Is all you care about chasing the Yankee dollar?
S2E4: ‘Motivation’ to remember The Office is a business
This piece is part of a series on The Office (UK), running up to the 20th anniversary of its finale this Christmas. Don’t miss out by following me on Medium.
Work is what we do to maintain ourselves indirectly, trading our time and labour for money, itself a means to harness the time and labour of others to maintain ourselves. Yet in this web of deferrals there are people for whom money is primarily the imagination of money.
One such is Simon, “your favourite computer geek” as Dawn says to Tim. He’s a fan fave too, thanks to writer/actor Matthew Holness, who plays him as the sort of haughty vampiric geek he perfected for his own show with horror loudmouth Garth Marenghi.
Tim has to deal with Simon most, first as worker drone to his hieratic expert. Simon doesn’t greet him back, tells him what he does and doesn’t need to know about firewalls, and ends by giving orders to browbeaten Tim.¹
The last time Tim deals with him he has double cause to return the aggression: Rachel is present, whom he wants to impress, plus he wants to stand up for, of all people, Gareth. The latter has been out-nerded by Simon on Bruce Lee films; but when Simon makes him correct himself, smirking at the camera and saying “at last”, Tim gives Simon a taste of his own sarcasm. Simon had claimed Bruce Lee “faked his own death to work undercover… infiltrating the Triads,” so Tim butts in, “Yeah, because if you wanted to send someone undercover, you’d want the world’s most famous Chinese film star.”
Between these interactions Tim deals with Simon more neutrally a third time, when he listens in on him one-upping Gareth about go-karting. Simon claims he had to tackle a ramp somebody had left on the race-track — “Litterbugs” Tim wisecracks to himself — and so did an aerial somersault — Tim looks agog — then was told he could go professional as a Formula One driver. But he doesn’t need to because he’s “making shit loads out of computers.” Simon tells tales about everything else so we can assume he is about this. Even if you don’t have it money is still the quantifiable brag.
Matthew Holness’s is a small role, and his Simon isn’t permanently based at the Slough branch; in more than these ways he forms a counterpart to UK manager Neil. Compare this exchange…
GARETH: You know he fights Chuck Norris in ‘Enter The Dragon’?
SIMON: No…
GARETH: You’ve not seen that?
SIMON: No…
GARETH: Have you not?! That is a classic.
SIMON: I’ve seen him fight Chuck Norris in ‘Way Of The Dragon.’
…with how Neil accosts David Brent:
NEIL: Dawn says she’s shutting down at five.
DAVID: Just half an hour early today.
NEIL: Can it run OK without her?
DAVID: Yeah. They can answer their own phones.
NEIL: So we can lose her altogether, can we?
Simon and Neil share a cruel streak of wanting to catch out the person first that they’re gonna correct. Neil tricks David this way after Brenda tells him she’s not been paid yet. (It’s reasonable she dobs in David; she’s familiar with the Department for Social Security, as we learn next episode, so literally can’t afford to be casual about money.) Neil asks David and Gareth whether they got their wages fine before his Gotcha! reminder that Brenda’s not had hers. Though he blames David’s lack of system, he also pushes back at his defence that the Slough branch is nonetheless doing well, citing profit margins.
Each time Neil tells David off this episode are to do with money. Their exchange about making Dawn redundant if she’s so redundant was triggered by David getting paid for work outside of — and to the detriment of — Wernham Hogg: the management training he was hired to do by Ray and Jude last episode. Neil again claims he’s angry about David’s lack of system but there’s also that proprietariness of work towards its workers. David is welching on time he’d traded to Wernham Hogg. But your employer is your paymaster. Another reason they pay your wages is to keep you there; they pay you for giving your money-making or -saving power and your time solely to them.² (It’s also why wages aren’t to do with how hard you work or what you deserve.) Neil concludes his bollocking about Brenda’s missing pay with his first serious threat. It took money for him to escalate annoyance with David into a professional matter, and the threat is framed around sales: “If you can’t improve [them]… you and I will have to have a serious chat.”
Does David take money as seriously as Neil? When he comes in he seems au courant with the pact of work, reeling off, “Another day, another dollar” — the first line of dialogue in the episode and its leitmotif. Two episodes from now he’ll rescue a bad joke about Neil and Jennifer having sex by pointing out she wouldn’t because her “husband’s loaded”. But the trappings of success matter to David more than success itself: to the new jacket and heels he’s added an earring, despite the fact it “really stings.” He’ll bleed to look the part.
Vanity trumps sensitivity. Gareth informs him that said ear-ring is mocked by staff, that they’ve given him such nicknames as “Bluto” (the villain from the cartoon, Popeye). But when he hears they also call him Mister Toad (from The Wind in the Willows) the idea he’s being talked about over-shadows any offence, for the moment: he smiles goofily as he asks why they call him that. Unfortunately a colleague then does a great toad impression. Offence taken at last, David shakes his head and repeats with the intonation of a Bond girl, “Mister TOAD.” As he chides his staff, “Nicknames are bad names.”
