800 Words: Bee Movie - Jerry Grows Up

(a rerun from early 2009, and a blog I'd forgotten I'd had)

The final two seasons of Seinfeld were supposed to make the working relationship of its creators crystal clear. Larry David was the volcanically productive genius who with Curb Your Enthusiasm continued to mine existence for its minutia in an eternally darkening palette of existential triviality. Whereas Jerry Seinfeld served merely as a socially acceptable face for an anti-social genius, the very affability and tastefulness of his cynicism-lite serving as the perfect ringmaster for a cast of freaks.

Let's face it, it's partially true. Listening to Seinfeld's standup by itself is a bit like looking at expertly crafted wallpaper. Word by word, rhythm by rhythm, the delivery is impeccable and can render flat jokes funnier than they have any right to be. Yet taken out of the support structure of a stand-up routine, the jokes crumble like six-month old matzoh.

In real life, it's probable that Jerry Seinfeld is exactly as he is rendered on his show - an A student arrested emotionally at the age of 16 - the seeming ease with which life carries him masking a profound bundle of neuroses he makes visible only to people too neurotic themselves to care about them.

Perhaps this is why it's so unsurprising that while Larry David keeps mining their mountain, Seinfeld has largely retreated into smug silence. Seinfeld, once widely touted as Johnny Carson's heir for the Tonight Show, is a natural mouthpiece to showcase the greater talents of others. As it was on the show, he is the sympathetic face and ear for other people.

This is what makes his animated film, Bee Movie, so surprising. Seinfeld claimed to be a show about nothing, and for Jerry it probably was nothing more than a review of his weightless early adult years. But what made it possible was that for many others involved, the show was weightily, painfully about themselves. Larry David and a host of writers mined every angle of their personal experiences to create it.

It should follow that someone as seemingly unaffected as Jerry Seinfeld, the only appropriate following act would be a retreat into silence. He's made his money, and now needn't do anything but enjoy the time he has with it. Instead, Seinfeld has begun to make a series of increasingly self-revealing movies. It's as if middle-age, wealth, leisure and family life have halted Seinfeld's seemingly unshakable belief that there is no more to life than Superman and cereal.

First, a documentary about the craft of comedy called Comedian. An all-too-loving, fawning, almost hagiographic tribute to the heroic efforts of a profession supposed to be the first to dispense with heroism. In this documentary you can feel Seinfeld wrestling with limitations which the show seemed to assure us he never cared about. Learning and hugging was rampant. The world's most nonchalant comedian was assuring us that appearing nonchalant was sheer agony.

And then comes Bee Movie. A children's picture as self-revealing as any divorce episode on Curb. 90 minutes exposing the inside world of a beehive: populated with industrious workers whose entire identities are bound up within their careers, which every bee has to flippantly decide upon the day he graduates from larva school. Bees who practice 'Beeism' (woe betide the Bee who dates a Wasp) are all-too-accustomed to the casual anti-sebeetic abuse of the world outside the hive, and base their lives on routines so stultifying that any young 'Bee' with half an imagination would do anything to get the hell out of the hive forever and experience New York City in all its glory. And so he does, and through a mixture of charm and flinty grit, he gives back by achieving eminence and (Marxist) justice for 'Bees' around the world, only for the bee colony to become beset by inertia and apathy due to his efforts (what must a Seder be like at the Seinfeld's?). There's then the obligatory save the day heroics and by the end of the movie, Barry B. Benson Insect-At-Law has a mid-town practice whose property he shares with his human friend Vanessa, whose banter with him has a certain suggestive sting (you knew that was coming...).

It's difficult not to read too much into this, particularly in how quickly his satire has dated. In 2007 nobody has the same career for more than a decade and surely there must be a more diverse breed of shiksect for him to date. But there is no doubt that these bees are not 2007 bees. This beedungsroman (sorry) is the bee world of Great Neck, Morristown, Paramus and Yonkers a generation ago. White collar bees whose ancestors flew across the ocean, fleeing pogroms perpetrated by bears jealous of their honey-making abilities.

And so Jerry Seinfeld, the most effortlessly casual celebrity of his generation, has willfully allowed us to watch him perspire in an effort to make us see him as more than just the front man. It is often said that in Noel Coward's effort to seem like the most effortless creator of his time, nobody worked harder. No doubt the idea has occurred to Jerry that the expense of fame and fortune is to be viewed as everyone's favorite lightweight manchild. So expect a lot more Jerry projects, perhaps even a few exhibiting a grown-up version of himself, before he's done.

