The Nard-Dog and the Walking
Stick.
I have turned nocturnal of
late. Today I went to sleep just as my father was getting up. I left him in the
kitchen at around eight in the morning. I slept up until around five in the
afternoon. My dream was interrupted by a phone call from some service provider.
The woman spoke in a Southern accent that was reminiscent of both Nicole’s
mother and of my music professor. I wondered why they were calling so early.
Then I wondered why they would not call my Father directly. Then I wondered why
my Father had not called them first. Then I hung up. It was slim pickings, but
I managed back to sleep. My ass was itching like a cat and I had to keep making
repeated visits to the restroom, to dig my nails into the soft pink flesh of
the ovoid bar of soap that sat beside the faucet. I awoke again a little after
nine. I went downstairs. My father was down there, dressed in his pajamas. I
looked at the clock and feigned alarm. I told him that he had better get to
work quickly. I had conked out for just an hour and a half, during which time
he had not left the kitchen, even to get dressed. I all so informed him that
the Sun had broken. He told me he knew. I ran upstairs to repeat the news to
Mother.
I don’t read much of late. I
haven’t read much since I finished the Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick. It
took me about a month to finish, whereas Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said took
me about three days at Barnes and Noble’s. It makes sense; that one took only a
week to write. As I reached the end of Flow My Tears I had to walk all over the
bookstore in order to avoid every conceivable distraction. I suppose that the
paranoia had made its way under my skin.
What I do predominantly at
night is watch The Office. Yet when my sister hinted that the episodes with
Steve Carrell in it were funny, she had neglected to mention that the ones
WITHOUT him would be miserable. Of course: I was all ready miserable by a
certain point. But back in Season Seven I was still ENGAGED. Now come Season
Eight, since B.J. Novak stopped doing the writing, I feel like I am just
waiting for this thing to die. And I can’t look away. Because every thing that
made it painful and addictive to watch remains just as painful and addictive,
but without the High.
So I usually watch an
episode or two and then return to my new computer. I play Chess and Yume Nikki.
I contemplate the mental landscape of the latter’s creator. I theorize about
its semblance to my own, and what that says about the Collective Unconscious. I
maintain invented arguments with old traitors (“friends”) about the sanctity of
the Individual Mind and the Introvert’s Intuition. I expound silently upon my
theories about the creator’s gender and extraversion. Sometimes I write these
things down in a Platonic format that I insert into one of my many plays in
progress, not one of which may ever live up to my magnum opus, which has yet
(To my knowledge) to be read in its entirety, save for by me. I do my best.
I have compiled a list of my
favourite characters from the Office, based on Season:
1. Dwight.
2. Michael.
3. Pam.
4. Kelly.
5. Ryan.
6. Andy.
7. Erin.
8. Gabe.
It’s a surprise to realize
that Pam became one of my favourites as early on as Season Three. At first I
gave that to her out of pity. Then I thought that I should choose the season
wherein she spoke up for herself for the first time.
Then I realized that they
were one and the same Season.
I rooted for Andrew Bernard ever
since he got out of Anger Management. It seems that overnight he went from
being the sycophantic, privileged and self-entitled “Office Pariah” to the
“lovable underdog” that his managers would praise him for being. I lost my
faith in Dwight when I saw Dwight live up to his own alpha-male pretense. I
lost some respect for Angela, though ultimately I feel the most overwhelming
sympathy for her unwritten plight. The subtext speaks loudly enough. Dwight won
it back by becoming the Nard-dog’s friend. He has his moments, even if he has
to be put in a concussion (or run over by a car) to do it.
For the record: this can be
extended to Meredith.
The same cannot be said for
Andy and Gabe.
When Erin first came onto
the scene, I had grown used to hot girls on the show. I do not doubt that B.J.
Novak owes some considerable debt to Mindy Kaling for the deeply human-hearted
twists and turns that the romantic plot takes at every one of its branches,
including even Dwight’s affair with Pam’s surprisingly hard-nosed (and
veritably kinky) cousin. I all so do not doubt that Ryan and Kelly are in many
ways indiscernable from the actors and writers who portray them.
At any rate: I had grown
accustomed to the apples of B.J.’s eye being either rotten or not yet ripe.
This was proven by Michael and Dwight’s visit to Ryan’s parties in Season Four.
It persisted as a motif for some time.
But Erin quickly became the
Perfect Girl of the Office. At first: her very seeming LACK of a personality
made her seem like just a stand-in for the pregnant Pam, who carried within her
womb not only the seed of new life but all so the seed of her own transmutation
from the silent partner to the Criminal Mastermind. Erin even sums up the
character foil in that episode when she wants to break up with Gabe and says to
Pam: “I can’t be mean like you,” to which Pam replies, “when am I ever –” and
then stops herself, remembering whom she is addressing.
