The English comedy duo Mitchell
and Webb have a sketch in which one of their fans (played by a member of their
supporting cast) accosts Mitchell and praises one of their earlier sketches,
which was set in a cash-register shop (and which really is quite funny), says
he craves another sketch exactly like it, and implores them to write such a
sketch. He likens the prospective sketch to a sausage roll: “What’s wrong with
more? If you have a sausage roll, and the next day you think you fancy a
sausage roll, that’s OK isn’t it? It’s not the same sausage roll. It’s a
fundamental principle of commerce: if people like something, make another one.”
Mitchell politely but firmly refuses on the grounds that sketch comedy is not
like food, that people will not watch or listen to the same sketch over and
over again even though they will happily eat the same style of food-preparation
over and over again; whereupon the fan, totally unconvinced but willing to
offer Mitchell a sop to his fetishization of variety for the sake of getting
his duplicate sketch, suggests the replacement of the cash registers, and only
the cash registers, with doorbells. Whereupon Mitchell emits a(n) “Hmm”
significative of That just might work,
and the next sketch is indeed a carbon copy of the cash register sketch with
doorbells instead of cash registers, and it is in fact even funnier than its
original. The sitcom It’s Like, You Know…
illustrates both theses implied by the preceding scenario, albeit from two
entirely distinct perspectives: it was created and written by a group of ex-Seinfeld writers immediately after that
sitcom’s voluntary egress from the prime-time schedule and was billed as “Seinfeld in Los Angeles instead of New
York,” and it fell dead-born into the ratings and was canceled midway through
its second season, in early 2000, thereby suggesting that viewers had
interpellated it as Seinfeld full
stop and had had quite enough of Seinfeld
despite their very recent rabid enthusiasm for it. And the show has not enjoyed
anything approaching a vital afterlife: it has never been released on DVD or
via any streaming service and has apparently been re-broadcast only twice (or, more
properly speaking, broadcast in full for the first two times, for the pilot and
last six episodes never aired during the original run, as their scheduled
airdates postdated the show’s cancelation), on Fox Latin America and
Australia’s The Comedy Channel. Fortunately a YouTuber formerly styled
JamesCanavanWagner but mystifyingly now styled knockitoffnow89 posted air
checks of all 32 of the Australian broadcasts about three years ago
as of this writing (August 11, 2023), but these air checks have since garnered only
an average of about 4,000 views apiece and a whopping 100,000 in total. If such
underwhelming statistics bespeak a so-called cult following, even as obscure a
so-called content creator as the present writer deserves to have at least a
temple or two dedicated to his worship. Anyhow or -hoo, from this perspective,
the perspective furnished by the verdict of its contemporary public and its near-term
posterity, It’s Like, You Know…
appears to bear out the Mitchellian thesis that variety is as surely the life
of comedy as Spice (whether as incarnated in the girl group or in the adult
cable channel) was the life of Variety
in the late 1990s. Yes, beginning in ca. 1993 the American television-viewing
public embraced Seinfeld with a
degree-cum-near universality of gusto and affection they had perhaps only
previously lavished on M.A.S.H. (for All in the Family, for all its legendary
Zeitgeist-definingness, had always
had a fairly large chorus of detractors), and out of loyalty to their original
enthusiasm they stayed with the show in near-record numbers until the airing of
its concluding episode in May of 1998. But seemingly no sooner had Seinfeld gone off the air than the public
relegated it to an earlier short-1990s micro-epoch in favor of shows that had
entered NBC’s “Must See TV” prime-time roster since its debut (Friends, Frasier, and Will and Grace)
much as they had relegated Cheers to
an earlier long-1980s micro-epoch in favor of Seinfeld roughly five years earlier. To the extent that they
noticed It’s Like, You Know… at all,
they must have regarded it in much the same smugly scornful attitude as that
evinced by a certain character in a certain play by one or both of Shakespeare’s
most illustrious junior contemporaries, occasional collaborators, and smugly
triumphal successors in the hearts of Jacobean theater (naturally I would not
be expressing myself in such vague terms here if I had managed to relocate the
play and the passage in question), Beaumont and Fletcher, when he remarks to
some other character that he or she is indulging in some sort of low form of
japery that went out of fashion with Shakespeare’s plays, thereby conveying to
the reader or spectator that those plays had become to be regarded by then, in
ca. 1620, as as (sic on the
repetition of as) naff and retardataire
as parachute pants in 1990 or inline skates in 2005. But from a different—and I
would argue far more enlightened and judicious—perspective, the perspective of
the present writer qua recent viewer of It’s
Like, You Know… in its 26-episode [or, rather, 25-episode-plus-1 pilot]
entirety, ILYK would seem to bear out
