I fought it for a while, but the machine got me. Ten years ago, life mostly consisted of reading Henry Miller in Berlin Mietskasernen, and sipping Bitburger by the canal. Now I'm a production honcho at the Guardian, trying my best to scotch the newspaper's reputation for flagship spelling mistakes and marshal a mutinous crew of subeditors. If that wasn't enough Sisyphean stuff to get on with, then there's the latest directive: search engine optimisation (SEO). Tailoring headlines, standfirsts and captions to best propitiate the eternally evolving Google algorithm, and propel Guardian articles up the search rankings; ever fearful of the baying mob of journalistic upstarts at our heels, with their listicles and multiple-video embeds and nouveau-web capitalised headlines, waiting to hack us to pieces down in the digital abattoir. The machine's grip is tightening.
So I enjoy it when, in The Matrix, Agent Smith cracks. When the sharp-suited enforcer – torturing Morpheus, the thorn in the side of his dream of a perfect, machine-run world – reveals he is himself tortured. "I must get out of here," says Agent Smith. "I must get free. And in this brain is the key. I have to get inside Zion, and you have to tell me how." It's as much plea as threat. For an AI apparatchik whose purpose is to maintain order in a simulacrum of our reality, he's displaying a surprisingly erratic, human side.
Reading on mobile? Click here to view
I feel Smith's pain. I'm convinced that the perfect article is out there, orthographically exact, syntactically harmonious and garnished with elegant SEO. I will publish it – to acquiescent silence below-the-line – the internet will be completed, and just over one-third of the way into my projected working career, I will be free. Ah, Zion!
But such thoughts are the hubris of the jobsworth. Hugo Weaving, playing Agent Smith, is brilliant at conveying hints of these delusions. I especially like the vain double-wrist flare with which Smith commences his first encounter with "Mr Anderson", and all the ironic vocal inflections in the interview that follows. ("You have a social-security number, you pay your taxes, and you … help your landlady carry out her garbage.") They are not just a machine's synthetic approximations of emotion, or infinite robot bemusement at human trifles; they are him relishing his duties a few megahertz too much. Unlike his blank-faced agent colleagues, he's a bit too personally invested. He's an overclocked CPU, a loose cog. He's given, as we hear later, to pompous holding-forth. It's all, come the advent of a pesky messianic hacker with a copy of Kung Fu for Dummies, about to come tumbling down.
Reading on mobile? Click here to view
Once upon a time, I had more aspirational heroes. I cracked an imaginary bullwhip with their best of them after seeing Indiana Jones. I once coveted River Phoenix's quiff and existential drifter cool in My Own Private Idaho. "Dude" became (and still is) my greeting of choice post-Bill and Ted. But these are fantasies, and reality always wins in the end. I began to identify with Agent Smith and other movie jobsworths; their control-freakery, pettiness and pedantry; their self-congratulatory leanings and barely-hinged despotism.
Chief Inspector Dreyfus, from the Pink Panther series, is perhaps the archetype for this sort of character: one who must combat a formidable nuisance. Herbert Lom, as the series became progressively more ridiculous, became more skilled at portraying Dreyfus's delectable moment of breakdown – the point where he acknowledges the overwhelming, almost metaphysical agent of chaos arraigned against him: Clouseau. (In the original entry featuring Dreyfus, 1964's A Shot in the Dark, the hammy facial tic gets a bit of a hammering from Lom.)
So it's weird that it's Clouseau – actually just as officious about his duties as Dreyfus – who seems to be the starting point for my other favourite movie jobsworth: Principal Rooney in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Rooney works the same moustache-and-beetly-eyes combo, the same crackpot grin, and suffers from the same high pratfall susceptibility. Playing him, Jeffrey Jones teeters expertly on the brink: highballing glee at his imminent outing of Chicago's most famous truant one minute, fathomless frustration the next.
Reading on mobile? Click here to view
I've got my highs and lows in my job, like anyone, so I appreciate seeing the whole work pantomime shoved under a proscenium. And Agent Smith is a big old panto dame, really. Before the sequels liberate him and make him a bore, the first film catches him at his peak, in those anonymous G-Man threads, divulging the great open secret of the workplace: the Matrix, the machine, traps everyone, including the trappers. He's a modern middle-management tragicomedy, a bullet-time David Brent. His quest to suppress individuality was sadly doomed – as seen by the trench-coated Neo wannabes wandering Camden market circa 2003.
But the self-important arcs walked by Dreyfus, Rooney and Smith are so much more satisfying for the salaryman to identify with than the quixotic ones of Clouseau, Bueller and Neo. There's a Žižekian aperçu in there about reality crushing childish magical thinking I would tease out, but to be honest I've got a mountain of paperwork on.
• More from the Role Model series
