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PART ONE: KILLING MR. LEEMAN
Doing meta about a radio sitcom is probably going to seem to most people like breaking a butterfly on a wheel. And maybe it is. Sitcoms are not supposed to be deep, or to be about things other than making people laugh. At most maybe you might get attached enough to the characters to be willing to grant them the kind of depth and dimensions that you give to the characters of your favorite novels. And yet, there is this thing that fascinates me about “Cabin Pressure” which I want to talk about; and since it’s my tumblr and no one can stop me, away we go.
The thing is this: “Cabin Pressure” started airing in July 2008, towards the end of a year-long process of economic implosion that we now refer to as the Global Financial Crisis (or Collapse, or Crash). And whether Finnemore was thinking about this at all or not, to me it seems as if the whole show is an exploration of life after prosperity, with special reference to the problem of achieving masculinity in a world where not only affluence but even financial stability are out of reach for an increasingly huge number of people. Over the course of its four seasons is goes from being a wickedly funny exposition of the reality of precarity–the condition in which 99% of the world population finds itself in the aftermath of the GFC–to a fantasy about escaping from it. And although all the characters are involved in this story, the protagonist–and the one who comes closest, in the end, to leaving precarity behind–is Martin Crieff.
Here’s Wikipedia’s definition of “precarity” as it is now used, and it’s good enough for government work:
Precarity is a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material and/or psychological welfare. Specifically, it is applied to the condition of intermittent or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence. The social class defined by this condition has been termed the precariat. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precarity)
When little Martin conceived his lifelong dream of becoming a pilot, being a pilot was a good job. The working conditions were good, the pay was good, and there was some social and cultural prestige attached to it. But in the just-about-bankrupt economy in which Martin is trying to find work, economic pressure on all airlines, large and small, means that except for the lucky few at the top of the heap, most pilots are living a fairly hand-to-mouth existence with a job that involves long hours, low pay, lack of job security, and very little personal autonomy or dignity. This was brought into the media spotlight in the US in 2009 thanks to pilot Chelsey Sullenberger, who landed a plane safely in the Hudson River after it was disabled by a bird strike, saving the lives of all passengers and crew. During his 15 minutes of fame, he tried to raise awareness about the way the airlines, by trying to cut labor costs, were degrading his profession and endangering passengers. From Wikipedia again:
Sullenberger testified before the U.S. House of Representatives’s Subcommittee on Aviation of the Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure on February 24, 2009, that his salary had been cut by 40 percent, and that his pension, like most airline pensions, was terminated and replaced by a “PBGC” guarantee worth only pennies on the dollar.[56]Sullenberger cautioned that airlines were under “pressure to hire people with less experience. Their salaries are so low that people with greater experience will not take those jobs. We have some carriers that have hired some pilots with only a few hundred hours of experience. … There’s simply no substitute for experience in terms of aviation safety.”[57]
What was happening to the airline pilots was happening all over: jobs that used to guarantee a comfortable and stable middle-class existence could now barely promise to keep you hanging on just above the poverty line. In that sense, Martin Crieff is all of us, desperately scrambling to survive in a world of scarcity in which one job is often no longer enough to keep the wolf from the door. And I think this is important to his appeal as a character. When Martin’s introduced, he appears to belong to a fairly common comic type: the incompetent boss who’s deeply insecure about his own authority, in part because it’s clear to everyone around him that he doesn’t deserve it. But Martin is not actually the boss of anyone; and neither is Douglas. As Carolyn explains in the Series 2 episode “Ipswich,” neither pilot has much real authority; the person who’s really in command is Carolyn, who owns their ‘airline’ and controls their working conditions and their salaries, or lack thereof. But even Carolyn sees herself as very much part of the precariat, because with charter airlines competing for an ever-shrinking pool of people rich enough to pay for their services, the pressure to keep prices low for the customer forces the airline to operate on the edge of bankruptcy.
