What Is a Man?: On What He Said…
SPOILER ALERT: The second part of this article contains The Office spoilers.
How to be a man? I picked up a book while Christmas shopping this December that I hoped might give me an answer. It is called The Book of Men. It is a collection of eighty short stories, some of them very short indeed, all of which have the title, “How to Be a Man,” and all of them by top-selling storywriters and novelists. The project was commissioned by Esquire Magazine and by Narrative 4, a global storytelling nonprofit.
I have to confess that my reading did not teach me very much about how to be a man, but a lot more about how not to be a man. This is not so bad in itself, I suppose, but the nearly complete dearth of stories about men who were husbands and fathers that one might look up to was a little hard to take. One should, perhaps, have been prepared for this after reading Hanna Rosin’s famous 2010 Atlantic essay proclaiming “The End of Men,” but even with that in mind, most of the stories were tough going.
I counted one story out of eighty with a married man whose wife and children could look up to him as in some way exemplary, and I think he got a pass because he and his family suffered from unjust social discrimination, and the man’s noble sense of dignity in the face of it was indeed truly inspiring. Nevertheless, there was almost no one else to admire, and many stories which answered the question “How to Be a Man” by depicting promiscuous, disloyal, cowardly, uncouth, abusive, violent, unfaithful, chauvinist, discourteous, greedy, ruthless, ignorant, parasitical, and lazy men.
And, once again, it may be the case that many men fall into these categories and it is good to be warned against following their footsteps, but the fact that the title of all the stories is “How to Be a Man” puts them into a different perspective; that is, as though we as a culture have forgotten that the word “man” can represent any ideal with positive content, or as though we as a culture are uncomfortable with the very idea that the word “man” might have something both distinctive and positive about it. It is almost as if the writers are embarrassed to be caught extolling any ideal associated with the word, “man.”
One writer, Edna O’Brien, in what is possibly the funniest entry in this compilation, pokes fun at the idea that people no longer expect anything out of a man as such. Here is her contribution in its entirety:
How to Be a Man. Open the heart valve. Read some great female writers, from the two Emily’s—Bronte and Dickinson—to present day. Tell me that you sometimes dream as you did when you were a child and spake as a child. And yes: bring home the bacon.
Well, I thought it was funny anyway.
Feminist writers of the last decades have rightly pointed out how standard cultural narratives about women are internalized by many girls and women as self-loathing, precisely insofar as they are women. I wonder if our standard cultural narratives about men nowadays are beginning to do the same thing. That is, if almost none of the eighty of the most prominent literary artists of our time could find nothing in their imagination that might be allowed to present a persuasive, if not idealized, exemplar of a man. Peter Griffin in Family Guy, and Homer in The Simpsons, can sometimes seem to have been the limits of our cultural imagination. Indeed the ideal of manliness or manhood as such seems to have come into a frosty period in our cultural imagination, where it is not frozen out altogether.
What I now want to present is a kind of jeu d’esprit. It is an episode of The Office which, I think, proposes a way of thinking about the very issue I have just raised. Before watching the episode, I want to pay two intellectual debts pertaining to my presentation. The first is to Northrup Frye’s classic work of literary criticism, Anatomy of Criticism, where he famously lays out four primal narrative patterns that he calls “mythoi,” and associates each with one of the four seasons, so that the Mythos of Spring is comedy, the Mythos of Summer is Romance (meaning heroic quest literature), the Mythos of Autumn is tragedy, and the Mythos of Winter is irony and satire. The mythoi merge into each other in interesting ways at their boundaries, just as the seasons merge into each other as one passes and the other arrives.
The second intellectual debt is to a book by Harvard political scientist Harvey C. Mansfield, entitled Manliness, published by Yale University Press back in 2006. Here is a quote from that book which may serve as a prelude to the episode of The Office and my comments:
Most people are either too enthusiastic about manliness or too dismissive of it. They think that manliness is the only virtue, and all virtue; or they think it is the last, stupid stereotype, soon to be dead as a dodo. To study it, well, the trick is not to get carried away to either extreme. Yet manliness is a passionate quality, and it often leads to getting carried away, whether for good or ill. A sober, scholarly treatment risks failing to convey the nobility of manliness–it’s so easy to make fun of. That’s particularly true today when the picture of manliness conveyed to us is as direct and unsubtle as the actor Russell Crowe in Gladiator; the singer Ted Nugent in Cat Scratch Fever; and the wrestler Jesse Ventura in Governor of Minnesota (21).
