AshSo this looks like a breezy two-town sitcom episode, twenty-two minutes, right, and I think it secretly holds up to being read the way you would read a serious film. There is a whole political theory sitting under the pig jokes. Real theory. So I do not want to recap it. I want to take eight real passes at it, eight different methods, and see how deep this thing goes.
JohnEight ways to read one Parks episode.
AshEight ways, yeah. Because it earns every one, you know. Welcome back, scriptnerd superfans, my name's Ash.
JohnI'm John. Season five, episode one, "Ms. Knope Goes to Washington." Aired September 20th, 2012. Aisha Muharrar wrote it, Dean Holland directed it. Leslie and Andy in D.C. chasing federal money for the Pawnee river cleanup. Ron holding the department together back home with a barbecue. One barbecue.
AshAnd the whole episode intercuts those two, right, so I want to read across the cut, you know, pulling beats from both towns together. First pass. Legibility. This is the pile scene, and I think it is the political core of the episode. The core. Leslie flies to Washington to apply for a federal grant to clean up the Pawnee river. She brings a CD that plays the sound of a babbling river. She brings a DVD of frolicking river otters. She brings the overprepared devotion she brings to everything she loves. That is Leslie. And she gets to the Department of the Interior, and the man she was promised, Jepson, stepped out for the day.
JohnAnd the receptionist just tells her to add her proposal to that pile there.
AshTo that pile there, right. What is that pile if not the entire federal attention span made physical? The face-to-face meeting she says she was promised gets converted, in two sentences, into directions to the top of a stranger's stack of paper. Two sentences. And then the receptionist cannot even place the town. Is that Pawnee, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, or Texas? Eight states, alphabetical, and Leslie has to go, softly, Indiana.
JohnOne guess in eight. And she isn't even being cruel, just blank.
AshNo villain in the sentence, you know, that is the part that got me. There is a book, James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State, and the argument runs kind of like this. A state can only ever act on what it can see, and to see you it has to flatten you first. It has to turn you into a category. A line item on a grid it drew itself. Just a number. And a town of forty thousand people with a raccoon problem is below the resolution. Too small, not on the grid, you know. The state cannot render her. Nobody in that office decided to hurt her, right, it is a scale problem, a legibility problem. And here is where I want to bridge out, because you have felt it. This is every unemployment line since 2008. It is the disability claim kicked back because one box was the wrong box. One box. It is being a case number, a ticket in a queue, a proposal on a pile. The institution that runs your whole life looks right past you, not because it decided to, but because you were never legible to it to begin with.
JohnBelow the resolution, sure, but the word cannot is doing too much work for you. Washington could see Pawnee fine. Fine, you know. The grid got built so it would not have to. Built that way. Somebody drew that resolution line, and they drew it right above towns like hers. That is a choice. Somebody made it.
AshThat is the correction, and I take it. I said the state cannot render her, like it is a weather condition. You are right that the blindness got designed. The grid gets drawn by people, and it gets drawn to count tax revenue and highway miles, not a councilwoman with a raccoon problem. The problem was never her size. Nobody built the instrument to look at a town like hers, and that is worse, and it is more accurate. Indifference at that scale still sits heavier than hostility, you know, because at least hostility means somebody looked at you first. Somebody learned your name to spit it. Not here. That, I think, is what class looks like from underneath.
JohnOkay. So what's the second read?
AshGenre next, because the title is doing real work, and I want to litigate it. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. That is the Capra film this is quoting, and the show earns it in the grimmest way. Capra's Mr. Smith gets an actual Senate floor. A filibuster. A whole chamber forced to sit and listen to one earnest man talk himself to collapse. A filibuster. He collapses. And that Washington is corrupt as hell, sure, but it is large enough to register him.
JohnIt has a room built to hear him.
