The Chair Company is the story of a man who realizes too late he’d probably be happier being normal. Our own Captain Nath more than adequately covered the themes and basic premise of the show, including the way it builds off Tim Robinson’s previous work in I Think You Should Leave. Ron (Robinson) is a typical Robinson protagonist, right down to the premise of the show: Ron is giving a presentation at work only to have a very minor embarrassing accident – his chair collapses under him – which he escalates far beyond what any normal person would. The thing is, the series is even more interesting than any individual line would imply, even my own that opens this essay, and the more I think about each part, the more directions I end up going down (appropriate for a conspiracy thriller).
This series in particular has been hit with the word ‘Lynchian’, and I do believe it to be even more true than the people using the word realize. Yes, there are bizarre moments that seem from a different reality entirely, but Robinson, like Lynch, is fascinated to the point of obsession with banality, and each man’s respective visions ends up twisting that banality into something unrecognizable and bizarre. Many ITYSL sketches are set in offices, birthday parties, dates, and dinners, then pushing the imagery and words to somewhere we’ve never been before. He particularly likes doing this with language; I think of “I don’t know how to hear anymore about tables!”, which sums up his almost childlike mixing up of words into almost-sentences.
With Lynch, I get the sense that he’s remixing and possibly misremembering things he’s heard somewhere; with Robinson, it feels like actively trying to push us out of reality and into somewhere much stranger. Each, in their own ways, is everyday life only moreso. It does mean there’s always this core of reality to Robinson’s work; The Cap’n has repeatedly noted how Robinson’s characters are always motivated by fairly basic anxieties and feelings – usually, embarrassment they try to avoid with increasingly extreme action (random ITYSL examples: the guy who is upset his date ordered fully loaded nachos, or the guy trying to fit into an adult ghost tour by dropping incredibly explicit references).
The Chair Company is interesting because it allows these ideas to spool out far longer and far more absurdly. Readers familiar with my work and thinking will know I was far less crash-hot on ITYSL than most people, because I felt like it was operating at 100% at all times and so the absurdity often felt like white noise (my favourite sketch was the last one of episode three of season two, as we watch the increasing absurdity of Robinson’s character watching people in court roasting his stupid hat). Contextualizing Robinson’s vision in a story is different; the most canny move the series pulls is that underneath all the absurdity is a real, sincere conspiracy thriller plot, with red herrings and various players and a solution that wraps everything up (another quality it shares with Lynch – banal genre choices). This even extends to the filmmaking, which never once breaks character to let us know that what we’re looking at is silly; my hardest laugh was when we see Ron walk into a room and discover it’s full of his hated chairs, and Robinson gives us an absolutely goofy look of triumph as the camera slowly pulls out.
A good story – driven by action and consequences with clear motivations – inherently calls for degrees of emotion, and Robinson’s gift for the weirdest and most inhuman facial expressions is given context that emphasises the absurdity; in the seventh episode (out of eight), he goes full 100% Tim Robinson, and I can’t help but cackle because Ron has every reason to break down at this point from the sheer stress of what’s happening to him and the buildup of humiliations and frustration. The side effect of this is that no one line quite seems to sum up what the story is ‘about’; the most common one I’ve seen takes Ron’s line about how ‘everything is garbage and nobody lets me talk to a person’ and said this show sums up the humiliation of living in the tech-dystopia of 2025.
What this ignores is how much Ron’s situation is his own fault. For one thing, he’s so obsessed with this entire Chair Company situation because of a minor humiliation; one of the great touches of the series is that for the longest time, we have no reason to believe anyone has anything less than total sympathy for his chair collapsing, and in fact, nobody ever brings it up after the scene where his workmates commiserate with him (of course, it factors into the final twist of the series revealing it was intentionally broken to embarrass him). Some of his problems are real grievances or worries, like his son turning to alcohol or his daughter possibly being in an abusive relationship; others are pettier but still understandable, like his soul-sucking job that has the extra layer of being a reflection of the humiliation of his dream job falling to pieces. The rest are extremely petty annoyances and insults.
I look at Ron, and I see people who complain about, say, streaming services having ads as if they’re an affront to the dignity of us all, or social media services becoming increasingly unusable, or people posting the dumbest and most rage-inducing crap online. The dumbest thing I saw someone online say – yes, yes, I know what I’m doing – was someone complaining about their lack of privacy and inability to be as incognito as possible on Tumblr, of all places. I can empathize – if not sympathize – with this perspective because I know how it feels. As I’ve gotten older and become more at one with my sense of purpose, I’ve found it hard to get annoyed in any meaningful way about the little complaints of life; when you don’t know what you’re here to do, you tend to latch onto every little piece of suffering and trying to cure or prevent it.