Okay, fair enough. Rather than risking my hand at a “sober, scholarly treatment,” I have elected for this jeu d’esprit, in the hopes that the light touch might make it easier to talk about a topic that seems to have become embarrassing even to mention in polite company. Here we go!
The Office, S3E18: Cocktails
Not to be indelicate, but isn’t the title of the episode a double entendre (“That’s what she said!“)? The title—somewhat indelicately—hints that the episode presents us with stories, tales, the exploits of the men in the episode. And yet The Office—both the show and the work environment it depicts—hardly seems like the place for “cock tales,” tales of exploits to brag about, tales of deeds of manly heroism, tales of the quest, the “mythos of summer” as Northrop Frye called the various forms and modes of romance. Instead of the mythos of summer, we get—The Office—an anti-heroic setting that presents the opposite of romance. In Frye’s scheme, this is the “mythos of winter,” which is irony, the great de-mythologizer, the genre that respects no structures and questions all of them, the genre that would subject heroic claims to a cold blast of skepticism or even cynicism. Even the scene with the opening credits is a winterscape.
An office is not a place where either dragons or heroes live, and the women are just as likely to be your boss as to be damsels in distress. The Office is the place where such romantic and heroic quests, and all their paraphernalia, are consigned to an imaginary realm. Dwight is the embodiment of the narrative frame, the ultimately inappropriate person, pointing out the feces present right under your eyes at an elegant cocktail party, the purveyor of irony, the mythos of winter itself, in which all structures are subjected to scrutiny and judgment.
In the episode we find him literally testing structures, as he roams freely around the magnificent suburban colonial home of the company’s CFO, examining the banisters, criticizing the arrangement of the windows, tapping to see where the studs in the wall are, and even kicking the chimney. He feels fulfilled when he finds some significant structural flaws, a “pretty fun cocktail party,” as he says, one in which the story or tale of one of the would-be crowing cocks (the CFO, and the whole status structure he stands for) is seen to have cracks in it. Dwight, the purveyor of irony, has nothing to hide because he is the one embodying the ironic frame that reveals all cracks in the claims to heroism, and accordingly he is the only one we see unclothed.
Okay, a tale down, but how do the others fare in this winterscape for manly exploits? The most obvious failure is Roy, who tries to wrest his manliness from the merciless demythologizing, deconstructing climate of irony by sheer force. He is a big, burly, bearded guy with curly hair and we are kind of rooting for him to be someone we can admire, and at first he almost seems as though he will pull it off, acceding to his girlfriend “Pammy’s” newly found assertiveness in her request for him to do “boyfriend” things with her.
He shows up at the bar, believing nevertheless that he can read Pam “like a book,” and when he finds out that she, a woman, successfully hid from him one of the most significant pieces of data he feels he can know, namely, that she kissed Jim Halpert in a moment of weakness, he cannot deal with it and we see the volatility and the violence latent within, as he rejects Pam and begins to throw items around in the bar. The irony of the scene invites the audience to laugh as he and his brother seem to descend into their true reality, naked before us even if fully clothed, people who bottom line just enjoy throwing things. His claim to any genuine masculinity is revealed as bankrupt. The manliness of irrational force is no manliness at all.
Who’s next? Jim Halpert? Does his manliness survive The Office intact? He seems to be the one in control, the one with the secure girlfriend, the one with his foot on the brass key, denying the key to Michael, keeping it to himself. And yet he is the one locked out. He loves Pam, but is not brave enough to defy Roy. His current girlfriend Karen puts him into an invisible straightjacket of deception, as she insinuates that she has had a sexual relationship, or at least an encounter with, every other man at the cocktail party, including David the CFO. She flirts with one of the men at the party as Jim watches from afar, his eyes wide open as he receives this revelation, his claim to manliness completely destroyed. What is true? That Jim is her first sexual relationship, as she hints at one point—and then just as quickly, as Jim feels pride in that moment, tells him he is so easy to fool? Jim tries to preserve his manliness in the wintry frame of The Office by adopting a posture of complete control, and he ends up with no control at all. The manliness of invulnerable control ends up astonished at its own impotence.