Erin is Perfect. Every quiet
girl elicits curiosity because there is an air of mystery surrounding her. As
layer upon layer of Erin’s kindness are revealed like some sort of strip-tease
(or, to be relevant in scope of innocence: an artichoke that is no ways [a]
tart) she becomes no LESS perfect, but moreso. Though we have not yet reached
the root of this particular flower, we can certainly expound upon the branches
of her awesomeness. She is nice. She is (com)pliant. She is an amazing dancer.
She is candid. She is innocent. And unlike a sociopath that wears a thousand
faces, each of Erin’s virtues is contingent with the rest. It is as though each
desirable attribute is a fractal that contains within it the whole, or a water
droplet that mirrors all the others, which in turn mirror itself amidst their
other neighbours, infinitely and interdependently.
Erin’s perfection is not
something whose early onset is a fleeting mirage or a veneer that must be
picked away with time. Its earliest intimations are apparent, even if unconsciously,
from the moment that she appears on screen. It begins even before its symptoms
serve as evidence, yet we overlook it prior to the symptoms because we have
been taught to tread with caution and to dismiss offhand. Yet as her character
becomes more and more complex in scope, as we see more and more about her, she
becomes MORE awesome, not less. And this is what Andy Bernard sees in her. Even
though he is given pause when she breaks up with him and starts to date
Gabriel, we can tell that the Feeling lingers. And it is (by then, as from the
beginning) absolutely mutual. And it’s a good thing, too, as Jim and Pam become
one collective bitch greater than the sum of its parts.
Andy deserves Erin. Gabe
deserves Erin. Erin deserves them both. But she can only have one. And this is
what I am unable to resolve. And I have just reached the point that I have all
but lost faith in that the series will resolve it. When B.J. and Mindy were
writing, I was confident. Now, I am confused. And my cynicism is painfully mirrored
in the cynicism of the character.
Andy fell for Erin quite
quickly and easily. In a very subtle fashion typical of great mockumentary,
Erin let slip that she reciprocated the feeling. Their courtship was like a
game of chess where in neither player knew what was going on exactly in the
game. Finally they kissed in the midst of a garbage landfill. Their romance was
swift as justice, but less just. Despite having been resistant to the concept,
describing her as a “rube”, Michael Scott agreed to take Erin out to Lunch.
Erin threw a hysterical fit about the paltry detail that Andy had at some point
long ago been engaged to Angela. Erin tried to rationalize her hysteria by
pointing out that Andy never TOLD her about the relationship with Angela. Of
course, this is a foolish criterion (though one must not presume heavy-handedly
that Erin is herself to be BLAMED for it). The fact that Angela had not crossed
Andy’s lips serves as evidence that she had not crossed his mind, in part
because, truth be told, Andy has a tendency to say things at the very moment
that they COME to mind, without either tact or calculation. His initial
manipulative tendencies disappeared after he learned how to manage his own
anger, and without that driving force he has no visible motive to be secretive
on purpose. Andy never repressed his passions successfully; he only changed
passions. Plotting never did him any favours, so he shed the habit, and he
became a Great Guy, and in fact a Hero.
Erin might elicit
frustrations because she elects to be alone instead of giving Andy an other
chance. Enter Gabriel, the stocky, twenty-six-year-old bureaucrat who looks
like he could have worked for Lord Vader back in the Day. Andy is desperate to
win Erin back, expending all most as much energy and capital in his own
theatrical manner as he did during the initial courtship. Erin does not
deliberately torture him. In fact, she defends him when he is made again into
the Office Pariah at the end of Season Six. Her story parallels that of Michael
Scott, whose romantic misadventures see the light on the horizon again when
Gabriel’s boss, Jo, suggests that she could arrange for his ex-lover Holly Flax
to return to the Office. Throughout the following Season, Michael’s story runs
parallel to Andy’s story. Erin breaks her promise to Andy by beginning to date
Gabe. Apparently, Andy permitted this, but only in the spirit of preserving
Chivalry. Deep down, he is heartbroken. Gabriel is secure in his position
because he knows himself to be In the Right. He has observed every necessary
social dictate, corporate and interpersonal. Yet his relationship with Erin
lacks one principal quality: Eros. This Andy supplements. The audience cheers
for Andy as he delivers a triumphant performance as the Sailor in Sweeney Todd,
giving credit where credit is due when Erin thinks that Andy himself wrote the
musical (originally by Stephen Sondheim, though Andy’s improvisations on stage
make it a real treat after his phone goes off; he was waiting for an unplanned
text from Erin). Erin shows up to the performance in PERSON, and the audience
loves her for it, even though Jim and Pam decide never to leave baby Cecilia
with Erin again. Ceci’s cries from the back of the theatre put an end to what
would have been a very awkward moment that we were rooting for Andy to get
through. He does so, unscathed, but not without the disappointment of realizing
that Erin still prioritizes Gabriel. As endearing as their friendship is, it
cannot last, because what Andy needs from Erin Erin can only provide for Gabe.
