Officetober: Dwight Schrute did Nothing Wrong
A Response to an Atlantic piece "Dwight Schrute Was A Warning".
Welcome to Officetober, where we look at the most influential sitcom in the 21st century, The Office, and its most underappreciated qualities.
The politics of a sitcom character is often in contention, but they stand out when they are the mockery of fashionable orthodoxy embraced by its creators. For conservative characters, they tend to be an audience favorite. Jack Donaghy from 30 Rock and Ron Swanson of Parks and Recreation are recent examples of this, but Tte epitome is Archie Bunker in All in the Family, a reactionary dad who, according to CBS News, turned ‘the angry white male into a cultural icon’. Rob Long, an executive producer for Cheers and right-wing rabble-rouser, wrote in Commentary Magazine that audiences will make their own interpretation, but they will ultimately warm-up to the contrarian character, either because they ultimately end up looking like a normal character or it playfully spits at whatever the writers believe.
In The Office, Dwight Schrute, Dunder Mifflin’s second-in-command (aka the Assistant to the Regional Manager), never professed his politics, if one can believe Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who compared the Republican party to Dwight. You can only presume that he’s an uber reactionary because of his instincts. At least, that’s what some cultural writers thought it would be a good idea to deconstruct. The Atlantic’s Megan Garber wrote a piece, titled Dwight Schrute As A Warning. Garber described Dwight as a lolsob, which means to express frustration and laughter at the same time, and this is the essence of The Office US. Or at least, if you were to summarize the first three seasons because the series later took on a warmer tone, in contrast with its British predecessors.
Such a piece like this would be ignored, but given that I’ve seen it shared many times on my Facebook timeline, I am obliged to give this its day in court. It is a confusing piece that says a lot about its author than the subject. And I’m going to show you why.
Schrute (Rainn Wilson) is Dunder Mifflin’s best salesman, a fact that The Atlantic describes it as a category error, if only because his caustic personality overshadows it. He scares people out of concern over his colleagues’ safety by pulling a simulated fire that can only be likened to a stunt in a C-grade thriller. Then he cuts off a CPR doll’s face as a mask. Instead of conventionally training Ryan Howard, he subjected him to memories of his fraternity hazing. He freezes his girlfriend’s cat. And that’s just a glimpse of it. On the side, Dwight owns a farm (and eventually the Business Park that Dunder Mifflin occupies) and makes a living off of that. Do you know who else owns a farm while being really good at his day job? Victor Davis Hanson. He’s something of a capitalist wet dream.
His paranoia is neutered by being the frequent target of Jim Halpert’s pranks, mainly because Dwight gullibly believes in anything he thinks, and gets an instant emotion whenever he is proven wrong. But there are some strong moments in the relationship. For one, Dwight saved Jim from getting physically beaten by Pam’s ex-fiancee, Roy. It brings a classic element of vulnerability to Dwight - to be recognized for saving people from danger - that we come to be familiar with.
Schrute is not a person born in a vacuum. Technically, he is the American equivalent of Gareth in the UK Office. But more importantly, Schrute feeds off his environment, as if he wants to be the host rather than a product. While he’s loyal to Michael Scott, it comes to a point where the relationship is about to expire and Schrute awaits impatiently in being a manager. When Michael loses the new leads for the sales staff, both men try looking for it in a large dump, resulting in a huge fight between the two about their roles. It’s clear from the get-go that while his managerial end goal was to be a weird and annoying authoritarian, this arc - which extends up to the series finale - does attempt to humanize him. Even when he’s the one person in Dunder Mifflin actually enjoying what he does, the effort to get there does tend to be frustrating, when you are in the role for that long.
One of the main storylines during Season 7 have been Dwight’s ambition to be a corporate executive, working alongside the ranks of the new CEO Robert California and Nellie Bertram, a relatively insecure executive. If being a manager doesn’t cut it (and he was the acting manager for one episode), then why not settle for the highest role? Dwight is assigned by Nellie to successfully launch not just Sabre’s Apple-esque store and its Apple-esque products. But any hopes have been dashed by Robert putting the product under the bus. And it’s only once Jim Halpert, during one of the best moments of their rivalry, prevents him from finding it out. It brings him down to earth, mainly because, it demonstrates the hollowness of workplace loyalty and enthusiasm.
This is why I find the more baffling that Garber would think he’s less deserving of his abilities with a framing like this:
In many early episodes of the show, Dwight’s destructive tendencies are treated as gentle jokes. He brings weapons into the office; Pam laughs about him being a “gun nut.” When he brags about his ability to “physically dominate” other people—or when he remarks offhandedly, “Better a thousand innocent men are locked up than one guilty man roam free”—the message is less that he is a menace than that he is a fool. Dwight comes to work on Halloween dressed variously as the Joker from The Dark Knight, a Sith lord, and the local criminal known as the “Scranton Strangler”; the costumes read primarily as pitiable. The sanitized threats are elements of the sitcom’s promise: No matter what might happen on the show, viewers can safely file it away as Fun. This is also part of the alchemy through which Dwight Schrute—a misogynist in the age of Elliot Rodger, a conspiracist in the age of QAnon, a vigilante in the age of Kyle Rittenhouse—can read, still, as a joke.
Garber at least acknowledges that as the show went on, his actions would have come to bite him:
But as The Office moved into later seasons, the calculus of Dwight’s bearability changed its terms: His actions came, more and more regularly, with specific consequences. Dwight, it cannot be stressed enough, gives Stanley a heart attack. He traps Meredith in a trash bag with a bat. Even his love life takes on, for a stretch, a sense of menace: The Dwight-Angela-Andy love triangle ends painfully for all parties, in part because Dwight’s gaudy version of honor does not preclude his cheating with someone else’s fiancée. As the show went on, the comedy around him got darker, too. In Season 4, Dwight speaks fondly about his grandfather, who is 103 and “still puttering down in Argentina”; as he talks, it becomes clear to everyone but Dwight that Grandpa Manheim is a Nazi.
If The Office pursues syrupy goodness, here’s a character (or many) that can be its antidote. Carrying the spirit of the British original, Dwight does embody some of that show’s bleaker spirits. And yet the joke is not on him, but rather the audience for even thinking that his behavior is far more tolerable if it can be laughed at, rather than with.
And bad events aside, Dwight being painted as an alt-right avatar is par for the course of cultural commentary prior to Donald Trump’s presidency and beyond. Of course, the things mentioned by me and Garber, are pretty crazy, if any of them occurs in real life. But this is a work of fiction, and Dwight is meant to be exaggerated for comic purposes. He doesn’t represent a conspiratorial way of thinking, but an almost unlikeable salesman with little social skills, that he shares with his superiors and his colleagues.
We get the comedy we deserve when we think the joke is no longer funny, once it translates into real life by divine possibility. The Office drew a fine line between the relatability of being a desk drone and the things that could not even happen in The Office. When the line is blurred, we wonder if the character that we liked are ultimately morally detrimental. However, that doesn’t serve as an indictment of the character or the audience watching it and somewhat accepting the possibility and laughing it off, because it would be absurd that anything that occurs under Dwight’s watch would occur.
Dwight Schrute is a character embraced for his eccentricities, but also for how he strives in a workplace that rewards mundanity with little to nothing. His ambitions allow him to pursue greater things and become further conscious about his journey when it runs into different problems. No doubt that trying to land a sale is his most important priority, and when it runs into Michael Scott launching his own company, that’s an obstacle he’s willing to avoid. Far from being a conservative character, he is a contrarian who gets effective results. And that’s why The Atlantic’s statement is false.