Quite a few people have pointed out that Ron’s quest is motivated, in part, by the constant humiliation and frustration he feels at having to be alive and existing in the world; to give himself some kind of control and drive. I love how, as the show goes on, Ron’s regular life ends up giving him ideas for solving the conspiracy, like any true artist. I think what The Chair Company ultimately concludes is that it’s impossible to get out of this life at all without some kind of suffering or embarrassment and life is a matter of choosing which one you take on through why you’re taking it on. One of the other canny touches of the show is that Ron is actually pretty good at his job – within the context of his strange world, he’s able to manage the people under him and complete projects on time and under budget, and he’s even pretty good at his amateur sleuthing.
And the canniest touch of all is that the solution to the Chair Conspiracy itself is the most banal element of the series; I’m sure there are thousands of companies around the world committing fraud in the exact way Ron identifies. The real weirdness in Ron’s life is the humanity around him; he ultimately lets go of the conspiracy, partly for ego reasons (he can now be satisfied in the sense that he’s ‘helped’ his wife in the most self-serving way possible), but also because he sincerely loves his wife and wants her to be happy, but he’s misidentified the threat of Mike (Joseph Tudisco) because, like me, he fell for the buddy comedy bromance thing they ended up developing and failed to really deal with his children’s issues.
This is where Robinson’s creative vision goes from merely funny to profound. His weird, childlike gift for language and behaviour means anyone who walks onscreen becomes vivid and memorable; I’d say my favourite character is Jamie (Glo Tavarez), who seems extremely pleased to be talking to Ron any time she sees him (and is adorable when she’s hurt by him), but I also have a lot of affection for Oliver (Alberto Isaac), who is the most concentrated form of Robinsonian weirdness in the show. People like this pass into your vision and you get why you should probably abandon your quest to uncover a conspiracy to pay attention to them.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
Tristan J. Nankervis’s ProfileTags for this article
More articles by Tristan J. Nankervis
"Obi-Wan never told you about your father."
"I love you." / "I know."
"I'm terribly sorry - no no, please don't get up--"
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
M*A*S*H, Season Three, Episode Twenty, “Love and Marriage”
“Frank, everybody knows you’re a good surgeon.”
“Of course I’m a terrific surgeon!”
“I didn’t say ‘terrific’, I said ‘fair’.”
“You said ‘good’!”
“Henry, that’s very decent of you. Would you like to try for human?”
I’ve really been thinking how *Seinfeld*ian the plotting on this show is, in terms of both the number of plots and the way they cross over organically. This has the first appearance of Soon-Tek Oh, who is a bit of a weak actor but always charming enough to make up for it, and the writing (as well as the rest of the cast) is strong enough to carry him; he plays a man trying to get back to his wife, while a white GI tries to pull off a scam fake marrying a local woman.
The latter is a really great moment of Hawk and Trap being too naive for their situation for once, even if Trap schemes his way out of it. There’s also great comedy from Radar freaking out when Hawkeye delivers the baby.
Babylon 5, Season Four, Episode Ten, “Racing Mars”
This has become interesting in a bad way – one complaint people often have about the series that is only tangentially about the series is that Straczynski has a massive ego, or at least inflated sense of self-importance. I’m told the show ends with a note that is, effectively, to all the haters, implying Straczynski made the series less for its own merits and more for spite (in ironic contrast to his humanism and warmth). I don’t think it interferes with the show too much beyond a slightly pompous, too-many-words way of talking, but now that’s become text as Garibaldi turns on Sheridan.
A lot of his complaints strike me as legitimate, sensible things to be concerned about, which makes his basic wrongness (Sheridan is obviously not gonna turn out to be a bad guy) more irritating, as if Straczynski is trying to ‘play fair’ with the concept that his hero may look wrong from the outside, but questioning him is ultimately foolish (slightly annoyed that this forcing of the narrative means I’m on Garibaldi’s side just on principle).
Love the unexpected Franklin/Marcus buddy comedy. Both characters can be irritating, but put them together and you get some great chemistry; Franklin is self-important and Marcus is clinically incapable of being serious. Sheridan complaining about the lack of supplies due to blockades is very funny given my own country has limited oil supplies because of the war in Iran.
