If you are a fan of “The Office” and? know what? Hyperreality is, then you may like this paper I wrote for my Radical Image Class:

A little boy awakes in his dimly lit bedroom to see a man in a tie sitting his rocking chair. The man, a total stranger, asks the child, “Who makes this chair?” Without showing any emotion the boy replies “I don’t know. It was here when I was born.” The mysterious man then asks if the chair is made of oak. The boy doesn’t reply.

The above scene is so surreal that it becomes real and is even more real than reality itself, which is why “The Office” is the perfect example of modern day hyperrealism.

“The postmodern universe is one of hyperreality in which entertainment, information, and communication technologies provide experiences more intense and involving than the scenes of banal everyday life, as well as the codes and models that structure everyday life,” Hyperrealty Theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote in Simulation and Simulacra.

The first thing that sets “The Office” as a hyper realistic show is its overall style/tone. The show is a half hour long (22 minutes) situational comedy. However the characters constantly break the fourth wall.? At times the characters talk to the camera like they would in a documentary or reality TV show. The characters also acknowledge the camera by giving it smirks or looks during regular scenes. Both Jim and Pam do this multiple times in every episode, but what’s odd is that in real reality-tv shows, the contestants never address the camera unless they are in a confessional-type situation.

This unique style of breaking the fourth wall is so well defined by “The Office” that when Rainn Wilson, who plays Dwight, hosted “Saturday Night Live” there was a spoof where the SNL actors kept addressing the camera with looks like how Jim and Pam do it.

“The realm of the hyperreal is more real than real,” Baudrillard wrote. “Whereby the models, images, and codes of the hyperreal come to control thought and behavior. Yet determination itself is allegory in a non-linear world where it is impossible to chart causal mechanisms in a situation in which individuals are confronted with an overwhelming flux of images, codes, and models, any of which may shape an individual’s thought or behavior.”

The aesthetics of “The Office” also play apart in its hyperrealism. Although the show is a scripted comedy, it is filmed as if it were a documentary. The camera is hand held, most likely shot with a steady cam, which gives it a more raw feeling. It also constantly zooms in on subjects when something happens as if the camera man were filming on the fly and trying to catch whatever was going on. Then the framing of the camera is often done in such a way that objects partially block the characters while the cameraman tries to get a better shot of them.

In “Cocktails,” episode 17 of season three, there is a scene early in the episode with Pam and Roy talking that demonstrates the above techniques. During this scene, the camera zooms in on both Roy and Pam’s face. At times the camera is blocked by books on a book shelf and the whole scene is shaky, giving it that hand-held feeling. All these techniques together give the show a real-world feel even though it’s completely scripted.

“The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: that is the hyperreal, which is entirely in simulation,” Baudrillard wrote.

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who obsess over “The Office” and those who don’t get it. There are none who falls between those two extremes because to like “The Office” is to obsess over “The Office.” The fans of the show, those who obsess over it, have a weird relationship with the show’s characters and it is the characters the further separates it from other sitcoms and makes it more hyperrealsitc.

If you ask any fan of “The Office” to name the non-warehouse people who work at the Dunder Mifflin Scranton branch they could spout out: Michael, Dwight, Jim, Pam, Ryan, Stanley, Kevin, Angela, Phyllis, Meredith, Kelly, Toby, Oscar, and Creed without thinking about it. However, if you ask them to give the real names of more than two of the actors, they would be very hard-pressed to do it.

The reason for this is because the fans of the show see the characters as real people. It’s not that the fans are idiots and don’t realize that its actors playing characters. It’s that because of the style of the show and depth of the characters, the fans suspend their belief in realty and accept the characters as real people. Then, because the show is so hyperrealistic the characters at times are so real they feel more real then actual people.

The previously mentioned scene of Dwight in a rocking chair questioning a child about the chair’s origin is a perfect example of this. All throughout that episode, Dwight it knocking on walls to find the spacing of the studs, examining rooms, and shaking chimneys. When fans see this happen they don’t think “No one would ever do that in real life” instead they think “That’s classic Dwight” and then they burst out laughing.

At the recent Paley Television Festival, an “Office” panel was held and during it, Steve Carell was asked, “You’ve played a lot of doofuses. What makes Michael Scott special in the pantheon of all doofuses?”

“Something actually Ricky [Gervais] said about his character, and I think it applies to Michael Scott, too,” Carell said. “If you don’t know a Michael Scott that means you are Michael Scott. No, it’s really fun to play—obviously, because he can pretty much get away with saying anything, and the way that the writers have created the dialogue, he can say the most incredibly offensive things. And yet he, in and of himself, I don’t think, is an offensive person…I think, at least the way I feel about the character, he has a decent heart, he’s a decent person, and he’s just trying his best.”

Although Ivone Margulies wrote about Chantal Akerman in “Nothing Happens” when Margulies talks about Akerman’s character she might as well have been talking about Micheal Scott or even Dwight Shrute from “The Office,”

“Akerman’s insistence on her character’s quirks as well as their literal representation, challenges the universal status of totalizing representations. There is no one quite like her, this ‘her’ being a pure cinematic being destined to behavioral and stylistic repetition, structured through a series of shots that defy conceptual reduction through their ‘absurd nominalism’ as well as through photographic indexicality.”

Ultimately, it is the characters and their actions that truly make “The Office” the perfect example of hyperrealism. Whether it Jim pouting at the camera, Michael saying “That’s what she said” or Dwight bringing in a dead goose to work, not even real life is as real as “The Office.”

Sources:
“Simulation and Simulacra” written by Jean Baudrillard in 1981 and translated in 1994.
“Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday” by Ivone Margulies.
“The Office” episode 17, “Cocktails.”
Paley Festival “The Office Panel” video from You Tube.
“Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings,” Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988.