the thesis tendered by Mitchell and Webb’s fictitious fan—the thesis that if a
comedic formula-machine ain’t broke, the worst thing in the world one can do to
it is fix it, let alone replace it with an entirely different comedic
formula-machine; but that by making just the right and exactly superficial
changes to the machine one can improve it ever so slightly. And inasmuch as I
think time hath more or less conclusively shewn that Seinfeld is the pinnacle of the sitcom quasi- or pseudo-form, the
sitcom-ic exact analogue of Shakespeare’s plays in the history of drama insgesamt (note, my fellow unregenerate
c*******l snobs, the presence of quasi-
or pseudo qua preemptor of any
ascription to me of the preposterous notion that any sitcom episode, however
brilliant, could equal any more or less competently turned play, however mediocre,
in point of aesthetic cogency-plus-quality [by which in particularized terms I
meantersay that while I would rather watch even the worst episode of Seinfeld than the most spectacular
performance of Our Town or You Can’t Take It with You, I cannot in good
faith deny that even the best Seinfeld
episode is beset by certain quasi-fatal flaws that inexorably flow from the
sitcom format and that Our Town and You Can’t Take It with You are
hermetically protected from corruption by such flaws merely in virtue of being
plays rather than sitcom episodes {even if certain plays that antedate the
sitcom format by several hundred years (and even at least one, The Merry Wives of Windsor, in Shakespeare’s
corpus) are contaminated by such
flaws in virtue of being possessed of certain qualities that anticipate those
distinctively characteristic of the sitcom format}]) it follows that It’s Like, You Know is more deserving of
the discerning viewer’s attention than any other sitcom that either originated
or lingered on the air after Seinfeld’s
disparation. This is not, admittedly,
to say that ILYK is quite as good as Seinfeld at its ca. 1994-1996 peak, but
it is admittedly to say nearly as provocatively that ILYK is at least slightly better than Seinfeld would likely have been in its counterfactual tenth season to
the extent that one can extrapolate what that season would have been like from
the tone and quality of its factual ninth one. To sum up this tone-cum-quality as succinctly
as possible (albeit at the cost of a certain amount of precision [not that I
have often or perhaps even ever before allowed succinctness to impede my precisation of precision {So why allow
it to do so this time? Why simply, I suppose, because giving precision its head
(!) would probably transform this essay into a comprehensive reader’s guide to Seinfeld that would presumably tender
many an assertion and conjecture long ago tendered by other commentators {whereas
I doubt very much enough has been written about ILYK to allow any extended
discussion of it, however wide of the mark or vapid, to consist much of
duplicative matter}]): the ninth season’s occasional reliance on overarching
formal gimmicks like the reverse chronology of “The Betrayal,” the traffic jam
in “The Puerto Rican Day,” and, indeed the entire jurisprudential framework of
the two-part finale, in lieu of relying on the long-established formula of simply
allowing the plot of each episode to be guided by the idiosyncrasies of the
four central characters (i.e., essentially, by the question “What would Jerry,
George, Kramer, and Elaine do if A, B, C, and D, respectively, happened to him
or her?”) imparts to it a false-ringing note wherein the characters are
presented as embodying or exhibiting certain traits that do not jibe quite
convincingly with their thitherto-established dramaturgical constitutions. The
finale’s gimmick is a particularly unfortunate one because in addition to
distorting the conduct of the comediae
personae within its 53-minute span it retrospectively imposes a contentious
master interpretation of the conduct of those characters over the course of the
entire series and, in virtue of being a part of the series itself, obliges the
viewer to regard this interpretation as authoritative. It is at least highly
debatable whether each of the “Latham Four” is essentially what the jury’s
guilty verdict enjoins us to regard him or her as being—viz., a dedicated
engine of egoism. True, Larry David did assert that the show’s foundational “creed”
was “No hugging, no learning,” but this “creed” is transparently to be regarded
as a general principle of poetics and dramaturgy rather than as a specific program
for Seinfeld’s comediae personae, as
a salvo in favor of verisimilitude and against the lazy proclivity of even the
“hippest” sitcom writers for portraying the ludicrously implausible complete
yet ultimately inconsequential moral transformation of a central character
within the confines of a single 23-minute episode. (An episode from Taxi, perhaps the “hippest” sitcom
antedating Seinfeld, illustrates the
intelligence-insulting cloyingness of this sort of scenario: the character
played by Judd Hirsch somehow or other gets set up with some girl he has been
led to believe is incredibly attractive only to discover on date-night that she
is more than slightly, erm, big-boned, and consequently run like heck on hydrazine
from her only to feel guilty and subsequently realize that he has been blind to
