Heroism in a Cubicle: The Trappings of the Action Hero in the Anti-Heroic Context of the Office

International audience; I would like to focus here on a very specific case, where space is neither an obstacle nor an ally, but appears as plainly anti-heroic. To do so, I will temporarily move away from the Action genre, to turn to a narrower corpus of films. The space of the office seems opposed to the construction of heroism in every way, firstly because it is a setting that seldom appears in Action films. When heroes want to prove themselves worthy, or when a common man has the occasion to save the day, they usually do so away from their home and work place, in exotic or monumental locales (from the jungles of Commando to the Nakatomi tower in Die Hard).