Precarity–the insecurity and instability that comes with economic distress–is a huge influence on the formation of Martin’s character; and when you listen for this in Series 1 you realize that all the things that mark Martin as a luckless sad-sack doomed to inadequacy are in fact imposed upon him by precarity. Basically all of Martin’s problems as a captain stem from a) Carolyn's constant demands to keep costs down and b) the fact that Martin is too desperate to resist her.
Let’s take Martin’s famous indecisiveness. “Abu Dhabi” opens with Martin being decisive. He hears from Carl that there’s a 20 minute (at least) delay; he knows they only have about 20 minutes of fuel left; he resists Douglas’s attempt to create a spurious emergency and instead does what, in a world where the company’s financial health were not more important than their own lives, would be the smart thing: he lands at another airport so that the plane doesn’t use up the fuel and fall out of the sky. The only reason that this is a bad decision is that it costs Carolyn money. Carolyn responds by revoking just about every pilot privilege that she can revoke, on grounds of economy; it’s true she’s saving money, but more important, she’s teaching Martin that being decisive leads to punishment and humiliation. So when another 'command decision' comes up after Martin realizes the cat is going to freeze to death if they don't divert, Martin can't make a decision; he knows what he WANTS to do, and what is actually the RIGHT thing to do; but he also knows that if he does it, Carolyn will “hunt me down. With knives.” In other words, Martin is not congenitally indecisive; he is *taught* to be indecisive by Carolyn.
Or let's take the one thing that most clearly defines his series 1 characterization: the insecurity that drives him to continually reassert his authority as captain. This authority is challenged by everyone around him, from his closest associates to complete strangers. The reason, of course, that Martin doesn’t “look like a captain” is that he does not perform masculinity well. Douglas has, or at least appears to have, all the attributes of traditional masculinity: he’s tall, he’s handsome, he’s confident, he’s suave, he’s quite avidly heterosexual, and so on. Martin has some physical disadvantages; but since it’s radio and we can’t see them (and since picturing Benedict Cumberbatch in your head interferes with your remembering that Martin is supposed to look more like Martin Freeman) it’s more important that he fails at the personality traits: confidence, decisiveness, coolness under pressure, and so on.
But, just as “Abu Dhabi” establishes that Martin’s indecisiveness is a learned response, “Boston” establishes that the reason masculinity is constantly denied to poor Martin is that he’s living in a vicious post-crash economy where, because real jobs are so scarce, anyone with a perceived ‘weakness’ is relegated to the lower depths. In a boom economy, where money was flowing and jobs were plentiful, Martin might do all right. Long before Martin’s big speech at the end of the Swissair interview in “Yverdon-les-Bains,” Finnemore establishes that Martin is actually a pretty decent pilot. (Arthur is always there to remind us what true incompetence looks like.) We don’t of course see all of MJN Air’s flights; but based on what we see, Martin doesn’t have any trouble actually operating the plane. Carolyn complains about Martin’s landing in “Douz,” but Martin does successfully land the plane in a crosswind with a hydraulics failure. His landing is good enough; it’s just not smooth or elegant. Douglas of course gives Martin a hard time over his landing in “Douz;” but let’s remember that when Martin says he wants to land after losing an engine in “St. Petersburg,” Douglas just says, “OK.” Douglas has to take charge during the process of putting the fire out, because Martin is kind of panicking; but he obviously trusts Martin to actually land the plane once he’s calmed down.
Martin’s failures of masculinity all derive from his inability to assert his authority over people; and “Boston” makes it clear that this particular incompetence, like his indecisiveness, is a symptom of his economic powerlessness. “Boston” makes an unusually explicit reference to its ancestorFawlty Towers by naming its passenger from hell Mr. Leeman. In the classic Fawlty Towers episode “The Kipper and the Corpse,” a guest named Mr. Leeman comes to stay at Fawlty Towers and dies during the night, with simultaneously hilarious and horrifying results. In “Boston,” Mr. Leeman dies again, this time while aboard GERTI, with simultaneously hilarious and horrifying results. But the original Mr. Leeman was an inoffensive man whose only crime was asking for breakfast in bed because he wasn’t feeling well; it’s Basil who’s really the asshole in that plot, and the comedy in that episode derives mainly from Basil’s callous treatment of Leeman’s dead body, which to him is just another one of the embarrassing and dangerous objects that he keeps having to conceal from other people in order to protect himself and the hotel.