her “inner beauty” and set up a second date wherein he apologizes for having
been such a schmuck and promises her at minimum a third one [doubtless
following up the promise with a hug {for I confess I haven’t seen the blessed
thing in at least ten years}]. And naturally that is the last we ever see or
hear of Hirsch’s prospective new girlfriend; in the very next episode he is
preoccupied with some completely different problem like the resurfacing of an
estranged sibling or a dormant case of sciatica.) True, at some point roughly
halfway through Seinfeld’s run Julia
Louis-Dreyfus famously said apropos of the show’s CP something to the effect of “They’re completely selfish and
self-absorbed” (I use “famously” decidedly hesitantly here, for although not so
long ago this utterance was perhaps the most easily locatable one about Seinfeld apart from “It’s a show about
nothing,” I am now finding it as hard to track down as the abovementioned
passage from Beaumont and/or Fletcher, whence the paraphrase in lieu of the
thing itself), but since when has a character’s portrayer been a reliable
source of insight into that character, let alone of characters not portrayed by
her or him? Surely—as persuasively argued by Leonard Rossiter, portrayer of the
eponymous protagonist of The Fall and
Rise of Reginald Perrin, one of the greatest and most Seinfeld-like of pre-Seinfeld
sitcoms, beginning at about 3:00
of this interview—the most reliable source of such insight is to
be found in the writer who has supplied that character with the lines only
eventually spoken by the actor (and, pace
Larry David’s unconvincing [albeit only deliberately and indeed contrivedly deliberately unconvincing] performance
of George Costanza’s lines for the Seinfeld
reunion episode-within-the-Seinfeld
reunion episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm,
lines generally convincingly performable by a wide range of competent thespians).
And at least one Seinfeld writer is
on the record as stating, some years after the show’s disparation (and hence, then, “arguably” while in a position to
speak more frankly than Louis-Dreyfus was when she proffered her own two cents
of moral philosophy) that he found nothing particularly unusual or
objectionable about JGK&E and that indeed he had always caused them to act
and react in exactly the same manner as he would have reacted in his own
real-worldial lifeworld. To be quasi-sure, this writer may, for aught I know
(and after my pismere’s piss-poor luck at tracking down Louis-Dreyfus’s remark
I am not going to try to know, or rather recall [for I definitely did hear this
writer saying something to the effect of the statement indirectly presented in
the previous sentence in an interview in which his name was mentioned {I
believe it was broadcast in an installment of NPR’s Fresh Air}] a jot more than this aught about the wight) this man is
scarcely representative of Seinfeld’s
stable of writers; indeed, for aught I know, he may have written every bit of
scriptage from which the prosecutor in the finale ultimately owed his case
against the Latham Four qua supposedly criminally bad non-Samaritans. But I
doubt it, else why would he of all the writerly horses be the only one whom I
can recall having been interviewed specifically about Seinfeld (he or him in notable contrast to Larry Charles, Sacha
Baron Cohen’s partner in comedic crime, whose affiliation with Seinfeld I learned about only in the
course of some interview regarding the first Borat movie)?—and in any case, it
is the validity of such pieces of scriptage qua indices of irredeemably
unregenerate egoism that is in dispute here. At minimum JG&E’s recurring
obsession with the minutiae of decorum suggests that they care at least a
smidgen about the well-being of other people “after a fashion” (even if
“paradoxically” Kramer’s utter heedlessness of even the biggest magnatia
thereof, as attested by, for example, his telling Elaine’s friend [and his own future
girlfriend] Audrey point-blank, “You’re a pretty girl; you just need a nose
job” attests to his caring even more thereabout albeit after a completely
different fashion). A pre-disparation
article in Baltimore’s City Paper
provoked by this obsession and certain other manifestations of scrupulousness
chez the comediae personae (like most
of the rest of Baltimore’s City Paper’s
articles it is now unlocatable even via the Wayback Machine) described Seinfeld as “the most puritanical show
on TV”—this naturally with the understanding that the show’s puritanism was a
very bad thing indeed. Of course Puritanism with a capital P is one of the
great veins of Protestant Christianity, such that what with Christianity being
a famously loving religion one might
be forgiven for at least entertaining the notion that a group of characters
embodying even some lowercase thoroughly secularized version of puritanism
could not be radical egoists. And in any case, it is not as though the show is
devoid of evidence of the comediae
personae’s espousal of a more organically altruistic sort of
quasi-Christianity, a sort of secular Catholicism—one sees evidence of such an
espousal in, for example, the moment at which Jerry announces that he is going
to give his father a car simply because he can now afford to do so, and Kramer
chimes in “You know this is about getting in good with the man upstairs [i.e.
