The Two Interesting Things about “Undercover Boss.”
This reality show, which premiered after the Super Bowl, has top guys at companies posing as entry-level employees in order to learn what’s really going on in the places they run. In the first episode, the President and COO of Waste Management, Larry O’Donnell, posed as new hire “Randy Lawrence,” toiling alongside the working stiffs at WM cleaning out porta-potties, riding the back of a garbage truck, and picking up litter at a landfill.
We’re meant to observe that the top execs in their corporate ivory towers, if only they knew what it was like for those at the bottom who “really do the work,” would not only run their companies more humanely but more efficiently — because the folks down below have so much to teach them about operational realities. That was certainly the lesson we were meant to take away from the premiere episode. But more interesting are the things the show can’t admit it is telling us, but which it is:
- In America, physiognomy is destiny. Larry O’Donnell may change his $2000 business suit for a work uniform when he goes undercover, but he can’t change his bone structure, and a world of difference separates him from the proles down below. They have faces that look run over by a Mack Truck; they carry too much weight around; they waddle when they walk. He, on the other hand, while being no movie star, has classically symmetrical features, and a weight-to-height ratio that is what every health insurance company chart demands, along with perfect posture and a graceful gait. They have dialects; he speaks perfect mid-American English. Dress them all alike — put them all in identical business suits or identical jumpsuits — and you’d have no trouble picking the COO out of the lineup. Any number of studies have shown that people who match our society’s definition of good-looking tend to get hired faster, earn more money, and advance further in their careers, but Undercover Boss is the living proof we don’t really want to see. The real lesson of the show is that people who look and sound like Larry O’Donnell are the ones who make it to the corporate boardrooms, while people who look and sound like the Waste Management guys who clean out the porta-potties are going to, well, be the guys who clean out the porta-potties. They haven’t got a chance.
- In our popular mythology (which the show plays expertly to), those who run companies can be alpha-dog heroes, those who do the grunt work can be working-class heroes, but those in between who are charged with executing the orders down the chain of command — without whom no organization can actually work — are just jerks. Larry O’Donnell is filled with admiration for the salt-of-the-earth types he meets on his odyssey, but in his encounters with their immediate bosses and supervisors, he shows nothing but contempt. They’re pond scum in his eyes (and therefore the audience’s), not capable of “really doing the work” and not capable of making the big decisions either. Before Larry went underground and learned to love the working man and woman, what do you think he would have done with any of these middle managers who failed to drive the working man and woman hard enough to hit the profit targets for their divisions that Larry had set out? But now, because of Larry’s epiphany, they’re the show’s villains. Of course, Larry gives lip service to his having been the one “responsible” for some of the bad workplace rules he sees being imposed, but the bullying way he feels free to talk with the middle-managers — a tone which contrasts with the veneration he expresses in all his conversations with the “working folks” — tells us how he really feels (and how we’re supposed to feel) about who deserves the blame. In the cosmology of Undercover Boss, the top boss is inherently a good guy because he gets his hands dirty trying to figure out to make a better company; the workers at the bottom are inherently good guys because they’re the ones getting their hands dirty every day. It’s the folks in between for whom we’re allowed to reserve our hate. Woe be to you, American white collar guy who’s not in charge.
Next Sunday’s episode looks from the previews like it exposes some truly egregious workplace practices at Hooter’s, in which instance middle-management might deserve the audience’s wrath. In general, I think this show might be worth watching, not for what it says that it’s saying about our attitudes toward work and the workplace, but for the more interesting things it denies it’s saying.
Storytelling.
The New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, in her books The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) and The Crime of Sheila McGough (1999), made a convincing argument that in journalism and in court trials, truth is never the issue; narrative is. When two sides need to sway a jury (or when a competition occurs outside the courtroom, and the prize is public opinion), seldom is it the case that one contestant has all the facts on his side and the other has none. Rather, each has the opportunity to present a narrative that makes sense of the facts at hand, a narrative that works from the assumption that certain of the facts are salient, while others (which may even be more numerous, but which don’t fit the narrative as conveniently) are trivial. The winner is never the side that proves a point supported incontestably by the most facts; the winner is the side that presents the story that makes the best sense of the facts.