It Happened One Night, Best Picture Winner 1934
Watching this, I found myself frequently contemplating the nature of men vs women. Much of Peter’s behaviour in this film rubbed me the wrong way, with his thoughtless assumption that he was here to fix every one of Ellie’s problems just for its own sake. On the other hand, it becomes increasingly clear that the movie sees Ellie’s problem as having been spoiled and indulged due to her privilege, and of course Peter is frequently charming; I like him throwing himself between Ellie and the man on the bus annoying her.
All the Garibaldi stuff plays out in a sci-fi universe where certain things exist and have been demonstrated directly to all characters involved, yet they are not considered by any of these characters as possible factors in the Garibaldi stuff. Just really annoying.
Boogie Nights – it’s been over a decade since I’ve seen this, but my feelings about it remain pretty much the same: it’s very good, and a hugely impressive step up for PTA, but I think he continued to grow after this and it’s definitely not among my favourite of his films. Still loads to love though, so many wonderful scenes, characters and performances. Had never previously noticed that this was eligible for my sprawling “Twin Peaks Reunions” list on Letterboxd, since in addition to Heather Graham it also stars Don Amendolia aka Emory Battis aka Audrey’s boss at the department store.
Live Music – got invited to the birthday party of a friend of a friend, he’d organised a gig to celebrate but I went in without knowing the lineup, exciting. The headline act was garage punk veterans Clambake who were a lot of noisy fun, the guitarist plays with only four strings on his guitar and they’re the top two and bottom two with a gap in the middle, very unusual. I missed the first act but the other one in between was one member of a hotly tipped local band doing a solo acoustic set, I am not sure what the appeal is really as she’s one of those songwriters who seems so intent on mimicking the sound of others that there’s nothing really unique or personal about anything. Affected pseudo-American vocals, songs generic enough that a few of them could have been covers but it wasn’t really clear, etc. Not for me.
Seinfeld – “The Rye”, “The Caddy”. Further adventures into Season 7 being notably zanier than anything that came before it, which is largely entertaining without delivering as many classic episodes. The Caddy featured another appearance from Kramer’s lawyer though who continues to be one of the best occasional characters, and it was good to see both George and Susan’s parents again (which would also make Seinfeld eligible for the Twin Peaks Reunions list, if it was on Letterboxd).
Woo, live music!
Wooooo live music! And affected American vocals sound so funny to me, although we affect British vocals all the time.
The climax of The Rye is incredible, I remember laughing my ass off when it aired live and the studio audience is losing it too.
It’s a very good ending, and I like that it gets a callback in the next episode when George asks Jerry to remove the flyers from his car in order to make his boss think he’s a workaholic.
See Hugh Laurie and Cumberbatch clearly gritting their teeth to do American accents, always funny.
Ricky Wilson, from the B-52s, popularized the four string/top-two/bottom-two set up.
Ah cool! Good info, thanks.
Elementary, “While You Were Sleeping” – A fairly routine murder, only the victim is a cop’s cousin so Holmes is called in. Only it isn’t so routine when it seems like the first suspect is in a coma. Within the logic of the episode, the mystery makes a lot of sense, but don’t pretend this would work in the real world. Meanwhile Holmes unwillingly his first addiction support group meeting. The meeting helps solve the case, but right now our boy would do anything to avoid more of them. He does, however, start playing the violin again (and no jokes here about how awful he is).
NCAA men’s basketball, end of Duke-UConn – I truly believe than even with the NIL-driven super-teams of the sport, the college game is inferior to the pros. But the pro game just doesn’t routinely produce the level of drama that a college buzzer beater can.
YouTube video by Amy Shira Teitel about how bowing to the algorithm is making YouTube videos and by extension everything else worse – Amy raises a ton of good points about the use of cover words to talk about things that will get you demonetized has made public discourse ever worse. But it really annoys me that she ends this with “and that’s why you should subscribe to Nebula.” It makes the whole video seem like an ad, and kind of undermines her points. I get there are people making living as content creators, but surely there are more subtle ways to make your pitch.
The “refusal to obey” factor is crucial here, if en masse these creators keep the words in, YouTube might capitulate. (Not definite, but at least worth trying to resist this nonsense.)
Ton of movies!
Don’t Go In The Woods – One competent actor in this and it’s the sheriff somehow. Truly a bad, often incompetent slasher albeit with some fun kills and I liked the “Teddy Bears Picnic” parody song at the end (though the original is creepy as is).
