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Anyone who has seen other posts of mine on Ephemeral Dawn will, I think, get the sense that I have an implacable disgust at the indignity of the modern workplace, and the sorts of people who make it such an awful place to be. The Office (UK) is a show I saw when I was quite young and the accuracy it bore to the patronising, soul-deadening drudgery of modern work surrounded by the most cringeworthy cast of imbeciles, sycophants and bureaucrats, was frankly horrifying before it was funny. They say art is meant to disturb the comforted and comfort the disturbed, but there The Office didn’t. In some ways it saddened me, really, that this is the chorus of modern human life: so unmoored from our inherent dignity; a depressing crushing of the human spirit through monotony and bureaucracy.
David Brent’s character is at the centre of this miserable world; a bumbling idiot of a manager who frequently crosses the unwritten line between what it is to be a manager and a mate, performing neither role with appropriateness, competence, or grace. He makes of himself a frequent subject for ridicule and much of the ostricisation he faces all through his own life is really his own fault, but there’s just a hint of something else about him, too. He is a quiet, modern tragedy that I think is so terribly sad when this facet of his personality lands. He is a dreamer in a world that no longer allows dreams. He wants human connection in a world that sterilises humanity through bureaucracy. He is an artist, in a world that wants products, not beauty.
There is a spark in David Brent that burns in us all – or once did, at any rate. Beneath his laddish inappropriateness, his uselessness, and his arrogance and selfishness, there is a lost child that doesn’t know how to live in the modern working world. It’s this facet – which I do not mean to suggest is the whole story of David Brent, that I want to explore here through one specific scene – though I think others epitomise it too. I will perhaps do another post just on his character. But for this one, it’s the scene where he sings Freelove Freeway. Here’s a link to the scene in case you want it for context before reading this post.
Free Love on the Freelove Freeway: The Love is Free and the Freeway’s Long.
One of the scenes that strikes me as the most compelling of Brent, viewed in this way, is when he sings Freelove Freeway on the training day. Those who know Brent will know he dreams of being a singer (or is it more accurate to say he already believes he is the world’s best at it, but remains unrecognised), and those who know work will know the dreary, asinine and pointless slog that these training days are. The context is very sharply the contrast I outlined in the introduction to this post: the artist is being smothered by the churn of the modern world and he wants – nay, needs – somehow, to resist that. So like caged birds, he still sings.
It’s so powerful because despite his arrogance, Brent is actually a really good singer. At least, to my tastes – this sort of indie/folk music is where my heart lives. Yes, it’s rough around the edges, but it’s not unpleasant, and the roughness is in search of something. It’s that which makes it so powerful for me. Not only in the emotional intent of the song (see later thoughts) but also in the very act of singing it, Brent is reaching for something beyond him that he seems unable to reach.
The only thing that is unrealistic about this scene is that the tedious bastard running the training day actually lets Brent sing.
The song itself does carry something of the weight of loss for Brent. He likely dreamed the circumstances – it is not probable, knowing him as we do, that he ever had such a dalliance as the lyrics describe, but there’s an interruption after he sings “she’s gone” where Keenan flattens the emotion of the moment with his blunt, “she’s dead.” After correcting him, and Tim also flattening the moment saying it sounded gay, Brent justifies his own art to two people who do not have artistic minds, and says it would have been clear in the video.
Our first reactions are meant to be to laugh, I am sure. Brent? Who does he think he is, getting a music video for a pub song like this? If you watch this as a comedy his delusion must be amusing, but I didn’t see it that way. The music video is an irrelevance. In his own mind, he had lived this scene. His loss wasn’t really a girl he once loved, in all likelihood. It’s a layer of his lament. He sings about freedom while he is not free; he sings of a lost love he never had. He is so painfully lonely.
