No Other Choice: Our society’s favorite phrase?

“It's been three weeks, I've applied to one million jobs.” —Jeff (Seth Rogen), Good Fortune

I have been without a full-time employment for over a year now. I started working in the summer of 2004, between high school and college, and this is by far my longest time in between jobs since then. I have sent out more job applications than I can count, had interviews with varying degrees of success and wasted time, and taken up two part time jobs (so far) to try to keep just afloat of extreme financial hardship. 

To put it bluntly: this past year has been the most challenging of my life. Even more than two years ago when I went through a different huge life upheaval, and even more challenging when my father passed away somewhat suddenly in 2021. Those were also fraught with emotional highs and lows, but also came with the knowledge that there was an end in sight to the acute event happening in front of me. I could shore myself up and tumble through it as best I could knowing that after a few months, things would settle into a new normal and I could recharge and recoup. This has been The Oregon Trail of crises for me. An endless march to nowhere with an unfamiliar landscape that looks the same that is also somehow always changing. A constant liminal state that feels like it could end tomorrow. Or never.

In 2025, two films lifted up the rock of contemporary capitalism to see what is crawling underneath to explore the difficulties in making a stable life for yourself. Both  Good Fortune and No Other Choice managed to give me a mix of both severe anxiety and catharsis watching each film’s protagonist struggle and trying to find a path forward in different but equally outside-the-box ways, which helped me wrestle with my feelings about my own situation.. One of my favorite quotes of all time is Roger Ebert describing movies as a “machine that generates empathy” (the full quote and more here). While Ebert frames this as a function to help us understand people who live different lives from us, the movies equally help us understand ourselves—or at least help us feel less alone. Knowing that someone else is on a similar journey to our own, has felt our pain, joy, depression, love, desperation. These are not films about abstract “what if” scenarios, these are films about what it takes to survive in this economy. If you even can. According to some Silicon Valley prognosticators/wishful thinkers, pretty soon most of us will be in the “permanent underclass” or lumpenproletariat with AI to thank for it (you know things are bad when Silicon Valley people are unironically quoting Marx). 

Good Fortune is an updated riff on the Frank Capra style of social comedy, where Arj (Aziz Ansari, who also wrote and directed the film) is a down-on-his-luck aspiring documentarian who goes from working at a hardware store and sleeping in his car to being a personal assistant for Jeff (Seth Rogen), an executive with more excess wealth than he knows what do with, before finally hitting rock bottom after a misunderstanding between the two men. Enter Gabriel (Keanu Reeves), a low-level guardian angel assigned to prevent people from dying while texting and driving. Similar to It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), Gabriel tries to show Arj how special his life is and how money doesn’t solve your problems by switching Arj’s life with Jeff’s. When boss angel Sandra Oh asks Gabriel what happened as the result of his plan, Keanu gives one of my favorite line deliveries of last year: “it seems to have solved most of his problems.” Hilarity ensues, and by the end Arj is back on his feet and Jeff seems to remember that people not as well off as himself exist and a lot of them live off delivery app tips. 

Good Fortune combines its empathetic social commentary with the kind R-rated comedy that was extremely popular in the 00s finding a lot of success in doing so (it helps that Aziz and his collaborators make sure that their cinematography is up to looking like movies of days gone by). Ansari took a real social issue—the working homeless—and found a way to make it relatable while also finding comedy in situations that could arise from it as well as the hardship. The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness states that:

When you can’t find a job, or you do but it doesn’t even make ends meet, or requires you working a second job just to sleep in a bed in a decently safe apartment, things seem really bleak. It’s no wonder Arj tells a child not to waste their time going to college, or dodges phone calls from his father so he doesn’t have to answer questions about his life. These are the real things about being unemployed—anger, resentment, depression, avoidance—that wraps the grief you feel about not having a job or the life you thought you would and bundles it together with diminishing self-worth until you start to convince yourself that you aren’t employable at all. It is not a fun place to be, and a significant part of job search energy is shoring up yourself. 