800 Words: Culture of Offense

Jason Alexander is not Michael Richards, after spending my youth watching Seinfeld on loop, I can tell you definitively that Michael Richards is an actor who does everything on instinct. There is not a moment when he even thinks what he’s doing, the ideas simply pour out of him as though he’s a vessel for a talent larger than himself. But while Michael Richards doesn’t even consider planning his ideas a moment in advance, Julia-Louis Dreyfuss and particularly Jason Alexander are actors who consider every possible shade of line-reading and gesture, and go with the one they think is best only after long thought.

When you look at their respective reactions to scandals in which they used offensive language, the reaction is utterly telling. Michael Richards was dumbfounded in the face of his instinct going awry - appearing on Letterman to give a dead-eyed apology which no one took seriously. The same instinct which twenty years ago made him appear the essence of laid-back hipsterdom made him take off like a rocket when faced with the slightest pressure. Is Michael Richards really racist? The only answer that does his personality credit is to say: absolutely, at least at the moment he uttered those words.

But Jason Alexander is a very different person. Last week, when appearing on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Alexander used the word ‘gay’ to describe a sport, cricket, as something effeminate – a description which most of us have probably used at one point or another in our lives without a second thought to whom it might hurt. He was called on it by fans for using it offensively, and used the as a lynchpin for a 1000-word apology in which he expressed solidarity with the gay community and traced the entire stereotype back to its origin. Jason Alexander is clearly a thoughtful person, but I can’t help wondering…

Is this a sincere apology, and if it isn’t, should it be?

As far as stereotypes go, Jason Alexander’s offense was clearly an offense, but it was at the lowest possible level, barely even meriting a mention except apparently on twitter. Now, one would expect that a Seinfeld star would be particularly sensitive to this kind of trouble after what Michael Richards did, and one can’t doubt that if you’re going to apologize, the way Alexander handled it was the best possible way. But the end result of this is that Mr. Alexander will not be vilified, he will instead be congratulated on his thoughtfulness and sensitivity, get his name back in the press, with the hope that it will lead to an offer for a new TV show or starring role on Broadway.

Jason Alexander is not Michael Richards, and compared to what Michael Richards did, his offense was so bland that it barely merited a second thought by all but a few people.

All over our lives, we hear stories of famous people saying the same offensive things we hear on a daily basis from various people in our lives, and we pretend to be shocked and appalled that these people we don’t know would say something so awful. What could the end result of this be but people on television growing ever more circumspect in what they allow themselves to say. It’s one of the terrible ironies of today’s America that the same PR consultants who are hired to manage un-politically correct gaffes are the same firms who enable politicians and corporate executives to hide their true intentions behind mountains of bullshit. We can’t have it both ways, either we want our public figures to speak their minds in public, or we don't. And since we don't, we live with the consequences of a society where no media outlet feels compelled to make powerful people speak their true thoughts.

And if you still think that eliminating offensive language is a total good for our society, look at a simple case like Mel Brooks. A living legend he may be, but he got there by making fun of Jews, Women, Blacks, Hispanics, Gays, Catholics, Hippies, Hillbillies, the Irish, and countless others – and he did so because he realizes what only true comedic greats do: even in its most benevolent form, humor is an expression of superiority and relief. Just as we’ve evolved to cry when we require protection, we’ve evolved to laugh when we realize we need none. If it doesn’t hurt someone else, it ain’t funny. In his two greatest films (The Producers and Blazing Saddles), Brooks respectively uses every offensive situation imaginable against Jews and Blacks. But anyone with a modicum of sense realizes that he's not using racial stereotypes to portray either Jews or Blacks negatively - he's using racial stereotypes to negatively portray those who use racial stereotypes. 

But if a comedy writer started out today with Brooks’s brand of humor, (s)he wouldn’t even be allowed to write a sitcom pilot. In the Obama era, Mel Brooks is a bigger legend than ever – a symbol of how offensive humor can be used to bring people together and throwback to the brief era between the Production Code breaking down and the advent of Political Correctness when people could make fun of whomever they wanted without fear of retribution. Mel Brooks’s best movies and comedy routines are still amazing because they have a liberating power; a power which allows us to laugh at all the things that are now forbidden to us. When a woman in an elevator accosted Mel Brooks and told him she thought The Producers was vulgar, Brooks replied “Lady, the movie rises below vulgarity.” Forty-five years ago, Mel Brooks could make comedies in Hollywood which dared to suggest that stupid people still live among us who think Hitler was a great man, or that people who love John Wayne films are nostalgic for an American era that considered blacks an inferior race. Today, Dan Harmon gets fired from Community, the utterly unique (if slightly overrated) sitcom he birthed and ran for three years, merely because he offended Chevy Chase and speaks his mind in public too often on the internet.  

