I’m doing a top-to-bottom “Seinfeld” rewatch and I’m only partway into Season 4 but I [studio bigshot voice] HAVE NOTES.
1. Michael Richards’s Kramer is all mugs and big reax; light on interiority or believable interaction. There’s too much of him by half, on the show, in the culture, even as the actor nuked his own career. He sort of became the Poochie, the “I Didn’t Do It” boy, the Urkel, the Balki — which tends to signal an uncomfortable nexus of out-of-control popularity and the flop sweat of boardroom desperation when there’s only one trick behind the gold cufflink.
2. Richards is totally doing a slapstick take on Harry Dean Stanton, and this is probably jumping out at me now because I watched HDS in “Paris, Texas” and “UFOria” recently. In terms of physical comedy, someone (Ebert?) compared Richards to Jacques Tati, and I think where Richards gravitates to the haywire, Tati was very measured and judicious with his movements. Perhaps the Tati nod would be more appropriate for “Seinfeld” as a whole, because the entire throughline of those Monsieur Hulot comedies was a “did you ever notice” cynicism about the silliness of modern life.
3. Jason Alexander never won an Emmy for George, but he won a Tony for his theatre work. And he did win four SAG awards for George, so fuck the Emmys anyhow. He handles George so beautifully — this character whose annoyingness could be a one-note samba — we see all these little expressions where he’s processing hurt, rejection, deep insecurities. If George is the Jungian shadow of Jerry, we still get to see George’s own shadow all the time, informing his tantrums.
4. He’s fully present as an actor, as is Louis-Dreyfus. I love their scenes together because they’re all the way in — giving, taking, joyful, melancholy, unafraid of the spaces between. It’s not news to anyone that Jerry is a limited actor, but by the end of Season 3 he kinda finds his footing, especially with Elaine. He’s at his best when he chills a bit, stops doing “school play”-style broad emoting, and allows himself to be conversationally intimate and loose, to place trust in the natural chemistry.
5. Gratuitous Steely Dan reference: my big realization from Jennifer Keishin Armstrong’s “Seinfeldia” book is that Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld were the Walter Becker and Donald Fagen of their universe, with Larry probably the Walter of the two, and Jerry as the one who liked teenage girls? Uh. But I mean the insane work ethics that they imposed on themselves and everyone else, and in how colleagues and hopefuls universally regarded the two as colossal dicks. A friend I was hashing this out with said, “I have no idea who was the bigger dick. For either duo,” and it’s hard to say. For Steely Dan, I think Walter acted like a dick as cover for a lifetime of emotional crap he wasn’t dealing with, and I think Donald deployed his reputation as a thoughtful, complex singer-songwriter as cover for a personality that was darker and meaner — prefiguring future generations of dodgy emo dudes. With “Seinfeld,” I believe Jerry is actually the bigger dick even though you might expect it to be Larry, who is just socially inept in extremis and has built an empire ruminating on exactly that. (Friend interjects: “I think this makes Michael Richards Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter.” Well, there you go.)
6. I don’t know how much I need to say about the problematic elements of “Seinfeld,” of the white gaze, the male gaze, all the othering — their obsession with Latina cleaning ladies, or service industry types with wacky ethnic accents. But it’s there and I can’t let it go. The men are terrified of any tear in the fast-fashion fabric of their own masculinity, and they project that as a disgust for the perceived flaws of the lasses who come and go in their lives, who are never quite feminine enough for their liking. The sense of “am I right, folks?” when “folks” means a very particular flavor of folk. The idea that WELL OF COURSE you, a red-blooded ancestrally suburban white male, would find high comedy in certain women being so delusional as to want to exist. In this way it reminds me of a 1970 film that’s back in the conversation, “EO” director Jerzy Skolimowski’s earlier “Deep End,” where it’s supposed to be a character study of the dangerous myopia but just ends up being the dangerous myopia itself. At least “Seinfeld” underscores the pettiness of the gaze, but neither work ever comes to terms with it.
