Fun at Work?

Sports Night, a show that ABC cancelled inexplicably after it won several Emmy Awards in its third season, presents a workplace that is friendly in senses that go beyond anything I've ever experienced. Dan and Casey, the sports news show anchors featured on the show, are best friends. Natalie and Jeremy, both high-up producers, are dating for most of the series. Dana, the executive producer, has a fling with Casey. And between all of that, everyone on the show obviously works in an environment where they're at the office late into the night working on an extremely collaborative sort of project, which seems to create an almost homelike situation in that workplace. On the show, that kind of scenario is downright irresistible; when someone messes up at work, his or her job is not immediately on the line, and everyone helps to fix the mistake. And everyone's at work with their friends, which makes "work" itself seem more appealing. Plus, these people are all doing a sports show, talking and working with the very sort of information by which many of us are distracted at our jobs that have nothing to do with it. I would love working in an environment like that, but none of the workplaces I've seen (or really even heard of) in my lifetime are anything like that.

Let's take as an example the office at Pitt in which I work as a tutor. It's quite an amicable place; all of the staff get along for the most part, and all are quite friendly and professional when at work. But with one very discreet exception, there has been no intra-office romance. And except for Josh and I, no one who works there seems to be very close friends with anyone else in the office. So while the place is great when compared to the average office with at least a few incompetant and/or rude people, it's nothing compared to the idyllic work environment depicted on Sports Night. Of course, I'm willing to throw out there the possibility that I'm completely full of it and that many of those who read this blog work in places that are like the one on Sports Night, but from what many of you have said to me about your various jobs, this seems unlikely.

So when I think about Sports Night, one of the questions is always how a show that depicts something so utterly unrealistic nonetheless manages to be so appealing. And here's what I've come up with. When I'm in one of my offices, there are always escapist moments here and there when I fantasize about what it's going to be like when I can actually leave the office. In addition to a workplace pastime, escapism is often the motive for various entertainment as well. I mean, seriously, why do millions flock to theaters for films like Under Siege and Speed? The average moviegoer likes these sorts of things because they provide him/her with an escape from the constant, nagging thoughts about when he/she will have to return to work. But Sports Night is the ultimate escapist fantasy, one much better than what the aforementioned films provide. It proposes something ridiculously appealing: What if the workplace were so great we didn't want to escape it? Oh, would that it were...

The Disappearance of Home

During the middle weeks of August 1997, I lived well. My friends had copious amounts of fun simply by sitting around someone's house and, in the parlance of those times, "enjoying each other's company." This might have involved capture the flag in Carolyn's back yard, listening to Joe narrate the muted Discovery Channel documentary on the wildebeest, or even deciding to go out and get the "weggie patch pizza" at Applebee's. And I had Janelle, that girl I loved madly and could just look at for hours without ever becoming bored. So things were pretty good in those last days of my seventeenth year, but then everything essentially vanished. It's that period of change that I'm interested in right now, that period which takes place many times over the course of an average American's life. Everyone moves, meets different people, loses touch with some, acquires entirely new sensibilities with which to relate to the world, and can never go back on any of these changes. In Anywhere But Here, Natalie Portman does a tremendous job of capturing that period in her role as Ann August. Although many people don't like that film because of the liberties it takes with the adaptation of Mona Simpson's fabulous novel, I think it's a pretty decent movie.

Ann's mother Adele (Susan Sarandon) decides that the two of them need to move to California to escape the "nothing town" of Bay City, Wisconsin. Of course, the irony is that Bay City, in an early flashback where Adele buys the Mercedes to take to California, is portrayed as something of a lush, green dreamland while Adele and Ann drive through dry, uninhabited scrubland in Utah. In Bay City, the original owner walks out of his cozy-looking home and over his soft lawn with a beer in his hand to show the car to Adele and Ann. A sprinkler is audible in the background. One thinks, during that flashback, of the so-called "American Dream," and Natalie Portman does dejection extraordinarily well to convey how upset she is over her mother's constant ramblings about leaving town. In Utah, Ann says to Adele, "This is like being kidnapped; you don't understand that, do you?" She's left her entire life behind in Bay City. She has friends, family, and familiar surroundings there, but is forced to leave.

I suppose, in retrospect, that I wasn't forced to leave Bethel Park or the Pittsburgh area as Ann was forced to leave Bay City, but I chose to go to school nearly 2100 miles from home in part because I wanted to save the image I had of that place and that time. I knew that if I stuck around, others would move away, and everything would change around me and leave me behind. By leaving for Missoula, an entirely new place in which I knew no one, I could maintain that home in my head. That's the quintessential part of the period of change I'm talking about: preservation of the image of home. While that image was inevitably depressing in my new location because of its inaccessibility, I felt as though I'd die without it. Similarly, Ann tries to maintain the image in her head on numerous occasions in Anywhere But Here, and is quite upset at her failure.

In the California diner where Adele fortuitously meets her real estate agent friend, Ann calls her grandmother's house in Bay City, but Adele interrupts her before anyone picks up. Ann leaves the diner for the impersonal, uncaring street outside and can't prevent herself from crying. Later in the film, she makes an illicit phone call to her cousin from a house she visits with her mother as a potential homebuyer. These types of incidents lead to an increasingly successful image of home in Ann's head, though inevitably that fight for preservation is a no-win kind of deal. Those incidents do remind me of the ridiculous phone bills I ran up calling Janelle in her Michigan Tech dorm room and the crazy amount of time I spent emailing everyone else, but like the movie suggests, no one can ever really "go home" after this kind of period of change.

Ann's cousin Benny dies late in the film, so Ann and Adele head back to Bay City for the funeral. In those scenes, the houses in Bay City don't look cozy; they look cramped and dull. The lighting isn't as bright, and it's raining. Ann's extended family is fighting. Nothing is the same. Similarly, when I go back to the South Hills these days, the place just doesn't look like it used to. Now, instead of the sprinklers and the nice-looking lawns, I notice all the Republican campaign signs in the yards, the gratuitous SUVs in every driveway, and the complete lack of sidewalks so that no one can safely walk anywhere. And just like Benny vanishes from Ann's Bay City, if you Google Janelle, you won't find anything, and no one I know has heard from her in years.