22
Michael Scott is Going to Die
One fine day in season 3, Michael gets a call with some sad news from Jan (“Grief Counseling”). They “lost Ed Truck.” Michael is initially confused and responds by looking for Ed’s cell phone number to help with the search and rescue. But there is no rescue from death. What at first looks like Michael’s thick-headedness is actually an instance of a very common phenomenon: the denial of death. Michael is so unwilling (or unable?) to consider death that a common euphemism for death (“we lost so-and-so”) is completely lost on him. Yet it’s true. Ed Truck, the previous Regional Manager of Dunder-Mifflin Scranton and Michael’s former boss, is dead.
When Jan drops the euphemism, Michael is forced to realize what has happened: Ed Truck is dead. Michael is surprised, but has no idea how to respond. Michael’s denial is so deep that he doesn’t even know how to react once he realizes that Ed isn’t missing, but dead. He doesn’t show any strong reaction until Kelly unwittingly alerts him to an appropriate response:
Michael: Attention everybody, I just received a call from corporate with some news that they felt that I should know first. My old boss, Ed Truck, has died.
Kelly: Oh, Michael that’s such terrible news. You must feel so sad. [Kelly hugs Michael]
Michael: Yes, I am. It’s very sad. Because he was my boss.
Creed then lets Michael know that Ed died gruesomely:
Creed: It’s a real shame about Ed, huh?
Michael: Must really have you thinking.
Creed: About what?
Michael: The older you get, the bigger the chance is you’re gonna die. You knew that.
Creed: Ed was decapitated.
Michael: What??
Michael is shocked that Ed didn’t die of old age. Michael is well aware that, at the end of life, death comes to everyone. What he manages to deny, though, is that death can come at any time—in the middle of a sentence, in between two syllables, while closing a deal on a condo— even while doing mediocre impressions of Bill Cosby. Death happens in the middle of life, not merely at its end. Creed’s comments force Michael to realize that he could die anytime, he may not have years stretching out in front of him—he could be decapitated on his drive home!
The philosopher and anthropologist Ernest Becker (1924–1974) argues that everything people do is motivated by the terror of death.1 While this may or may not be true for every human being, it’s certainly true for Michael Scott. Michael is living in denial of death. While he recognizes death as a fact of life—as something that “happens,” he refuses to recognize it as a fact of his life. The shock of Ed Truck’s death jerks him out of his inauthentic understanding of death—forcing him to recognize that death is not like shit. It doesn’t just happen. It happens to me.
This duplicitous attitude toward death is a centerpiece of the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s (1889–1976) analysis of human existence.2 Heidegger contends that very few people manage to authentically realize and comprehend the meaning of their own mortality— that our death is “not to be outstripped”—that there is nothing we can do to escape it, despite our ever-present efforts to be more than bags of flesh and bones that are destined to decay. We construct an average, everyday conception of death that enables us to chatter about it, and to file it away in fatuous categories when we are confronted with it. All of this enables us to avoid looking honestly at our own existence. Rather than acknowledging that we will die, we simply note that “death is a part of life,” and remain totally unaffected. When others die, we can tell ourselves little stories that make contemplating our own death utterly pointless: the dead person is “in a better place,” “it was his time to go,” “God works in mysterious ways,” “she was too good for this world,” “he has moved on to the next life.”
Our ways of describing death allow us to deal with it without confronting it. We (inauthentically) regard death as a fact of life, but not as a fact of our individual lives. To confront our own mortality is to stop telling ourselves stories about another world, or a better place; it is to realize that we are decaying flesh, and that all we do will ultimately end in rot and decay. It is this that Michael is confronted with when he is hit by Ed Truck’s decapitation. Like Ed, Michael loses his head (figuratively, that is).
