I love Ikuno Naka’s and Garima Jaju’s film State of Address. I have my reasons. They’ve something to do with McLaurine Pinover. Who is McLaurine Pinover? McLaurine Pinover is Director of Communications at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in the USA. McLaurine Pinover is busy firing federal government workers. Elon Musk wields the chainsaw. McLaurine Pinover is the chainsaw. Part of. On the face of it, McLaurine Pinover has nothing much to do with State of Address or the offices and reception room at the Delhi Development Authority, the state government body for subsidised housing and urban planning in Delhi, where the ‘action’ in State of Address apparently takes place. Yet for me, McLaurine Pinover has everything to do with it. And State of Address has a lot to do with her. Albeit unwittingly, I guess. McLaurine Pinover makes me worry for State of Address because if McLaurine Pinover (or any of her fellow travellers, human or algorithmic) ever get to see (or ‘see’) State of Address, then ‘This,’ they might say, ‘is a good example of what we’re up against! (Or would be if we were doing our thing in India.)’ I’ll get to what they’re up against in a moment.
I’m in love with McLaurine Pinover. That’s a lie. Fake news. I’m in love with the videos that someone who goes by the name of ‘McLaurine Pinover’ posts on Instagram. All of them? No. The ones I love to hate to love the most are the ones she posted on Instagram on the day 20 of her colleagues were fired. McLaurine Pinover’s #dcinfluencer vids. McLaurine Pinover’s fun ‘moments of mixed patterns’ vids in which Mclaurine Pinover advertises clothes (in her office, at work, on the government’s dime). McLaurine Pinover swishing around the room, blowing kisses at the camera, at us. Chaste kisses. Nothing ‘salacious’. McLaurine’s a ‘good’ ‘girl. A good girl that likes to have fun. Good, clean, lucrative fun. McLaurine’s on commission. McLaurine Pinover’s on a mission. On the same day she posted the vids, McLaurine Pinover sent an email to federal employees that said: ‘As part of the Trump administration’s commitment to an efficient and accountable federal workforce, OPM is asking employees to provide a brief summary of what they did last week (in five bullet points)… Agencies will determine any next steps.’ (Blasey, L & Faguy, A., List weekly accomplishments or resign, Musk tells US federal workers BBC 23.02.25.) Ominous. The Director of Communications at the Office of Personnel Management is on a mission to weed out waste, corruption, inefficiency, and ‘irrelevance’ at work. One of the ways in which this is done is to endlessly recycle and embed in the popular imaginary (so far as there is a unified popular imaginary) the idea that the public sector per se is not only emblematic of ‘waste and inefficiency’ but is that and only that.
State of Address – like most films – could be about so many things. Which is to say it could be spun or instrumentalized in so many different ways.
State of Address is an anthro-art doc. A fly-on-the-wall slow film. Shades of Chantal Ackermann (From the East.) Errol Morris (Vernon, Florida.) James Benning (Twenty Cigarettes.) So what’s it all about? What kind of story is State of Address? There’s the rub. State of Address – like most films – could be about so many things. Which is to say it could be spun or instrumentalized in so many different ways. In 2025, in the age of McLaurine Pinover, in the age of propagandising AI media ‘slop’, in the age of the demonization of the public sector, this is quite troubling, and also very interesting.
If I were to spin it – one of the functions of any review – then perhaps I’d begin by saying something about the relationship between State of Address and the idea of banter at work. I like banter. I like doing it and I’d like it if more people talked about it. Interrogated it. Critically. Anthropologically. In view of that, in view of what I want from the film, maybe I’d say something like this: The ‘us’-ness of the two male administrators in State of Address, their ‘relatability’ (to us), is partly invoked by the way that they speak and by what they speak about. The one joshing the other about his age (‘Wear an identity card! “I’m a senior citizen – I don’t look old but I am.”’ Laughs.) Banter! Which irrespective of the job itself or its relative value within the work place constitutes a small act of defiance. Banter is an interruption. It defies the forms that need filling out, ‘now, as a matter of urgency’. The decisions that need to be actioned ‘immediately!’, at the Delhi Development Authority. Banter is a way of asserting a degree of autonomy over the conditions of labour. Banter is taking an unsanctioned break. Banter is a distancing device. Banter distances the worker from the specific demands of labour whilst at the same time enabling the worker to engage with other workers as something other than simply another ‘worker’, another reified effect of an often more or less identical job description. Banter is subversive. (In State of Address, it’s also the preserve of men. This is not to say that women workers at the Delhi Housing Office don’t engage in banter – I have no idea whether they do or not, or if they do, when, where, or how. But it is to say that women don’t do it in the film. The men banter; the woman on reception ‘works’.) State of Address could be a film about banter. A celebration of banter. It’s not implausible. Is it? It could be spun like that. Couldn’t it?