Why bother to romanticize friendship for its own sake when it is tarnished by
this impersonal and unjust restriction?
As Andy struggles to redeem
himself and to ascertain the celibacy of his former lover, forced to confront
an impersonal system via the very man who had put him in this disadvantage,
Michael suffers through the notion that he “romanticizes” women. He fights to
assert his own Subjectivity as Absolute. Spoiler: he is victorious. But fate is
not so sweet for Erin and her lovers. Erin breaks up with Gabe under the
tutelage of Pam Beasley, but she does so (as most kind people do when they try
to be severe for the first time) with an utter absence of tact or context.
Gabriel is embarrassed and humiliated in front of the entire Scranton Branch,
within moments of the fact that his girlfriend received an award for Cutest
Redhead from Michael Scott, her de facto father figure now.
Erin broke up with Gabe for Andy.
But she has her regrets for how she treated Gabriel. She confides her inner
turmoil in Michael, who advises (with charming hypocrisy) that she should date
neither. Of course: his hypocrisy is incomplete; Michael only set his sights
most fervently on Holly after he realized that his other lovers were a
collective “freak show”.
Phyllis acts as Mother for
the foster girl, advising when the time is right (both in the sense of her
advice and the strategy that it posits) to go for whom Erin wants. Erin does
so, asking Andy out in a sock puppet show that she delivers from behind her
Receptionist’s Desk. Her bashfulness is lovely and endearing to ALL MOST a
fault. But Andy turns her down. His pride affronted by the fact that she chose
Gabriel over him, he has reservations about dating Erin again, though he
respects their friendship. This sense of bruised pride might have something to
do with his sudden confrontation with his rival’s True Nature in the Men’s
Restroom. Perhaps he only fully internalized the Injustice that was done to him
when Erin’s paramour and replacement for Andy turned out to have been the
obsessive type. But then: it would have only been because he was seeing himself
reflected in the eyes of the Victim. When Gabriel tells Andy to stay away from
her, Andy complies in part out of SYMPATHY for Gabe. Any sane man would.
I relate with them both.
What is tragic about self-identifying with a Victim is that you acknowledge the
existence of an Oppressor. What is tragic about identifying with BOTH Victims,
in whose eyes the Other is Oppressive, is that one eliminates the Oppressor.
But one can never shake the feeling of OPPRESSION.
I am neither Gabriel nor
Andy. One represents the formality and calculating idealism of the Corporate
State. The other is the perpetual adolescence of being born into Old Money and
unable to escape one’s social role of privileged white male. I have both sides.
I am neither exclusively. And both are simply games. The conflict is in right
brain and left brain. My own plight has been one of role fulfillment. This was
not the role of either the bureaucrat or the rich kid. It was the role of the
friend who had to watch his friends die on behalf of his other “friends”. I was
more than the spited lover. I was the provider and the victim. And I was left
friendless, for better rather than worse.
My Oppressor did not have
Andy’s decency. Nor did he have Gabriel’s formality. My oppressor was a
sociopath. But parasites thrive in an environment wherein most conflicts of
interest have no one exclusively to blame.
As a
child I was the one who would be able to handle such situations. But the Office
is not Breaking Bad. True Evil does not appear on it until very late, and
before then we only encounter the Devil via a young Ryan Howard and a horny
Karen Filipeli. Even if both exhibit narcissistic tendencies, the former does
so only without his significant other balancing him out, and the latter does so
only when her own significant other lets her get away with it. Aside from being
a bitch to Andy, who is not yet fully sympathetic, Karen is largely a harmless
sociopath. But we should not go too easy on either her or Ryan. It would be
only symptomatic of our own narcissism or our own tendency to accommodate it.
If Erin made any mistake, aside from her aversion to the only devout Christian
in the Office, it was that she did not know what she wanted, what she deserved,
and how to get it without sacrificing her own sense of dignity. Thankfully:
that dignity remains intact. So only a bitch would condemn her for the
outcomes.
Gabe is not me. And I am not
Gabe. I say this in such a way as to remind you that I could only BE Gabe if he
were a category that I belonged to, and Gabe could only be ME if *I* were a
category that HE belonged to. Otherwise, the turn of phrase would be redundant.
