I
can’t believe I’ve only accrued 6 vacation days…!
I have
a thesis that started about twenty years ago.
By thesis, I mean an idea in my head that I have used a few times to
write stuff, talk about on a podcast, and make comedy bits. In my quest to observe why people like the
things they like, and how communal these disparate entertainment experiences
may actually be, I hit upon one common thread that only appeared to me when I
became an adult. To be more specific, it
is when I became an adult and had to work at a bunch of crappy jobs. I don’t want to weigh down this light essay
with the details, but to encapsulate in a few words; I was not sufficiently
wired to handle the responsibilities of a real career. However, due to my responsibilities as a
husband and father I had to find a way to work and make some money. What does
this have to do with TV and movies?
Gimme a damn second.
If you take a step back and look at
the most popular pieces of fiction in the last thirty years or so, what do we
have? Superhero stuff, for sure. Harry Potter.
Lord of the Rings movies, Star Wars franchise, Avatar, Twilight, Hunger Games,
not to mention a pile of kids’ adventure and fantasy stuff I don’t want to
list. Most of the intelligent sociologists would say it is a sign that we need
an escape. These are the stories of Luke
Skywalker and Katniss Everdeen, etc. We want to feel a sense of drama in out
otherwise boring lives. I buy that. But I take it a step further. Think of the characters in most of these
stories. With the exception of cops
involved, most of the characters have no
jobs. What does Luke Skywalker do
for a living? Did Katniss ever have to
punch a clock? Bruce Wayne is a
billionaire, so he’s got plenty of time on his hands for nighttime hobbies. What are the occupations of hobbits, and the
pretty vampires, and bands of people running from a zombie apocalypse, and a
bunch of survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 stuck on a crazy island? Nothing.
They are free. They may be in
danger, they may be hurt, they may even die, but one thing they will not have
to do is fill out a W-9 and take shit from a grumpy boss with bad bagel breath.
I always believed the obsession with
the hilariously non-disastrous Y2K events of 1999 to 2000 were less about
computer glitches and more about the opportunity to save canned goods. People prepared en masse for an apocalypse
that never happened, and there seemed to be a little be of a letdown; a
collective sigh when it amounted to nothing and January, 1st 2000
was just a normal day. I propose that
more than a few of us, at least secretly, wanted the modern world to
crash. It would be an extended relief
from the grind. Then, we could all go camping and live on the frontier and hunt
and fish for our food and ignore everyday chores. Hell, it’s a dangerous existence, but I don’t
have to show up at the office on Monday!
You can shove your quality review
paperwork straight up your bunghole, Mark!
But it didn’t happen that way.
All we were left with were Chunky Soups and that same old grind. At least we still have fiction.
We don’t just like these stories
because we need an escape. We’ve always
needed an escape. That’s as old as Greek
theater. We like these particular stories because we, for the
most part, hate our jobs. I know I hated
all my jobs until about a year ago. Not
many adults would choose to go back to high school and go through that all over
again. But what if it was Hogwarts
instead? You learn how to use a wand and
you don’t have to deal with traffic and the power bill. Yoda had no job. He was one with the force. He never needed to endorse a check or go to
traffic court. Ever.
Firefly
is another great example. Malcolm and
his crew were technically criminals.
They were on the run and on the radar of the space government, or
whatever. They sometimes were low on
food and space-credits, but they did not have to answer to HR about the new
dress code updates. It’s not adventure
we crave as much as freedom. We have lost something very dear to us as
humans and we have replaced it with piles of stuff we have to pay for. Here is
where I could go on a 3,000 word manifesto on deconstructing a consumer
society, but that would get even less readers than time travel essays.
If you ever saw the less-than-par
movie Wanted with James McAvoy, you
may remember the opening ten minutes.
McAvoy is an office drone who will be plucked from his humdrum life into
a world of assassins and Angelina Jolie.
He was a put-upon dork with a frightening hell-beast of a boss and his
only work buddy was banging his girlfriend.
I thought that was cartoonishly over the top and completely unnecessary. It would have been better if he was just a
drone like hundreds of thousands of others out there in the real world,
reasonably content but bored, detached, a little sad and tired. That life alone is enough to make an audience
sympathetic for a main character; it’s
their lives! There’s no need to
sweeten the pain with goofy office caricatures.
You
could like your job and like these movies. Sure. Also,
not all of these movies feature people without jobs. Soldiers in Avatar, teachers in Harry
Potter, Peter Parker is a photographer.
It’s not a perfect theory, but I believe it has some teeth. Most of these adventures’ goals are outside
of the system. The major events happen
above the law or in spite of it. There
are vigilantes or threats to the throne or agitators. They are either destroying or rising above
the system they are in. Part of that reality
is living without the constraints of working at Dunder Mifflin. It is not just
the adrenaline rush of the adventure and impending peril that excite us; it is
that we get to feel like what it is to live outside of the structure of normal
society. For a lot of us, that means
ditching our shitty jobs.
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