Rage Against the Machine

By June Pulliam

01/17/2005

Fowler, Christopher. Breathe: Everyone Has to Do It. Surrey, UK: Telos, 2004. 102 p.

Breathe is an example of an emerging subgenre of horror, the corporate horror tale, which envisions a world where large institutions become vast, sentient entities that use human beings for fodder, and ultimately, cannot even be controlled by their human makers. Fowler's novella is reminiscent of the work of Floyd Kemske and Bentley Little, writers who have become well-known for their own stories about characters who rage against the machine in all of its forms. SymaxCorp, the evil corporation in Breathe, is the embodiment of the soul-less corporate entity that many of us swore in college that we would avoid working for, a creature who sucks the lifeblood from its employees in the name of increased profits and world domination.

Breathe begins with a description of the building itself, setting the reader up for a sort of post-modern haunted house tale. SymaxCorp's office tower itself is a dark foreboding edifice that should be as off-putting as an abandoned house where a well-known murder took place. Instead of being a monument to human endeavor, the SymaxCorp's building is a place where "workers come, do the job, and get the hell out. . . . for how can you be comfortable in a building where the windows don't open ? Where the walls reflect back your lonely image?" However, the workers do enter the building regularly, unlike the old abandoned house where most people have better sense than to go inside, as the tower is not unique, but instead, the latest of many buildings of its type, "monolithic cathedral[s] of industry designed not for the benefit of the individual, but for the unification of the masses." Employees have come to expect this sort of oppressive environment which crushes the spirit in name of productivity. This is precisely the chilling mission statement of SymaxCorp.

SymaxCorp allows businesses to increase productivity by standardizing the working environment. This is accomplished by artificially inducing a sort of sinister homogeneity in the workforce whereby employees are reduced to the status of battery hens squatting out a uniform product. But this homogeneity isn't limited to requiring employees to adhere to billions of rigid and arcane rules or to work at a consistently rapid pace. It also includes requiring employees to minimize their own personalities, even their own bodies, so that they aren't too fat, too ethnic, too dark or even too female. One employee is even mandated to go on a diet, not to prevent any obesity-caused illnesses from raising the companys cost of health insurance (this is the U. K. after all, and unlike the U. S., everyone has health insurance!), but because her employer considers her too plump to be an effective worker.

This pursuit for homogeneity creates a toxic workplace, where employees and management are a huge dysfunctional family. The groups mutually despise one another, but are bound in their unpleasant relationship by a need to survive. On his first day of work, Ben comprehends the toxicity of the workplace as he meets Fitch, his new supervisor. Fitch discourages any sort of personal contact by rebuffing Ben's request that she call him by his first name, as she doesn't favor the personal touch, and she assures Ben that he'll never be the son she never had. The sphincter-tightening Fitch is not an anomaly at SymaxCorp, but rather, the embodiment of the entire corporate culture. Employees aren't even allowed to talk to one another while on the job, and security cameras are mounted at workstations to detect even the slightest sign of fraternization.

On his first day at work, Ben quickly discovers that the SymaxCorp tower is a sick building. As he enters the structure, Ben can feel its atmosphere changing him, making him feel uncomfortable in his skin. A receptionist describes her own headaches that produce searing pain only moments before she blacks out at her workstation. Upon reviving, she tells Ben that this happens all the time. Other workers get nosebleeds or experience a general malaise, and so much electrical current surges through the walls that at certain places, metal objects can be bound to their surfaces and spun.  Nevertheless, people don't quit in droves, but instead, allow their bodies to accommodate a variety of assaults on the corpus and on the spirit, and even more surprisingly often experience bursts of almost supernatural energy and loyalty when they are cocooned in the SymaxCorp tower.

Inevitably, Ben befriends several employees who have become company outcasts for actively fighting their assimilation into the great corporate machine. All attempt to discover what really happened to a recently terminated employee who seems to have dropped off the face of the earth: his beloved car is still in the parking garage and no one is able to reach him at home. As Ben and his fellow workers get closer to the truth, the SymaxCorp's building itself is becoming insane, causing the more loyal employees to do everything from Xeroxing their butts to engaging in cannibalism.

For all of its supernatural trappings, the setting of Breathe is such a familiar, real life horror to us all, that any action that takes place within such an environment is nearly redundant. The things that stay with me from Breathe (or from Bentley Little's The Store, about a Satanic Wal-Mart [is that redundant?] or Floyd Kemske's Corporate Horror Series) are not the particulars of the plot, but of the setting. And I believe I am not alone with my experience with this emerging subgenre of horror, the corporate horror tale. When I've used Bentley Little's The Store as a text in my horror literature classes, students are far more interested in discussing their own bad work experiences, World Trade Organization, NAFTA and CAFTA than they are any of the usual literary themes. Breathe follows this pattern. It strikes a nerve not because of anything that happens when SymaxCorp's product malfunctions, but because it makes readers painfully aware of the degree of surplus repression that we each willingly endure. What we allow others to do to us, or sometimes do to ourselves, in order to make a living and find a place within the world, is the most frightening thing of all.