I’m reminded of this, now that the dust has settled, by the “late night TV wars” that went on in January. Most people came out thinking that Conan O’Brien was done wrong by NBC and Jay Leno. Now, mind you, I’m one of those people who agree with Robin Williams when he guested on Conan’s next-to-last night that “NBC canceled the wrong show.” Conan has always made more interesting use of an hour of television than Jay Leno has, and I wish his show had prevailed. But does Jay Leno deserve to be seen as the villain in the scenario? He should own up to presenting a crappy television show, but does he need to own up to Machiavellian tactics in the pursuit of getting his old time slot back? Many people think he is guilty of these. But that is probably only because, of the two hosts, Leno has done the poorer job of managing public perception, of putting out a narrative that makes sense.
In this conflict, as in practically every other one that is put before a jury in a courtroom or the jury of public opinion, we have only a second-hand notion of the facts. We weren’t there when they “happened” (if, indeed, the things we presume to have happened, from reports we’ve received, happened at all). We have only two competing narratives. Conan O’Brien (and his people) did a superb job casting Conan as the victim in the scenario. But Leno, through his failure to put out a compelling competing narrative, or through his failure to hire people who could (he has even made a point of not having such people, if that can be believed), handed public opinion to O’Brien on a silver platter. A story Leno might have told was that NBC treated him unconscionably when it came to him in 2004 to tell him they were handing his job to O’Brien in five years, and that the way things played out instead is a triumph of an underdog against an evil corporation which has to admit it made a mistake. Well enough told, that’s the story we’d be telling ourselves now. But that’s not the way Leno managed the narrative in 2004 or since.
To call this a matter of spin is to denigrate it. We are hard-wired to need stories, especially stories that speak to our internal sense of (and need for) justice. Since the dawn of human consciousness we have told them to ourselves and to each other in order to make sense of a random and senseless universe. Our brains are also imbued with an internal sense of logic. What lawyers, journalists, PR people, advertising creative directors, and writers of all kinds know is that all competing narratives have potentially equal claim on the imagination, if they can just be made to sound logical enough. The narrative accepted as the truth will not always be the truth, but will always be the one that is the most compelling and convincing, the one that sounds logical, the one that “just seems to make the most sense” — and that is an outcome with which the talent of the storyteller, and his understanding of the human mind, has everything to do.
When Is a Talking Head More Than a Talking Head? When It’s a Python.
Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut) holds you in its grip from start to finish — all six hours of it.
In this massive documentary from 2009, on the occasion of the group’s fortieth anniversary, all five living Pythons — John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin — sat down for lengthy individual interviews. Each appears before the camera solo, framed head and chest against black, facing at a slight angle an off-camera interviewer. In other words, it’s classic “talking heads,” the kind of stuff that’s supposed to be deadly. Plenty of clips are on hand to illustrate what those talking heads are telling us, and the interviews are intercut expertly, but nevertheless a substantial part of the film consists of one or another member of the British comedy troupe just sitting there and talking. What the film proves is that talking heads can work when the heads happen to house some of the greatest comedy minds of their generation.
The film is organized into six chapters. (These were shown weekly on the IFC channel in the fall; the film is now available on DVD, and for download on iTunes.) The participants speak seriously, and passionately, but of course with a sense of humor (as how could they not?). They make excellent raconteurs. Each hour-long chapter goes by before you know it; I have watched two at a clip while blissfully losing all sense of time.
Their stories pretty well cohere. We learn who these Pythons were, what they did before Python, and how they came together; Cambridge and Oxford educated (apart from Gilliam, the American animator), members in various underground or overground theatrical troupes at their universities, they had early television careers individually or in pairs writing and performing for British comedy-variety shows of the sixties. We hear how Monty Python’s Flying Circus took off, flying under the radar even of the BBC which aired it irregularly and at odd hours. We discover how cult success became popularity, and how their fame spread to the United States when one Dallas PBS station took a “what have we got to lose” chance on the show. (A Boston PBS executive, who had made initial inquiries, chickened out; literally turned white at a screening.) We hear about the creative difficulties and solutions behind the scenes of their three movies (Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Life of Brian, The Meaning of Life).
