Wednesday, April 15, 2009

The 40 Year Old Idiot: Steve Correll as Dostoyevskyian Innocent

Michael Scott's crime is innocence. He is a fool, not a villain.

He is, in many ways, the polar opposite of his evil doppelganger in the original version of The Office. His crime is that he fails to be as evil as David Brent. David Brent's character is dangerous, cruel, humilating, precisely because he callously and insincerely manipulates his employees. His means-end reasoning and indifference to anything but consequences is precisely what Michael Scott lacks.

First things first: innocent in what sense? In the Dostoysevskian sense, as portraryed in characters such as Alyosha (Brothers Karamazov) and Prince Myshkin (The Idiot_. The Dostoyevskian sense is the Christian: one is innocent, not of wrong doing, but of sin, where sin is not wrong doing, but wrong intending (Compare Kant: There is nothing good without qualification but a good will).

Now, straightaway we must acknowledge, with qualifications, the quaintness of such a conception (and this is the quaintness, whether contemporary revised Christians like it or not, of Christianity itself -- its alien heart from the dominant, like it or not, worldview of the late modern world). We all know very well that, as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions--ironically (and literally, historically), with innocents. In other words, we later moderns say with condescension: how nice that you meant well, but the proof is in the pudding. That is to say: we are consequentialists (our nice name for what Nietzsche called nihilists).

And this is why innocence is a crime, and how an innocent can be a villain: to merely mean well and not do well is not just a misfortune, in a post-moral consequentialist universe, it is a crime.

If anyone is inclined to doubt that Michael Scott does not, in his disastrous, imcompetent way, truly and utterly mean well, I refer you to the authorial center of the show: Pam. By authorial center, I mean that her character tells us what the show--as opposed to the characters--thinks. Broadly: she is the most positively portrayed, sympathetic character. Specifically: she is the only character whose point of view is not even lovingly critiqued and, consequently, is implied to be true. Pam consistently reaffirms Michael Scott's innocence. That is, she plays the Christian counterpoint to the audience, and the office's, consequentialism. For Pam, Michael is annoying, embarrassing, and disturbing, but he is not evil. Again and again, at the bitter end of each new humiliating display, Pam arrives at the end to pick Michael up and reassure him. In contrast, in the judgements, complaints, and mockery of every other character, we always detect something more: moral judgment. To the rest of the audience, Michael is not a bad boss, but an evil one. To Pam, Michael is a fool, to the others a jerk. More precisely, to the others, to be a fool is to be a jerk, since intentions are irrelevant.

(To be continued...)