ABSTRACT
This chapter examines two recent French-language films that deal with the world of work: Deux jours, une nuit (2014) directed by the Dardenne brothers, and La loi du marché (2015) directed by Stéphane Brizé. By concentrating on the individualising dynamics of the contemporary workplace, the films depict what might be described as the tactical withdrawal of government and capital. In the context of this withdrawal, the symbolic order collapses and the panoptical gaze of the disciplinary regime has been supplemented by the lure of identification, encouraging individuals to scrutinise themselves and each other for signs of weakness, incompetency or inadequacy. As the chapter shows, one common tendency in workplaces where jobs are under threat is for employees to construct a fantasy of management as an all-powerful, capricious agency that must be appeased at all costs. Read in this way, Deux jours, une nuit and La loi du marché go beyond the realm of personal drama to show how workers are exposed to what Slavoj Žižek identifies as the ‘systemic violence’ of contemporary capitalism. Although capital as an organising and controlling force has a less tangible presence within these filmic landscapes than it would have had in the Fordist era, it still exerts control as a reference to spectral, global economic forces, mediated in the workplace by bland managerial newspeak and an overbearing surveillance infrastructure.