We live in a culture of offense – no matter what interest group we belong to, we all feel entitled to take offense when someone says something that isn’t to our liking. In many ways, it’s probably a step forward from the era when bullies could say whatever they like to any minority with impunity. But before long, Political Correctness can harden into Newspeak no less dangerous than that which exists under any authoritarian regime, and no matter how bad their intentions, people bland enough to never give offense can rise to power, while no matter how good their intentions, people interesting enough to sometimes give offense can be barred from success. We've already seen the beginnings of how this problem takes effect on media outlets as diverse as Fox News and al-Jezeera, both of whom exploit the culture of offense stir up resentments against causes for which nobody should take offense. Because if we even give an inch wiggle room to people looking for a way to exploit us, the bullies will always find it. 

800 Words: Must See TV Part 1

I.          

           

I’d like to think I grow tired of saying this over and over again, but clearly I don’t if I keep coming back to this point: if any foreigner or future scholar wants to understand America in the post Cold War era, all they’d have to do is watch TV. It’s not like there’s much competition: I can and have named dozens of TV shows that have completely altered the landscape of our culture. Many people say that we’re living in a Golden Age of International Cinema, but are there even fifteen American movies since 1990 that have completely shaken up the way American culture views itself in the manner of which the best dozen-or-so episodes of The Simpsons did, or South Park, or The Wire, or Mad Men (The Truman Show, The Social Network,  WALL-E, American Beauty; and if we’re being charitable maybe Juno, Forrest Gump, Minority Report, Pulp Fiction, There Will Be Blood, Fight Club… The Dark Knight is ultimately British…and after that I draw a blank)? Are there even half-a-dozen American plays since 1990 that have changed the country (Angels in America, Oleanna, Doubt, arguably Rent and The Book of Mormon if you count music theater…nothing but blanks after that…)? Think of how many ‘Great American Artists’ in today’s cultural world are clearly, unambiguously, unassailably at the very peak of their careers – artists whom most every critic and connoisseur in their field seems to agree will not ever, cannot ever get better than the work which they’re producing right now. Now think of how many of them are not television showrunners (Jonathan Franzen, David Fincher, Wynton Marsalis, Kanye West, Lady Gaga if that’s your kind of thing….blank…)  With so few exceptions, the way which American artists use movies, theater, literature, art, and music seem to grow ever smaller and more insular with every passing year. But the manner in which television is used seems to grow ever larger, more diverse, more ambitious, more epic. Overall, I suppose I prefer watching a great movie to great television – great movies suggest the ‘unfathomable depths’ in a matter of a few hours. A two hour movie requires less time commitment but just as much artistic reward at the end as 100-hour TV show, and utterly without the longeurs it takes to reach the end of a series. Movies are simply more interesting.

In a country like ours, which redefined everything which the arts can be, movies have virtually supplanted the importance of theater – often providing a more visceral, more flexible experience than live theater was ever capable of suggesting. But if movies are to us what theater was to Elizabethan England (but who’s our Shakespeare?), then TV is to today’s America what The Novel was to Czarist Russia. We could even play a kind of parlor game in which we create equivalents for Russian novels with today’s TV shows. Perhaps The Sopranos could stand in for Dostoevsky’s whirlpoolish psychological immediacy – the show could easily be renamed Crime and Punishment. Or perhaps Mad Men could stand in as a spiritual replacement for Tolstoy’s slow, critically distant psychological burn - think of the first line of Anna Karenina and imagine applying it to the marriages of Don Draper and Roger Sterling.

II.

Being a person with very few reasons to live, I grew up with NBC’s Thursday night lineup as the cornerstone of my week. Growing up, my weekends were inevitably disappointing: I didn’t much care for my friends, and the Baltimore Symphony was too expensive to go every weekend. Thursday night was the highlight of my week, because that was the night the new Seinfeld premiered, and that thought was enough to get me through one week of extended suburban ennui to the next.

