How should I wear my problem hair, my dirty, no-good problem hair?
I should really be working on either my second Wendy and Lucy essay or procrastinating with my ficmix (Post-Basterds, set in Boston fo sho), but this popped into my head during work today, fueled by knightseri being totally annoyed by my fangirling over Ryan Howard's hipster glasses last night, and would not leave me alone. Pretty much structured like my massive Bear Jew/Little Man post.
The OG Prima Donna
Cap by potthead.
You know, every time I think I hit rock bottom at my job, the floor opens up, like at a carnival ride. I'm gonna retrace my steps. College, four-year degree, student loans, business school, alone in a beet field. I... there's a step missing. "Hey, mom." "Hey, Ryan. How's that five-year plan coming?" "Oh, it's great. Today, I knelt down in cow manure and I got abandoned in a beet field." "Oh, that's cool." "Yeah, that's really cool. I'm learning a lot. I'm really glad I took this full-time job."
-- Season three, episode five "Initiation"
My feelings on the most recent episode of The Office have ranged from being really upset about the sitcomization of Dwight, Pam, and Ryan, to having Kelly Kapoor-level freak outs over Ryan's attempts to reinvent himself, like his photography. And while I'm still not sure the writers have really stepped it up as far as fully expressing his character breakdown, I'm incredibly attached to him as a person, and I feel the need to deconstruct why he is the way he is.
While I think it's been clear for a while that Ryan Howard is a very callous person, that's been much more overt since season four. The experience of becoming "the youngest VP in the company's history" sort of cemented him as a shallow and mostly careless individual, and since the end of that period, he's become so much more childlike in his thoughtlessness, which is, I think, an expression of him finally changing from a boy into a man, to be totally cheesy.
As author Larry Doyle said, the whole teenager-coming-of-age thing was a construct of the 1950s, and in the past decade or so, we've definitely seen more in terms of men being unable to grow up until their thirties or later. Just look at all of Judd Apatow's films, or Christopher Noxon's book Rejuvenile. I'm not sure one person can accurately gauge where this long period of arrested development ("Hey, that's the name of the show!") began within a societal context- a reaction to the Vietnam war, maybe?- but it's pretty apparent that, for now, it's here to stay. Within the context of The Office, I don't think we've seen Ryan as a "child" until season five. Certainly, Michael likes to describe as some young ingenue in the earlier seasons, but at that point Ryan appears to be pretty well-immersed in his goals of pursuing the grown-up ideal. He's gotten his MBA, he's working the office job, he's making an effort to be promoted. On-screen, he is an adult. Season four is obviously when he's begun to crack though, buckling under the weight of his own responsibilities, and, after several months on the job, he's developed a drug habit, is going out and getting into fights, and, most notably, has begun to cut all the corners in the workplace.
And then, at the end of the season, he's knocked down to the same place he was before: temping at a mid-range, failing paper supply company. He's doing the mind-numbing, menial work again but he's lost even his notoriety as Michael's golden child. His erstwhile girlfriend- who he had at least formerly had for the purpose of having her- is dating someone else. He's back at home, living with his mother. In that situation, how does he react to being pushed down, all the way to the bottom? In a decidedly immature fashion, detailing those he hopes to harm once he's back on top, not giving a damn about his job, and eventually, when the pressure of not being on top becomes too much for him, he takes Kelly's money and runs away to Fort Lauderdale under the guise of Thailand. Presumably, when the money runs out, he comes back to Scranton, tail between his legs, and ends up working in a bowling alley as the shoe bitch. Even at that stage, his apparent total fall from grace, he still works hard to keep up appearances though, dying his hair blonde and maintaining that he was abroad. He jumps at the first opportunity to be more though, joining the Michael Scott Paper Company briefly, only to find himself adrift again, when he cannot (as before) justify his existence as a paper salesman. And once again, he becomes the temp, living within the office walls, without anything other than a flimsy emotional pretext to tie him to his work situation.
Same shit, different day.
But the real issue I have with the writers is Ryan's attempt to become a hipster this season, and how it relates to what he's already gone through as a character, with the fedora and the black-and-white photography and the unnecessary glasses (which are supposedly based on Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character in (500) Days of Summer). The thing is that Ryan Howard is a man adrift. He's become season two Jim Halpert, but with more "artistic" inclinations and thoughtlessness. He doesn't seem to give a shit about his job and he's using his co-workers for money again. Without his business school dreams or his title to define him, he's lost, and he needs to eke out his identity once more.