“Boston’s” Mr. Leeman is not only an asshole, but an embodiment of the global economy that is crushing people like Martin. He loves the fact that his wealth enables him to emasculate other men. And when Martin, against Carolyn’s wishes, goes out to confront Leeman himself, Leeman just castrates him in a speech which is a thousand times more cruel than anything Douglas has ever said to him:
LEEMAN: What are you gonna do, Commander? Have me arrested? No. An’ I’ll tell you why not. Because your tinpot little one-airplane outfit needs me and my business about a zillion times more than I need you. You think you can scare me by marching down here in your Fisher Price When-I-Grow-Up-I-Wanna-Be-A-Pilot costume? Give me a break! You’re not the commander of anything! You’re a little guy who can’t get a game with the big boys and wears a uniform like a rear admiral’s to make up for the fact that he’s basically just a flying cabbie. Am I right? ( thanks to Ariana DeVere for the transcript)
This speech actually makes Martin cry. And that’s because everything Leeman says in it is both intentionally cruel and factually true. Martin can’t get a game with the ‘big boys’ because he didn’t follow the approved career path, for two main reasons: he doesn’t come from money and he doesn’t test well. Having been shut out of flight school (series 2, “Helsinki”), he’s qualified as a pilot without the credentials used by the industry to winnow out the privileged few who will be considered for the ‘real jobs’–the ones where you won’t be constantly ordered to do things that are unsafe and unethical just to keep costs down, where you might actually have a voice at work, and where they might be willing and able to treat employees like human beings. He’s stuck in the precariat, where despite the fact that he is still a “skilled professional doing a difficult and dangerous job,” he is treated like a menial–or as Leeman puts it, “a flying cabbie.” Because, in fact, MJN Air does need every last customer it can scrare up, and because MJN Air’s only real asset is that it always underbids the competition, Martin is constantly being undermined and countermanded by Carolyn, who knows that his tendency is always to do the safe thing rather than the cheap thing. Martin needs the “Fisher Price pilot costume” because unlike Leeman he has no access to the money and power that would get him the other things that go with being a “skilled professional,” including authority, respect, dignity, and autonomy.
And so, as in “Abu Dhabi,” Martin can't make a decision because his fear of being punished again by Carolyn for wasting her money is in tension with his knowledge that the right thing to do is to land at the closest airport and try to get the “horrible man” who just rhetorically castrated him some medical attention before it’s too late. Douglas appears to be modeling the ‘right’ response, but of course Douglas is protected by the fact that it’s not his respsonsibility.
Douglas appears to have managed to retain his masculinity under similarly precarious conditions; but Douglas is just as much a prisoner of the post-crash economy as Martin is. In fact, he’s in an even worse position, because he’s been fired for stealing. Theft, smuggling, and various other black market activities have, apparently throughout his career, been Douglas’s way of getting a bit of his own back. But, as Douglas must know, by stealing he has forfeited the favor of the elite, for whom property rights are more sacred than anything else. He will never get another job at a ‘real’ airline, no matter how good a pilot he is; and now Carolyn, purely in order to save money, has (as Mr. Birling puts it) “totally emasculated” him by installing a younger, less experienced, and less confident man as his superior. Douglas plays it off by pretending he doesn’t care; but as Martin discovers when he meets Helena, he clearly does. Martin can’t be a man even *with* the captain’s stripes; but Douglas is afraid he can’t be a man *without* them.