Once Michael figures out that he’s supposed to be sad (thanks to Kelly!), he decides that the rest of the office isn’t grieving properly. To “help” them, he drags them all into the conference room for some grief counseling, mostly so he can express his newly confronted feelings of horror at death:
I lost Ed Truck, and it feels like somebody took my heart and dropped it into a bucket of boiling tears and at the same time somebody else is hitting my soul in the crotch with a frozen sledgehammer. And then a third guy walks in and starts punching me in the grief bone, and I am crying, and nobody can hear me because I am terribly, terribly … terribly alone. (“Grief Counseling”)
Michael uses Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grieving to explain to the camera crew how he’s going to facilitate the grieving of his staff:
There are five stages to grief. Which are [reads from computer] denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And right now, out there, they are all denying the fact that they’re sad. And … that’s hard. And that’s making them all angry. And it is my job to get them all the way through to acceptance. And if not acceptance, then just depression. If I can get them depressed, then I will have done my job. (“Grief Counseling”)
So, in what looks like an attempt to confront his own mortality honestly, Michael attempts to conduct some grief counseling. Like most of Michael’s management efforts, this one proves pretty ineffective— either because Michael is a total goofball, or because the rest of his staff is as death-denying as he is (or maybe both!). Michael asks everyone to talk about an experience that they’ve had with death, and Pam starts out by reworking the plot of Million Dollar Baby to suit those purposes:
Pam: Let’s see … I had an aunt that I was really close to; she was this amazing female boxer. Anyway, she was injured in a fight, and she was paralyzed. So, you can imagine how sad I was … when I found out that she asked her manager to remove her breathing tube, so she could die.
Michael: Wow. If you wanna cry, that’s ok. (“Grief Counseling”)
Ryan catches on and chooses The Lion King, and Kevin unsuccessfully tries Weekend at Bernie’s. Death denial is not isolated to individual persons at individual times: it is as rampant in the office as it is in the world. Michael’s attempt to confront death is met with comedy and unconcern. Pam, Ryan, Kevin, and the rest of the office clan can’t even acknowledge death enough to indulge Michael. They use examples of death that are fictionalized and distant from them, as if they didn’t know anyone who has died. At this point, Toby has to step in to console Michael:
Toby: Michael, look, I know this is hard for you but that’s just a part of life. Just this morning I saw a little bird fly into the glass doors downstairs and die. And I had to keep going.
Michael: How do you know?
Toby: What?
Michael: That that bird was dead. Did you check its breathing?
Toby: It’s obvious.
Michael: Was its heart beating, Toby? Did you check it? No, of course you didn’t. You’re not a veterinarian. You don’t know anything!! (“Grief Counseling”)
According to Becker, “there is nothing like shocks in the real world to jar loose repressions” (21). Michael has been denying death subconsciously, but Ed Truck’s nasty demise and a little dead bird successfully remind Michael that he, too, will eventually die (just like you will, reader!). Becker’s discussion of how children deal with death unsurprisingly applies perfectly to Michael, who is less than mature: Recently psychiatrists reported an increase in anxiety neuroses in children as a result of the earth tremors in Southern California. For these children the discovery that life really includes cataclysmic danger was too much for their still-imperfect denial systems—hence open outbursts of anxiety. (21)
Michael’s ability to repress is obviously weak, so a catastrophe like Ed’s decapitation reminds him of his own finitude—the fundamental limitations imposed on him by being finite, mortal, and a plain piece of biology. Like a little kid after an earthquake, Michael spends the whole day in an open outburst of anxiety.
