Jobs in Movies are complicated. Not everyone can have the same job as James Bond or be a Marvel and DC Superhero. Given the sheer punishment they go through in every movie, who would really want it? It is when you clock in at the office or start a shift in a job or craft that you wish to be 007. So this list is to celebrate you.
Sales Account Manager: The split personality
The ultimate two jobs in one that many do. You sell business-to-business (B2B) solutions, and you get the honour of being at their whim for the rest of your life. We can make this job a modern-day escape story like Papillon or 12 Years a Slave if we want to go extreme. One thing we will all agree on by the end of this movie is that Sales and Account Management are two different people. This is why our protagonist has a split or delusional personality.
Revenge of the ‘Executive’ (who is not an Executive)
If you have the work executive at the end of your title (as opposed to the start) and you are earning less than 50,000 in your currency, the term ‘executive’ has confined you to a life of hard labour and a potential nervous breakdown. Sales Executive, Onboarding Executive and Business Development Executive are just some of the wonderful titles that could easily be explained with the word Sales. In this scenario, our protagonist ‘Executive’ launches a quest of vengeance against the Specialists, Managers and other potentially senior titles who robbed them of respect in the past. As Max Cady said to Sam Bowden on the Boat in Cape Fear (1991), ‘Now you and I will truly be the same’ once all the technical roles are merged into his department, and he becomes Sales Management, Executive. Now, the UK and US versions of the office tapped this reality before, but they introduced unclean elements like love and basically good people. We don’t want bad people either. We want them realistic and soul destroyed instead. It won’t be cathartic for the character. It will be for us, instead.
Your own restaurant, really?
Who hasn’t dreamt of owning their own small business and being an owner/manager? That is the devil tempting you, of course, and once you are in the restaurant business, you will feel like a victim of the Cenobites as food delivery platforms, review websites, and your own customers rip the spirit out of you before you have to ‘light a match’ in Goodfellas style. This won’t be like the Bear. This will just be some honest person who had high hopes, who got destroyed and will never come back. It’s why it will only last a season.
Doesn’t the Law look fun?
Boston Legal, LA Law, Suits, The Practice (that gave birth to Boston Legal) and even Law & Order. Isn’t the law so interesting? In court, it probably is. Researching, filing motions and the drudgery of nothing moving fast, now that is the law. Even bringing in some clients who are delinquent on their payments, and you will really wish they had been sent down. We need a really realistic, nasty legal programme (as opposed to legal drama). Broadchurch Season 2 tried (and fair play for effort) but failed. Instead, we need a legal drama from the lawyer who gets the paperwork (who was the real hero of the Untouchables) once they came away from all the shooting for five minutes. At least they might avoid being fired like Andrew Beckett.
The Competent Bodyguard
The Kevin Costner movie brought us a fantastic piece of cinema but what if our new Bodyguard does his job right and turns up professional every day? In fact, this would have been the plot of Taken with Liam Neeson if his daughter weren’t so unbelievably unfortunate.
So you have a job, and you might hate it. But what makes it worse is when movies and television shows like that horrible job look exciting, and you have to go in the next day and trade another day of life for a paycheck getting lower due to rampant inflation. I say we make the movie-going public as miserable as we are.