God]”; an assertion that Jerry does not contradict. Of course, here godless
wags will brayingly demur that if Jerry had been a true altruist he would not have been motivated at all by a desire
to improve his estimation in the eyes of the Almighty, that indeed if he had
been a true altruist he would have resolved to give his father a car only in
the teeth of the expectation of being eternally damned in consequence. To which
demurral I shall whisperingly (i.e., mock-patiently-cum-genuinely
exasperatedly) counter-demur that not even the saints ever act out of true
altruism in the wag’s sense, that indeed, the only reason they sacrifice their own well-being for the sake of the
well-being of other human beings is because such fellow-men-orientated
self-abnegation pleases God; or, rather, I would
counter-demur this if I thought I had a hope in heck of not receiving a
counter-counter demurral of something to the effect of either “That’s not real Christianity” or “What but such
sociopathic callousness would you expect from a religion that gave us the
Crusades, the Inquisition, gunpowder, and Gunsmoke?”—in
either case a manifestation of the as-yet-unreversed triumph of the cult of
“empathy” (a word that is really just a linguistic fig leaf for unbridled
sentimentality) over the entire Occidental moral landscape over the course of
the last, say, third of the twentieth century. At bottom I think one “arguably”
can view the entire arc of Seinfeld’s
conception and reception, from David’s formulation of his “creed” to the
digital chorus of finger-wagging that has beset its comediae personae since the show’s middle years, as an
epiphenomenon of that triumph. Starting in ca. 1960 psychologists and other
“thought leaders” started banging on about the need to be “empathetic”;
starting in ca. 1970 the sitcom-writers started imposing “empathy”-advocating
scenarios on their scripts and thereby amplifying the influence of the on-banging
(this in virtue of both the pride of place of the sitcom in the c******l life
of the period and the time-constraints of the genre-cum-format); by the late
1980s a substantial minority of people involved in the production of sitcoms,
including their “creators” and writers, had gotten sufficiently sick of the “empathy”-centered
formula to wish to try something different, and their audiences had also gotten
sufficiently sick of the formula to tune into that selfsame different something—but
by no means sufficiently sick of the cult of “empathy” eo ipso to take a full-fledged and enduring shine to characters who
did not at least make an occasional spectacle of their prostration before the
cult’s idol. And one suspects, in point of fact, that even David was only ever
exasperated with the empathy-cult to the extent that it had vitiated the sitcom
genre-cum-format, that he never had much if any of a bone to pick with the cult
itself; one suspects this first if perhaps ultimately not more convincingly on
the evidence of the near-pride of place given to David’s whiny sentimental wife
in the comediae personae of Curb Your Enthusiasm, to a character who
invariably comes across as presenting “empatheticness” as the normative
habitus-cum-ethos of the show, as the habitus-cum-ethos that it believes to be
the morally correct one, however it may allow Larry to embody and advocate a
habitus-cum-ethos stridently at odds with it. One also suspects this (i.e.,
that David had no beef to air about the empathy-cult eo ipso) on the evidence of something David said near the end of the
2011 gathering of the Curb Your Enthusiasm
cast at the 92nd-street Y (a gathering emceed by the now-notorious
Brian Williams): he said that if he were to lose the notepad on or in which he
wrote more than figuratively everything he
wrote, the loss would be for him “like someone dying.” To lose the sole
repository of the objective fruits of one’s lifelong métier and vocation is by
any sane and decent measure a “traumatic” event; an event that could only even
be equaled, let alone exceeded, in point of devastatingness by the death of a
spouse, a parent, or a child. The death of a mere “someone”—meaning by default anyone, down to some celebrity one has never
heard of in some country halfway across the world—can be likened to the loss of
such a repository only by a mawkish milksop who takes it for granted that every
human life both can and should be precious to everyone everywhere at all times,
and indeed more precious thereto than any non-human entity. And when one
considers that David returned to Seinfeld
after a two-year absence for the express purpose of writing the finale, the
very episode in which the nouvelle idée
reçue of the comediae personae as egoists was solidified, one cannot but
conclude that by then he had been converted, or re-converted, to the “empathy”
cult, that if he had been obliged to state his creed then, he would have
formulated it as “Hugging galore, learning galore.” But anyway, as I have
already effectively said, and been meaning to elaborate on for several pages
now, the imposition of the empathy-cultish interpretation of the comediae personae was but one of the
distortions of characterization that crept into the later seasons of Seinfeld. What I have not already even
effectively said and what I am now going to say verbatim is that many and
perhaps even most of those distortions (that perhaps-even-most naturally
excluding the empathy-cultish interpretation itself) were more or less beyond
the control of Jerry and his writers. Take that episode in which Jerry