Michael’s death-denying is in full view when he insists on a funeral procession for the bird that Toby saw die. Ryan immediately recognizes this as at least a little odd:
When I was five, my mom told me that my fish went to the hospital. In the toilet. And it never came back, so we had a funeral for it. And I remember thinking, I’m a little too old for this. And I was five. (“Grief Counseling”)
Ryan can see that having a full-blown funeral for the bird is juvenile and unnecessary. What he doesn’t see, though, is the function of the funeral service for Michael in particular, and perhaps for society in general. The funeral allows us to give meaning to an otherwise absurd existence. It enables us to know what we’re supposed to do in the face of an unbearable confrontation with mortality. Like other rituals, the funeral provides us with something to do, something to hold onto, when we must confront the brutal reality of our existence. As the philosopher Robert Pogue Harrison has argued, it is through a shared symbolic language of grief and ritual that “the work of separation begins to take place. It is essential that this work fulfill its purpose, for if and when it fails, instead of the dead dying with me, I die with the dead”3 —even when that dead is just a bird. So, the funeral is by no means a pointless exercise. It is a means of making our confrontation with our own biological existence a little less horrifying. “Mourning rituals would be feckless if they did not provide the means, or language, to cope with one’s own mortality even as they help one cope with the death of others” (Harrison, 70).
In fact, Ernest Becker argues that all of our activities—the practical jokes of the office, the ambition that drives us to become Assistant Regional Manager (or better), or our desire to find true love, are the result of an inability to openly and honestly acknowledge the fact of our inevitable death. “All culture, all man’s creative life-ways, are in some basic part of them a fabricated protest against natural reality, a denial of the truth of the human condition, and an attempt to forget the pathetic creature that man is” (Becker, 32–33).
Michael doesn’t want the bird’s life and death to be meaningless, much as he doesn’t want his own existence to be meaningless. He assigns greater significance to the bird in an attempt to deny his own insignificance, his own finitude. Luckily for Michael, Pam realizes that the real problem here isn’t Ed’s shuffling off of this mortal coil. It’s Michael being terrified of his own death, and the isolation that his death accentuates. So Pam makes the bird’s funeral more about Michael than about the little bird. Pam takes the death of the bird seriously as a means of taking Michael’s death-anxiety seriously, making a casket and saying things in the eulogy that will comfort Michael:
Pam: What do we know about this bird? You might think, not much, it’s just a bird. But we do know some things. We know it was a local bird. Maybe it’s that same bird that surprised Oscar that one morning with a special present from above.
Kevin: I remember that, that was so funny.
Pam: And we know how he died. Flying into the glass doors. But you know what, I don’t think he was being stupid. I think he just really, really wanted to come inside our building. To spread his cheer and lift our spirits with a song.
Dwight: It’s not a songbird.
Michael: Shhhh.
Pam: An impression then. Lastly, we can’t help but notice that he was by himself when he died. But, of course, we all know that doesn’t mean he was alone. Because I’m sure that there were lots of other birds out there who cared for him very much. He will not be forgotten.
The main theme here, as elsewhere, is the thing that no one will talk about—the fact that Michael will one day die (a fact that Michael is just realizing). Everyone dances around the reality of the human condition, making the conversation about Ed Truck, or the little bird, or death in general. Michael especially tries to make the day about Ed, who is a good representative of Michael, saying things like: “That is just not the way a Dunder-Mifflin manager should go, I’m sorry … alone, out of the blue … not even have his own head to comfort him” (“Grief Counseling”). Although Michael is scarcely aware of it, he’s talking about himself here—about how he doesn’t want to die alone. In making his words about Ed Truck, Michael tries to repress his fear of death, as well as his fear that his life will be insignificant— two fears that, if not identical, are at least complementary. “The guy who had my job has died, and nobody cares … and he sat at my desk” (“Grief Counseling”). Confronting mortality is a deeply depressing, if not outright offensive, event. “What kind of deity would create such a complex and fancy worm food?” (Becker, 87)
In “Safety Training,” Michael confronts death again, although in a different way. As every viewer knows, Michael is of the opinion that he’s a fairly important guy who will go on to do great things, and be remembered. This is one version of what the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) calls living in the world-historical. To live in the world-historical is to live as though the significance of one’s life depended on something external to one’s own individuality. One’s life is devoted to something that is not really one’s own. A person’s life takes on significance if that person plays some role, however minor, in the world-historical process: one is an important person by being a volunteer sheriff, or by being a soldier, or by being an admired manager who brought comedy to the lives of his workers. This is why Michael wants hospital wings named after him, why he donates to Oscar’s nephew’s charity, why he does so many of the things that he does—he wants to be remembered. Kierkegaard called “living in the world-historical” a defense mechanism for the ego.4 It is yet another form of death-denying. A person “living in the world-historical” believes that they can live on through their work, that what they create or influence will still be there after they die and in that way, they become significant for having created or influenced it. Kierkegaard says:
When a headstrong person is battling with his contemporaries and endures it all but also shouts, “Posterity, history will surely make manifest that I spoke the truth,” then people believe that he is inspired. Alas, no, he is just a bit smarter than the utterly obtuse people. He does not choose money and the prettiest girl or the like; he chooses world-historical importance.5
The world-historical life, it turns out, isn’t much more than the life of a nitwit—one who hasn’t the courage to be himself. If this is true, then it is almost certainly better to take the subjective course—to live “subjectively,” as Kierkegaard puts it, rather than “world-historically.” How one is to do this, however, is a mystery to all of us.