With the omnipresent syndication and ubiquitous reruns (not that they don’t mean the same thing), it’s nearly impossible to remember how revolutionary Seinfeld seemed in the 1990’s. Seinfeld was more than a show about nothing, it was a show about taboos. Week after week, issues which none of us dare mention in polite company were discussed in barely concealed euphemisms: masturbation, public urination, breast implants, oral sex, faking orgasms, contraception, self-exposure, sexual techniques, fetishes, fears of responsibility, commitment, marriage, immigrants, the handicapped, social and sexual humiliation, dentistry, bullying, hygiene, the elderly, homeless people, blind dates, being perceived as racist or homophobic, social ‘inferiors’, and the truth. Seinfeld’s greatness came from constantly taking uncomfortable situations in which we’ve all found ourselves, yet none of us wants to admit we have. It then stretched those situations to the exact breaking point of believability.

If Seinfeld now seems like a completely different show than it did in the 90’s, it’s because all the greatest sitcoms were in fact a variation on that exact same trope. All In The Family made bigotry charming for white and black people alike. M*A*S*H showed people who never served in the armed forces that the experience of war is not all sacrifice and patriotism. Cheers allowed literate upper-middle class Yuppies to bond with loser alcoholics. The only difference between these shows and Seinfeld is that the latter broke taboos to an exponentially higher degree than any sitcom before it. Seinfeld seemed like a beginning, in which every issue could be discussed on television so long as there it’s done with sufficient cleverness; but 15 years after the show ended, we now see that Seinfeld was an end. After Seinfeld, all the taboos of what could be aired on television were broken, and we now live in a nearly taboo-free society of reality TV, pay cable series, and internet memes, where virtually any subject can be discussed openly and acceptably. Seinfeld still seems like a great show, but it seems almost quaint and prudish, as though it’s a show from another solar system where people have to talk in code. It seems downright weird to use terms like ‘master of your domain’ or ‘down there’ when today’s shows can discuss absolutely any issue with utter transparency.

III.

There were great shows before Seinfeld. Must See TV (NBC’s term for its Thursday night lineup) is older than I am, and included fine shows as different as Cheers, Night Court, The Cosby Show (I include that begrudgingly), Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, A Different World, Frasier, Wings, Mad About You, Friends (REALLY begrudgingly), ER, Just Shoot Me, Will & Grace, Scrubs (SOOOOOO begrudgingly), My Name is Earl, The Office, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, and Community (honorable mention to Andy Barker P.I., one of two Andy Richter shows that should have been picked up past a first season).

In an era of 300 channels, NBC might have more history than any channel save two others, but its best days are so clearly over. It’s difficult to forget that sight-gag on Family Guy in which NBC headquarters proclaims on its sign “We Used To Have Seinfeld, Remember?”

Like the other networks, only moreso, NBC has moved into the world of pay cable. NBCUniversal owns CNBC, MSNBC, USA, Bravo, Syfy, Cloo, Chiller, and Telemundo. It has large stakes in AMC, A&E, the History Channel, the Biography Channel, and National Geographic. This list doesn’t even include the overseas networks which NBC manages or the fact that NBC has a large share in TiVo.

NBC clearly understands that the name of today’s broadcasting is ‘niche’ – and there should be a niche for every taste and every demographic. But they still don’t understand well enough. Like any network, they are principally committed to preserving the dominance of their once ‘august’ brand – and will not preserve a show on their flagship network if it does not recoup a certain amount above the expenses it takes to make the show - how very 1985.

The rumors were abounding last week that NBC is cancelling its Thursday night lineup almost wholesale. For longer than I’ve been alive, Thursday night’s been the lynchpin of NBC television. But there’s something about the very idea of dominating a night of television that feels utterly old-fashioned. Nobody wants to dominate a TV night anymore, nobody who’s living in 2012 at least. At this point, sensible executives just want enough viewers to derive a reasonably large demographic against 300 other competitors. Anyone executive who sets out to make a TV show watched even by a quarter of those who watched Seinfeld every week is a guaranteed failure. The most watched non-reality TV show of the last year was NCIS, and it was watched by a weekly average of 11.6 million people.

Desperate Housewives, one of the highest rated shows of the last decade, will air its final episode this Sunday, and will be considered a stunning surprise if it rakes in anywhere near 15 million viewers. Let’s put that in a bit of context. Nearly ten years ago, the Friends series finale attracted more than 50 million viewers. Nearly fifteen years ago, the Seinfeld series finale attracted almost 75 million viewers (and was expected to attract a lot more than that). Nearly twenty years ago, the Cheers series finale attracted almost 85 million viewers. Nearly thirty years ago, the M*A*S*H series finale attracted more than 100 million viewers.

The age when any network or channel could coast on the strength of a single show is over and will never come back. In today’s TVcology, there is only competition – and even the highest rated shows can only appeal to a severely limited demographic. No two people watch all the same television shows anymore.