Videodrome – I have a tattoo of the flesh gun, what else could I rate this but five stars? Blue Velvet was a few years later but “I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert” also applies to Max Renn. Unlike Jeffrey, though, Renn isn’t well intentioned though as much as greedy. He finds the new thing he’s been seeking except it’s more deranged and innovative than anything he could imagine on his own, the New Flesh, the onlyfans and FetLife scroll a few decades away. Long live…
Vampire in Brooklyn – People are trying to reclaim this movie as underrated and…nope, I’m sorry all, this stinks. Angela Bassett is trying so hard to deal with the whiplash of tones and John Witherspoon, RIP, is fantastic, but it is a total mess split between Craven-y horror and the (not great) comedy the studio apparently demanded. Murphy is somehow much hotter in Coming to America than he is as a powerful, commanding vampire. I wanna watch that instead.
Swept Away (1974) – Make an American remake but with a bougie former Hilary stan and a die hard DSA council member still bickering about 2016. A lot of good takes on Letterboxd about the anti-humanism and despair here – the Communist uses abuse to keep the bougie capitalist under his command – but also an operatic tone I got into. Wertmuller’s themes of power dynamics and misogyny are always provocative and compelling, with Giannini as her angry, stupid alpha turned cuck caught in the middle of the muck much like Seven Beauties. Happy I saw it on the big screen.
This is a fascinating point about Murphy — he’s one of the most charismatic actors ever but that is entirely outside the vampire’s seductive charisma, isn’t it? Not that he can’t be charming, but you generally want to watch (can’t take your eyes off) him, not be close to him. There’s a distance.
He’s also trying to be pretty serious here as Max, which cancels out a big part of his appeal. There’s a moment here where he puts his hand over his face in exasperation and it just reminds you of how funny he CAN be and how he’s wasting that talent.
A Perfect Murder — let’s kill Gwyneth Paltrow! Been a while since I’d seen this and forgot the twist midway through and how sleazy Mortensen can be, he’s a lot of fun. But it’s impossible for me to not root for Douglas here, Paltrow is underwritten and a moron for a good chunk of the film and Douglas is the king of smooth-talking assholes who think they’re smarter than they are. An enjoyable watch but there’s a sense of people not bringing their A game, perhaps filming in New York prevented Andrew Davis from reaching his usual Chicago excellence. But the real flaw is how the film nods to a very cynical ending — a victim turning the tables to create their own perfect murder — but this neo-noirish concept is only sketched and does not seem to be indicated in performance. Too bad.
Sliding Doors — mediocrity saved by a bravura performance, I am of course referring to John Hannah putting the movie on his back and carrying it whenever he’s onscreen, he’s perhaps too-good-to-be-true charming but dude nails it. This is in stark contrast to John Lynch, who looks and acts like someone put Hugh Grant, Adrien Brody and David Schwimmer in a centrifuge and distilled all their worst qualities, at one point Paltrow correctly disses him for acting like Woody Allen and say what you will about Allen, he knows how to act like Allen and this guy is a bad parody. Much of this is down to the movie rightfully hating him but why do we spend so much time with this guy? Why is Jeanne Tripplehorn obsessed with possessing him? All of this weighs down the gimmick, because while Blonde Paltrow is taking action Brunette Paltrow is middling in a rut instead of doing different things. Perhaps there was a way to do this but the heavy rom-com stuff overwhelms the quotidian realism, and then the end slaps home realism in a really weird way. There’s a reason this is remembered more as a conceit than a film.
Death Proof — in the credits there is a thanks to “Rick Linklater,” presumably for Austin-related stuff but it unlocks the first half of the movie — this is Tarantino’s version of a Linklater film. The hangout vibes are immaculate in the Austin scenes and even the big scene of seduction via dialogue (as opposed to lapdance) between Ferlito and Russell has a lot of exploratory Linklater feeling. Which makes the switch into terror and gore that much more effective. The second quartet feels like they exist in conversation with the first, more natural group — for one, they’re all clearly working on a Tarantino film, something that by nature exists in conversation with other flicks — but the gearshift into the first chase and especially the second is just as effective, enormous ownage, Bell hopping onto the car with the pipe is so fucking cool. Tristan mentioned the Winstead scene in his write-up a while back and it is indeed terrible, tonally awful in a way Tarantino rarely is (her “gulp” is straight out of Scooby Doo and this could’ve worked with a different setup, as is it’s a sick joke played on her by her ostensible friends). On the other hand, Russell (who is fantastic throughout, few people would get as weak as he does by the end) is a foot-sniffing pervert obsessed with old TV shows; he’s clearly a stand-in for Tarantino himself and Tarantino stages his doppelganger getting humiliated, assfucked and beaten to a pulp. Dude must have some fun bedroom proclivities.
