Does Jim Prefer? And Why Pam Does Not. Pt. 1
by zunguzungu
You’re supposed to identify with Jim in The Office. You, presumably, are male, since Pam, the only remotely sympathetic female character, is constructed to be as boring, repressed, and boring as possible. The actress who plays her, Jenna Fischer, comes from an improv background but she was instructed to disregard the first rule of improv: instead of responding to questions with a “yes, and…,” her character always says “no,” and then sits quietly, looking scared.
Her relationship with Jim is supposed to be a kind of awakening, and this is played fairly nicely: in season three, she emerges as self-willed in ways the earlier Pam, cowed by her brutish fiancée, could never have been. She pursues, somewhat pathetically, her desire to be an artist, and after rejecting relationships with both Roy and Jim, her character arc builds to a nice seasonal climax in the “Beach games” episode, where she first berates her co-workers for not coming to her art show and then tells Jim that she cancelled her wedding for him, but not just for him, and that most of all, she just misses his friendship. This is well done, because the key is less that she finally declared her love for him than that she asserts herself. That this narrative arc inevitably deposits her in a relationship with Jim should surprise no one, though, and however good the season three climax is, it is a bit disappointing to see an interesting dramatic vein get played out. I’m not optimistic that the show will be able to recover from the loss, but we’ll see.
When I used to watch the office on TV (occasionally, and rarely), it was hilarious, one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. Over the long weekend, I nursed a bad cold by getting through the first two seasons of the show, from its glorious beginnings to the cliffhanger season finale, and the subjectivity of that experience is very different: you get much deeper inside the characters, and the humor cuts at a very different angle. This is a show about being trapped in a Kafka-esque prison world, where Michael Scott is not merely a nominal authority but (nightmarishly) actually does have authority. He actually can fire people (and the real horror is that they don‘t want to be fired). So when you, too, start to get sucked into that world, when you, too, keep going back into the prison-world of the office and watch episode after episode on end, the awkwardness becomes harder and harder to laugh at. Michael Scott, quite frankly, becomes unendurable.
But while Pam’s character arc might be a nice narrative of self-realization, the development of the artist story is only heartwarming in direct inverse proportion to how honest it is (and the show is pretty honest). She’s not a good artist, nor (it is absolutely clear) does she have a future outside of being a secretary at this office, which the show is occasionally brutal in portraying as a degrading, futureless, and empty existence. As is the office as a whole, of course, but her narrative of self-realization and salvation through art is ultimately a delusion and shown to be such: one of her pictures (at her pathos drenched art show) is a picture of a stapler and another is a picture of the office itself, which Michael Scott (the only person from the office to even show up) promptly buys and places on the wall in the office itself. That the picture wasn’t originally for sale, that what is meant to be Pam’s escape from the office leads her back to the office, and that none of her coworkers show up–implying that they disapprove of her attempt to escape, like prisoners distancing themselves from a jailbreak–are all very nice touches. But the master stroke is that Michael Scott, the show’s arch-villain, does show up, but fails even to realize that Pam is trying to escape from the office because, in fact, her escape is so doomed from the start. The ignorant, oblivious, idiot is, in this case, absolutely right. And that’s scary.
This is why you’re supposed to identify with Jim rather than with Pam. Her character is the show’s figure for failure (dramatizing the power of the office, and all it signifies, to crush humanity), and while Jim can leave the office — remaining in The Office but in another offices — it seems to me that this privilege could never be extended to Pam without tearing the heart out of the show. As receptionist, she exists as a petty, sordid trophy for Michael Scott’s most casual and most unthinkingly heartless actions; since Michael is the embodiment of the office’s stupid and evil power, the show needs her as the object of that evil. It needs her passivity (even cooperation) to demonstrate his awesome power, just like he needs her, however oblivious he is to that. So she has to hug him when he buys her sad little painting in order to demonstrate how hopeless escape really is, like Smith at the end of 1984. It’s a powerful (and wonderfully dark) vision, but we can only laugh at it to the extent that we don’t identify with Pam, I think, the way Frederick Douglass could only represent subjection along side a curious assertion that he was never truly subject to slavery. The two cannot co-exist. If we identified with her, the show would be far too dark to see.
Great post (per usual), Aaron. I’ve had a similarly weird experience watching The Office on TV as opposed to Netflix, and I couldn’t figure out why exactly until now.
I still wonder, though: is Jim really all that mobile? Unlike Pam he receives other job offers, he gets transferred to other locations, he gets befriended by every boss he works for, etc. But he’s also to a large degree internalized the same kinds of constrictions that, in a more overt way, hold Pam back: he doesn’t really *want* to move up and has more or less resigned himself to being an anonymous paper worker for the rest of his life. There’s a great moment, for example, at the end of one of the newer episodes where Michael is presented as Jim’s future self — and Jim accepts it. And, if I remember correctly, when Pam is getting ready to get hitched, Jim plans a vacation… but is totally unable to do so: he has *never* gone on a vacation (as Ryan points out) and even has to ask the other workers what location would be desireable (he can’t even imagine his way out of the office’s walls). If I were more Foucauldian (which I’m not, thank god), I would suggest that Jim represents an even more insidious form of subjection to the office’s power.
Oh, and do you think the show has — or *can* have — a Bartleby (since Pam’s preferring not to is incapacitated from the start)? For my money, it’s Creed.
Hey Cody! Rock chalk! More on Jim in part two of this post. For the moment, I would say that I think the totality of Pam’s subjection (the fact that her character has no other options) means that her character can imagine separation from the office in a way that Jim’s less severe subjection forecloses. In other words, the meaning of “art” for her character is as a sphere differentiated from the iron cage (until Michael buys it, of course), which she can imagine because she is more directly held captive: because she is chained to a desk she hates (having no alternative), she can imagine an alternative. Precisely because Jim is *not* chained to the desk (and has options) his dilemma as a character turns that agency into an unwillingness to recognize the office for what it is. IOW, the very fact that he can leave it means that he doesn’t register its violence as clearly. She does, and *since* she does, she can conceive of a space outside of the office (which she calls art).
Regarding Foucault:
You want to use it, don’t you? Take the panopticon. Use it. I am unarmed. Strike me down with it. Give in to your anger. With each passing moment you make yourself more Foucault’s servant.
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[…] by zunguzungu on November 26, 2008 (This is a long deferred part three on The Office; part one was Does Jim Prefer? And Why Pam Does Not and part two was Teaching Jim to […]
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Anonymous Posted on I broke-up with a guy Junior year of college who could just not get over who my provieus boyfriend was. If he’s going to get all weird and be all jealous either don’t tell him or find someone else. You don’t need that weirdness in your relationship.
Thanks for spending time on the computer (writing) so others don’t have to.
[…] of posts about the American The Office that I am still quite fond of; you can read them, in order, here, here, and here, if you like. I treated the American version of the show as a standalone entity for […]
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It’s great to find an expert who can explain things so well