AshIt has a room built specifically to hear objections, right, full of rules designed around the idea that some stubborn nobody might one day need to talk for eighteen hours and make everyone listen. And that is a genuinely populist fantasy of the state, you know, the idea that the machine has a slot in it for the honest little guy, a procedure that protects him. The New Deal believed that, and so did Capra. And watch this. The villains in that film have to actively conspire to shut Smith up. They plant fake letters. They buy off a whole state's newspapers. They spend real money.
JohnIt's expensive to shut him up.
AshExpensive. That is the thing, right. Because the default of that floor is that Smith gets heard whether they like it or not. And Leslie walks into a building with no chamber for her at all. There is a receptionist and a stack of paper, and that stack needs no villain conspiring against it, because indifference does for free the work corruption used to have to earn. For free, right. Capra's Washington was adversarial. This one just forgot she was standing there. Forgot her. And honestly that is the sharper, sadder update, right, because at least Smith's enemies bothered to learn his name. The genre promised her a fight, and the show hands her a filing error. A filing error.
JohnSo the movie is about corruption and the episode is about scale. Now the Pawnee side.
AshEmotional labor, yeah, and we cross the cut to Pawnee. Ron is throwing the annual Employee Appreciation Barbecue at Ramsett Park with Leslie out of town. And I want to ask a weird question, right. What would Leslie's version of this barbecue be? Tom pitches it, you know. The Employment Enjoyment Summerslam Grill Jam Fun-splosion. A popsicle contest. A slip-n-slide-a-thon. A one-woman show called Parks and Dolls.
JohnSo it's a party where the people being thanked also run the party.
AshThey perform the fun, they staff the fun, they are the fun, right. They are the entertainment at their own appreciation. This is emotional labor, the Hochschild idea, you know, the job where you are paid to manufacture a feeling. The flight attendant paid to be delighted to see you. On the clock. And Leslie's whole appreciation event is that, you know. It is one more shift, you know. Games you have to run, costumes you have to wear, delight performed on the clock. It looks like a gift while it works like a rota. You get thanked by being handed more work, just with balloons on it. Balloons.
JohnSo the party is a shift with a party hat glued on.
AshRight. And the Ann and Tom subplot runs the pocket version of the same racket, you know.
JohnThe Haverkins.
AshThe Haverkins, right. Ann and Tom are faking that they are still a couple. One drunken night they agreed to move in together, swore no take-backs, and by day two it was a catastrophe. But everyone had been so smug predicting the crash that they keep performing the relationship, purely to deny anybody the satisfaction of being right. Pure spite. And Tom bet Donna a thousand bucks they would last another month, so the performance has a wage on it now.
JohnManufactured delight, on the clock, to keep a scoreboard happy. Same shape as the barbecue.
AshAnd here the currency is embarrassment, you know. They would rather run a dead relationship in public than hand one person the pleasure of being right. Donna calls the bet off once she clocks the fake, and Tom flips the whole thing into a business the second it stops needing to be a couple. Sparkle Skin, by Annie. Very Tom. The performance was the product the whole time. Every time.
JohnFine. So what does Ron do instead?
AshUse-value against exchange-value, and I want to earn this one off the screen, right, because it can float if I let it. So stay with Ron for a second. He refuses the whole apparatus in one breath. Barbecues should be about one thing, good, shared meat. No froofy desserts, no soap-bubble guns, no vegetables. Donna asks for corn on the cob, bare minimum, and he turns her down flat. And what he does instead is blunt and slow and kind of monastic. He builds the whole day around one shared meal. He sources it, slaughters it, seasons it, cooks it over open flame himself. By hand.
JohnHe does the labor.
AshHe does the labor, all of it, himself, you know. All of it. And Ron thinks appreciation means you hand people food. Real food. Food you made with your own hands, over a fire, and then you shut up about it. Then quiet. No games, no costume, nobody smiling on cue to earn their own dinner. Just dinner. That is the use-value buried in it, the thing itself, handed over with no performance stapled on top.
JohnIsn't that just you romanticizing a guy's labor because he owns the grill?
