I’m re-watching the UK version of
The Office, purely on a whim, and
however much it pains me to say it considering how insufferable Ricky Gervais
is: it holds up. More than holds up; the show is a beautifully composed piece
of work, worthy of all the praise that has been lavished upon it – but not for
the reasons often put forward. Often the show is praised for its “realism” and
“relatability” (see here
and here
for examples), for accurately representing the mundane reality of office jobs
and everyday life in 21st century Britain and spinning it to comic
effect. Indeed, certain Brits revere The
Office UK (hereafter just The Office)
as some kind of grimy, depressing, “authentic” artwork, while degrading The Office US as an inferior,
unrealistic and sanitised rip-off. Here, as in a certain brand of reactionary
politics, it’s the “real” and “authentic” that’s valorised, whatever that might
mean. The “unrealistic” is shunned, an amateurish child-like sketch of the
intricate artwork that is the “real”.
Now, there’s no doubt The Office resonates with a lot of
people, including myself. There’s also no doubt the show has a fundamentally
different feel and texture than The Office
US, which does feel sometimes like it was pumped out by a machine, does
feel more sanitised and sentimental, and does seem to lack a certain “depth” its
British counterpart possesses. However, it seems awkward, clunky and
reactionary to read this difference in terms of “realism”. In what sense can
the differences between the British and American Office be read as different levels of “realism”? Is The Office US really “less realistic”
than The Office? How would one even
judge such a thing, what is the metric? As the various convergent crises of the
world attest to more than anything, “reality” is constantly in motion,
constantly changing. From what substance could one derive some standard for
“realism”?
The difficulty involved in
metricising “realism” points us towards an important point: fictions like The Office aren’t “fake” or “not real”,
they just have a different mode of reality to other events that occur in our
lives. As Deleuze and Guattari note in the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, books (and by corollary television shows,
films, plays, etc.) are “little machines”, productive apparatuses integrated in
circuits of value circulation and valorisation. “A book exists only through the
outside and on the outside”, they write. Flatten the terrain: no more “real”
things up here and “fictional” things down there, but various things on the
same level, all real in different ways, all on the outside. A book, a film, a
BBC series: each is a machine, channelling and combining certain flows of
economic, cultural, politics, etc. value in particular ways. Each has an
interiority, it has its characters, its plot-lines, its montage sequences, but
these are all contortions, twistings, machinic configurations of particular
flows that come from the outside.
If The Office doesn’t “represent” reality, if its interiority (its
narratives, characters, aesthetics) are ultimately folds of the outside rather than a detached plane that “resembles”
or “represents” it, then we should instead judge the show’s merits
(particularly vis-à-vis The Office US)
by what it actively produces, or manufactures. Indeed, this is where the
show excels. Because what The Office constructs,
and constructs meticulously and intensely, is a plane, a plane of suppression. The plane of suppression is a kind of
spectral or virtual force in The Office that
constantly suppresses and contains the desires of all its main characters
(apart from Brent, who serves as the plane’s unwitting enforcement officer),
and consequently gives the show its famously grey and everyday texture. The
plane is a kind of internalised disposition that inhibits characters like Dawn
and Tim from following their dreams, or from more minor characters like Oliver
and Donna from speaking up against David Brent’s blatant racism and sexism. As
such, the plane primarily operates through a kind of tense, metastable silence,
a silence that feels (en)forced and fragile, as if a thin wall has been put up.
We sense traces in this silence, the “true thoughts” of Tim, Dawn and the
others in the office can be sensed as kind of mumbles, muffled phonemes from
the other side of the wall, but nothing concrete, intelligible, or fully
formed. (A hauntology of The Office…)
Indeed, it’s the moments of
silence in the show (not just the awkward silence, but the intermittent, quiet,
three second shots of printers printing, or people just working at their desks)
that really give the plane (and the show) its affective force. The Office masterfully uses silence in a
way very few television shows do, because it understands that silence is not
the simple negative absence of speech, but instead the very active presence of
things which cannot take form in speech, which cannot be made audible, which
resist any sonic expression. As the old saying goes, “silence speaks volumes”;
but of course, silence doesn’t “speak”, it merely emits a kind of force, an affective intensity. This is partly why The Office feels so rich as a show: unlike the closures of language, which create the
illusion of some kind of final “meaning”, a certain (false) objectivity, its
silences create openings, excesses,
overflows. We’re not always sure what to make of the silences in The Office – are they meant to make us
laugh? Cringe? Cry? Something else? Most of them exist in an indeterminate zone
between those four (or more?) poles, resisting any kind of rigid codification (it’s
always been reductive to call the show a “cringe comedy”), whereas in The Office US, a more straightforward
comedy, it’s clear that almost everything is leading up to a joke, a laugh, a
release of tension. Rather than efface the indeterminacy, unknowability and
creativity that so plainly characterises our existences, then, The Office integrates them into its very
fabric. There’s no feeling comfortable here, where the television show, by
being so formulaic and predictable, almost falls under our control. (This is
perhaps the case with The Office US.)
Instead, it is discomfort which is
the dominant affect of The Office.
We, and the characters, are perpetually haunted by the silences, which continually
make uncomfortable any sense of security we may have. Nothing seems to fit
together or flow smoothly. The unspoken thoughts are jamming the machinery, but
we can’t see them, we can never see them, we can never know them. They are an
excess, an overflow, perpetually eluding our control.
Of course, words and language are
obviously integral to The Office and
its humour. But what’s interesting is how almost everything said in The Office is also accompanied by the not said, the plane pushing down the dreams
desperately wanting to break through, flee, out of the office, out of Slough,
out of the universe. The statements uttered by characters in The Office are bursting at the seams;
their content refuses to be contained in any self-identical form, fixed in a
semiotic/linguistic structure. No one is honest in The Office, nothing said is really “true”. It’s as if every word
uttered means something completely different. Does Tim really mean it when he says he will return to university? Does
Brent really believe his egotistical
declarations about himself, his status as “basically a chilled out
entertainer”? These untruths, far from being marginal to the show, are what The Office is all about. For if everyone
told David Brent what they really thought of him, we’d not only have an
entirely different show, but we wouldn’t have a show in the first place; he
never would have become manager. The same is true if Dawn really told Tim what
she thought of him, or Lee for that matter.
In all these misalignments, these
mismatches between what is said and what is “real”, we see the aforementioned
plane operating, stifling intensity, repressing desire. That’s what the office
is in The Office: not a building, but
a plane constantly suppressing the desire for freedom, for the sake of not
losing the job that bores you, the sexist fiancé you hate, or the friend that you
secretly love. The office is the place where dreams go to die.
**
The provocation from here is: where else is the plane of suppression (which, upon further reflection, has close affinities with Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the "plane of organisation", which I have essentially aped and contorted to fit my own purposes - Google D and G and plane of organisation if you want to know more) in our lives? The force and resonance of the plane in The Office suggests its "origins" lie far beyond this mere 14-part television series from the early noughties, with the concept resonates with many of our experiences at work, in friendship groups, at university, and so on. (Think of discussions over sexual harassment and "cultures of silence", for just one example.) Where is it that we feel like we cannot speak, we cannot be real, we cannot dream, and why? Does this attest to a particular mode of power? A coerced silencing? This is beyond the scope of what I want to talk about in this blog post, but it's something The Office forces us to think about.
