I read Scott’s terrific piece on Glengarry Glen Ross today. The film adaptation of David Mamet’s classic play is the archetypal masterpiece about sales, boiler rooms, con-artistry and capitalism at its most ruthless and inhumane. From Boiler Room to Two For The Money to the rightfully obscure direct-to-DVD Vince Vaughn vehicle The Prime Gig, I can’t see a film about sales without being reminded of Glengarry Glen. It’s the gold standard against which all entertainment about salesmen will be measured.
Yet even though The Office prominently involves sales and airs immediately before a show starring Glengarry Glen Ross’ master soloist I never really connected the two. I think that’s because The Office isn’t really a show about selling or capitalism or the cutthroat world of business. It’s essentially about relationships and workplaces and Michael Scott being an infantile jackass.
Tonight, however, all that changed (except for the part about Michael being an infantile jackass). The new regime decided to tilt the work dynamic at the office firmly and perhaps permanently in favor of salespeople. Suddenly everything revolved around sales and making the lives and jobs of salespeople easier. To that end, the head office purchased, at great expense, a list of highly valuable leads to be disseminated to their top closers.
Alas, they made the mistake of giving those leads to a threatened and terrified Michael, who decided to enact passive-aggressive revenge on his now arrogant and super-charged sales force by forcing his underlings to embark on a pointless scavenger hunt to find clues that will lead them to the leads. Not surprisingly, this moronic tactic backfires and the leads end up in the town dump.
Meanwhile, the power shift between newly empowered salespeople and their colleagues in accounting and management causes all sorts of friction and bad blood and Andy and Erin’s oppressively adorable romance continues to proceed by baby steps, in part because both are so fundamentally child-like.
The question underlining just about every episode of The Office seems to be, “Just how dumb and juvenile can/should Michael be?” The answer, generally, is pretty damned dumb and pretty fucking childish. I don’t usually mind if an episode is funny or engaging or sweet or psychologically astute but when the laughs aren’t there it’s hard not to dwell on Michael’s stupidity/immaturity and how it would play out in the real world.