From this decision about the show’s content—that “it’s about nothing”—we again go into Jerry’s apartment where he is again in mid-conversation with Kramer who insists that he be allowed to play Kramer because—he is Kramer. The audience could not know at that moment that Larry David’s neighbor Kenny Kramer insisted the same thing, which David would later reveal either simply because it’s true or because it makes the scene even funnier. Newman’s entrance again ends the conversation, and the now doubled sequence moves on, for the premise to be presented to an authority higher than the quirky, unemployed neighbor: NBC, which is still, of course, essential to our viewing of Seinfeld, though less apparent in syndication. They sit in the waiting room where George has a freak-out (“They’re men with jobs, Jerry!”), Jerry accidentally sets in motion Crazy Joe Devola’s entrance into the Kramer/Newman subplot, though he can’t call to warn Kramer as they are summoned in at that moment and Jerry mockingly reassures George as they walk into the president’s office.
Jerry is friendly and conciliatory, but George insists on taking over the conversation, lies about an “off-off-Broadway” play he wrote (or an “off off-Broadway” play) called La Cocina, and becomes first smug as he “sums about the show in one word—nothing” and then again to the president’s “nothing?”—“nothing.” The meeting takes a turn here and Jerry tries to concede, “well, maybe in philosophy—but even nothing is something.” Then George insists that it is about nothing, and is resolute that it is to contain no stories. Finally, he turns self-righteous, like he’s some sort of visionary who will save television from mediocrity:
Look: if you want to just keep on doing the same old thing, then maybe this idea is not for you. I, for one, am not going to compromise my artistic integrity. And I'll tell you something else—this is the show and we're not going to change it.
And they are back at the coffee shop for the sequence to begin again, and Jerry to play the pharmacist who knows exactly what’s wrong with George:
What were you thinking? What was going on in your mind? Artistic integrity? Where did you come up with that? You're not artistic and you have no integrity. You know you really need some help. A regular psychiatrist couldn't even help you. You need to go to like Vienna or something. You know what I mean? You need to get involved at the University level. Like where Freud studied and have all those people looking at you and checking up on you. That's the kind of help you need. Not the once a week for eighty bucks. No. You need a team. A team of psychiatrists working round the clock thinking about you, having conferences, observing you, like the way they did with the Elephant Man. That's what I'm talking about because that's the only way you're going to get better.
The power is back with Jerry here: he is the celebrity who is approached by big wigs at NBC; George is the layman who needs to walk away while Jerry talks business.
In the sequence Jerry’s apartment has been a sort of reflection of what is decided in the outside world, where Kramer contributes his opinion: the first time he suggests that Jerry manage a circus, the second time he insists that he play himself, the third time, in perfect reflection and escalation of what just occurred—George’s disembowelment of their professional chances and Jerry’s evisceration of his frustrations upon George—Kramer vomits on Susan, the NBC executive George brings up to Jerry’s apartment. As gross as it may seem, this literal evisceration is an evocative metaphor for the unabashed reality that Jerry and George, with the aid of Kramer, wish to bring to NBC: it is not just air that comes out of their mouths—they want to bring substance to the network, however crass and unpleasant substance may initially seem. Kramer, the spokesman of the other three when they can’t mustard the honesty, vomits on Susan, the representative of that organization to which they wish to bring the essence of themselves and their reality. And what causes Kramer to vomit?—old milk. Like the stale and rancid family values of Father Knows Best, Kramer takes in the tradition of the situation comedy, has it sit for an uncomfortable moment, and then reproduces, as George has just done, with Jerry apologizing for him, for the benefit of the NBC network executive, in turn forcing George to apologize for Kramer.
The show becomes this dialogue: the simultaneous rejection by the network of the show and by the show of the network. The two represent the show in the second meeting as formulaic and absurd, with the premise that a man with no car insurance is decreed by a judge to be Jerry's butler. Seinfeld is never this episode, though an early episode when Jerry is forced to care for a drunkard's dog comes close. Rather this second meeting represents the compromise that the network mandates of Jerry and his co-creator. They either get away with doing an episode that consists entirely of waiting for a table at a chinese restaurant, or they get away with making fun of the network for not letting them.
The network head asks in disbelief in that first meeting, "You read on the show?" and Seinfeld reacts by not only taking all reading out of the plot (episodes like "the Library" about George and Jerry's high school liaison with Henry Miller's Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, along with other casual references to the fact that these are somewhat intellectual, literate characters disappear after this moment), the characters become entirely hostile to reading, besides for Kramer, always the exception, who reads an entire manuscript in Jerry's apartment which is in the process of being fumigated when Elaine, who was supposed to read it to get a job, couldn't manage to read it; an entire episode is devoted to George's inability to read Breakfast at Tiffany's at the behest of his girlfriend, and subsequent difficulty finding a copy of it at any video rental store in New York. America doesn't want Diane Chambers from Cheers, so they give us a cast of Sam Malones who were never baseball players, but rather were once thinkers, but have since retired out of necessity because they have found themselves on network television.
No comments:
Post a Comment