LC#3: Live Fast, Die Old
On The Office and cringe capitalism.
Hello folks, looks like I’m keeping up with this, innit?* These days there’s a good chance you are either working from home or not working at all, which makes it likely you might be experiencing some nostalgia from back in the day - you know, when we used to meet in places we hated we called “offices”, reluctantly nodding to people as we passed them by in the corridor for the 5th time in three hours. This week I revisit the classic workplace comedy The Office and ponder on its legacy, discussing two recent series that are at once super different from it and heavily indebted to it. Read on and (does it need saying?) please share this thing if you like it.
*“Innit” and “mate” are the only two things I picked up from my time in the UK, language-wise.
Imagine being the daughter of a man who made a huge career out of being anxious; imagine having the generational anxiety of being a gen-Z person in 2020 on top of that; imagine you are presenting your book live on Zoom to Seth Myers with no empathy from a live audience. I haven’t read Cazzie David’s book yet, but good luck to her.
There are comedy podcasts and there are meta-comedy podcasts (or comedy meta-podcasts? I honestly don’t want to get into it now). I will be writing a piece about meta-comedy pretty soon, so do some homework and listen to Up Close and Personal. If you like the TV version of Comedy Bang Bang (a spin-off of the podcast by the same title) you’ll thank me for it.
Finally: pandemics may be no laughing matter, but remember accidental penises on live news always are.
What is cringe? We could say it is a reaction of second-hand embarrassment deriving from witnessing someone doing something inappropriate within a particular context. In other words, the wider the gap between a character and their social environment, the bigger the laugh. In 2020 we all know cringe is comedy gold (the Internet is rife with it), but TV-wise I don’t think there was ever a more consistently face-twisting formula than the original BBC cult series The Office, created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. Sure, there were Seinfeld and Alan Partridge before it, but there are a couple reasons why I think the series’ unbearable protagonist, David Brent, might have ultimately left a deeper mark.
David Brent should need no introduction in a newsletter about comedy, so let’s keep it focused on the context. Brent (Ricky Gervais) is stuck in one of those useless yet life-defining positions that anthropologist David Graeber would call a “bullshit job”: a middle-manager in a small branch of a paper company. To make up for the inherent grayness of his workplace, David takes it upon himself (day after exhausting day) to play the role of the inspiring leader to a crowd of unenthusiastic employees, most of whom humor him only because he’s their boss (and make fun of him constantly). Nonetheless, Brent believes to be a creative, charismatic songwriter and professional team-builder (or at least so he tells to the silent documentary crew that follows him around). The spectacle we witness across two seasons and one Christmas special is thus the screeching tragedy of a hapless middleman, someone who has been put in a position he is not fit for and aspires to a validation that never comes. The mockumentary format is just what the audience needs to frame what is essentially a delusional self-narrative: the becoming-creative of the low-level technocrat.
In a nutshell, David Brent’s motto “live fast, die old” is a crystalline allegory of late capitalism and its non-sustainability. On one hand, there is the ongoing chase for eternal growth and productivity; on the other, there is the chimera of spiritual fulfillment and inspirational leadership. In this respect, David would ideally lie in between the predatory boss from Office Space and the exotic mentor from The Internship - someone who needs to perpetuate the illusion of work as meaningful, but whose lack of talent and charisma demonstrates instead exactly what the neoliberal mantra of eternal self-improvement and motivation tries to obscure: the system does not work for everybody, because it is not for everybody. And even though the system is rigged in his favor (David is still creepily interviewing female employees, still pretty much getting away with racist and sexist jokes) as soon as productivity is not reached the bubble can bust anytime.
The character is then not merely about its performed self-importance: while Alan Partridge is a has-been, David Brent is a never-been, could-never-have-been. When he takes time off the office to invest in his musical career (the subject of the spin-off movie "David Brent: Life on the Road”), Brent has to face reality: he’s too old and unfit to find creative fulfillment in society, but he is now also openly dissatisfied with his job-job. As a character, David Brent is the personification of the known meme formula - this is what you think you look like, this is how people really see you.
The cultural relevance of The Office lies largely in its workplace setting and the power relationships within it. Seinfeld was about being friends, lovers, neighbors, and customers; the main characters found themselves in cringy situations, but even George Costanza (the most awkward and bitter of them) was still able to land jobs and date a TV executive while he was unemployed, seemingly without too much effort. In other words, if Seinfeld was built on an innovative “no hugs, no kisses” cynicism that emphasized the irredeemable spiritual poverty of its protagonists, those characters were still positioned in a society that mostly rewarded their behavior. Curb Your Enthusiasm, the second-biggest achievement of Seinfeld co-creator Larry David, pushes this narrative of cathartic assholery further: the more the show goes on, the more Larry moves from being a genuinely embarrassed old man, who tries to patch things up by awkwardly apologizing for everything, towards being a sociopathic celebrity with a big mouth and “fuck you-money”. The short-lived BBC show, on the other hand, was quite evidently the product of a different society: one based not on the American dream, but deep class divisions swept under the carpet by the New Labour administration (“We are all middle class now”, Blair’s Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott famously said). The cringeworthiness of David Brent and his pep talks emerges thus not only out of the gap between different social expectations, but stretches across the widening pit that separates human and economic capital.
This is clear if we look at the The Office’s most direct derivation: its American remake. I have to admit I have only watched a few episodes of the US version, but the video above confirms my initial suspicion that the show ultimately reflects a far brighter worldview. This is in part due to longevity (more seasons allow for storylines to develop further, with characters getting married and maturing), however for the series to thrive this long in the US the essence of the main protagonist Michael Scott (the equivalent of David Brent, played by Steve Carell) had to be altered. Gervais’ original character was just too unlikeable and unsuccessful, so in order to fit within the inherently positive tradition of the American sitcom hero his hair needed to grow thicker, his personality smoother.