considers getting married and ends up briefly engaged to that woman played by Janeane
Garofalo. The engagement is highly out of character for the Jerry of the show,
and at the time it would have been highly out of character for the Jerry of
real life—at least qua Jerry. And
when the Jerry of real life got married only two or three years after Seinfeld’s disparation, it was still out of character for him qua real-life
Jerry, but one might have persuasively argued that the marriage was long, long
overdue for real-life Jerry qua real-life adult human male. And now that
real-life Jerry has been married for more than twenty years or nearly half of
his adult life and more than three times as long as Seinfeld was originally on the air, one might persuasively argue
that being married is as much in character for Seinfeld (whether real-worldial
or “fictional”), is as authentically Seinfeldian, as a query of “Who are these people?” So if Seinfeld had stayed on the air much
longer, it is quite likely that the Jerry of the show would have had to enter
into an engagement that, unlike one of George’s showers (or his own sole
engagement), “took,” simply so that he could retain his plausibility as a more
or less normal man in his late forties and beyond; it is highly unlikely that
the two Jerrys could have pulled off a Jack Benny, with the show Jerry living
as an aged (and not merely aging) bachelor who only went on occasional dates
with a woman portrayed by the wife of real-life Jerry. And while such a move to
matrimony would have been quasi-inevitable, it would also have been inimical to
the show’s Schaugeist. For make no
mistake: for all the offbeatness of most of the métiers pursued (or
deliberately not pursued) by its comedia
personae and its claim to be a show “about nothing,” there is no denying
that Seinfeld was originally at its
core as much of a show about “yuppies” as its much-ridiculed contemporary, the insufferably
po-faced ABC drama series Thirtysomething.
The high jinks-suffused scenario-components that formed the building-blocks of
the plots of the episodes of the first few seasons—the endless string of dates
with potential girlfriends or (in Elaine’s case) beaux, the endless string of Jerry’s
club gigs, Elaine’s and George’s office jobs, and Kramer’s bricolage-centered moneymaking schemes, and the like—worked because
they were, if not always exactly plausible (for of course from the beginning the
show thrived on implausibility at least in certain registers [e.g., Kramer qua
across-the-hall neighbor who had taken Jerry’s
moving-in salutation of “What’s mine is yours” {retroactively inserted
into the chronologically ancient conclusion of “The Betrayal”} far too
literally and a version of prewar Eastern Europe in which every little girl had
a pony]) at least always eminently seemly
for youngish single childless non-working class people living in a big city.
The second half of the show’s run tended to exploit not exactly the unseemliness but the decaying seemliness and incipient general seediness of the same
sorts of high jinks in the lives of oldish
childless people of any class living anywhere. (Elaine’s fifty-something
coworker Peggy’s pithily withering pronouncement on and to her—“You’re with a
lot of men”—in the Season-Nine episode “The Apology” encapsulates the effect of
this aura of decaying seemliness on the normative viewer.) Had the show
remained on the air and insisted on sticking to its original dramaturgical
constitution in lieu of availing itself of age-appropriate scenario-components
like “taking” engagements, the high jinks would have devolved into full-blown
seediness and thence into preposterousness, but not the preposterousness of
mere farce that salutarily imbues, for example, Season Nine’s “The Blood” with
its multi-generational crepe-making dynasty employing Kramer-conscripted Cuban
cigar rollers in its kitchen; the preposterousness, rather, of the cartoon, in
which there is not even a pretense that the events could occur by any concatenation of events, however improbable.
What “third way” then remained to the show’s show-runners (or those of whom who
continued to want to run it, a set of persons that excluded both of its
“creators”) but that of continuing to work with the original genres of
scenario-components in connection with a new comediae personae consisting of people young enough and
attachment-free enough to inhabit them seemly-ly? Whence the timeliness—and,
after a certain fashion, the indispensability—of It’s Like, You Know… qua cash-register sketch analogue. Pace the show’s original billing, its
cash-register analogue is its younger cast-cum-less attached characters, not
its Los Angelenan setting (its title being a presumably supposedly
quintessentially Los Angelenan verbal hedge that is uttered exactly once in
each episode). And now that I have established this fact about It’s Like, You Know…, the reader who has
had his hand importunately raised in Horshak-esque fashion since the
lower-first page of the essay and been straining with anticipation for the
moment when I allow him to tender his assertion that the reason It’s Like, You Know… has never developed
even a cult following is that it was rendered instantly redundant by the
premiere of Curb Your Enthusiasm in
October of 2000, less than a year after It’s
Like, You Know,,,’s cancelation—now, I say, is the moment for that reader
to lower his hand, but not so that he may tender his assertion but rather so
that he may hold his peace and hang his head in utterly crestfallen dejection.