AshA little, yeah, and I will keep the narrower version of it. Ron sits inside the wage relation like everybody else. Same as her. The one thing he will not do is make the workers perform their own gratitude on top of a week of work. One thing. That is the part that survives you, and it is smaller than what I started with.
JohnSee, I'm not buying it all the way, and here's my problem. You're describing what Ron intends, and I'll grant the intent's decent. But intent isn't respect. He never asked these people what they wanted. Donna asked for corn, he said no. The kids asked for food, he said no. He made them wait hours in front of a pig he named. He gave their veggie patties away to skip across a pond like flat stones. Then he got offended when they complained and quit his own party. He honors his own idea of what the workers ought to want, and calls that respect.
AshThat is the strongest version of the case against me, and I am not going to wriggle out of it. You are right that he decides for them. What I hold onto is that the episode agrees with you and then forgives him anyway, on purpose, and the forgiveness is the corn. Back at City Hall he tells them their work is appreciated, and, eat some corn. He said no corn six scenes earlier. Now he is dealing it out with both hands. He never needed to withhold it, you know. He needed the day to be his, cooked at his pace, on his terms, and once the meat is cooked through he hands over everything. Corn and all. Corn included. The show knows he was a jerk. It just decides good meat retroactively buys it back.
JohnA slightly rigged trial. But the show runs it on purpose. Keep going.
AshThen sovereignty, and this is the permit, which is the funniest object in the episode and also a complete theory of the state in five words. Somebody points at it and reports what it says. This just says, I can do what I want. That is the whole legal document. One sentence.
JohnSo it's his?
AshHis, all of it, every inch, you know. He is director of the Parks Department, this is a park, so by his own logic the barbecue and the slaughter both fall inside his jurisdiction, right? Dead center. And there is a grim little bit of political theory in that, Carl Schmitt, the sovereign is the one who decides the exception. The one who gets to say when the law does not apply. That is Ron. A tiny sovereign, deciding inside this park, on this day, when the health code is real and when it is just paper. His call.
JohnA tiny sovereign with a smoker.
AshA tiny sovereign with a smoker, yeah. And here is the wild part. The state backs off, the meat gets cooked, and everybody eats. He waited out the ranger, and the ranger lost. Watch what happens when the state actually shows up, because Donna tells him it is against three laws and a dozen health codes and Ranger Patrick shuts the slaughter down.
JohnAnd Ron doesn't fight it.
AshHe does not fight it. He just postpones, quiet about it. No principle, no big stand. He will go get meat from the Food 'n' Stuff instead. The law wins the round and Ron reschedules around it, and that is its own little theory of how a man like Ron survives inside a system he has no respect for. He waits for the code to look away, and then he moves. His whole sovereignty runs on patience, you know. He treats state power like weather. You do not argue with rain, right, you just wait it out and cook once it passes. Just weather.
JohnOkay, I have to bring up the pig, because I laughed at it the whole half-hour and then it got me. Ron rolls out a live pig, to a crowd of children, and he has given it a name. One name. Everyone, meet your meat, he says. The pig's name is Tom. His name is Tom.
AshWait, say that again, because I want to hear the whole thing.
JohnTom. He says it dead straight, and when a kid laughs he corrects them. That is the pig's given Christian name. Tom is very smart and deeply loyal, he says. Basically a dog they are about to cook.
AshAnd, hold on, I think you just walked us into the center of the whole episode, and I nearly strolled past it. Ron means the tenderness and the slaughter in the same breath. Both at once. No wink. And then he weaponizes the name for the whole half-hour. Let's go, Tom, he says, to a coworker also named Tom. Man or pig? You guess, every single time. And here is why I think it is more than a runner. The pig gets the single most dignified introduction in the episode. The whole episode. A name, a character, real affection. And then it gets eaten. Somebody eats Tom's ribs and apologizes to the pig by name for it. By name. Sorry, Tom. And that shape, the sweet thing introduced with real tenderness and then consumed, is the exact shape the episode runs on Leslie. She gets introduced as sincere and competent, and gets fed to the machine the same way. Politely, without malice. Nobody stops. The pig and the councilwoman get the same deal, and I think the pig gets the more honest sendoff, because at least somebody said his name first.
