About The Film
BAD BOSS THEORY
Director - Rahmin Atarod
Writer and Producer - Michael B. Neff
[Photo Left: the real Laney Dracos]
In BAD BOSS THEORY, created from a single scene in the novel, YEAR OF THE RHINOCEROS, two young government employees meet in a D. C. bar after work to debate the facts concerning the growing corruption in their own agency, and in the government as a whole. Laney Dracos, a gritty and sharp veteran of the Washington wars, attempts to convince the naive newcomer, Manny Eden, to join in her plan to resist and expose the White House regime of Ronald Reagan. Manny, however, remains skeptical. He is reluctant to accept Laney's argument due to his own ignorance, the fact that he actually hero-worships Ronald Reagan, and because his new job at the agency is too precious to lose.
MUSINGS AND FACTOIDS
The Washington D.C. agency referred to in the film by Laney Dracos as "the OWC" is based on a real government agency known as OSC, or the Office of Special Counsel.
Social Darwinism - Laney uses it as her basis for understanding the evolution of corruption in Washington. She means it not in the classic sense of an argument for superiority, but as a means to explain the manner whereby a corrupt system relentlessly weeds out those who cannot be corrupted until, as she puts it, "only the favorite scales remain."
The Scarecrow song by Alden Wellman at the end of BBT is the perfect metaphor for Manny Eden. He is the scarecrow, straw in head, the hollow man who tries futilely to protect his country (farm) from the harm wrought by the crows of corporation and corruption.
The "Presence Chamber" referred to by Laney as having appeared in a story by the Russian writer, Gogol, was actually an "audience chamber" used by a minor Czarist bureaucrat to terrify subordinates and anyone else he considered an inferior.
"Pickering and motive and nexus" - Laney is making reference to the ways in which the agency created special tests to determine the nature of a whistleblower. Of course, virtually no one could pass the test (at least, no one that mattered). For example, if the "speech" resulted in a condition of office "disruption" it was not "protected" speech, and therefore, the individual in question could not be a whistleblower.
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