7. As for pettiness, Larry David’s “no hugging, no learning” credo functions as an interception against any possible criticism of the writing. Characters who are intentionally assholes are often proxies for writers and showrunners who are morally not always so great, who insist we’re not allowed to criticize the content Because Art, and we’re all just too sensitive. Jerry Seinfeld’s well-publicized disdain for contemporary college campuses bears this out. But he did come from a 1990s in which alt culture was a safe space for fetishists of serial killers and violence against women, where middle-class guys were suddenly real gazey about freakshows, carnys, “midgets,” mental institutions, the garish poor.
8. On the other hand, if pettiness was the soul of “Seinfeld,” the scenarios could be endlessly interchangeable and the thematic intent of pettiness would always prevail. We tuned in to see which ways the principals were going to be petty this week or the next, and the specifics were often secondary. They could be anything. Which is why when the specifics defaulted so often to casual racism and sexism and looks-ism, it’s like — come on, guys. You have this huge pool of writers you can call on to give you fresh content. Stop accepting the laziest pitches and be as innovative as everyone says you are.
9. But meme culture is proving an excellent way of isolating the most indelible bits of “Seinfeld,” and it seems very obvious that what’s surviving in the 21st century is the show’s delight in language and gesture and the ineluctability of base human impulse, in neurosis and sputtering anger as a hot fountain of putti imps in a funny Sondheimian Forum of first-world problems.
10. It’s a very visually driven show even beyond the iconography of the principal characters and their standard settings. An episode will have all the characters showing up in a scene or two wearing shades of blue — denim jeans, a turquoise button-down, a fuzzy powder-blue bathrobe — and you make a goofy note to yourself that “the wardrobe coordinator on S3E16 really feels that the color blue Should Be Dialoguing,” and then you remember how Kramer showed up at Jerry’s with a fistful of condoms and George helped himself to one that was blue, and hey! The blue condom ended up being a key plot detail.
11. In “The Trip,” the Season 4 story arc where Jerry and George look for the elusive Kramer in Los Angeles, we end with the three atop Griffith Park, first with the camera tilting up from the rear of a bench to behind their heads as they look out on the hazy megalopolis below, with cutaways to the Hollywood Sign in the opposite direction. Jerry, George, and Kramer get their moment to reflect and take this place in, panoramically, parabolically. In this town, the fake-noir vernacular of cop shows becomes the fake-noir vernacular of real cops, and the celebrities you’re abasing yourself trying to throw unsolicited pitches to are politely biding their time until they can use your creepy lunacy as couch fodder on late night. It’s all Larry David and crew expanding on an experiential vocabulary, gathering what was accruing offscreen and finding room for it On Main. The “outsiders in L.A.” refresh, although the New Yorkers running the “Seinfeld” ship had been out west since nearly the beginning, reminds me of Jacques Demy putting France on hold to make his 1969 loser-cinema meditation “Model Shop” in the hills and flats of Hollywood: “I needed another language, new problems.” (The critic Clare Stewart called Demy’s film “a road picture that doesn’t go anywhere,” echoing the legendary “Seinfeld” refrain that it’s “a show about nothing.”) And it’s fitting that the show left the L.A. detour as a detour and returned to the insularity that was its lifeblood.
12. It relies on their world being a little askew — of course it’s L.A. standing in for NYC and it’s a backlot “New York Street” standing in for New York streets, but it’s actually multiple backlot New York Streets each standing in for a backlot New York Street that couldn’t accommodate the needs of the scene. And the establishing exterior shot of Jerry’s New York apartment building is not New York, not a New York Street, but a real building in L.A.’s Koreatown. In the tradition of “Synecdoche, New York” and “Drive My Car” and “All That Jazz” and “8 ½,” a show where a guy plays a fictionalized version of himself gives us different levels of reality and non-reality. Pretty advanced stuff for a normcore institution.