Along the way are interviews with others who played a part in the story as it unfolded, and with comics whose lives were changed by their exposure to Python at formative stages.
If I can share just one impression among hundreds that emerged from my viewing, it’s my surprise at the drama that prevailed among these guys from the very beginning. Discovering Python as an American in the seventies, I saw a show that spoke with one absurd voice, one brilliantly silly point of view — it was anarchic, but paradoxically, anarchic in a unified way — and I assumed a show like that could only result from superb teamwork. To an extent that was true, but the men collaborated “as one” only rarely. They were really a collection of smaller teams, in alliances that remained what they had been in their college days. Graham Chapman (who died in 1989) and Cleese (Oxford) wrote together as a team, as did Palin and Jones (Cambridge). Idle floated, coming up with many of the musical bits. The internal factions could be harsh with one another, and Cleese could be particularly withering in his criticism of the work from Palin and Jones. Palin and Jones, often as not, would slink off feeling chastened, convinced that their work wasn’t up to snuff — but occasionally sneaking it back into the script when Cleese wasn’t looking.
Meanwhile, in the production of their movies, Cleese often lost patience with Gilliam whom he felt spent an inordinate amount of time tinkering with the “look” instead of just shooting the funny script and getting on with it. In fact, the look of films like Holy Grail is essential to their success as comedy, so Cleese was wrong, but nevertheless his words on the topic in the documentary have relevance to the success of the documentary itself. Defending his critique of Gilliam, he says, “Everyone talks about film as a visual medium. Well, guess what, life is a visual medium. Yet here I am talking to you, and here you are talking to me.” When the talk is as good as it is in Monty Python: Almost the Truth, he has a point.
A Conan Post-Mortem Thought Experiment.
Now that Conan is done at The Tonight Show…I’ve been conducting a little “thought experiment” for my own amusement.
I always loved Late Night with Conan O’Brien. I loved the brilliance of the show’s humor, its edgy, free, try-anything subversiveness. While succeeding as light entertainment, the show made our “entertainment lite” culture the target of its satire, and hit the target time after time. Conan had authenticity as the host of that show, because the show felt like the man — felt like the man himself, transformed into a show.
At first blush the idea of being able to watch this show an hour earlier sounded fantastic, but when Conan took over The Tonight Show, that’s not what happened. Conan blanded out. He was still good, but in a more generic way, rounding his square edges in order to fit into the round hole of the earlier time slot. Was he dumbing himself down? Or listening to the wrong advice?
We know that what Conan did do with The Tonight Show in his seven month stint — attempting some sort of Conan 2.0 for broader consumption — didn’t set the world on fire. (The event that led to his demise was Jay Leno’s failure in prime time, but it’s safe to say that had Conan pulled in big audiences for The Tonight Show, he’d have kept the gig.)
So changing didn’t work. Would staying the same?
We can’t know, but we can guess.
Let’s go back a couple of years. Late Night with Conan O’Brien is going strong. NBC — this is the important part of the thought experiment, without telling Conan — decides to air his show in the hour immediately following the local news, and Jay Leno’s Tonight Show after that. After all, both shows are taped around 5 in the afternoon the same day; the order they’re broadcast is arbitrary, so NBC reverses the order. Conan never finds out, and everyone does his best to make sure he never does. As far as he knows, he’s still doing the show that airs after The Tonight Show, not the show that airs after the local news. He’s still doing it in New York, on a modest set, to New York studio audiences. Because he doesn’t know that his time slot is different, he keeps doing the same great edgy subversive hilarious show he always has.
The question is this: If NBC had done that, would that show have worked coming right after the local news? Or do people need something else in that hour than what Conan does best?
