jim and the just world fantasy

You've heard of the Just World Fallacy —– that idea that this is a just world.    Of course, no one really believes that in those words, because we can look around.    But if you listen closely you can hear it as a hidden assumption behind things like "He had it coming to him" and "You'll pay for this eventually" and "Well of course it turned out poorly for them, look at their attitude."    Any time you find yourself thinking "I deserved that good thing" or "I deserved that bad thing" or "You deserved that good thing" or "You deserved that bad thing," be on the lookout for the Just World Fallacy.    Naturally, its opposite, which I guess you'd call the Evil World or the Random World Fallacy, is also pitfallen —– surely there are good and bad things that are deserved, and where we can draw a line from cause to effect.    But, in general, those assumptions, especially when hidden, make mischief.

There's much comedy in what you might call the Just World Fantasy.    We know the world isn't just —– fine.    But wouldn't it be great if it were?    Think of how great that would be!    Just a little spot of justice now and then, even.    In 1977, the movie "Annie Hall" gave audiences a delicious squirt of convention-busting justice with this scene:

Hah!    Wonderful.

I'm thinking of all this because the other day I wished I could turn to the camera and just meet eyes with the audience when someone said something patently absurd, one of those self-indicting things it's fun to laugh at, except no one was there but the two of us.

What I was wishing for, The Office's Jim Halpert made into an iconic gesture.

It occurred to me that the thing that makes the actor's physical joke work here is the same Just World Fantasy the beleaguered boyfriend exploits in the movie:  don't you wish the universe could just bear witness to this madness?   Couldn't I just get a witness?   Someone to share the insanity with, and show that I myself am not insane?   It is, I think, a wish that goes back to the first-composed book of the Bible, the book of Job.    Why do the wicked prosper?   Are you seeing this?   Ultimately, Job's key is right where Jim's is, in the locking of the eyes.

Jim is the Pilgrim who, alone it seems, understands that all these cameras are an assurance that there will be a reckoning, the kind of reckoning even the Bible doesn't give Christians —– the moment-to-moment airing of all.    Not to mention the kind scripture and reality actively deny to us all —– the showing-up that proves we were right and not these deluded people who, comically, think they are right.

That's why fantasy is fun, I guess —– and why it's fantasy.

The reality it speaks of is why Jim is such a great character.    He's the satiric moral center of The Office's world, the one character not stuck in the moment, who can see, more often than the others, that this thing is all going down on film, and will be eventually shown.    (The other key to Jim-as-norm is that he's not as easily or completely corrupted by the microdoses of power that go to everyone else's head so madly.)    His Jim Glances, then, are a sort of prayer, an "I'm connecting with you, the Future Judge, right now, and trying to keep my balance."    It's in the service of laughter, of course, this being a comedy; but on the other hand, greater minds than ours have reminded us that this is a comedy too, all this around us, with a long-overdue marriage and concomitant feast on the family farm.

I hope I'll be trying the Jim Glance more often.