So when Douglas tells Martin that “you don’t have to listen to Carolyn,” it’s partly wishful thinking; they both do have to listen to Carolyn, or they will be unemployed with very little chance of ever working as pilots again. But by helping Martin at least imagine what it would be like NOT to have to be dictated to by the bottom line all the time, Martin asserts himself with the paramedics and discovers his “newfound butchness.” But he fails once again by not understanding, as Douglas has painfully learned, that butchness only really works on people who are at least as vulnerable as you are. Just as it can’t really change the economic power dynamics that keep him trapped in his two jobs, it can’t stand up to TSA functionaries backed by the power of a gigantic, irrational, and paranoid government.
PART TWO: WAITING FOR GODDARD
So basically, the only time that Martin is able to successfully ‘man up’ in series 1 is when he’s dealing with an opponent who’s about the same status as himself–i.e., someone who belongs to a profession which actually requires quite a lot of skill and dedication but who is nevertheless treated, in the new economy, like an errand boy. Every other time he tries to assert his manliness, he comes to grief, and usually it’s because of money. Trying to impress Hester, he gets himself on the hook for an enormously expensive hotel room in “Cremona.” In “Douz” he gets into a power struggle with the airfield manager which nearly bankrupts MJN Air. His attempt to preserve his dignity on Birling Day–no doubt because all the toadying around him reminds him unpleasantly of his own desperation–crumples when he realizes the scale of the tipping involved, and he winds up toadying so hard he kills the golden goose. He has yet to learn what Douglas has learned, which is that if you go up against someone with more money in a straightforward power struggle, you lose. Douglas himself succeeds, not because he’s so much manlier, but because he knows how to use guile and trickery–which, despite how impressive they make Douglas seem to Carolyn, Arthur, and Martin, are in fact the weapons that the weak have always had to use against the strong.
By the time we hit “Fitton” Martin’s mood is not good. But “Fitton” brings a little sweetness and light into this bleak universe via Arthur, the happiest man in “Cabin Pressure.”
So I mentioned that this show is a lot like Samuel Beckett in that the characters are often preoccupied with passing the time. “Fitton” tips its hat to Beckett with a premise that alludes to Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot. Like Gogo and Didi, the luckless tramps waiting to see if the mysterious and possibly nonexistent Mr. Godot can do anything about their nearly unbearable existence, Martin and Douglas are stuck at the airfield, in the rain, waiting on standby just in case their client, a Mr. Goddard, shows up. Americans pronounce Godot gu DOH, whereas in England it’s pronounced GOD oh, which makes Goddard and Godot nearly homonyms. Anyway, while passing the time–before they get started on the drinking that ushers in the obligatory farce plot in the final 10 minutes–Martin and Douglas talk about the kinds of things you would talk about in an existentialist play: the nature of happiness, whether existence is meaningful or not, and the perennial boredom of waiting, waiting, waiting.
It is one of the common tropes of this strain of British comedy that intelligence is incompatible with happiness–or even, really, success. Edmund Blackadder’s always the smartest guy in the room (in series 2-4, anyway) but that almost never helps him. Basil Fawlty is obviously witty, creative, and gifted at improvisation, but he can’t get out of the dismal seaside town into which life has thrust him, or of a marriage that brings him nothing but misery. So it’s not perhaps surprising that the famously stupid Arthur knows the secret to happiness when Martin and Douglas don’t.
Arthur is able to be happy in this shitty universe for a few reasons. One: the fact that he comes from a family with money insulates him from the kind of economic desperation that is Martin’s lot. He’s not being paid any more than Martin is, but as Martin points out in The Baked Potato Speech (more on that later), Arthur doesn’t really need money; all his needs are provided for by Carolyn, and because nearly everything delights him, his wants are very few. The only thing he needs money for, really, is Toblerones.
Because he doesn’t need financial independence, he doesn’t have to worry about becoming a man. Which is good, because as Martin and Douglas are constantly showing him, becoming a man in this economy is well-nigh impossible, especially for someone as unemployable as Arthur. So all the pressure Martin and Douglas feel to establish their manhood makes no impression on Arthur, who is quite happy to stay a little boy who just loves airplanes and traveling round the world and thinks everything is brilliant. Arthur typically has no effect on MJN Air’s finances–since he’s not responsible for anything, even things like the disastrous final moments of “Johannesberg” are always the fault of either Martin or Douglas. This means he’s living with his mum at the age of 30; but Arthur doesn’t care–except at the comparatively rare moments when some abusive billionaire is tormenting him for fun (Mr. Leeman, Mr. Birling, and his own father all do it).
