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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David's TV show wasn't just a sitcom -- it was one of the most complex and troubling art works of our time.
Jan 7, 2002 | Walk through the great museums or churches of Rome or Paris and marvel at a curious thing. You don't have to be a cultural nostalgist to admit that, if nothing else, the artists of the past seemed technical masters of their media in a way that almost nothing today approaches. The degree of precision in sculpture and painting -- the breathtaking emotions and the almost hallucinatory details -- seem to have no counterpart in the present age.
In the mechanical or structural sense, the modern era has its areas of precision. But these are most often hidden with a patina of sparseness or repetition, as in our great skyscrapers. There are technicians, sometimes acclaimed, at work in film (Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott) but they are emotionally crude and too often manipulative. Indeed, the modern age has come to make us view technical brilliance in the arts a bit suspiciously. Why? Are our artists today just not detail-minded? Do they lack the patience, the imagination, to work on such a precise level? Is detail on that level just not part of contemporary culture?
On the other hand, it's possible that the people in previous eras looked at Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, or gazed on a Bernini statue, and simply took it for granted.
Perhaps today we take things for granted as well? What if the true cultural brilliance of our time existed right under our noses?
It might be something that was well liked and even respected, but might not be recognized for its mastery.
It might be something that we'd not even suspect of such artistry, precision and meticulous attention to detail. It might be a TV show. It might even be a sitcom.
It might be ... "Seinfeld."
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I didn't watch "Seinfeld" for most of its run. I sneered at broadcast television. Friends met every Thursday to hoot over it, but I never deigned to join them.
It wasn't until its last year on the air, sometime in 1999, that I happened to catch a scene -- a rerun, as it turned out -- that brought me up short.
George Costanza (Jason Alexander), Jerry Seinfeld's schlub friend, is sitting in a car with a woman, outside her apartment, late at night. The dynamic was appreciable in an instant: A tubby bald guy with a nice looking woman, the date winding down.
You could see the emotional accounting of the moment trip through the woman's mind, and you could see her all-but-perceptibly shrug when, in the end, the bottom line appeared, and it favored the schlub.
Sitting next to her was George, enduring the calculations; he was at an age, 30-ish, by which such moments were familiar. Indeed, he could recite the thoughts going through his date's mind: He's a schlub but he's obviously willing to please; I don't have to get up that early in the a.m.; it's been months since I've been laid; I don't have to go out with him again; my friend downstairs is out of town so there's no chance of her busting me with him; it may be just that I had two glasses of wine but he's not that bad looking ...
The shrug. "Would you like to come up for a cup of coffee?" she asked.
This seconds-long moment was already an exquisitely brutal and compressed masterpiece of conception and acting. And here we, the viewers, sighed with amused sympathetic relief for the schlub (this is how guys like George get lucky, after all; it's not pretty, but it works for them) when George broke into our reverie.
"Coffee?" he scowled. "No! It keeps me up all night!"
The woman looked at him with a burst of disbelief, and then the quick realization that she'd lucked out -- been given an inadvertent reprieve by someone who was a bigger loser than she'd appreciated. "OK," she said, and got out of the car.
George remained in his seat, stunned at what he'd just said and marveling savagely at the urges that moved him.