Live music — the best part of the No Kings protest was a dude who had set up a drum kit and was just bashing away, we passed his area later on and it appeared people had joined him to play “Smells Like Teen Spirit”? Hell yeah. The drums followed to a matinee show at the no-cover bar from local hero Andrea Gillis, who brought her ten-year-old son up to play drums on a few tracks (her husband is the regular drummer). Family rocking at the bar! She had great banter*, great covers and great original material, one track in particular clearly had the band feeling it and that’s always great to see live. She closed with one of her greats, a cover of Mahalia Jackson’s “Hold On” that brought the place down, but before then she fulfilled a request for “Jump Into The Fire,” more drum action! She and the band killed it of course, the requester was very pleased and called out “Thank you for playing the real shit.” Gillis replied “I wouldn’t know what else to do.” Hell yeah.
*praise for the bartender turned into an impromptu rendition of “Isn’t She Lovely,” complete with fake harmonica mouth sounds solo, which turned into an anecdote about Gillis making a tape of that song when she was six and the tape being sent to an uncle who was serving in the Navy off the coast of Bahrain at the time, the tape is long gone and the uncle was “court-martialed twice.” I didn’t know that was possible.
John Hannah’s one of those actors I just barely remember I’ve seen before and them like very much while I am seeing him onscreen, and then forget again.
Lee getting left as collateral by her friends is the one time I’ve ever seen Tarantino admit to not playing fair with character and motivation. Apparently Rosario Dawson brought up that it didn’t really seem in character for the other women, and why am I doing this. By his own account, Tarantino’s answer was basically “because I’m your director and I’m asking you to.” Got a little too in character as a guy writing 70s exploitation? And funny that you should mention Russell going so weak at the end; Mickey Rourke was very nearly cast as Stuntman Mike, one of the few guys I actually could imagine going as far.
25th Hour – It captures a lot, but one of the things I like is how it captures the negotiation of the relationship between people who are your friends because you knew them years ago even as your lives have changed in the interim.
Lee is a filmmaker I always appreciate, but he can let himself get too cute, and he does here a couple times with the alternate takes and stutters. Also, there aren’t always enough clues when he’s engaging in flashback, especially the scene where the DEA does the search. But the cast here is great (Norton the least interesting, but that’s ok for the fulcrum of these otherwise disparate people). Hoffman is the best I’ve ever seen him. Somewhat similar to his character in Boogie Nights but toned down and contained as appropriate to a schoolteacher.
I remember reading, in September or October of 2001, about people who had died some weeks before and envying them their ignorance. Because you’re not thinking about it all the time. But then something reminds you.
The reveal of Pepper’s view of the Towers wreckage from his apartment is so powerful.
Great point about the friendships here. The trio is largely driven by inertia, but everyone can see how that inertia is about to crash and it gives their actions significance that they have trouble bearing.
The ending of this is justly famous but it really got me how Lee essentially stages the opposite version of it a few years earlier in Clockers.
Cox’s delivery, that is all.
What did we play?
Our Strahd game is on hold due to no one’s schedules meshing. But might be in trouble as at a hangout with two of the players, my wife and I both said things that inadvertently offended both of them. We’ve been trying to find effective ways to apologize and clear the air, but it feels like nothing we’ve done is working, so this could be the end of the friendships and the game. I wish I could unsay what I said. I wish I felt like a text-only apology didn’t seem so incomplete.
Hollow Knight on Nintendo Switch
Beat the Traitor Lord with Cloth’s help. Didn’t go so well for Cloth though. At least he won’t die from the infection that’s going around.
Discovered a bright green giant cocoon thing, and met a beautiful white sentient tree. Also met a ghost called Marmu who challenged me to a fight, but since it’s optional, I opted not to take him up for the moment.
I found an opening in the City of Tears that I hadn’t seen before, which made me glad because it seems to lead to the final mask I’m looking for, and because that area looks and sounds gorgeous. Made it to the Watcher Knight, and then a few more of them. Lost a couple of times, and I stopped there for next week.
Also, 40 hours in, it just dawned on me what a bold design choice it was to make a Metroidvania with no health items whatsoever.