Since Arthur doesn’t have to be a real combatant in the post-crash economy, he is able to actually enjoy his life. He’s the opposite of future-oriented. He lives in the moment. He is not, as Kieran would put it, “goal-focused.” Having accepted the idea that he has no talents and no potential, he doesn’t try to improve himself. Instead of striving after the rewards that are supposed to come once you become a proper man with a proper job, Arthur just stays present and takes the moments of happiness as they come. He tries explaining this to Martin and Douglas, and they are able to sort of appreciate it; but they can’t stay in that place for long. Martin has to figure out how he’s going to survive; and Douglas has a front to keep up.
“Fitton” is an important episode for Douglas because it shows that he a) has a heart and b) is just as wounded, regarding his sense of his own masculinity, as Martin is. He just hides it better; and the act of hiding it is in a way as funny/tragic as Martin’s total failure to hide his own insecurity. The most important thing about the drunk!comedy that ends “Fitton” is that it forces Douglas to admit that he’s spent eight years pretending to drink. Presumably this is a) to conceal the fact that he is a recovering alcoholic and b) to maintain something he evidently considers a very important part of his performance of masculinity (or as he puts it in “Kuala Lampur,” of being a “hard-drinking sky-god”). That Douglas would think he needs to pretend to drink in order to avoid losing face, even with Martin, is really sad–just as sad as finding out that he thinks the wife he loves more than all the others needs to think he’s a captain in order to love him. He’s better off than Martin in that he realizes that masculinity is an illusion and a game; but he’s trapped by his own desire to keep on winning it.
PART THREE: I LEFT MY HEART IN QIKIQTARJUAC
Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.”–Samuel Beckett, Endgame
Comedy comes from pain. This is something a lot of media outlets failed to grasp in their commentary after Robin Williams’s suicide. Other comedians had no trouble understanding how someone who had made so many people laugh for so long could be locked in a lifetime battle with addiction and depression. Comedy is made out of anxieties, terrors, heartbreak, humiliation, and all kinds of other horrible things. We enjoy it, we crave it even, for the same reason that the Riddikulus spell gets rid of boggarts: it is therapeutic for us somehow, or at least cathartic, to have the things that torment us made so ridiculous that we can laugh at them.
There is a balance that has to be achieved, though; and if the characters are in too much pain eventually either we stop laughing, or laughing stops making us feel good. And what’s interesting to me about seasons 2 and 3 of “Cabin Pressure” is that you get to watch Finnemore trying to cope with the fact that he’s upset the balance. IMHO this is what happens at the end of the series 2 episode “Gdansk,” when Martin reveals that Carolyn is not actually paying him. At all. And never has paid him.
I don’t know how seriously Finnemore took that scene when he wrote it. I don’t really know anything about him as a writer or actor so I can’t speculate about intent. It’s possible that he introduced this information just for the sake of the “nothing plus nothing equals nothing” joke, for which many writers of comedy have traditionally had a fondness. But for me, anyway, and I’m probably not alone though I am quite often in the minority, this information actually weighed down the tragic side of the scales rather a lot. And then in the middle of “Qikiqtarjuac,” which is one of CP’s most brilliantly written and hilarious episodes, a thing happens that makes me not only sad, but really really angry.
“Cabin Pressure” is meant to make you happy, and most of the time, for me, it does. If you don’t want your mellow harshed by what I have to say about the way Carolyn treats Martin as revealed to us in “Qikiqtarjuac,” then don’t go below the “Read More” tag, and this episode will forever, for you, be about funny French accents and traveling lemons and final bear facts and le bear polar, and you won’t have to come and live with me in mostly-really-funny-but-also-sad-and-outrage-honing-“Qikiqtarjuac.”
