In January, we’re watching Frederick Wiseman’s 1983 documentary “The Store,” about Neiman Marcus’ flagship location and headquarters in Dallas. The movie is available to stream on Kanopy for some library card holders. You can also purchase a DVD on Wiseman’s website. It may also be available to borrow from your local library.
From its opening moments, “The Store” is equal parts cozy and unnerving.
As Frederick Wiseman’s camera captures the 1982 holiday hustle and bustle at Neiman Marcus’ flagship store in Dallas, we hear an executive at the retailer’s nearby headquarters addressing the troops.
“There’s really one purpose to our being at Neiman Marcus, one grand purpose, and that’s to make sales, because it’s an institution created to make sales,” he tells a blank-faced boardroom. “If we don’t encourage that, if we don’t eat and sleep that as a purpose, then we’re defeating our purpose.”
It’s not the last time we see Neiman employees proselytize to each other. Merchandisers talk up the latest underwear to assembled sales clerks; a sales clerk monologues about her passion for the store during a job interview at corporate; a roomful of corporate execs discuss how they can command a room by revealing what they do for a living.
It’s all a bit … cultish. As the credits rolled, we knew we had to call Amanda Montell. She wrote the book on “the language of fanaticism” and hosts the podcast “Sounds Like a Cult,” so we wanted to get her reaction to that opening scene.
“Anyone who manages a team, you have to remind them of their mission in order to keep up their energy,” Montell said. “There’s almost like a Pentecostal pastor’s lilt to that, and it’s still impactful. Because then we feel taken care of. We’re like, ‘Oh, all these other problems that I thought I had here in the workplace, they don’t matter because this very confident, eloquent, like, work daddy is telling me that I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.’”
Montell’s new book, “The Age of Magical Overthinking,” is out April 9. She talked with Marketplace right before the pandemic about signs your workplace is culty, and she got back on the phone with us last week to discuss how the cult of work has evolved in the past four years and four decades since “The Store.” This interview has been edited.
A lot of your work is about disentangling culty language, behavior and aesthetics. Are cults really all around us? And are they always malignant?
As soon as the word “cult” landed in everyday American vocabularies, it came to represent certain subcultures, and that sort of haziness surrounding the word has only continued, as the haziness around the ways we find belonging and community and connection have become more nebulous and more fanatical. Cultishness pervades all sorts of spaces, including corporate environments, brands, retail spaces, and that’s especially true as America becomes less traditionally religious, but no less spiritual, no less mystical, no less ritualistic, no less communal.
We all recognize that sort of, like, 70s cult iconography that’s present documentaries about the Rajneeshpuram or the movie “Midsommar.” But you know, having a group of people all dressed in white, wearing flower crowns and chanting isn’t inherently dangerous. And a lot of the cult-like exploitation that actually results in trauma and death in worst-case scenarios, that’s not necessarily connected to that iconography. You can have a group that looks really, really culty, but it’s actually not that dangerous. You could have a group that looks like a bunch of three-piece suits in a boardroom who are actually enacting great harm. These are the gray areas surrounding the word “cult” that I like to operate in.
How can you tell if a job has become cultish?
So what makes a workplace culty, is, I think, a lack of boundaries between what your job offers you and what your life and sense of purpose offer you. It wasn’t really until the ’80s with the human potential movement and entrepreneurial workshops, these, like, career-growth movements, that your job and your fundamental sense of worth as a human being became so conflated. Since then, it’s really become difficult to disentangle how you value yourself, how you perceive your life’s purpose and sense of meaning with what you do at your job. I cannot personally disentangle the two, no matter how hard I try. And I think that has a lot to do with the way that the American dream messaging has been shifted since the ’80s.
Who benefits when a workplace is culty?
Higher-ups know that if they’re able to imbue their employees with not just the knowledge that they’ll be making money here, and that they’ll have security, but that they will find something more transcendent here, they’re going to be much more likely to stay. And you can push the envelope really, really far before they’ll leave, as long as that sense of community and belonging and meaning is wrapped up in it. But also, consumers benefit. So many of these cult-like companies, from Amazon to Trader Joe’s to Glossier — that energy on the corporate side extends to the consumer side. Because consumers, especially now, they want their product to say something about them. They want their lipstick to say, “Not only do I have red lips, but, like, I am an ethical, conscious, cool, literate, whatever person who is living a good life.”
The end of “The Store” focuses on Stanley Marcus, the scion of the Neiman Marcus founders, former president and chairman of the company. By then, he had stepped down, but even another decade after that he was in his 80s declaring “selling is my religion.” Does a company need that kind of true believer at the top to amass a cult?
I think it makes a big difference. When I think of cult brands, either the figurehead is known to all consumers or they’re just known to those on the inside, but their image, their rhetoric, their attitude sets the tone. And much like a real cult, when that person either steps down, is canceled, goes away somehow, the brand’s cult following dims. Glossier is a good example: Emily Weiss is not really a forward-facing part of that brand anymore, and the fanaticism and fury has sort of softened compared to where it was when that first launched.
The pandemic changed a lot of people’s relationship with work. Do you think workplaces have become more or less culty in the past four years?
I think it’s changed. People are becoming wiser to the nefarious premise that you should have no boundaries, and your work should be your entire purpose in your life. I wrote a piece recently for Harper’s Bazaar about the rise of therapy-speak in the workplace. I think as conversations about mental health, and therapy, and boundaries are becoming more present and mainstream, people are indeed setting those boundaries with their bosses and recognizing when a boss has transgressed. Now, recognizing when a boss has transgressed and getting out from under their clutches are two different things. I do think that bosses are having to accommodate the mental health needs of the current day. But I learned writing that piece that there are plenty of cult-like bosses who then just learn how to weaponize the therapy-speak and make you feel like you’re, you’re really held and you’re really validated, but at the same time they’re treating you the same. Similarly, they’re getting in front of the narrative with that therapy-speak, and they’re almost treating the company itself as a living, breathing thing whose mental health needs to be cared for. In any workplace, I think it’s healthy to bring a certain sense of suspicion to any language that you can’t on its face understand.
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