The Last Two Seasons of Seinfeld

In June of 2008 I took a train to Nebraska to visit Brendan.  I took a bus from Salinas to Oakland at 3 in the morning one night, and then a commuter train to Sacramento, and boarded the California Zephyr by late morning.   As we left the station, after the conductor gave his brief speech, an older couple announced their presence: as historical enthusiasts they board the train in Sacramento, travel to Reno, and narrate the important sites in gold country that the train passes.  Because I intermittently listened to the walkman I had brough I only remember Donner Pass being pointed out, the location of the stranded party that resorted to cannibalism. 

            At a certain point in Nevada I started writing a story about a narrator who entered into a restroom in which a man is masturbating in the stall.  I realized I was ignoring what it was I wanted to be doing and abandoned the story.  I instead began taking the first notes, drawing up the first charts, and composing the logical proofs for the book I had of late decided to take up.  I decided I would begin one such proof with the moment in Derrida when the interviewer asks him about Seinfeld and he dismisses it, and I would then add the deconstructionist idea that one must reinscribe one half of a binary (Seinfeld is not deconstruction) with its opposite (Seinfeld is deconstruction), in order to deconstruct each erroneous extreme.  If the trip was to be productive toward the end of the book I needed some tangible point from which the dialogues with Brendan could begin, although these notes ultimately never really played a part in the ensuing conversations. 

            I arrived two and a half days into the journey at 5:30 in downtown Lincoln.  I called from the train station’s pay phone and Brendan told me to meet him at the Mill coffee shop on T Street, and to ask the stationmaster how to get there.  However, he was occupied helping people with their luggage and I figured the streets went alphabetically and I could manage, and so I set off and smoked a spliff in celebration of my arrival.  I walked three blocks to S Street when downtown Lincoln ended and yielded to a combination of freeway and train tracks.  It looked as though on the other side of the freeway there would be room for T street, so I crossed and saw Memorial Stadium, a very exciting thing to happen upon at quarter to six in the morning, and found where T street should be (between S and U), which was the walking entrance to the campus of the University of Nebraska.  I decided to turn back around and return to the train station to ask the stationmaster, as I should have the first time, where the Mill Coffeeshop was.  Ten minutes later, as I approached, I saw Brendan coming towards me.  It was then revealed that he said the Mill was on P Street one block away, that it was closed, and that T street disappears into the school and reappears on the other side in a part of Lincoln referred to as “T Town.”

            The first thing I said to his mother when we stopped at his house after breakfast at the Village Inn was a joke about taking Brendan back to California to marry him, as our courts had just legalized same-sex marriage, what I thought a very topical and humorous remark.  It seems however that it was actually a poorly-chosen joke and that Brendan suspects that his mom suspects that we are a gay couple.  He once saw her look strangely at a picture on his computer’s desktop that included me, one moment among others in which he’s caught her noting “evidence.”  And, of course, we’re thin, single, and neat.  That I came to visit for a week and opened with a joke about marrying her son did not help things.

            Brendan took a week off from his job at State Farm Insurance, where, that summer, his dad and brother were also working.  We had a grand ol’ time seeing the Lincoln sights, watching a marathon of the teen soap-opera Degrassi, seeing the final of the College World Series thanks to tickets provided by Brendan’s dad (the game marked the end of the miraculous underdog story of the Fresno State Bulldogs against the Georgia Bull Dogs, an underdog story with which we were unfamiliar at the time, mostly thinking it was funny that the Bulldogs beat the Bulldogs, that the Bulldogs lost to the Bulldogs), seeing fireflies on evening walks and bunny rabbits on daytime ones, going bowling, arguing with locals, forming a band called Lennon/Lenin (that hypothesizes musical history if John Lennon never collaborated with McCartney but rather with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, or if Lenin joined up with Lennon to form the skiffle group the Bolsheviks instead of participating in the Russian Revolution), visiting Brendan’s love interest who works at a burrito place, eating burritos, and conversing.