Even though he’s committed to the world-historical task of being a beloved office manager, Michael’s not that thrilled about his life. He admits this only when he forgets the cameras are there. For instance, when he is contemplating jumping off the office building in “Safety Training” to demonstrate that his life is a life of danger, Michael becomes quite depressed about his circumstances. His playing at being suicidal brings him quite close to his own death, and Darryl tries to talk him down from the roof:
Darryl: Mike, this is the opposite of safety. You jump, you’re going to seriously hurt yourself.
Michael: You told me that I lead a cushy … wimpy … nerf-life.
Darryl: Yeah, but I never said you have nothing to live for.
Michael: What do I have to live for?
Darryl: A lot … of things … uh … you … What about Jan? Lovely, lovely, lovely Jan, man. It’s going good, right?
Michael: It’s complicated with Jan. I don’t know where I stand or what I want; the sex isn’t near as good as it used to be.
Darryl: Mike, you’re a very brave man. I mean, it takes courage just to be you. To get out of bed every single day, knowing full-well you gotta be you.
Michael: Do you really mean that?
Darryl: I couldn’t do it! I ain’t that strong. And I ain’t that brave.
Michael: I’m braver than you?
Darryl: Way braver. You Brave Heart, man.
Michael: I Brave Heart. I am.
Michael’s not happy with his nerfy life. He’s not positive he has anything to live for at all. (He also doesn’t realize he’s at the wrong end of the little backhanded compliments in Darryl’s pep-talk.) Up on the rooftop (and when he learns about Ed’s death), Michael is feeling something that Becker describes amazingly well when examining the knowledge of one’s own death: “This is the terror, to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness and self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression—and with all this yet to die” (87). Michael returns to his old death-denying ways at the end of this episode, when he states that he saved his own life: “I saved a life … my own. Am I a hero? I can’t really say, but … yes” (“Safety Training”). Surely someone who’s saved a life has done something significant and will therefore be remembered!
And the rest of the office staff are no better. They too deny death. Only once does Michael’s staff even mention death, and it’s just a joke. Jim says “He’s going to kill himself pretending to kill himself,” but it’s just a silly pun—the kind we love Jim for—not an expression of an actual confrontation with mortality. In a more serious moment, Jim drops talk of death, opting instead to talk about Michael being “seriously injured” if he jumps off the roof. Darryl uses the same kind of language when he says Michael is going to “seriously hurt” himself (“Safety Training”). They use such phrases because, even when confronted with the prospect of death, they don’t see it—or, better, they refuse to see it. Sometimes what we do kills us—and death is not just another injury!
The Office is not a show that will teach you how to confront your own mortality. No show will. Even this chapter won’t. At most, philosophy (the discipline) and The Office (the show) might force us to rethink some of our assumptions about human existence. The rest is up to us. You will die. And so will Michael Scott.
NOTES
1 See Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973). All citations from Becker are from this text.
2 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper Collins, 1962).
3 Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 58.
1 See Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 136–137.
5 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, pp. 136–137.