I don't want to read too much into Subtle Sexuality's lyrics, but I'm going to, because I think they are pretty demonstrative of Ryan's opinion of himself:
They call me Mr. Understood 'cos no one understands me
But when I spit rhymes, everybody buys my CD
Knowing that there's not a whole lot to go on this season, I think Ryan, in his need to identify himself, likes to imagine himself as being misunderstood, a sort of juvenile notion popular mostly among high schoolers and college students (as a college student, I like to think I would know). He needs to believe that he's a soul no one gets because it staves off the notion of himself as a typical person. Watching him lately, I can't help but think of something a film professor once said in my class, quoting one of her old professors, "Oh, you haven't realized you're average yet." Ryan's floundering and experimenting with his hipster persona because the struggle does not allow him to accept the fact that he's going nowhere, that he is- and is going to be- one of the sad old fuckers in his office. And, as the latter line of the song suggests, to differentiate himself through his hipster pursuits, he gets attention. If he's got the pretext of creating great art, he can talk to the dully oblivious girl in reception. If he's deliberately mysterious, he can get everyone wondering about him. The point is to place himself there, to draw attention to himself specifically as the outsider in a way that validates his opinion of himself. I'm not sure that it's easier or harder to struggle against inevitable conclusions, but there's something to be said for the act of struggling, and Ryan's definitely tapped into that.
I think it's also significant that his most notable image produced as an artist is a piece about "exposure in the workplace." Yes, it's a silly and easy way to be sexually provocative, but it's also worth examining for the purposes of puzzling out Ryan's perceptions of himself. There's a lot made about the difference between "naked" and "nude" in art, and the image definitely falls into the former category. There's no pretext for Kelly's nakedness aside from Ryan's own desire to make "deep" art, and, even then, it's presented in a purposefully unidealized manner. This is not Venus of Urbino, this is Olympia, with decidedly less care given to its presentation and while I sort of hate myself for comparing fake Office art to Manet. The fact that Kelly is naked though and given the description of the piece, it's hard not to read Ryan's own experiences and his identity into the picture's significance. He is the naked one in this scenario. His dirty laundry has been aired to the entire office. There's no question of who he is in his coworkers' minds, but he still has to believe that no one is really seeing him, as a person. While the nakedness of his transgressions is still there, his real identity is hidden.
Even as Ryan is accepting in this way of his role within the office, by turning it into art, he still feels a need to present himself as something more, which is why he has to reinvent himself. He's not just Ryan Howard, Fire Guy, the one who cost Dunder-Mifflin hundreds of thousands of dollars. He's Ryan Howard, hipster artist, who wears intentionally boring sweaters and inexplicable spectacles, and even though this doesn't make him any more accessible to the people he spends all his time with, it does identify him as something better, perhaps somebody above his office existence and that's infinitely preferable to being at rock-bottom.
God, that came out so much more pretentious than I'd hoped and probably less clear. I'm still leaning more toward being annoyed at the writers for not conveying this sort of thing well-enough, which is honestly just a bunch of bullshit conjecture, but whatever. I'm all for finding depth where there is none. Why can't all my term papers be about relating The Office to modern art though? There's only so much I can say about Cades, but I could talk your ear off about B. J. Novak's on-screen personas.
BTW- I'm hard at work on my thesis, which is all about his character in Knocked Up.
Kidding, I think.
The OG Prima Donna
Cap by potthead.
You know, every time I think I hit rock bottom at my job, the floor opens up, like at a carnival ride. I'm gonna retrace my steps. College, four-year degree, student loans, business school, alone in a beet field. I... there's a step missing. "Hey, mom." "Hey, Ryan. How's that five-year plan coming?" "Oh, it's great. Today, I knelt down in cow manure and I got abandoned in a beet field." "Oh, that's cool." "Yeah, that's really cool. I'm learning a lot. I'm really glad I took this full-time job."
-- Season three, episode five "Initiation"
My feelings on the most recent episode of The Office have ranged from being really upset about the sitcomization of Dwight, Pam, and Ryan, to having Kelly Kapoor-level freak outs over Ryan's attempts to reinvent himself, like his photography. And while I'm still not sure the writers have really stepped it up as far as fully expressing his character breakdown, I'm incredibly attached to him as a person, and I feel the need to deconstruct why he is the way he is.
While I think it's been clear for a while that Ryan Howard is a very callous person, that's been much more overt since season four. The experience of becoming "the youngest VP in the company's history" sort of cemented him as a shallow and mostly careless individual, and since the end of that period, he's become so much more childlike in his thoughtlessness, which is, I think, an expression of him finally changing from a boy into a man, to be totally cheesy.
As author Larry Doyle said, the whole teenager-coming-of-age thing was a construct of the 1950s, and in the past decade or so, we've definitely seen more in terms of men being unable to grow up until their thirties or later. Just look at all of Judd Apatow's films, or Christopher Noxon's book Rejuvenile. I'm not sure one person can accurately gauge where this long period of arrested development ("Hey, that's the name of the show!") began within a societal context- a reaction to the Vietnam war, maybe?- but it's pretty apparent that, for now, it's here to stay. Within the context of The Office, I don't think we've seen Ryan as a "child" until season five. Certainly, Michael likes to describe as some young ingenue in the earlier seasons, but at that point Ryan appears to be pretty well-immersed in his goals of pursuing the grown-up ideal. He's gotten his MBA, he's working the office job, he's making an effort to be promoted. On-screen, he is an adult. Season four is obviously when he's begun to crack though, buckling under the weight of his own responsibilities, and, after several months on the job, he's developed a drug habit, is going out and getting into fights, and, most notably, has begun to cut all the corners in the workplace.
