Olga Ravn's THE EMPLOYEES (Tr Martin Aiken)

I know you say I'm not a prisoner here, but the objects have told me otherwise. - Statement 021

I really, really wonder if Olga Ravn is a fan of some of the same weirdass international cinema that I am, because this novel made me think of some of the strangest films I've seen. It's even, kind of, structured like they are, its narrative decidedly non-linear and divided into little vignettes we're left to ponder, rearrange, connect for ourselves into something that feels meaningful enough to be a story.

In the case of The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 23rd Century, what we are given is a collection of statements from workers on a spaceship called the Six Thousand (six thousand of what, we are left to ponder) that has taken on a collection of not-entirely-inanimate objects found on a planet on the ship's route to an unspecified destination. The statements chiefly concern the emotional effects the various objects have on the members of the crew, and appear to maybe be a sort of threat assessment, or at least to be trying to tease out what idiosyncrasies each employee, of which there are some who were born, some who were created, some who will die, and some who will never die,  has that make them more or less susceptible to these effects. 

From the very start The Employees had me thinking of visuals from some of the weirdest bits of fantasy filmmaking I've yet encountered; the first "statement," for instance,  has an employee talking about a large machine they regard as female. The employee is responsible for cleaning it and mentions that "One day she laid an egg." Immediately I was reminded of one of the more perverse scenes in Alejandro Jodorowsky's feature-length freak-out, The Holy Mountain and of course I'm talking about "The Love Machine." 

Simultaneously I also thought of the weird alien bio-contraptions in Katsuhito Ishii's Funky Forest: The First Contact -- especially once I encountered this passage:

Despite your numbering system, which I personally find reasonable indeed, I can inform you that the crew employs countless unofficial names for the objects, some more improper than others. Examples include: the Reverse Strap-On, the Gift, the Dog, the Half-Naked Bean... My own impression is that this idiosyncratic naming process is an indication that crew members feel a need to appropriate these objects in their own way, reducing the distance between crew member and object, and establishing a form of intimacy, so to speak. It's my assumption that naming in this way renders the object harmless, scaling down its strangeness and assimilating it into a reality the individual crew member can both relate to and accept, thereby facilitating coexistence with the found objects.

For illustrative purposes, here are some stills from Funky Forest, a film I still feel that not enough of you have given the chance it deserves. This first image, could it not indeed be the Reverse Strap-On? Or perhaps a parent producing a whole new generation of Reverse Strap-Ons?

This second still doesn't really fit any of the names described in the passage above, but in its Cronenbergian intimacy between a strange machine and a person, it uniquely depicts visually the kind of relationship some of the Employees have to the objects on board the generation ship.

If you someday find out that a certain cute house on a certain cute street in Casper, WY was mysteriously stricken by bolts of pure fury and burnt to a cinder, you might later learn that Olga Ravn is not, in fact, a fan of either of these films and is deeply offended by my comparisons. But then again, you might not.

One might also consider the sub-genre that shows up more in TV and video games of "mundane objects imbued somehow with weird/supernatural powers or properies" like The Lost Room, Warehouse 13, or Remedy's magnificent video game, Control. Since the objects under discussion seem, most of them, to be at least partly alive, though, I go for the Funky Forest imagery.

Another work of art The Employees brought strongly to mind as I read it is something Ravn might find a more flattering one to be compared to: the epic poem by Nobel Laureate Harry Nilsson and the 2018 film adapted from it, Aniara, which features a technology that swamps the entire sensoria of passengers on an accidental generation ship with detailed recordings of natural scenes of Earth that was. It's only when this artificial nostalgia machine finally burns out that the passengers finally face the reality of their fate and go mad from existential dread. This doesn't quite happen aboard the ship in The Employees, but it always feels like a possibility as many workers express longings for scenes and experiences in the natural world of Earth that are no longer available to them, and reveal that they have sort of incorporated some of the more evocative objects into their fantasies of walking through a forest or sitting by a babbling brook.

Those of us from Earth, we can hardly talk to each other. We're weighed down with memories of where we came from and what we left behind. Seeing the others on the ship, speaking to them, all it does is make me unhappy.

While most of the statements give us little glimpses of life with the objects, some invite us to ponder other matters, as when an employee who is evidently of the "created" category wonders just how meaningful that status really is:

I know I'm only humanoid and that it's not the same. But I look like a human, and feel the way humans do. I consist of the same parts. Perhaps all that's needed is for you to change my status in your documents? Is it a question of name? Could I be human if you called me one?

In an age where some of us seem to be agitating for up to (or maybe even more than; it all depends on how bigoted one is) half of us to lose our status as fully human, this bit hits pretty damned hard, as I'm sure it was meant to. 

It hits even harder in a statement or so later, when another -- or possibly the same* -- employee tells us "You can't cry, you're not programmed to cry" in response to the employee's reaction to the news that they will be allocated less time with their human co-workers : and that you want me to stay with my kind." One now wonders -- are these four categories of worker inherent in the individuals' beings, or assigned/imposed by Authority? Is the difference between those who will die and those who will never die that some are functionally immortal, or that they've been artificially designated for their fates?

As is probably inevitable with a storytelling structure like this one, we finish The Employees with possibly more questions than we started with. What happened to the Earth? What does the Employer want with the objects? Is the distinction between humans and humanoids even real (one of the few questions that kind of get answered, but only kind of)? Is this actually a meaningful mission, or just an experiment to see how much people will put up with? What are the objects? What's the deal with Cadet 04? What the hell happened in the canteen? Who was Dr. Lund and where is he now? Is he the speaker in Statement 160?

When does Tadanobu Asano show up?

Olga Ravn, you've got my attention. 

*The statements themselves are given unique individual numbers, presented in sequence but not in their original entirety (some numbers are missing) but the employees aren't.