For while Curb does indeed like ILYK feature a Los Angelinan setting it
most certainly does not feature a re-Seinfelded
comediae personae. The star, Larry
David, playing himself, is a quinquagenarian at its very start. He is also
married to Cheryl Hines’s semi-namesake Cheryl David at the very start. This
couple are complemented by another married couple—Larry’s agent, Jeff Greene,
and his wife Susie, played by their semi-namesakes Jeff Garlin and Susie Essman.
It’s true that Garlin and Hines, being 38 in and 34, respectively, in 2000, were
and are both younger than Seinfeld’s
youngest cast member, and that Essman, being only 44 then, was and is yonger
than both Jerry Seinfeld and Michael Richards. But en revanche, all but Hines were and (a fortiori) are grotesquely untelegenic. It is extremely unpleasant
even to imagine Garlin and Essman involved in any remotely “romantic” scenario,
either with each other or with other parties. So from the outset in Curb we are presented with a comediae personae that more closely
resembles that of I Love Lucy than
that of Seinfeld. And indeed, perhaps
the best way of thinking about Curb Your
Enthusiasm is as a latter-day I Love
Lucy with the husband rather than the wife of the more telegenic couple in Lucy’s
spot (i.e., the spot of the principal unwitting fomenter of chaos) and a far
less telegenic (and altogether more disagreeable) couple in Fred and Ethel’s
dramaturgical spot. In any case, in virtue of the just-mentioned in-built
qualities of its cast and comediae
personae, Curb is most certainly
not merely a sort of R-rated version of Seinfeld,
however strongly its tone may often recall Seinfeld’s
merely in virtue of its authoring by Larry David (even if, en revanche, a goodly portion of Curb’s R-ratedness is doubtless owing to the absence from it of any
contribution by real-world Jerry Seinfeld, who has never been the biggest fan
of “blue” material, such that even had Seinfeld
been afforded the greater license for profanity, nudity, and the like permitted
by HBO it would doubtless still have been much thinner in R-rated material than
Curb). It’s Like, You Know…, on the other hand, more than serviceably
takes up the komödiesgeistig thread
deliberately dropped by Seinfeld, and
it manages to do this simply in virtue of centering on a comediae personae composed entirely of single people under the age
of 40, including one person well shy of the age of 30. This is not to say that ILYK’s comediae personae merely replicates that of Seinfeld. For one foundationally non-replicating thing, it consists
of five characters rather than four, and for another, it contains two women
rather than merely one woman. The first of these un-Seinfeldemes perforce both facilitates and begets more complicated
plots than Seinfeld’s; the second
perforce facilitates and at least per-pressure begets intrasex team intrigues,
which were impossible in Seinfeld
except in one-episode increments, via the in-roping of a female member of the
guest cast. (Not that I can even think of a single such intrigue in Seinfeld, what with Kramer’s appraisal
of Elaine as “a man’s woman” whom other women avoid like the plague being [like
so many of Cosmo’s other pronouncements, including the above-cited one about
the big nose] basically, on the, erm, nose, although I assume there were a few
such rule-proving exceptions.) Both un-Seinfeldemes
simultaneously invite (invite, mind
you, not beg [“invite, mind you, not beg” seems to have become my corpus’s
equivalent of “other brands available” qua boilerplate disclaimer {but how can
it cease to be so, as long as the misusers of as indispensable an idiom as “beg
the question” continue to outnumber the responsible users of it by an enormous
and ever-increasing number}]) and frustrate the question of the mappability of ILYK’s comediae personae onto the comediae
personae of Seinfeld; the
question of who is ILYK’s Jerry, who
its George, etc./et al. Obviously the principle of parsimony that is the
guiding principle of this entire essay (i.e., inasmuch as I have postulated
that ILYK differs from Seinfeld no more than it absolutely has
to, such that the notion of a comediae
personae with no significant characterological overlap with Seinfeld is precluded from the outset)
dictates that the answer to this question is either that one and only one of ILYK’s five characters is not more or
less precisely mappable onto a Seinfeld
character or that the characteristics of the four Seinfeld characters have been apportioned among the five ILYK characters such that each ILYK character is a mixture of two Seinfeld characters, that ILYK character A is a mixture of Jerry
and George; ILYK character B is a
mixture of George and Kramer, etc./et al. When I embarked on this essay, I was
more or less firmly convinced that the second possible answer was the correct
one; now I am at least slightly tentatively convinced that the first answer is—i.e.,
that the character played by A. J. Langer, Lauren Woods, has no counterpart
whatsoever in Seinfeld’s comediae personae but that the other
ones have at least vague counterparts therein. Robbie Graham, the character
played by Steven Eckholdt, is basically ILYK’s
Jerry. Like Jerry he is eminently datable (and indeed even more datable than
Jerry, verging as his features do on the cloyingly handsome), hard-working at
his métier (in his case software development), and more or less sane.