JohnAnd the show makes you complicit in it too.
AshIt does, right, that is the sharp part. You spend the whole episode laughing at the pig bit. You are charmed. You are on Ron's side, you know. On his side. And then you are chewing right along with everyone else, apologizing to Tom with a rib in your hand. The comedy recruited you into the slaughter. You chewed. It runs the same trick on Leslie, honestly. It makes her lovable so that watching the machine grind her hurts more, and you cannot look away from either one.
JohnThat's grim and I think it's right. Okay, next.
AshEpistemology, and this one belongs to Andy, who is the smartest idiot in the show. Andy walks into Washington with zero map and total confidence. He thinks the Capitol looks like a boob. A boob. At the Lincoln Memorial he pores over the inscription as an encrypted message, because he treats the National Treasure films as documentaries. He finds gum on the monument and calls it a clue.
JohnIt's gum.
AshIs it, though? How does he know it is not a treasure map waiting to be unfurled? And okay, here is my flag, watching this cold. I think Andy is right. He is wrong on every single fact, and right about the shape of the whole town. Leslie's Washington is a city of institutions working exactly as designed. Competent, orderly, worthy of reverence. Andy's Washington is a city where a wad of gum might be a clue and every building is hiding something. Everything. Now watch what the episode does to Leslie. A staffer drops her application on an unread pile. A cocktail party turns her into a punchline about raccoons. A senator finds her sobbing in a coat closet. The institutions never once reward her sincerity. Not once. So Andy's paranoid, everything-is-a-secret city describes what happens to her better than her own civics-textbook one does. The idiot diagnosed the town. By accident.
JohnAnd I'll go a step further, because I don't think it's an accident, I think it's the only honest posture a tourist has. Leslie believes the plaque because the plaque was written for her. Andy distrusts the plaque because nobody ever wrote anything for Andy. His paranoia is just what you get when the official story has never once been about you.
AshOh, that is better than mine. You have got a class read where I only had a structural one. Andy is the guy the monument was not built to impress, so he assumes it is lying to him. And the show proves him right in the tag, in the meanest way. Fake tour guide Andy tells a crowd of strangers the White House is most notably the building where Sinbad lived in the film First Kid. That the Oval Office is named for Oval Redenbacher. And then he charges them two hundred cash, up front, for the invented history.
JohnHe gets paid for fake knowledge.
AshHe gets paid real money for invented history, right, minutes after his own girlfriend got quietly mocked by real senators for her real, unglamorous, hard-won civic knowledge. Real knowledge. The con man clears two hundred bucks. The honest woman eats a pile rejection. That is the whole epistemology of the place. The nonsense that sells beats the knowledge that is true. Every time.
JohnFake history is a growth industry. Real history gets you a pile.
AshFake history is a growth industry, right, that is exactly it.
JohnBring it home.
AshGender and affect, and this is the one that hurts, because it is about every register a woman brings to that building failing in turn. Watch the sequence. Leslie clocks the cocktail party and asks why the women are all so tall, C-Span and Neiman Marcus had kids. Ben introduces her to two real senators, Barbara Boxer and Olympia Snowe, and she self-sabotages instantly, calls Pawnee small and unimportant and overrun with raccoons and obese toddlers, means it as charm she thinks, means it as charm, and it comes out as a confession she cannot reel back. Cannot take it back. Then she pivots to worship, voice breaking, and excuses herself. Neither senator gets a word in. Not one.
JohnThe prepared pitch fails, the charming aside fails.