So as I say, from the episode it seems possible that Finnemore never fully intended to do what (for me, and probably for other listeners) he did by telling us that Martin is making no money at all at MJN Air. But on the other hand, Martin’s speech to Douglas about his ‘salary’ is structurally the climax of the episode; and at first, nobody’s laughing. We get a couple of release points with Martin’s description of his characteristically disastrous “negotiations” with Carolyn. But at the beginning of that speech, we’re just sitting with Martin’s despair. Douglas, meanwhile, is clearly flabbergasted to learn this. His self-preservation instincts are far too robust for him to ever agree to a deal like this; and besides, he doesn’t have the fascination with piloting for its own sake that’s driving Martin. Though he can’t resist the sarcastic jab at the end, learning this obviously changes his view of his own treatment of Martin. The low self-esteem that allows Douglas to screw Martin on every bet they make is the same thing that led to Martin agreeing to work for Carolyn for nothing. In the same way that he refuses to trust his instinctive knowledge of the right answer (everyone hates strudel), and takes the bad bet because he’s convinced that Douglas is the one who must know the right answer, he refuses to trust himself and his own skills, and instead is so worried that Carolyn is unimpressed with him that he starts negotiating against himself before the interview is over. Now that Douglas has seen how Carolyn’s exploiting Martin’s weaknesses, he’s no longer interested in doing the same; and in fact he sticks up for Martin against her in the only way that’s immediately available: by helping him beat her at the sevens game.
Obviously this makes us tremendously sad for Martin. For me, though, the problem is what this does to Carolyn’s character. As I have been explaining in the earlier installments, her pennypinching at Scrooge McDuck Airlines is problematic in that it constantly undermines Martin’s confidence, authority, and autonomy, not to mention the safety of both pilots and passengers. But since Carolyn is obviously under her own financial pressure (as we learn in “Douz”), this doesn’t absolutely require us to think of Carolyn as a terrible person. In fact, although a lot of Carolyn’s dialogue is pretty harsh, Stephanie Cole’s performance somehow takes much of the malice out of it. And this is actually something that I really appreciate about “Cabin Pressure.” Carolyn is basically playing the role that Sybil Fawlty played on Fawlty Towers: the bossy older woman whocontrols the purse strings and is therefore always ruining the fun of the manchildren she supervises. (Prunella Scales, who played Sybil Fawlty, has a cameo in “Wokingham” as Martin’s mother.) It’s a big relief to me that Carol is rendered more sympathetic and more interesting than Sybil was, and that her relationship with Arthur seems to be genuinely mutually supportive instead of nasty and toxic like Sybil and Basil’s marriage. She also, when she’s not harassing them over money, seems to genuinely like Martin and Douglas and enjoys playing along with their games when she can. "Helsinki,” the episode right before “Gdansk,” is the first extended attempt at humanizing Carolyn, and does an excellent job of gaining our sympathy for her by submitting her to Martin-style humiliation at the hands of her awful sister Ruth.
So it’s a shock to discover in “Gdansk” that Carloyn has exploited Martin’s overwhelming desire to achieve his dream by manipulating him into working for her without pay. Because that really is unconscionable. It would be going too far to call it slavery, because Martin’s human rights have not been severely compromised; he’s not prevented from leaving Fitton airfield, for instance, or forced to go into debt to MJN Air so that it will be impossible for him to ever leave the company. But it is definitely wage theft. It isn’t just that she’s not paying him. She is actually stealing from him. She is stealing his labor, which actually adds value to her company (unlike Arthur’s).