Having a bad name, a poor reputation preys on his mind, perhaps more than money. When he rehearses his training speech on Gareth he tells the imaginary audience how people in business will try shake your spirit. And your body — the staff’s nicknames for him are “body fascism”, shaming him into sucking his gut in when client Jude sees him topless, into doing sit-ups in his office with Gareth, only to be disturbed by Neil. David justifies himself with, “Fit body. Fit mind. Mind the gap” (Neil’s anger has him waffling). He reframes Neil’s anger around toughness, pouting at him with that beta response to a threat: “Oooh, you’re hard.” After Neil’s left, the fitness imagery continues with Gareth giving David a boxer massage. So upset is he that he barely bats Gareth off his shoulders even though the cameras might make them look gay.
Backstage at the management training speech, the tough-guy sensuality worsens. Client Ray needs a photo of David, who keeps posing more suggestively. (The photo-shoot calls back to his pose on the table to greet interview candidate Karen Roper and calls forward to the pic he’ll put on his dating profile in the Christmas specials.³) Otherwise he keeps acting tough, sparring in slow-mo with Ray. As well as acting, he’s accidentally aggressive, throwing his cap at Dawn to catch but hitting her face. (Delightfully Lucy Davis almost corpses.) He starts his speech by opening the door and telling the audience to “Get out. Go on. If you’re not going to make it, go now — [over-enunciating] if you don’t think you can cut it. No?” He eases up with a patronising smile: “Good”, then gets interrupted by a cleaning lady who thought the open door meant he was done.
Ironically the first expertise he dispenses to the audience is his gloss on a “Collective Meditation” he reads out, that, “it’s saying the grass isn’t always greener on the other side,” and this despite him seeing green throughout the last episode. This advice against comparing-and-despairing twists into the avowal that he’d rather be dead than limbless. When he tries to empathise with those in the audience who might fear they’re past it he exposes his own anxiety: “I’m 39 — I’m in my 30s.” Of Tim’s birthday in the last series, I suggested that “30 [is] the fulcrum age when you look behind you and look ahead of you then think with a pang: is that the club I’m leaving, and is that the club I’m joining?” How much worse then at the other end of the decade.
In The Culture of Narcissism Christopher Lasch wrote that, “Americans experience the fortieth birthday as the beginning of the end. Even the prime of life thus comes to be overshadowed by the fear of what lies ahead.” Against what lies ahead, what has David shored? Because he is worried about legacy. Talking to the camera he says at the end of “your threescore-and-ten” a person wonders “Did I communicate?” He began the episode with “Another day, another dollar” but during his speech asks, “Oi Brent, is all you care about chasing the Yankee dollar?”
Does he know the answer? Know what else to care about and how? And does he believe himself? After Ray and Jude pay him for his speech he strong-arms them into coming for a night-out: “More importantly, what pub we going to?” He then giggles at this absurd mis-evaluation: “More important than £300! I don’t think so!” It’s less that he doesn’t care about things other than money, it’s more that he just wants to not care; and in the mean-time, what else does he have left to care about?
Dawn is no materialist — not relative to fiancé Lee who thinks everything’s a con or Gareth with his cars and phones — but even she’s not immune to the lure of lucre. David bribes her to support him at his speech and not with office beer this time. He over-pitches with an offer of £100 for an hour’s work — which work comprises carrying a stereo for him. After she’s accepted he tries to talk her down by twenty or ten quid, notably calling his offer “silly money”. Implicit in the idiom is the idea wealth is absurd.
In 1982 Janine Scottish novelist Alasdair Gray equates all work you don’t want to do but will for money to “whoring.” David makes the same link when he jokes that his hiring of Dawn is a date: “What sort of date is that? And £100, what would I get for that… Everything, I imagine. I’m not imagining any of it.” (Does he fancy Dawn? It’s more he doesn’t know how to play the role, though play it he must, of boss with (pseudo-)secretary.)
Dawn not only chose to take the money but when she herself is comparing-and-despairing for the camera, she cites an old classmate who “used to eat chalk” but is now a financial success, running her own eBay. So the values and incentives of the system do get her consent. Or is consent just what you get when you offer someone money in a world dictated by money to do something that they wouldn’t be doing if it were not for the money? There’s a reason they call it wage slavery.
Dawn’s address to camera comes immediately after her nadir. The road down to it starts with her walking in on Tim and Rachel, who between this episode and the last have escalated romantically: Dawn gawps, Rachel laughs, Tim squirms.
