The white man on the silver screen
Odd, isn’t it, that two of the most popular primetime television shows star racist, sexist men in essentially unchallenged positions of authority? The Office, I mean, and House. Michael Scott is nothing like Greg House, of course; Michael is insulting more or less on accident, out of ignorance and social ineptness, whereas House is deliberately insulting. Both are incorrigible. There seem to be no lengths to which these men can go that result in their actually being penalized. Oscar is given an extended vacation at the company’s expense rather than firing Michael. House can debase and even grope his women co-workers without fear, because he’s always right. When my mom saw her one and only episode of The Office, she hated it—because Michael wasn’t a joke to her, he was real. He was the incompetent, ignorant, insensitive boss she’s met a thousand times, who for some bizarre reason is untouchable. And House is just Michael’s more intelligent double, who precisely because he isn’t incompetent, can get away with anything.
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Tags: Racism,TV and Film
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One of the interesting things that I think House does is problematize the viewer-protagonist relationship.
I very often find myself looking to the protagonist of a show as the one to tell me how to evaluate what’s going on. “Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?” Usually the main character provides an answer to it by embodying the good guys (in the Office, it’s Jim).
But House is a despicable person who sometimes does good things. Watching him be completely horrible and degrading always makes me wonder, “Should I be laughing at that?” In that show, I can’t simply look to the main character to tell me what the show wants me to think – I have to keep my evaluative wits about me through the whole thing. It’s refreshingly infuriating at its best.
Yeah, you’re exactly right. One can’t look to House himself, because so much of what he does is questionable at best. But neither can one simply look to everyone else’s criticisms of House (Wilson’s, for example, or Cameron’s), because of the sneaking suspicion that House is really right about them. Are Cameron’s attempts to “stay human” or “stay ethical” really just expressions of cowardice, of a refusal to take the risks a doctor has to take for fear of hurting someone? Does Wilson project need and misery onto House, refusing to see the real joy House takes in his work, because he himself needs neediness? Etc. Refreshingly infuriating at its best, yes. Though sometimes it’s just infuriating, because you end up being angry with all the characters for not doing what you would have done.
I write as a The Office addict who probably would have been seriously offended by the show if I’d seen it a few years ago. About House, I know nothing.
Isn’t there something to be said for being able to laugh at someone who would offend us if we took him seriously? The Office asks us to identify with other characters in the show, to put up with Michael, and even to laugh at him. Sometimes it is painful, but I wonder if laughing that the screen couldn’t cultivate both long-suffering and a certain self-presence; I can take the Michaels of the world lightly because they do not threaten me. Isn’t that why everyone loves Jim and Pam? They are normal characters, with the exception that they are willing to go-with-the-flow in the Office. Yet, they are never absorbed into Michael’s offensive ignorance.
I like it—the Office as a kind of training in revolutionary subordination. Leaving the world to be the world (leaving Michael to be Michael) because it (he) has no real power. Which is certainly true in that context. Nobody in the Office bothers with Michael because, at the end of the day, he’s a powerless baboon.
Still, it’s one thing to see Michael from the perspective of Jim—whom the baboon loves—and another to see him from Phyllis’s perspective, or Stanley’s, or Oscar’s, or Toby’s, or even Pam’s. Because all those people genuinely suffer for Michael’s antics. Toby’s all but drowning in his own depression because Michael is so cruel to him. The others usually endure, but there’s no question that Michael’s derisiveness sometimes hits its mark and pulls them a little lower. In such situations, they don’t laugh. Laughter is robbed of them. My fear would be that laughing at the show would leave us thinking of Michael as basically harmless. Which from the perspective of Jim, he is; that’s the perspective the show encourages us to adopt. From anyone else’s perspective (except for maybe Dwight, but only because he’s too dense to take an insult), Michael’s not harmless at all.