McLaurine Pinover banters too. With us. But McLaurine’s banter – her chat, her spiel – is a sales pitch. McLaurine sells clothes. McLaurine sells herself. Brand McLaurine Pinover. And when she does it, she’s selling out the government. With great enthusiasm. McLaurine is screwing the public sector. With great enthusiasm, a big smile and a swishy skirt. McLaurine Pinover is an entryist. A senior government official who hates ‘big government’. It’s OK though because McLaurine Pinover has a proper job. I told you, she’s an influencer. Contrary to what CNN says, that is her proper job. Being Director of Communications at the Office of Personnel Management is McLaurine Pinover’s ‘side hustle.’ CNN et al assume that McLaurine Pinover is stupid because she posted influencer videos at work, in the middle of a ‘weed out waste and corruption’ campaign. But I don’t believe that. No, McLaurine Pinover is deadly smart.
To realise its ideological potential – its potential for the political right – the meaning of work in State of Address has to be be re-written, reinterpreted, re-reviewed and in so doing reconstituted as an image of consummate failure
McLaurine Pinover knowingly trivialises big government because she knows it deserves it and she wants ‘us’ to know that she knows it deserves it too. She wants us to know that it deserves it. This is the state of her address. McLaurine Pinover is a performance artist. A good one. Marina Abramovic could learn a thing or two from McLaurine Pinover.
If from the point of view of a Jeff Bezos or an Elon Musk, the ideal work place is one in which surveillance is absolute and labour controlled absolutely; where every moment is to be ‘seen’ and accounted for; where the relationship between the well-being of workers and the efficiency of the work place is, in the age of the increasing obsolescence of actual human workers, becoming increasingly irrelevant, then the somewhat redemptive image of work in the public sector in State of Address (according to my reading of it) presents the Bezosians and Muskians with a problem.
Indeed, the absence of any visible signs of extreme anxiety or extreme pressure (on the male ‘characters’!) and the absence of technologies of surveillance which this implies, or could be taken to imply – whether surveillance of a purely technical kind (the absence of cameras, with the ironic exception of the film camera itself, staff surveillance software etc.), or whether in terms of the absence (or suspension) of technologies of self-surveillance, which typically manifest as feelings of guilt, fear and inadequacy, stimulated by the worker’s failure to meet endless impossible-to-satisfy-or-anticipate production targets – is anathema for the likes of Bezos and Musk (and the interests they represent).
Clearly the relatively pragmatic fantasy of work represented in State of Address – the one represented by my reading of it and one that may or may not have much, if anything, to do with the actual conditions of work at the Delhi Development Authority – is a state of affairs that cannot, for obvious ideological reasons, go unchallenged. To realise its ideological potential – its potential for the political right – the meaning of work in State of Address has to be be re-written, reinterpreted, re-reviewed and in so doing reconstituted as an image of consummate failure; of the antithesis of the successful modern workplace. It wouldn’t be hard. Ask Mclaurine Pinover. She’d make a good go of it. Exploit its semiotic fragility – (is there an image like State of Address that isn’t potentially that?) – and turn it into another ideological pretext, another justification for the decimation of the public sector.
Slackersville! The Delhi Development Authority as the institutional embodiment of waste and inefficiency. ‘Look at them! These people! Sat around, stinking the place out, wasting time, wasting money. Wasting your money engaging in ridiculous chit-chat in their out of date, chronically inefficient, analogue-ish world. Not a ‘mixed pattern’ in sight! Root them out! Eviscerate them! For “our” sake. For the sake of “the people”’ etc. etc.
Joseph is an airport security officer. Joseph is the main character in Surge (Dir. Aneil Karia, 2020). Joseph is the person that tells you to take everything out of your pockets, remove your belt, take off your boots before you go through the airport body scanner. Joseph was that person. Before he became an ad-hoc bank robber. Towards the end of the film, a case containing money from Joseph’s latest heist explodes in the street. A thick mush of red smoke fills the screen. The money is useless now. Useless to Joseph. Unexchangeable. It won’t get him what he wants. It won’t do what he wants it to do. Perhaps State of Address should be like that suitcase. Primed to do something similar. Immediately disintegrate in a shimmering heap of permanently disfigured pixels in the event of its ever being appropriated, stolen, spun, used as evidence against the need for a properly functioning public sector. In India or anywhere else. One in the eye for McLaurine Pinover (et al.)
Dream on.