But I know it to be that Gabriel represents a stereotype. We are all Gabe to
some extent. The cause is Corporate Culture Itself. Kelly Kapoor attains an
unprecedented sense of self-importance when she uses Brown Privilege to attain
status in the company. Kelly never lives up to her own feelings of greatness
and importance, so she supplements by turning her initially quirky,
human-hearted gossip into a slew of toxicity. Under false auspices, insisting
that the matter does not concern Gabe in any way, and doing so under the cover
of polite convention, she proceeds to inform Jo that Gabe is “stalking” Erin,
his coworker.
Gabe is not “stalking” Erin.
The two of them work together. They have history. He believes that she wronged
him. We never learn what the letter that he wrote to her said. If his PRESENCE
at her place of employment is the problem, he should leave. But that is UP TO
HIM.
Jo does not seem to think
so. She blatantly dismisses Gabe as though his feelings do not matter,
requiring him to leave Scranton for some time. At this point, the stick insect
that was the butt of everyone’s joke in the Office is turned into a monstrous
beetle as in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
This happens to everyone.
The entire function of Michael Scott was to alleviate it. Gabe is just the
scapegoat because he is most obvious and sincere in his pious devotion to the
social order. Others are simply jaded as they try to work the system in their
individual favour. Gabriel does not represent self-interest, but Justice. He is
ravaged by the Corporate Lifestyle and the Corporate Consciousness, and this is
in part because of the rampant self-interest that permeates his surroundings. He
loves Erin, and he deserves her. But he is rendered cold by his occupation, and
that makes him unattractive to her. In his own words, within the same scene
that we learn that he is dating her, he likens his occupation to Siberia. His
life is Godless, Lifeless, and Loveless. He can do nothing to change himself,
because one can only model one’s self ACCORDING TO ONE’S OWN THINKING. And we
cannot change thinking. The subject must CONSENT to the change, unless the
programming is subconscious. And once the consenting ego is involved, it
“distorts” all good advice in its own favour. Gabe is not alone in doing this.
WE ALL do it. And to the extent that it is Universal it is not a Stereotype,
but an Archetype.
Gabe bears the burden for
the Office. But even though his selfish coworkers are less attentive than he
is, they are no less jaded. They cheer when things go well for them and bewail
their good fortune when things go poorly. Gabe does this as well, of course. He
MIRRORS it as it occurs in everybody else.
In the same way: Holly
mirrors Erin. Erin develops skepticism of Holly because Holly is made out to be
gorgeous. This cactus begins to bud into distaste when Erin realizes that Holly
broke Michael’s heart. She even stands up for Michael at some point, telling
Holly’s boyfriend that he has to leave when he attempts to visit Holly at work.
The Office sides with Erin when it comes to light that Holly broke up with Michael
under the auspices of physical long distance, yet Holly held her new lover, who
is all so a long-distance lover now, to a different standard. Erin is not wrong
to find fault with Holly. She simply overlooks the fact that Holly mirrors Erin
herself. In the same way, Gabe is not wrong to give Andrew Bernard such an
awful performance review to Jo. Jo is the villain. I know what you’re thinking:
(and I sound like Gabriel now, surely) way to blame the C.E.O, dad. But in
fact, it is Jo’s manipulative disregard for the feelings of all of her
employees, using and apparently seeing them and their emotions as mere strings
to be pulled, that produces this tragedy and corroborates my running theory
that the Office satirizes Corporate Culture, which bosses like Michael Scott
redeem with their idiosyncratic and well-meaning methods. From a Corporate
Perspective, and through the eyes of a jaded desk jockey, Michael is selfish.
But when he proposes to Holly and moves to Colorado it becomes apparent that he
is the Last Great Romantic that saves everyone. It’s not his fault that Erin
reacted as she did to the news that Andy dated Angela. The news was
inconsequential to begin with; she simply imbued it with shock when she had to
realize that her beau was not as perfect as was she herself. And it’s not her
fault, either. Who IS at fault is Jo for doing nothing to remedy the matter in
a humane manner.
Besides: Michael did not
even WANT to go out to Lunch with Erin in the first place. Andy talked him INTO
it. It was not Andy’s fault. It was the right thing to do. It simply had
unexpected consequences. Andy bears that burden that Jim, in his self-absorbed
pragmatism, does not have to. Jim gets away with everything. I guess he earned
some part of that for watching Pam and Roy from just near by for two entire
seasons.
It’s a great thing that
Michael went to Lunch with Erin. Erin needed a Father Figure, and Michael
needed to feel like a Dad. Did he need a daughter? Not as much as did Jim. I
think I sound a bit like Jim when I say that Michael does not know how to give
young women good advice. If I may be so bold. And I would not put it past Jim
to code the tough love by saying “I don’t think Michael needs a daughter”.
Yet who does NOT need
ERIN?!?
Dm.A.A.