Gareth and Tim are blunt instruments – Tim copes through life (and with some charm) by not taking any of it too seriously, pratting about as lads are wont to do, and Gareth has no capacity whatsoever for introspection. By their nature these two men were not malicious against Brent, but they did reject him. Freelove Freeway was offering something. Brent put a tender part of his heart into that song and by misunderstanding the song, they misunderstood him. They denied him.
I think Ricky Gervais did something incredibly clever with this, because when I watched that scene I could only think of the times I opened my heart to people whose souls move about with closed eyes, too, and how similarly flattened, lonely, and rejected I felt in turn. I don’t like Brent, but I feel I do see him. Gervais set up a scene where I think the a great many people who watch it enjoy it for a cringeworthy gag, but don’t themselves actually see Brent here, and so he suffers that tragedy again, and again, and again. Nobody who was there with him did. Not even Keenan, despite the fact I think he felt exactly the same thing as Brent.
A relationship defined mostly by competition, if only Keenan was a bit more inward-looking and a lot less big headed, could have been much more emotionally fulfilling for both of them as they both feel they’re missing similar recognition from life.
Gareth Keenan and Tim Canterbury, and The Artistic Soul:
I know this post is about Brent but Keenan engenders some mention here, too. He’s in many ways a worse extreme of Brent’s tendencies. Brent can be inappropriate but he’s not usually seedy; Keenan is. Brent misuses his power but it’s usually cowardice or weakness in the face of a morally weightier decision, where Keenan uses his power in pursuit of his own ends intentionally.
But there is a child in him too. His is not as endearing, he is as a character deeply sycophantic and highly arrogant – in a worse way than Brent; Brent wants peer approval and popularity, but Keenan wants power. Both are awful motivations to do anything and both from men who are immature and poorly morally evolved, but in the contrast I hope to highlight a comparative innocence in Brent that is not true of Keenan.
Despite it, both of them sing here. Keenan harmonises well. He didn’t need any encouragement from Tim to start singing; he wanted to anyway because he always wants to bask in some of Brent’s limelight (a parasitic ‘friend’ indeed he is), but he, too, was good. Not in the polished quality we expect of mainstream music but in that there was passion.
Both of them sung slightly off key, and far from being an imperfection I actually think this is an expression of deep pain. They both felt something in that song. Sure, Freelove Freeway is a little sexual in the connotations of both the name and the song lyrics, but fundamentally the Freeway is associated with the idea of freedom, and both of them want that. They are both trapped, in a way they feel denies their greatness but in a way I feel more broadly denies their (and everyone else’s) humanity, but this song let them feel the sun on their face and the wind through their hair as they cruised down the freeway.
The use of ‘free’way I think is telling here, because in the UK they are called motorways, not freeways. The Freeway is an American symbolism, associated heavily with liberty and endless road adventures, like Route 66. They are both trying to invite a sense of texture, experience, and mythlogy into their depressingly pointless lives, and in that I think it is very hard to find the ‘cringe’ most people see in this scene. For me it hurts, and it hurts so much because it is so, so tragically true.
A Personal Anecdote Working for Amazon:
When I worked at Amazon, one of the only things I liked about that job was that we were able to submit songs to a Spotify playlist to play over the radios while we worked. No one of us was viewed or treated with any dignity, or as having any worth by the company: the reason they did it was clear; what temporary boost it gave to morale, it helped further the end goals of business by keeping productivity up. But the cynical justification for the ‘treat’ aside, I knew in that dreary and miserable place the same feeling Brent and Keenan do here. One of the songs I queued was Run, by Harrison Storm. Some of the lyrics go thus:
Lost and broke I feel like we can’t get anywhere
Enough to feel like leavin’
Hopeless but I know that this can’t be everything
We don’t need this heartache
We could break away, if you really want to run.
Now I know, of course, that this is really more of a love song, and these words were not written with my plight in mind. But they made me cry anyway. Isn’t (although less poetic in its lyrics, perhaps) Freelove Freeway also a song about love, but what it really evokes in the context of a stifling job is the dream of freedom? Run is a song that holds a painful place in my heart for the same reason I think Freelove Freeway would for Brent. It’s what the slave sang in the cotton field; what the bird sang in the cage.
