of a different office age, says Emma Jacobs for the Financial Times.
New: You can now listen to articles.LONDON: The aspirations and frustrations of the white-collar worker have been depicted by great fictional characters in novels and on the screen, notably Bartleby, the Scrivener, Revolutionary Road’s Frank Wheeler and The Office’s David Brent.between 1994 and 2004, was of course about friendship but it was acute on work too. Chandler represented the office worker whose life was impenetrable to outsiders.
As Justin Spitzer, writer and producer on the US version of The Office and creator of and American Auto, workplace comedies, pointed out to me, “Chandler was just a guy who worked in exchange for a pay cheque, but didn’t need or want his work to define him. That’s relatable.” Some like Ewen see Chandler’s career as an example of bullshit jobs, a term coined by the late anthropologist David Graeber to mean those “which even the person doing the job can’t really justify the existence of, but they have to pretend that there’s some reason for it to exist”.
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