Goodbye, Michael Scott
In Michael Moore's ultimate propaganda masterpiece, Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore rhetorically asked how someone who got as many things wrong as Timothy Geithner did (in his pre-and-during meltdown job at the New York Fed) could be rewarded with a kick upstairs to heading the Treasury Department. "It doesn't make any sense," Moore tells an interviewee, who swiftly corrects him. "It makes perfect sense," the interviewee states. In his opinion, Geithner got the big break precisely because he had proven he could make the most outrageous, impossible to believe statements with a straight face. The contest between telling authority figures like the press, the President, and the ruling class what they wanted to hear -- as opposed to what the facts actually were -- was no contest for him.
Whether that's true of Tim Geithner or not is subject for debate, but one thing is for certain: what better metaphor is there for our era of euphemism than the man who just signed off last week after five and a half years running The Office, the "World's Best Boss" himself, Michael Scott? Played to perfection by Steve Carell in his breakout role, Michael was the ultimate uber-nerd, trying desperately to be liked even as he always digs his own grave deeper.
Last week, that harmlessly destructive head of the Scranton branch of paper company Dunder-Mifflin finally left for a bittersweetly happy ending with his most appropriate love match, the delightfully inappropriate human resources chief Holly Flax (Amy Ryan). But like a reality show (which The Office greatly and intentionally resembles in style, and indeed Michael himself was a Survivor fanatic), the final two episodes of this season will kick off a competition of sorts to take his place, including A-list names like Will Ferrell (who's already been featured as Deangelo Vickers), Ray Romano, British Office boss (and Golden Globes scourge) Ricky Gervais, and some comedian or other named Jim Carrey.
They said that Seinfeld was a show about nothing. When the American version of Gervais' 2003-04 Brit hit The Office debuted on NBC in March 2005, it was a show about what the meaning of nothing is, about futility. About people living lives of quiet desperation yet trying to keep their sunny sides up. People who are trying to find some meaning from what they know deep down are redundant jobs, and perhaps even lives, ones that get more and more obsoleted by the day (a paper company in the era of email and iPads, an unproductive office in the era of downsizing and outsourcing and the Great Recession...)
Indeed, both versions of The Office were almost anti-sitcoms by American standards, at least when they first went on the air. They were filmed single-camera, with no studio audience or even a laugh track. Instead of a central narrator, all creatures great and small got to talk to the camera. Instead of hitting people over the head with comedy bits and routines, The Office got its comic staying power by its seeming blandness, it's lack of affect. Not to mention a downright politician-like ability to deliver those outrageous one-liners and intelligence-insulters, complete with a straight face and Daniel Day-Lewis-like conviction. Along with its even loopier longtime playmate, 30 Rock, The Office was the definitive sitcom for the era when absurdist movies like the Charlie Kaufman canon competed with absurdist debut novels by buzzy authors like Jonathan Safran Foer, Benjamin Kunkel, and Joshua Ferris. A show for real people who find themselves trapped in an ever-more unreal reality.
The other characters who populate the Dunder-Mifflin office range from resigned, longtime "lifers" like Phyllis, Stanley, Kevin, and Creed, to self-centered divas like Kelly and Angela, to striving go-getters like Ryan and Andy, and of course, Rainn Wilson's diabolical Dwight. The latter are near-desperately trying to add some meaning to their lives and work, while one can practically hear the former just silently thinking to themselves, "They'll learn soon enough, just you wait and see." Amidst this study in contrasts, even the voices of normalcy, America's Sweethearts Jim Halpert and the former Pam Beesly, have plenty of quirky qualities to spare. Everyone (most of all Michael) tries so comically hard to come across as "appropriate" and totally professional, it makes their complete unprofessionalism and inappropriateness that much funnier.
As a society, we proudly throw around buzzwords and dog whistles like "diversity" and "celebrating the individual". Yet in many ways we're more conformist and terrified of going apart from the crowd than we ever were. On one hand, our humor is almost unimaginably coarse and vulgar compared to the past. Yet on the other (especially in the workplace), we're prisoners of political correctness. No wonder so many of us switch over to The Mentalist at 10, a show that's basically the bookend antidote to Michael Scott, controlled by a man who plays mind games on purpose, and who'll tell you the score whether it hurts you -- perhaps even especially if it hurts you -- or not.
In the definitive Michael Scott scene, the perpetually childless (though not for lack of trying) Michael takes some of "Scott's Tots" (on a take-your-child-to-work-day) to the conference room and proudly plays a videotape of himself in the mid '70s, on a Romper Room or Wonderama type local kids' show. When one of the show's muppets asks Michael what he wants to be when he grows up, 8-year-old Mikey says guilelessly that he wants to have 100 children, so that he'll never be lonely and no one could ever say no to being his friend.
You'd have to go to South Park or John Waters movie territory to come up with a more campy-ghastly punchline in TV or film. Yet it was grounded in truth. Like all the show's other best payoffs, it was delivered straight, no chaser. We may never have known Michael Scott, but we've all known someone like him -- sometimes, maybe even the person in the mirror (God forbid.)
So well played, Michael Scott (and the rest of the Dunder-Mifflin gang). With your pointless jobs and unimportant lives, you managed to make yourselves the definitive symbols of the latter half of the last decade. Of an era where disingenuousness has been raised to an art form, where the ability to think of oneself as a nice person is more important than actually being a nice person. I'd say you were irreplaceable, but then, the whole point of The Office is just how replaceable we all are.