And then, at the end of the season, he's knocked down to the same place he was before: temping at a mid-range, failing paper supply company. He's doing the mind-numbing, menial work again but he's lost even his notoriety as Michael's golden child. His erstwhile girlfriend- who he had at least formerly had for the purpose of having her- is dating someone else. He's back at home, living with his mother. In that situation, how does he react to being pushed down, all the way to the bottom? In a decidedly immature fashion, detailing those he hopes to harm once he's back on top, not giving a damn about his job, and eventually, when the pressure of not being on top becomes too much for him, he takes Kelly's money and runs away to Fort Lauderdale under the guise of Thailand. Presumably, when the money runs out, he comes back to Scranton, tail between his legs, and ends up working in a bowling alley as the shoe bitch. Even at that stage, his apparent total fall from grace, he still works hard to keep up appearances though, dying his hair blonde and maintaining that he was abroad. He jumps at the first opportunity to be more though, joining the Michael Scott Paper Company briefly, only to find himself adrift again, when he cannot (as before) justify his existence as a paper salesman. And once again, he becomes the temp, living within the office walls, without anything other than a flimsy emotional pretext to tie him to his work situation.
Same shit, different day.
But the real issue I have with the writers is Ryan's attempt to become a hipster this season, and how it relates to what he's already gone through as a character, with the fedora and the black-and-white photography and the unnecessary glasses (which are supposedly based on Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character in (500) Days of Summer). The thing is that Ryan Howard is a man adrift. He's become season two Jim Halpert, but with more "artistic" inclinations and thoughtlessness. He doesn't seem to give a shit about his job and he's using his co-workers for money again. Without his business school dreams or his title to define him, he's lost, and he needs to eke out his identity once more.
I don't want to read too much into Subtle Sexuality's lyrics, but I'm going to, because I think they are pretty demonstrative of Ryan's opinion of himself:
They call me Mr. Understood 'cos no one understands me
But when I spit rhymes, everybody buys my CD
Knowing that there's not a whole lot to go on this season, I think Ryan, in his need to identify himself, likes to imagine himself as being misunderstood, a sort of juvenile notion popular mostly among high schoolers and college students (as a college student, I like to think I would know). He needs to believe that he's a soul no one gets because it staves off the notion of himself as a typical person. Watching him lately, I can't help but think of something a film professor once said in my class, quoting one of her old professors, "Oh, you haven't realized you're average yet." Ryan's floundering and experimenting with his hipster persona because the struggle does not allow him to accept the fact that he's going nowhere, that he is- and is going to be- one of the sad old fuckers in his office. And, as the latter line of the song suggests, to differentiate himself through his hipster pursuits, he gets attention. If he's got the pretext of creating great art, he can talk to the dully oblivious girl in reception. If he's deliberately mysterious, he can get everyone wondering about him. The point is to place himself there, to draw attention to himself specifically as the outsider in a way that validates his opinion of himself. I'm not sure that it's easier or harder to struggle against inevitable conclusions, but there's something to be said for the act of struggling, and Ryan's definitely tapped into that.
I think it's also significant that his most notable image produced as an artist is a piece about "exposure in the workplace." Yes, it's a silly and easy way to be sexually provocative, but it's also worth examining for the purposes of puzzling out Ryan's perceptions of himself. There's a lot made about the difference between "naked" and "nude" in art, and the image definitely falls into the former category. There's no pretext for Kelly's nakedness aside from Ryan's own desire to make "deep" art, and, even then, it's presented in a purposefully unidealized manner. This is not Venus of Urbino, this is Olympia, with decidedly less care given to its presentation and while I sort of hate myself for comparing fake Office art to Manet. The fact that Kelly is naked though and given the description of the piece, it's hard not to read Ryan's own experiences and his identity into the picture's significance. He is the naked one in this scenario. His dirty laundry has been aired to the entire office. There's no question of who he is in his coworkers' minds, but he still has to believe that no one is really seeing him, as a person. While the nakedness of his transgressions is still there, his real identity is hidden.
Even as Ryan is accepting in this way of his role within the office, by turning it into art, he still feels a need to present himself as something more, which is why he has to reinvent himself. He's not just Ryan Howard, Fire Guy, the one who cost Dunder-Mifflin hundreds of thousands of dollars. He's Ryan Howard, hipster artist, who wears intentionally boring sweaters and inexplicable spectacles, and even though this doesn't make him any more accessible to the people he spends all his time with, it does identify him as something better, perhaps somebody above his office existence and that's infinitely preferable to being at rock-bottom.
God, that came out so much more pretentious than I'd hoped and probably less clear. I'm still leaning more toward being annoyed at the writers for not conveying this sort of thing well-enough, which is honestly just a bunch of bullshit conjecture, but whatever. I'm all for finding depth where there is none. Why can't all my term papers be about relating The Office to modern art though? There's only so much I can say about Cades, but I could talk your ear off about B. J. Novak's on-screen personas.
BTW- I'm hard at work on my thesis, which is all about his character in Knocked Up.
Kidding, I think.