Propelled by this improved formula, the format has been so successful that the series (just like a boring multinational company) has branched out to India, Germany, and many other countries. What I find most fascinating, however, is how the ripples of David Brent’s proverbial hole in the water have reached far beyond workplace comedies.
People Just Do Nothing, for example, is quite literally what happens when a group of DJs and MCs with a background in the London garage, drum and bass, and grime scenes sit down together watching The Office and smoking a lot of weed for enough time to start shooting videos. Also adopting the mockumentary format, the show follows a fictionalized version of its creators (who do actually perform as Kurupt FM at festivals and such) as they introduce viewers to their lifestyle. The action revolves around the crew running a pirate radio in Brentford, West London, as they also try to fend off the pressures of adulthood.
In this case, the series’ David Brent is frontman MC Grindah, an egotistic poser whose only focus in life is proving his street cred by bossing his friends around and neglecting his girlfriend and daughter. Like Brent, Grindah is also delusional about the extent of his creative skills and the relevance of his input: in the age of online streaming, the pirate radio project feels anachronistic in itself, and the crew being from West London puts them in a diametric opposition to the subcultural appeal of East London and the musical scenes that inspire them.
At the same time, Grindah’s refusal to take responsibility for his actions or fully commit to starting a family position him in a more advanced stage of capitalism: for him, creative work and the Kurupt FM brand are no longer a complement or an alternative to the gridlock of a stable office job, they make up the only conceivable horizon. Grindah’s system of reference is not a stable (if soul-sucking) office job, but a spectral market he is not equipped to fathom, the productivity he is not able to achieve derives from his lackluster feel and taste for culture. His cringeworthiness, then, comes from his ignorance of the cosmic distance between the very tangible network of people who support him (and whom he barely acknowledges) and the shapeless universe of opportunities that at some point, somehow, somewhere, have made somebody else a legend.
Another unlikely heir to David Brent’s cringe empire is Orm, a character from Norsemen. The Netflix show has been referred to as “The Office with vikings” and, while it does not adopt the now standard mockumentary gimmick, it does indeed share a few crucial ingredients with the Gervais formula. Most notably, all characters speak a very contrived form of workplace English, with a passive-aggressive tone that benefits from the actors’ original Norwegian accent and clashes with the violent nature of their actions. The setting is not a workplace per se, but the ghost of office future is there. The creators wanted to put modern people in a non-modern world, and the contrast itself is enough to generate the gap that enables cringe comedy.
Plot-wise, Norsemen is about a village of vikings in 790s Norway, a time when pillaging, raping, and achieving success through brutality was the default. Unlike the series’ hero, Arvid - a warrior turned chief who earns his properties and women through violence, de facto playing by the rules of the period - Orm is a sexually ambiguous beta-male who lives in his brother’s shade and, when push come to shove, gets away by exploiting loopholes and begging his way across. Unfit for pillaging, we mostly see Orm being avoided by his peers and emasculated at every chance; however, he has a moment of glory when him and former slave Rufus (who comes from the more advanced Roman empire) manage to cheat their way into power and even attempt a modernization of the village customs’ by commissioning an amphitheater, performing experimental dance, and even creating art installations. Their attempts to requalify the vikings are obviously met with indifference, if not with downright hostility, and their day in the sun doesn’t last long. Not unlike Brent and MC Grindah, Orm is then a man unfit for his time, frustratingly unable to produce value within the system he needs to live by and yet managing to survive, thanks in part to his own wits and more significantly because his relatively privileged status grants him a spot.
If Norsemen absurdly projects this archetype in pre-modern times (when there is no currency for human capital, creative cities, and generally the values of Blair’s New Labour, which were the backdrop to The Office), it also speaks to a future socio-economic paradigm - one that anticipates the curve from Brent to Grindah, and beyond. In other words: Brent is an uncharismatic man trapped between a bullshit job and a music career —> Grindah is a clueless musician lost in the matrix of a music industry that has long ago absorbed and capitalized on the pirate radios whose subcultural value he aspires to —> Orm is a viking technocrat who would have had a chance in the golden days of Tony Blair, but has to exist in the era of raping and pillaging. The descending parable of their creative aspirations echoes the economic downfall of an ultimately unsustainable system, which has already given in to the primal spirit of the Brexit/Trump/post-covid era. The reason I think Norsemen is more conservative than the other two shows is that it feels like a symptom of this reckoning: between a saturated cultural market and massive public divestment from the arts, there are many reasons to think the economic reality of these times has less and less space for aspiring artists and musicians, and even less patience for the delusions of the unexceptional ones like Brent and co.
Of course artists and creative people have always had to make do and have day jobs, and those with talent, patience, and luck can eventually make it. Significantly, the narrative that David Brent’s cringeworthiness shatters is that you can have your cake and eat it too: have a full-time stable position, be successfully creative, and even integrate the two in one holistic chimera of a gig. This is not about the individual, but the model itself, which frames profit and creativity as things that can somehow be fused into one. We laugh at Brent specifically because we know you cannot be a middle-manager within a profit-driven system and a cool artist at once. You cannot live fast and die old.
Alan Liu wrote a great book about the “laws of cool”, describing the condition of knowledge workers and their dismissive attitude towards the workplace, a form of detached irony that at once mimics and resists the postindustrial credo of innovation and creative destruction. Perhaps what David Brent can teach us is that the “laws of cringe” also exist, and they are a normative response to those that do not abide by the cool, lying instead on the wrong end of irony and cultural nuance. An innocent victim Brent may be not, but a beeping red light on the dashboard of cringe capitalism, perhaps.