Though a fan of Late Night with Conan O’Brien, I have a hard time in the cold light of day imagining that show transplanted to the earlier hour. You can’t be subversive and be a network’s standard-bearer. And changing Conan didn’t work, either. Much as I hate to write the words, NBC’s reviled re-reprogramming decision of January 8 may have been correct. (One explanation for what went wrong with the show is that Conan was too freaked out by the “responsibility” of wearing the mantle of a franchise he had revered for so long.) There is a third way — which Conan didn’t do — which is for him to figure out how to broaden his appeal while maintaining the authenticity of who he is, and I wish him well in figuring that out for another network. If anyone can, it’s Conan. He’s brilliant.
An Opportunity, Not a Dilemma.
With Republican Scott Brown’s election to the Senate from Massachusetts, and the unlikelihood that health care legislation as the Democrats have written it will now pass, we have an opportunity to create a simpler and much-needed new law, arguably the law we always should have wanted. I can write it in three bullet points.
- Make it illegal for insurance companies to deny coverage to new customers based on pre-existing conditions.
- Make it illegal for insurance companies to terminate coverage of existing customers based on loss of employment or getting sick.
- Require all adults to carry health insurance for themselves and their children (for the same reason we require all drivers to carry automobile insurance—to spread out risk and reduce premiums for everyone).
There. Minus that last parenthesis, 48 words. If I can do that, why can’t Congress and President Obama? It’s not brain surgery.
When Sweeney Met Walt.
You might not think Johnny Depp and Alan Rickman, playing a serial throat-slasher and a pederast judge, singing Stephen Sondheim’s “Pretty Women” from the film version of Sweeney Todd, would juxtapose well with a montage of Disney heroines, but — well, see for yourself.
The magic goes beyond clever editing.
Ernest Anderson.
John Huston’s second film as a director, In This Our Life (1942), contains several excellent performances, but none more noteworthy — and tragic in its way — than that of a newcomer, Ernest Anderson.
Anderson has an important role in the film as Parry, a young black man who decides to better himself by going for his law degree. Currently he works as a shop assistant to the character played by Olivia de Havilland; they get along well and she has a benign interest in his future. As he puts it in his speech to her, a white man working in a low position for a white employer has a chance for advancement, but a black man working in a low position for a white employer will always be only that until he dies. To rise, he must have a profession that will allow him not to be in a white person’s employ. And so he is studying the law.
Anderson instantly gets your sympathy in this quiet speech. He has a luminous intelligence and a gentle, understated pride that are in marked contrast to other portrayals Hollywood demanded from black actors of the time. You’ll find no exaggerated “black dialect” in his speech patterns, no shuffling in his walk or his manner. Turns of the plot (which I won’t spoil) only deepen your sympathy for the character — and your regard for the actor’s range in his handful of key scenes. You’re aware that you’re watching, in its treatment of race and racism, a very progressive movie for the time, and an equally progressive performance. Anderson seems a precursor to Sidney Poitier ten years later; if anything he is the more natural actor.
The performance is such a standout that it won Anderson a best acting award from the National Board of Review in 1942.
The story goes that Bette Davis (who stars in the film along with de Havilland) proposed Anderson for the part when she noticed a special quality about him as he served her lunch in the Warner Brothers commissary. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, and he made good in it. You watch him and see a career full of promise.
Yet an odd feeling begins to set in. You notice that while he looks vaguely familiar, you can’t actually place him in any other movies. And that means he must not have gone on to great things, because if he had, you’d surely recognize him from those.
A look at his credits on the Internet Movie Database tells the tale — a bitterly ironic one. In the 24 movies he made after In This Our Life until his last one in 1970, these are the roles he played in 18 of them, in order: George M. Cohan’s Valet; Club Car Steward; Messenger; Train Porter; Black Man; Sam, Elevator Operator; Waiter; Wong, Houseboy; Second Elevator Operator; Redcap at Airport; Mme. Brizar’s Footman; Eddie, Train Steward; Black Man; Fred Johnson, Train Steward; Train Porter; Porter on Twentieth Century Ltd.; Ernie, Ice Cream Vendor at Beach; and Sol, roomservice waiter.