Down on road I see a cowboy crying .”Hey buddy, what can I do?”
Brent reveals a part of himself in the verse where he meets a crying cowboy, too. The man is clearly at the end of his journey having “lived a good life, had about a thousand women”, “but why the tears”? “Because none of them was you.”
The man has been on a journey that to anyone else should have looked great – maybe even aspirational. He was free on the open road, and had quantifiably at least a thousand lovers. But not one of them was really love, was it?
Brent imagines the man is looking at a photo in this scene of a woman he wished he’d loved, and in this I think Brent is actually expressing a worry, not a regret. Brent may have lived a good life in some sense: stable job (for now), made manager, gets to have a laugh with the lads at work, etc. But none of it, like none of the thousand lovers, was really what his heart wanted. None of it was real.
It’s a worry that will mature into a regret if he doesn’t change the course of life. The man in the song missed a chance that it’s too late to correct – it’s the end of the line and he will die without that woman he really wanted. Brent fears missing his chance, too; he fears that he will die without the understanding and recognition that he, too, desires.
Going home ’cause my baby’s gone. She’s gone.
The journey for Brent here, like the song, ends at a point of hopeless resignation. It is not a climactic close to a great adventure, basking in wild joy and liberation. The end feels like a death; the dim flicker of a waning candle extinguished – and with it, hope. His baby’s gone, and he goes home.
Isn’t this exactly Brent’s plight? He sung the choruses of Freelove Freeway with increasing passion – he closed his eyes and was dreaming this life he wanted to live play out before him, but then the song ended he had to return ‘home’ too. And there he was, back in that ugly office room on the payroll of a boring and unglamorous paper company, in a pointless training session.
And even despite that disgrace, no dignity was allowed: the training instructor, bored and unamused, merely says “right, that’s lunch” and leaves, stamping that Orwellian boot on the human face again. You can hear the awkwardness in Brent’s voice as he says “okay” tainted with embarrassment, and the tragedy of it is again compounded, because it wasn’t a targeted act of malice – at least such an act acknowledges your existence. It was a routine act of ignore-ance; and that may even feel worse to a tender heart, because it doesn’t acknowledge your existence at all. It erases you.
And I roll on by. Bye bye.
If I had to condense what moved me so much about this scene, I think it’s because it’s like they were reaching for something that they only had an inclination of. It’s not the tragedy of part 2, where an old man looks back on the end of a life superficially well-lived but with regrets.
It’s the a tragedy that’s borne of youth, or inexperience; Brent wasn’t dreaming of a freedom he used to know before he lost it. He was dreaming of a freedom he never had; of an adventure not known. But he is on some sort of ‘awakening’, you might say, because he has some idea what it feels like. He finds the faint scent of it in the mythology of the Freeway, and in those few minutes, stuck in that office, his soul travels further than perhaps ever it has before. “Maybe it’s freedom. A chance to keep breathing. Maybe we’re lonely.”
I think this yearning beautifully sets up the compounded tragedy that is explored in David Brent: Life of the Road, where he undertakes to go on that very journey, which I will certainly write about at some point – hopefully soon – because it was the seed of the idea that grew into this post to begin with.
I think if there’s something to be taken from all this, aside from my apparent tenderness in the face of literary tragedy (which I do find deeply moving), it’s a hopeful note really that by seeing Brent this way – not as the whole Brent because it remains true that he is a deeply flawed man in ways that are not endearing, but a facet of him – that we might be more careful when we touch other human hearts in our own lives; to be careful not to erase others by the same dismissal Brent knew here.
I don’t think it’s an act of malice, but of carelessness – and I think that compounds the tragedy because it’s an erasure, rather than mere opposition. The less we might cause others to feel this, in some respects at least, the less tragic life might become.
Wishing you fair winds and a following sea, dear reader,
Ephemeral Dawn.