And the thing is, we could maybe pass this over as one of the zany things that happens in this kind of heightened world, were it not for the fact that it is increasingly happening to ‘professionals’ in the post-crash world. There are so many professionals looking for jobs and so few decent jobs out there that it has become pretty common for people to toil at extended unpaid ‘internships’ in hopes of eventually being offered an entry-level job, or for jobs in professions that used to be high-income and high-status to be broken up and parceled out as piece-work which pays less than a living wage. I’m thinking particularly of adjunct labor in American universities, many of which–ostensibly to keep tuition down–have decided to staff their courses with ‘temporary’ faculty who teach for a criminally low flat per-section fee, with no benefits and no guarantee of future employment. This is how you can have a PhD and be working full time and still be experiencing food and housing insecurity. But this is happening to doctors, too, who are struggling with crushing student loan debt while working insane hours in an unbelievably long period of apprenticeship; and no doubt in other professions as well. And like Martin, many of these exploited professionals accept this horrible treatment as the price they have to pay for remaining in a profession they genuinely love.
So “Gdansk” really bothers me. And it seems to bother Finnemore too, because it gradually becomes a problem that has to be fixed, instead of just another joke about Martin’s haplessness. But before it’s fixed, we go to Qikigtarjuac. And if “Gdansk” sort of saddens and bothers me, “Qikiqtarjuac” actually breaks my heart.
What I’m mainly talking about is the sequence in which Martin asks Carolyn for a raise. There are funny bits embedded in it (such as Carolyn telling Martin that he can’t come live with her and Arthur and Martin involuntarily blurting out, “Oh GOD no!”, and his description of how the students pass him on to succeeding generations “like a friendly ghost”). But most of it is just pure brutal truth. For instance, take a look at Martin’s monologue about how he lives:
The only thing I’ve got going for me is that I’m cheap. So I live in a horrible attic in a shared house where I’m the only grown-up. All the other five are students at the agricultural college. I’ve been there nine years now; that’s three generations of students. They pass me on to the next lot like a sort of friendly ghost: “Oh, are you living in Parkside Terrace next year? Well, listen, there’s a pilot in the attic but don’t worry, he never bothers anyone.” I can’t afford to go out, to buy nice food. I live on toast and pasta. Sometimes, for a treat, I have a baked potato. So – just so you know – I’m not asking because I’m greedy. (transcript by Ariane DeVere )
This is what precarity looks like. Martin’s not actually homeless; he’s not actually starving; but everything about his life is marginal, hand-to-mouth, and inadequate. He’s stuck in the kind of existence that is supposed to be a temporary stage on the way toward becoming a ‘real’ adult and finding a ‘real’ job; only he is an adult and this is his real job and he’s still unable to put down roots or buy anything he can’t immediately consume. His housing is “horrible,” his diet is unhealthy, and he can’t afford entertainment. The way he’s living is not sustainable. It gives him no chance to put anything away for the future, or in case he’s one day unable to work. England has better safety nets than the US does (or does for now, anyway); but in the US, Martin would be about two man-with-a-van jobs away from homelessness. And this is not the way anyone should be living; but it’s definitely not the way someone should be living who is actually working two jobs.
Even Carolyn seems to be impressed by Martin’s outburst, since she promises to “think about it.” But up to that point, her end of this painful conversation is just…well…horrible:
MARTIN: Yes, I know. I just … I really want her to think of me as a professional.
CAROLYN: Why? What do you care what she thinks?
MARTIN: Well, she said I was one and … and now she thinks I’m not and I … Well, I’m not, am I, because you don’t pay me. You pay the others but you don’t pay me.
CAROLYN: It’s not that I won’t, Martin. I can’t. How many times do I have to tell you: this is a loss-making company which could fold at any moment. Anyway, I don’t pay Arthur.
MARTIN: But he lives with you, so he gets all his food and lodging for free.
CAROLYN: Martin, let me nip this very much in the bud – any suggestion of you coming to live with us.
MARTIN: Oh God, no! No, no-no-no. And what about Douglas? You pay him, don’t you?
CAROLYN: Yes. Yes, I pay him because I have to pay him, because he’s not like you. If I stopped paying him, he’d stop coming to work – in the limited sense of the word ‘work’ that applies to Douglas.
MARTIN: You … could … cut his pay, though.
CAROLYN: You want me to cut Douglas’ pay.
MARTIN: No, I-I don’t want you to, I’m just saying you could, theoretically, split it between us. It’s not unreasonable. We do the same job. Why should he get all the pay? I mean, have you ever thought about the way I live at home?