The speech he makes in his spectacular debut role — about a black man never being able to rise when working for a white employer — was prophetic about his own career. That spectacular debut role was his one shining hour.
A product of Ernest Anderson’s obscurity is that there is not one picture of him on the world wide web that shows him clearly. In fact, there is just one picture of him of any kind — a very small one, from In This Our Life, in which he’s a tiny figure in the composition, all but invisible. The pictures of him accompanying this post are freeze-frames I snapped myself from my television set. Moments frozen in time.
The Real Progressive Flo.
The actress who plays the gal who waits on people in the Progressive Insurance Store is Stephanie Courtney, a member of The Groundlings improvisational theater troupe in Los Angeles. Here she is as herself (I’m guessing this video comes from a few years ago), doing a two-and-a-half minute piece that is more performance art than standup comedy. It’s amusing, and I enjoyed seeing what she looks like without her Flo makeup, and hearing what she sounds like without her Flo voice.
Avatar. Not Just Dumb. Dangerously Dumb.
James Cameron’s Titanic was stupid, but at least it didn’t hurt anybody. The writer-director’s Avatar, on the other hand, gives aid and comfort to America’s enemies and will win converts for their cause. Al Qaeda could not have made a better film for its purposes. Now it doesn’t have to.
In the tale (set 150 years into the future), an American corporate-military expeditionary force has established an outpost on the planet Pandora (get it? unexpected consequences in store!); they want to mine the planet for the mineral Unobtainium (yes, it’s really called that) which fetches $20 million an ounce back on Earth. But an indigenous population (the Na’vi) lives on the land, and stands in the way. Corporate American Imperialism will have its way, and the Na’vi can either stand clear or be clear-cut like the forest they live in. Of course, the Na’vi have mighty spiritworld-based defenses our Evil Empire can’t begin to comprehend — apparently, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in the Americans’ decadent, cynical, greed-obsessed, results-oriented philosophy…
A sixth grader will comprehend that the Na’vi (who, in their resistance, are seen by the occupiers as terrorists) stand in for a casting call of past and present targets of American imperialism. The strongest and most persistent parallel in the movie is to the plight of American Indians forced off their land by the white man’s Manifest Destiny. But thrown into the mix are scarcely-veiled references to America’s thirst for oil and the wars we have fought for it, our trampling of the faiths of Muslims whose religion we don’t understand, Vietnam, and even (just to make sure the Europeans aren’t left off the hook) a dollop of African colonialism.
Nowhere in his unsubtle parallels does Cameron allow that the Western powers’ historical motivations have been more complicated than greed and blood-lust. Certainly one driver of America’s foreign policy has been our need to protect energy sources vital to the national interest, but is that all our war against radical fundamentalist Islam is about? Is it not also a worthwhile (and, for the survival of our ideals, necessary) fight to defend freedom and religious pluralism against religious fascism? When settlers came to America, was their only motivation to steal land from Indians and kill as many of them as possible — or was there at least, additionally, a trace of something magnificent in their quest to claim a life for themselves and their families at great personal sacrifice?
I have confidence that most in the American audience will dismiss the movie’s one-note propaganda for the pap that it is. It’s not Americans I’m worried about. This movie will play in every corner of the world, and its message will be welcomed in all the corners that hate us. In putting forth an unambiguous, unlayered parable of an America whose role in the world is rapacious, corrupt, and Satanic, an America-as-juggernaut that must be stopped for the sake of the world and of God, it embraces the jihadist’s Powerpoint; it might as well be a recruitment film. The ending, in particular, will be a motivational feel-good for all those who’d like to see American power brought to heel. I wish that, apart from its stupid ideas, Avatar were poorly made — but it isn’t. Avatar is stupendous filmmaking. Its visual imagination takes the breath away, and it carries significant emotional force. But Leni Riefenstahl was a good filmmaker, too.