AshEvery register fails, right. The pitch, the charm, the worship. And then the private breakdown fails too, you know. She invents Hot Rebecca. A jealousy amalgam, every giant dark-haired smartphone power goddess in Ben's orbit fused into one imaginary rival, because his real life is senators and Super PACs and she cannot get one meeting with one bureaucrat. Not one meeting. And then the coat closet. She asks for privacy, a man walks in for his coat, and she snaps at him without turning around. Nosy people have no respect for personal space.
JohnIt's John McCain.
AshIt is John McCain, you know. A sitting United States senator, and she torches the back of his head over a coat rack and never turns to see who it was. And I think that whole run is the gendered version of the pile, you know. The institution cannot see her, so she cycles through every mode a woman is allowed to operate in, competence, charm, deference, feeling, and the building has no chamber for any of them. No chamber. There is a real double bind in it, right. She is asked to be small and likeable and also serious and fundable at the same time, and the two demands cancel each other out. Both at once. That is Arlie Hochschild again, honestly, the managed heart, except now the emotional labor is the price of admission to even be seen, and the building still does not let her in. Even April's comfort comes out as a garble. That is what makes you kickass Leslie, she says, you never give up on stuff. And Leslie has to correct her, gently, an amalgam, because April cannot finish the compliment without mangling the word.
JohnAnd then Leslie stops waiting.
AshAnd then she stops waiting, right, and this is where all eight passes converge. She got nothing from the federal government. No meeting, no funding, a pile with her application buried in it. So her answer is to build her own institution. She is going to clean up the river herself. Herself. Office hours, every Saturday, eight to ten in the morning, right there in the park, anyone who wants to talk can find her. Let's get to work, Pawnee. The federal grid could not render her, so she draws a smaller grid she can actually stand inside. Her own grid. Two hours a week and her own two hands.
JohnWhich rhymes with Ron, and I want to complicate that fast, right, ahead of you making it too pretty. Ron and Leslie both refuse to wait on somebody else's committee. Fine. But Ron withheld comfort from hungry people standing right there, and Leslie is offering comfort to people who never got any. The engine's the same. The bill goes to different people. And the bill is the part that matters.
AshThat is the sharper version, and you are right that I was smoothing it. The mechanism is identical in both of them, you know, and the people who pay for it are not the same people at all. Different bill. And that is the eight passes, honestly. Legibility, genre, emotional labor, use-value, sovereignty, sacrifice, epistemology, gender. One breezy twenty-two-minute sitcom episode holds all of it, and it never once raises its voice to tell you it is doing any of it. Not once.
JohnYou wanted a footnote ahead of the wrap. Go.
AshYeah, one honest personal one. The coat-closet scene got me somewhere specific. I once had a full meltdown at a work retreat, in a supply closet, because I could not find a stapler, and everything else that week had already gone sideways. And a coworker walked in for paper, and I snapped at him exactly the way Leslie snaps at McCain. No idea who I was even talking to.
JohnDid you ever find out who it was?
AshA guy from accounting. Much lower stakes than a senator, much higher stakes for my dignity that particular week.
JohnIf the long history of that barbecue permit tells us one thing, scriptnerd superfans, it's that we've got more questions than answers. What gives one man the standing to declare he can do what he wants in a public park?
AshAnd why does the show let him be right about it?
JohnI don't have a clean answer, and I've been chewing on it since our fight about the corn. Maybe the permit was never about the law at all. Maybe it was about a guy finally getting to cook the meal his own way, one time, with nobody's committee weighing in.
AshThat is the discourse for this one. Eight ways in, and they all land at the same strange mercy. The government could not see Leslie, so a barbecue fed everyone the state ignored. Everyone. Ron got his day. Leslie got her Saturday office hours. Andy got his two hundred dollars. And the pig, God rest him, got an honest introduction ahead of the end. More than the councilwoman got.
JohnRest easy, Tom, you were a good boy.
AshOffice hours in the park, and a pig with a Christian name. A sitcom that lets a plate of food solve what the government will not even look at. Until next week, scriptnerd superfans.