post-post-jew

For today’s class, we read a classic article by Douglas Kellner called “Popular Culture and the Construction of Postmodern Identities”–even if he’s not certain that so-called postmodernism isn’t just an attenuated form of modernism. Still Kellner offers some useful distinctions to help us understand how our experience of personal and cultural identity has shifted in the last 60 years. Since, say, 1950, Americans have generally grown more comfortable balancing multiple identities, even adopting additional identities and affiliations, at the same time those identities have grown less stable and more open to change. Beneath this, however, lies a more fundamental shift. As Kellner summarizes, “While the locus of modern identity revolved around one’s occupation, one’s function in the public sphere (or family), postmodern identity revolved around leisure, centred on looks, images, and consumption.” To put in another way (and to paraphrase my Post-Post-Jew colleague), how a man earns money is now less important than what he does in his free time. “Yes,” he tells someone at a party, “I am an investment banker, but my real passion is film.” Kellner is less clear in discussing the family, thrown lightly into parentheses. If anything, family has traditionally been understood as private, in opposition to the public workplace, but for Kellner it is part of our public identities. Similarly, being Jewish certainly has a private dimension (how we observe, if at all, at home), but it also has aspects of public performance–how someone dresses, what he does or does not eat–that have the potential to mark someone as Jewish both to other Jews and to outsiders. Yet precisely as personal and cultural identities become increasingly multiple and flexible, they grow increasingly privatized and contextual. We grow better at “switching” identities from one context to the next–or at least, we imagine we do. I am not what I “am” but what I say I am, what I seem to be, what I consume–all of which is subject to revision.

What makes Michael Scott a perfect shlemiel for the postmodern age–to build a little on Moishenadir2′s earlier post–is that he, unlike nearly all of his office mates, refuses to play any role but one. His life revolves almost entirely around the office, and his status as boss–it’s not possible to imagine Michael doing anything else. He sees his co-workers as his closest friends, if not his family members, and his only significant romantic relationships have been with co-workers (or this season, the mother of a co-worker.)

To put it another way, Michael is the opposite of a Zelig–he cannot assimilate to a changing context. Heck, Michael can barely keep a secret for more than fifteen minutes. And yet, that inability–or perhaps refusal–to bend, to switch roles, is the source of both Michael’s greatest successes and failures. As much as Michael’s style gets him in trouble, it also works for–as last year when he regained control of the Scranton branch. In an ever-changing world, Michael Scott is that last bastion of stability–for better and for worse.

Yes, it’s true: “The Office” is increasingly one of the most depressing shows on TV and a large part of that is the pathos invested in its co-lead, Michael Scott. This is truly one of the biggest differences between the American “Office” and its forerunner. Michael Scott had to grow and develop in order for the show to be successful long-term, but the way he’s grown is somewhat unexpected, peculiar. Michael Scott has become a Schlemiel, America’s most prominent since Malamud’s Fidelman or Alexander Portnoy.

The Schlemiel is one of the classic comic types of Jewish culture, defined by his haplessness. The popular explanation goes: a Schlemiel is the one who spills the soup, rather than the one upon whom soup is spilled.  Yet this description of bumblery masks the complex role that the Schlemiel often serves in literature. As Ruth Wisse argued in the classic The Schlemiel as Modern Hero:

The schlemiel’s misfortune is his character. It is not accidental, but essential. Whereas comedy involving the schlimazl tends to be situational, the schlemiel’s comedy is existential, deriving from his very nature in its confrontation with reality.

And:

In this respect, the schlemiel differs from most anti-heroes who are characterized–as the term accurately implies–by means of negative definition. The schlemiel is not a hero manque, but a challenge to the whole accepted notion of heroism…The schlemiel is mighty in that he subdues his urge to be a hero.

The comedy of the Schlemiel is the exposure of the immorality of the world around him. His inaction teaches us more about the nature of the world than directly confronting the circumstances ever could. This increasingly comes to define Michael.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Michael’s relationship with Jan. Michael is willing to do anything for Jan. He takes on a second job, he endures emotional abuse, he has to watch her pine for another, much younger, lover. Yet he is silent. He even goes through multiple vasectomies and reversals as Jan debates whether or not to have children. Shades of “Gimpel the Fool.”

This is not the only dimension of Michael’s character. At times, his boorishness makes the comparison impossible (as when he refused to let Phyllis be Santa Claus). And yet, the fact that Michael’s foolishness–as painful as it can be–is often the result of a naive outlook to the world, a misjudgment of the forces allied against him, is one of the major reasons that we ultimately embrace the character.