Admittedly, his big professional project, a subscription cable-TV synagogue
service called Pay Per Jew, is decidedly wacky (or was decidedly wacky until
COVID mainstreamed religious worship via Zoom), but from the start he has only
been involved in it from the back end, as they say, the idea and the name
having been concocted by an old college chum of his. So like Jerry, Robbie
tends to become wacky or less than fully sane only by association and light
contamination. Shrug, the character played by Evan Handler, is basically the
show’s Kramer, and indeed the “creators” seem to have signaled that he is a
sort of bizzaro Kramer-plus by never divulging his last name rather than (as in
Kramer’s case) refraining from devising and divulging his first name as long as
possible (although of course it must be remembered that if Seinfeld had also only run for a season-and-a-half, Kramer, too,
would have remained one-named in perpetuity, as his first name only surfaced in
Season Six). Like Kramer, he is the immediate neighbor of the Jerry figure,
although what with this being Los Angeles rather than New York, the abodes of the
two dudes are freestanding houses rather than apartments and are sited cheek by
jowl rather than face-to-face. Like Kramer, he has a distinctively eccentric
hairstyle—although in his case it is a non-hairstyle
because he is completely—i.e., Kojak-esquely—bald (here again, a bizzaro-ish
quality seems to have been aimed for). Like Kramer, he has no regular
occupation, although in his case, unlike Kramer’s, the métier-lessness has been given a verisimilitudinous alibi in the
form of rentierism: he is a trust-fund kid with an incredibly large trust fund.
(The abovementioned house next door in which Robbie resides is Shrug’s guest
house, and from the outside both men’s houses seem to be semi-palatial.) Like
Kramer, he is always coming up with wacky or harebrained schemes, although in
his case, owing partly to his superabundant wealth, the schemes tend to be
self-indulgent or philanthropic rather than entrepreneurial in conception. He
hires the movie star Elliott Gould to record his (Shrug’s) autobiography, a
narrative which, what with his being an incredibly well-endowed trust-fund kid,
is completely without incident. (Gould eventually storms out of the recording
session in exasperation with Shrug’s implacable punctiliousness about his
enunciation of Shrug’s prose in the teeth of its manifest vacuity.) He starts
up a one-man detective agency at which he sits around all day waiting for
people to come to him not to ask him to tail their cheating spouses like your
average private dick but to track down the answers to questions of no personal
interest to them that have been irking them simply because they don’t know the
answers. Having dreamt up the idea of a “smell bar” serving up cocktails of
odors, he gives a friend enough money to open and begin running the joint. When
that friend is subsequently (or perhaps precedingly [it is exceedingly hard to track down and situate individual moments of
even a short-lived twentieth-century American network sitcom like ILYK with no episode guide!]) jailed for
violating the city’s then-universally-thought-to-be-draconian prohibition of
smoking in bars and restaurants, he spends a night in the slammer with him just
to keep him company. I just said that the less-entrepreneurial-than-Kramer’s
conception of Shrug’s schemes is or was partly
owing to his great wealth, and I said that because this conception is also
owing to Shrug’s non-entirely-Kramerian cast of mind. Kramer’s mind is or was
like Falstaff’s (for despite his lack of corpulence and non-bibulousness Kramer
is “in a certain very real sense,” like his contemporary, Jeffrey “The Dude”
Lebowski, a latter-day Falstaff) “apprehensive, quick, forgetive,” always on
the qui-vive for “nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes”; Shrug’s, on the other
hand, is quiescent, naïve, and whimsical, like that of a clever-but-lazy very
small child, or indeed, like a person heavily intoxicated by a(n) hallucinogen,
although he seems never to touch any drugs of that type. He finds himself
bemused or baffled rather than captivated by an idea and then ambles or wanders
rather than runs with it as Kramer would do like a dog with a bone in its mouth
(it is of course not for nothing that Kramer is closely paired with a dog in at
least one Seinfeld episode). Lastly,
in point of Shrugian divergence from Kramer, Shrug’s wardrobe is utterly
lacking in any stylistic flair; his dress does not set him apart from the other
characters in any manner that really sticks in the mind; indeed, if I remember
aright, it differs from Robbie’s only in its more frequently featuring a buttoned-up
