HBO’s ‘The Chair Company’ Is Every Man’s Nightmare Of Looking Stupid
With every minute, the episodes grow progressively unhinged, dragging us over the burning coals of embarrassment
We all remember that one moment in our lives when we wanted the earth to rip open and swallow us into its crusty belly. It could be a fart in a meeting room whose acoustics ensured it was adequately amplified, or that time you tried making small talk but ended up tripping over your words, sharing jokes that made you look like a Frankenstein’s monster. The other day, at a corporate event, a man wanted to show us this Aeon article he’d read on how autism might explain Virginia Woolf’s unique voice. When he opened his browser, though, the only unique voices we heard were those coming from an intense hentai orgy video from the night before that he had forgotten to close the tab on. Of course, the four of us present pretended to instead admire how luscious the butter chicken for dinner was.
Then there are romantic dates. Oh, how men love shitting their pants and not even being conscious of it. On Instagram, reels abound of women sharing screenshots of their chats on dating apps, the way a normal conversation about films and music suddenly spirals into, ‘Sit on my face, will you?’
HBO’s The Chair Company, with only two episodes out so far and streaming on JioHotstar in India, wields a scalpel through the epidermis of male embarrassment. At the nerve centre of it all is William Ronald Trosper, Ron in the show, a simple family man played by the hilariously awkward Tim Robinson of SNL fame. During a crucial office event, where he must give a speech following a promotion, his chair gives way, and he collapses into it. Over the first and second episodes, he becomes hell-bent on pursuing a far-reaching conspiracy surrounding this chair, which leads him into abandoned basements, eccentric shops and the company of duplicitous hitmen.
Both episodes have an uneasy calm about them. The word ‘weird’ gets repeated by the weirdest character in the show, Ron himself, more times than I could count. But it is really the joy of watching a man unravel, second by second, that keeps you hooked. It is a feeling the visionary writer Joseph Heller best described in his workplace horror novel Something Happened, published in 1974: “Something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage and left me with a fear of discovery and change and a positive dread of everything unknown that may occur.”
In The Chair Company, one might wonder, is Ron’s obsessive investigation into a simple chair company really that far-fetched and ridiculous? The following episodes may tell us, or perhaps not, but his behaviour certainly offers a stirring exhibit of what is commonly referred to as fragile masculinity: the anxiety among men who feel they do not meet cultural standards of manhood. In Ron’s case, his masculinity is threatened by a very public embarrassment. He is seen, at least in his own eyes, as less of a man. Never mind the fact that he will put everything on the line to ensure his queer daughter gets the marriage she wants; that does nothing to repair his self-esteem. As a Cornell study published at the turn of this century showed, men tend to overcompensate when their masculinity is threatened.
In the middle-manager suburban setting that defines Ron’s world, where control matters above everything, The Chair Company seems to suggest that we are all living in the same universe. Things are falling apart, and life is playing tango. TCS is laying off thousands of employees, Japan has just elected its first female prime minister, who also happens to oppose same-sex marriage among other things, rules around H-1B visas keep edging Indians more than any hook-up ever did, DEI programmes are being rolled back, even by fashion darlings like Burberry, and to top it off, northern India is bracing for one of its coldest winters in years.
Where is control? Which spreadsheet will tame the sheer randomness that has defined the year so far? While we figure out how to do life, it is some consolation to know that shows like The Chair Company are not really about a broken chair; they are about men still pretending they are sitting steady. Where do we go from here?