This gets to me because Carolyn uses the same justification that a number of real US industries–including the airlines–use to coerce employees into accepting pay cuts and degraded working conditions instead of fighting them: we can’t afford to pay you a decent wage or to shorten your hours or to make your workplace safe because otherwise we would go out of business. And it’s fundamentally dishonest. It may be true that the company is under economic pressure. But it is funny how the solution to the company’s economic distress is always to try to cut labor costs, instead of, say, cutting the salaries of the executives, or skimping anything that might actually be visible to the customers.
And it’s clearly dishonest when Carolyn does it. She can’t possibly have gone into that job search intending not to pay the man she hired. We know from “Gdansk” that Martin’s the one who gives her the idea; when he offers to come at half of what the last first officer made she gets a “funny light in her eyes” and asks him how little he would take to be captain. If Martin hadn’t shown up for that interview, she’d have had to pay both of her pilots and she’d have found a way to do it, because when a business cannot make payroll, then it is done. She is paying him nothing, not because she can’t afford to do it, but because she has found someone desperate and vulnerable enough to accept that.
And she basically tells him that. When he points out that she pays Douglas, she tells him perhaps the most brutal truth there is of life in a capitalist economy: You are not paid what you are actually worth. You are paid what you can force your employers to pay you. If your employers can get away with underpaying you or without paying you at all, they will. It doesn’t matter how good your work is or how loyal you are to the company. They will never pay you more than they think they have to pay you. And Carolyn knows that she has to pay Douglas; but she doesn’t have to pay Martin because Martin will never quit.
And look what this does to Martin. He winds up turning on Douglas and asking for half of Douglas’s slice of the pie, instead of asking for his own slice. And this is what happens when companies use this “we can’t afford it or we’ll fold” tactic: the workers, unable to increase the overall amount of compensation, are forced to compete with each other for the resources the company’s willing to give them. This destroys solidarity and makes it even less likely that the employees will be willing or able to band together to resist intolerable conditions. And in fact Douglas, despite the fact that he gets to be more and more fond of Martin, and obviously thinks that Carloyn’s treatment of him is wrong, never offers to do that. Martin never asks him. It would be easy enough for them to go on strike for Martin’s pay. Carolyn’s not in a position to hire anyone else and there’s only two of them and they can’t fly the plane without them.
But they don’t, and that’s because after “Qikiqtarjuac,” Finnemore validates Carolyn’s claim that she can’t possibly pay Martin without destroying MJN Air. And I guess that’s what really makes me angry. From here on in, the show accepts as true Carolyn’s claim that she wants to pay Martin but just can’t, and sort of forgets about her admission that the real reason she doesn’t pay him is that she doesn’t have to. And that’s the point at which “Cabin Pressure” stops becoming a critique and starts turning into a fantasy. “Newcastle” introduces the improbable Hercules Shipwright, who improbably falls head over heels for Carolyn, who now actively encourages Martin to start looking for other jobs even though everyone now accepts that this will scuttle the company. Martin gets his own fantasy romance with the Princess of Liechtenstein. His obsessiveness is finally rewarded when he gets an offer from Swissair, which he hesitates to accept because Carolyn will never be able to hire another pilot. (This is a complete change of heart from “Boston,” when he has no qualms about applying for a job with EasyJet and telling everyone about it.) Through all this, Carolyn never offers to pay Martin–despite the fact that she’s doing things like blowing 85 pounds on a stuffed sheep– until she actually discovers that the plane is made of gold.
The fantasy phase of “Cabin Pressure” is by and large just as enjoyable as the earlier phase. It includes some of the best and most charming episodes, like “Ottery St. Mary.” It’s not that the show gets worse. It just gets less true. The fact that it validates something that I see as a really damaging lie about labor doesn’t stop it from being brilliant and funny and all the rest of it. But it also is not able to really unbreak my heart, part of which is still back with les bears polars on the tundra in Qikiqtarjuac.