These feelings are also centered in South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice. Park’s latest film is also a comedy about being unemployed, but with a significantly darker edge than Good Fortune. No Other Choice is much closer to the social satire of Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, Poor Things, Bugonia) and the Coen Brothers (Fargo, Burn After Reading, A Serious Man). Or maybe this is the Dr. Strangelove of joblessness. In No Other Choice, Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) begins the film by talking about how perfect his life is. A happy wife, two children, two Golden Retrievers, a great career at a paper company that even sent him some eel to barbecue…of course saying this at the beginning of a film means we know all of this will be lost (or nearly lost) by the time the end credits roll.

Soon after, the company Man-su works for is acquired by an American company, and he is laid off after he objects to being asked to lay off many of the other employees. Thirteen months later, he and his wife are cutting their home budget to the bone, even after she gets a job as a dental assistant. The dogs are sent away, the home is up for sale, and everyone is miserable, especially Man-su, who also has a recurring toothache.* So in an act of desperation, Man-su turns to murder, identifying his closest competitors for a new job similar to his previous one and killing them so he has a better chance of being hired. The film ends with Man-su successful, but working in a factory where he is the only human surrounded by automated machines. And this is shown to be a relatively happy, if ironic, ending. 

The film’s title does not come from the title of its source material, David Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax, but from the title becoming a recurring phrase in the film. When layoffs happen, “we had no other choice.” When the house needs to be sold because the Yoo family are behind on their mortgage, there is “no other choice.” The Americans could have kept on experienced staff or offered a generous buyout. Man-Su’s retail employer could have let him come back to work after he was contacted about an immediate job interview, but they had “no other choice” but to fire him. In this way, No Other Choice is the other side of the coin from Office Space (1999), where instead of “interviewing for your own job,” you are told that the company simply had “no other choice” and its survival is more important than yours. If Man-su said he had no other choice, that would likely not hold up in court against murder charges, but there’s no recourse for when your employer parts ways and has next to zero social responsibility to give back to you personally or the community at large. 

Since seeing No Other Choice, I have begun to hear the titular phrase everywhere. As a phrase, “no other choice” absolves the person saying it of any ownership of a decision they’ve made. If there was “no other choice,” how can they be blamed? But there is ALWAYS another choice. We are living in a time where no one wants to be responsible for anything or own a decision that might anger someone. There is only constant deflection, which is in fact, more disrespectful than telling someone to their face that they are not valued and no longer needed at their place of work. But “no other choice” is also what political leaders tell us when we go to war, or when we see citizens taken off the street. “No other choice” actually means “there were no other solutions I could imagine to this problem that I made up.” There is “no other choice:” use AI or be a member of the “permanent underclass.” 

As someone whose communication skills are a primary asset at work, I didn’t think my job would even be considered for offshoring, and yet here I am. There are so little resources for people who fall through the cracks, especially when there are more job-seekers than there are roles being hired for and when “economic uncertainty” manufactured by the White House (tariffs, occupying American cities, wars, etc.) causes employers to try to ride it out by not expanding their payroll. Getting a job is not like graduating from school. There’s not an unlimited supply, you are typically competing for 1 spot, determined by a bunch of people you have never met, who never tell you enough about what they are looking for in enough detail that you can emphasize the right aspects of your career experience or personality and that you’ve only talked to from the other side of a computer screen. 

I’m going to keep looking for jobs, all while I try to work on other long-term goals (more on those later this year, ideally) and I try to keep up with writing and not making myself feel worse. But I can’t give up, and I won’t give up because then I really would have “no other choice.” But hey, if you are an angel (or rich person), money would really solve 100% of my problems. Let me know if you want my Venmo. 

*Fun fact: my own tooth was in desperate need of a root canal when I first saw No Other Choice at the Philadelphia Film Festival, and now I owe my dentist almost $2,000 that I am unsure when I will be able to repay. He says until I do I can only come in for routine cleanings and emergencies, despite having 1-2 more cavities in need of attention. 

▶ Podcast in my ears: Blank Check’s Critical Darlings

▶ Current reads: The Invisible Bridge by Rick Perlstein, Die by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans, Rebel Bookseller by Andrew Laties

▶ Album on repeat: Wuthering Heights by Charli XCXS

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