            The most important stride made in our joint Seinfeld thinking concerned the character of the last two seasons of the series; what it meant to keep going after Larry David left the show to make his movie Sour Grapes.  We decided that the remaining writing staff—Larry Charles had also already left for Mad About You by this time—were left interpreting the first seven seasons of Seinfeld.  The last two, then, were what the came up with: interpretations of what was more subtly at work in the series.   Elements that were obliquely present became spelled out for the viewer, while others were neglected in the interpretation because the show, properly studied cannot produce a univocal interpretation.  In short, as we saw it, nuance became gimmick.

            Jerry may be interpreted as a neat-freak who breaks up with women in an endless of parade of women for silly reasons and otherwise does not have any troubles, instead making smart-aleck remarks about his friends’ problems—so this is the simplified rendering of him in the last two seasons; Kramer is defined by the eccentric objects that bring him into unexpected situations—a meat slicer, a competent cock-fighting chicken, the set from the Merv Griffin Show, a one-mile stretch of the Arthur Burghardt Expressway that he has adopted, a job as a seat-filler at the Tony Awards—rendering him as more cartoonish than he ever was (we also learn he has been on strike from a bagel shop for 12 years, partly explaining his unemployment); Elaine is partly wrapped up in work and partly  in her boyfriend, and neither vary much in the end as J. Peterman of the J. Peterman catalogue makes up much of the Elaine storylines, and David Puddy, the mechanic, overwhelms the social side; and George, the incomprehensible rendering of Larry David, becomes a lazy, stupid, and immature rage-aholic who is obsessed with food, sex, and television—when once one side of the viewer might have sympathized with an absurd Costanzian aspiration—“I always wanted to pretend I was an arquitect” (“The Marine Biologist”)—now it is simply pathetic and ridiculous for his epic dream to be “the Summer of George” in which he intends to read “a whole book,” or to maintain his Frogger score on a machine in the pizza place that was his and Jerry’s high school hangout that’s now going out of business. 

            The show itself literally becomes an explicitly staged mockery of television, when it always kind of had been, when Kramer turns his apartment into the Merv Griffin Show and interacts with his friends as its host, having them sit next to Jim Fowler who has brought a hawk and asks “where are the cameras?”  “The Bizarro Jerry” literalizes the show’s constant self-mockery by having Elaine enter a “bizarro” world that perfectly parodies the show.  George argues his suffering easily rivals that of an Andrea Doria survivor, providing a review and interpretation of older episodes.  “The Blood” literalizes the way that one character’s reality blends and informs another’s by having Jerry filled with “a half a pint of Kramer.”  However, it’s interesting that it is from the outside in, sleeping in the other’s bed, that causes Jerry to become Kramer—again simplifying the character by having someone who is not even an actor be “Kramer”—and vice versa when the two switch apartments in “the Roasted Chicken.” And most notably the Seinfeld reputation for inventing catch-phrases is adopted as what seems a function of the show, providing us with countless new phrases.

            Brendan has a friend that argues that the last two seasons provide a “greater amount of play” than was ever allowed under the guidance of Larry David who insisted that the show’s absurdity be based in realism, which is certainly evident in these more unconventional and surreal episodes.   And in retrospect it seems the logical next step in the show’s self-mockery that it turns its former methods into hyperactive parodies of themselves.  It was the summer of 2008, though, we were in Lincoln, Nebraska and anything seemed possible.  At the end of the ten days Brendan drove me to the bus station at the edge of town where he waited with me for a few minutes.  I asked him about Sour Grapes.  He said that, though it is not very good, it was an interesting choice for Larry David, to leave an incredibly successful show that was making him millions of dollars to make a mediocre movie about a man who wins a lot of money in Atlantic City and becomes unpleasant as a result.  He was interested in what I would think about it and encouraged me to find it.  He left in the car that State Farm gave him so he could go to flooded Waterloo, Iowa for 12 hour days of sorting out insurance claims of the locals who had been struck by disaster, and I went back west.   I still have not seen Sour Grapes as it is not on Netflix, and movie rental stores have severely depleted VHS collections these days.