The Nihilists’ Masquerade

by Richard Kuslan (February 2020)


Business, Charles Demuth, 1921

 


 

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Michael: Home, sweet home.

 

 

) without understanding why we have laughed or the kind of laugh we have laughed or to what purpose we have been made to laugh. But since a fictional character represents an idea in the minds of the writer, we must ask, if we truly wish to understand what is meant and our reaction to it, why it is that the writers visit upon Michael the indignity of ridicule which the dialogue above, one of many such, represents? They deny him even the poignant longing for a sentimental memory of grandchildren happily at play. The writers have condemned Michael. The writers encourage us to laugh at this. They have created him to condemn him and to have their way with him. Moreover, they condemn him to a purpose: the writers want the audience to agree with them that Michael deserves his fated denial of happiness. The laugh in reaction represents our agreement.

 

 

 

Anyone who is aware of the dramatic changes over the past fifty years in the Northeast of the United States understands that the Big Apple has been over for at least a generation. It has ceased to be the center for the creation and exploration of life-enhancing, thought-expanding art and ideas. The buildings still stand, but no longer does their skyscraping point to the civilizational aspirations they once stood for. However, when The Office plays in proverbial Peoria, where the local idea of the Coasts may be as much as a century old—the national audience will not understand that New York City has become a greenhouse of deadly nightshade.

 

Mind Parasites, these negative, corrosive, divisive ideas have turned The City That Never Sleeps into The City That’s Woke and Gone Broke. It’s once flourishing cultural life is bankrupt, its collective back turned upon its former high-minded, high-achieving aesthetic ideals. We see an aspect of this strident ideological nihilism at work in The Office.

 

 

 

it is an “all-inclusive cast, after all), for the failings that inure to the “elites” themselves. No mea culpas for these nihilists: it’s “tua culpa” all the way. If they could not ridicule others, they would have to ridicule themselves. But, of course, they would never deign to be introspective; gods never are.

 

 

Demographically speaking, it must be kosher to denigrate the Amish before a worldwide audience. After all, they do not watch TV (or even have electricity in their homes), so they could not possibly complain, but even if they did, their numbers are so miniscule that the producers would never field flak from the advertisers. (Do you really wish to buy anything from a company that sponsors a show such as this?) The public degradation of these people is in the clear: The suits in Manhattan do not care because it does not affect advertising revenue.

 

 

 

 

The Office with the work of Laurel and Hardy, about as representative of comedy as any act ever was.

 

they have no money and no prospects and end up with neither. They are only rarely employed, and when hired usually as woodworkers or day laborers perform poorly, making great guffawing gaffes, as in The Music Box when the piano case hurtles down the enormous flight of stairs they are supposed to carry up. They never really succeed with the ladies and when Ollie does, as in Thicker Than Water, he is inevitably henpecked by a woman half his size. They never achieve much of anything in life.

 

 

And yet, in spite of the pratfalls into trap door openings, the smashed plates over the head, the soakings in watery canals, the pulley-hoistings by mule into barnlofts, etc., when were they ever truly made unhappy? Never. They always make it past every obstacle in faithful friendship to one another, together. Whatever they have, they share and share alike. Trouble never lasts long for this positive, life-affirming duo, as they go through life together, imperfect as they are and over their heads without a life-boat in sight.

 

Real comedy compassionates. There is a reason why the Greek tragic trilogies ended with a satyr play.

 

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Charles Dickens was perhaps the most compassionate writer a fictional character ever had. When he writes of the divine mercy granted even unto his fictional characters, we are witness, in fact, to his own mercy-granting nature:

 

 

 

 

 

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Richard Kuslan is an admirer of Donne, Sheridan, Byron, LeFanu, Trollope, Orwell, Sacheverell Sitwell, Christopher Logue and Jean Sprackland, among (many) others in the English language. He marvels at meaning’s fecundity when language is constrained by form and delights in the melodies that take to the air when the beautiful is read aloud.

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