Who is left standing? What about Michael? I think at first we might be tempted to say that he fails, too. After all, he seems reduced to fighting off the forceful sexual advances of his girlfriend, signing a waiver of his rights and doing so with a heart-shaped dot over the “i” in his name, and ending up nearly in tears, seemingly a most unmanly position. And yet . . . we see Michael in the beginning of the episode being tied into a straightjacket by Dwight, the embodiment of irony. Michael has attended a class on magic tricks intended for kids and now he wants to show off his magical escapist abilities. The narrative framework, the mythos of winter, consigns, or tries to consign, Michael and his language of love and devotion to the imaginary realm of Magic. And now, Michael dramatically says, “The chains!,” calling for the chains of the child’s magic trick he has learned.
But what really are these chains? The chains of love? Michael takes those on himself, and willingly enters this world, consigned by The Office to the realm of illusion, and yet it is also the realm where kids dwell, kids who have not lost their dreams, kids who, when confronted with the narrative frame of irony face to face in the mansion, can only say to his (Dwight’s) questions, “I don’t know!” Michael takes the risk, loses the key (which Jim steps on to keep Michael from finding it), and still declares, he will get out only by Magic.
He submits to the “chains” of love. The very first thing he says to Jan when she calls on the cell phone is not just “I love you,” but the more poignantly intimately pronounced “I wuv you,” right in front of the wintry mythos of winter, Dwight himself, and he is not afraid to have the conversation on speaker phone so that none of it escapes the notice of the tester of all structures.
Michael is the only one in the episode who uses the word “love” in a declaratory way, first person singular indicative, the tense of assertion and claim. Jan specifically refuses to say this back, explicitly telling Michael she never told him that she loves him as she asks him to waive some of his rights, and responding only “OK,” when he repeats his declaration of love in the car scene later. The narrative frame, the mythos of winter, is prying and testing, looking for cracks—Michael does not seem to understand that in the world of The Office, he is signing away his rights, and yet he does not see it that way. He insists on calling this waiver of rights a “love contract,” and wants to frame it. The ironic frame makes us laugh at this—how pathetic can you get!—even signing it with a heart! And yet, love involves self-gift, and it creates true vulnerability. Michael is proud of his love, so proud that he wants to tell the whole world; when Jan, in the car later, expresses regret that they ever went public, Michael confesses that he is greatly hurt and we know he is because he starts to cry. How unmanly!
Or is it? “I love you, Jan,” he exclaims disconsolately. “OK,” Jan says, noncommittally. Just then we see the narrative framework, Dwight, obtruding himself, testing all structures—and yet what happens? Leaning back from the front seat of the car, Dwight declares this structure sound, saying, “Don’t break up you guys; you’re great together.” A genuine confession of love without pretense, revealed by those supposedly unmanly tears, can survive all the tests that The Office might put to it, that demythologizing, anti-heroic, blast of wintry deconstruction—and the Magic turns out to be real, and with it, Michael’s manliness. What is more manly than the risk of assertion of true love? Whatever else it is, true manliness seems to involve, not force (Roy), not control (Jim), not the status of domination (David), but the risk of self-assertion that makes one truly vulnerable and accountable, the putting oneself in a position where one risks looking silly but has something to live up to, the risk of love which will always involve a waiver of the privilege that disdains love and tries to replace it with force, control, or status.
None of the other versions of manliness presented involve any risk, freely accepted. David has the mansion; Jim has the key; Roy has his burly brute force; and they all come to grief in the cold of a winter of lovelessness. Not even Jan is willing to take anything but a “calculated risk,” as she calls it, though she is at least willing to venture that. The episode seems to say that true manliness has nothing to fear from a world that seems to deconstruct the privileges of masculinity, because true manliness has nothing to do with these in the first place. True manliness, it seems, is the willingness, in a man, to take the risk of the assertion of love, that is, of self-gift, a magic that was always the underlying reality.