Gareth is shocked as well to have been beaten to the love-punch. After he walks in on them (they do indulge in a ridiculous amount of PDA for a workplace) he compares Tim to a Fisher Price toy. Rachel reacts aggressively, muttering, “Get over it.” This doesn’t ward him off: he’s angry but confused because, as he says, “I’d still do you.” Aggression tends to backfire in The Office; Tim calls out Simon’s bollocks about Bruce Lee and the Triads, but then Simon takes one look at him with Rachel and cuts him down: “Gone off Dawn have ya?” Soon after there’s an insert shot of a perturbed Rachel…
Not that Dawn saw it, who’s perturbed in her own way. She insists Tim and Rachel haven’t shagged yet, to Tim as well as to Lee. Wanting to protect her feelings Tim, like David, “doesn’t kiss and tell”, though unlike what Chris Finch said of David, there is something to tell in his case. Hence why Dawn gets touchy at Lee’s insistence that Rachel is “very attractive”, and why she gets touchy-feelie with Tim with her lingering handshake and bimbo-toned “Alright babes!”
Her true low-point, and one of the high-points of the show, is when David during his speech rolls out the line about laughter being the best medicine. To the not-amused audience he demonstrates laughing without jokes; and as he gets into the flow of hooting and tittering Dawn on voice-over, over a zoom-in on her baffled face, says, “I’d be lying if I said my life had turned out exactly as I expected.”
To rub her failure in, she receives backstage a too-hard high five from David, then his t-shirt thrown at her like the cap before, then his deodorant in her face: a barrage of rotten tomatoes. And in the post-credits insert she struggles under the weight of his stereo — even by that decade’s standards, it’s huge. The closing statement of the episode is a shot of someone paid to haul a comically huge object; it’s as if there’s an inherent indignity to any hired work.
“We all wake up and go, ‘Oh, I ache. I’m not 18 any more,” David says during his speech. Or as the title goes for an Ozu film, Where now are the dreams of youth? Well, they go to fuel work.
Fittingly, then, the episode builds towards the management training seminar. David’s speech is preceded by two slicker men who sound like get-rich-quick-schemers from The Wolf of Wall Street. His own grounds for giving a speech is based on the self-help bromide that “If it’s in you, I’ll find it,” though he reveals his self-interest by adding if it’s not then it’s not his fault: “I don’t want to be sued because you haven’t got it.”
Those who may or may not have it file into a bleak room to hear how to become a success, just the right mix of ordinary people tending towards low-rung weirdo. (All praise to the casting director for finding these extras.) The first trainer, from “Sound Investments”, tells them they shouldn’t feel bad about their goal because “this is a business.” A match-dissolve takes us to the end of the second speaker’s speech, with a line harking to David’s anxiety about legacy, “Your future hasn’t happened yet.”
David’s speech is his chance to prove the expertise he claimed over Stewart Foot, the business trainer from the last series. He starts by padding the speech with the sort of quotes he read out during Tim’s appraisal (though now admitting it, and with a “Foreword by Duncan Goodhew”). He ends by telling the audience, “Promise me you’ll remember one thing,” and then reveals the point of the stereo: “You’re simply the best,” sings Tina Turner on it. He fails to get a clap-along going while the camera gets a side-eye from the suited redneck in the baseball cap and woodsman beard. “I’ve been David Brent, you’ve been the best”: success no longer through false promises of more money but pure assertion, the proto-celebrity mindset that’s David’s true ethic; forget the reminder that “this is a business” — this is a TV show. As if to expose the emptiness of this message, Jude hits stop on the stereo too soon, getting scolded by a miffed David. In turn his goodbye wave to the audience goes unreciprocated. The concluding judgment on the fiasco is a glance at the camera from the wheel-torsoed man in a purple polo-shirt.
Not a fiasco for David: to a stammering Ray and Jude he claims that that was him on a 7; they should see him on a 9 or 10. But his self-delusions are crumbling. He knows he messed up. He’s insistent for company or, better still, booze: “Forget Pizza Express, what about beer express?” He even tries to get Ray to come clubbing, like the last time at Chasers where we saw him obliterate himself, at least for a night.
Does work take your life or make it? In the one case money is the compensation, in the other the incentive. But in both cases money becomes the point. David takes Ray and Jude’s money and tries to teach people there’s more to life than money, even though his failure at selling snake-oil like his fellow speech-givers is salved only by money.
The point of work wasn’t to make money; the money was meant to make us work — work which we’ll spend most of our “threescore and ten” on, which therefore defines us more than accidents of heritage, is the only place real value can be found, or rather produced. In lieu of that, you get the trapped and unsatisfiable David Brent. “Another day, another dollar” he said. He left out the less famous second part: “Another dog, another dog collar.”
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[1] I once worked in an office where the IT guy was so well aware of his keystone status in the company he’d answer phone calls from the CEO with “What?”
[2] It’s like that coder who got fired by his company for hiring someone abroad to do his job for him. The company was still getting the productivity and results it wanted; but that wasn’t the point. You don’t owe work some material end; you owe it your time.
[3] Jude looks at David’s ever-more suggestive poses in horror. By showing the reactions of on-lookers, The Office avoids ever getting silly. We can’t scoff at the show for pushing things too far if the characters in it get appalled before us.