shirt than an unbuttoned one and Dockers-style twill slacks than jeans. I shall
have occasion to discuss both this sartorial habitus and Shrug’s trippy-hippy
mental bearing a bit later, in connection with an appraisal of ILYK’s overall Schaugeist. For the moment I shall continue my adumbration of its comediae personae by discussing its analogue to George Costanza, Arthur
Garment, played by Chris Eigeman. “Right up front” (to the extent that we are
at the front of anything now), I cannot forbear from mentioning that it greatly
pains me to designate this character a George Costanza analogue because George
is the least telegenic and most morally objectionable of Seinfeld’s comediae personae
and Eigeman has been an object of my intense admiration since at least slightly
before ILYK could possibly have been
a twinkle in anybody’s eye. I certainly won’t go so far (or so low) as to say
that he has ever been a so-called role model for me, but I can (and will) say
(because it is true) that when, within two years of its 1995 release, in other
words, at the age of 25 at the latest, and hence an age at which one is still
(if only just still) permitted to
pattern one’s outward behavior on that of other people, I first saw Noah Baumbach’s
debut film Kicking and Screaming, I was impressed enough by Eigeman’s
performance to want to be a bit more like him around my friends, to be more a
bit more blasé, pernickety, and witty around them in exactly the same way as
Eigeman’s character was blasé, pernickety, and witty around his fellow recent
college graduates at the bar they frequented together; and that when, in the
early-to-mid oughties, I finally got around to seeing the three Whit
Stillman-directed films featuring Eigeman, I was impressed enough with the continuity
of his performances in those films with the one in Kicking in Screaming (even if I could not help finding him a bit
off-putting in the against-type role of a cocaine-sniffing club-bouncer in the
final one of these films, The Last Days
of Disco) to wish that I had seen
them alongside K&S and hence had had
a chance to incorporate their Eigemanisms into my bearing at a seemly age. I
realize that my simply saying that I
have found Eigeman thus charismatic in these roles does not suffice to make it
plain to the reader that he is more charismatic
than Jason Alexander in the role of George Costanza. But I think any reader who does not have some
sort of fetish for “short, stocky, bald men” will, on watching even a half a
minute of an Eigeman-featuring scene from Kicking
and Screaming, Metropolitan, Barcelona, or (even) The Last Days of Disco, agree with me that
he is a less off-putting presence—which is to say, handsomer, better dressed,
and wittier—than Jason Alexander at his very most charming in Seinfeld. And I can confirm from my
viewing of the entirety of ILYK that
he is just as less off-putting than JA as GC in ILYK (even if the slightly [but only slightly] poorer average quality of the writing of the ex-Seinfeldians of ILYK than that of Stillman and Baumbach makes Eigeman as Arthur
Garment slightly less witty than Eigeman as Nick Smith [his character in Metropolitan] et al.). Why, then, do I declare without
hesitation that he is the George Constanza of ILYK? Why, simply because unlike the other characters he is a
near-constant and unabashed worrywart, a type who a decade or two earlier would
have been reflexively described as a neurotic.
And really it could not have been otherwise, even if Eigeman had been as
cloyingly handsome as Steven Eckholdt rather than merely as uncannily handsome
as the young Ludwig Wittgenstein (to whom he bore an uncannily close
resemblance between the ages of about 25 and 40, such that the failure of any
biopic of Wittgenstein to be made between ca. 1990 and ca. 2005 is an incalculably
great loss both to the corpus of world cinema and Eigeman’s own career [for I
believe it sadly must be conceded that he has really done nothing truly
noteworthy, at least as an actor {for I have not seen the single film he has
directed} since ILYK {for I certainly
don’t consider his featherweight supporting role in that featherweight instance
of televisual chick-lit, Gilmore Girls,
noteworthy}] since ILYK) because the
show is at least initially presented as a comedy of the encounter of Arthur
Garment qua New Yorker with Los Angeles, and in the commedia dell’arte of late-twentieth century America neuroticism is
as tightly conjoined to New Yorkers as Pierrot’s (or “Crazy” Joe Davola’s) pompom-buttons
to his domino and Pantaloon’s pantaloons to his backside in the original commedia dell’arte. Of course, by the
same token, the fact that Arthur Garment is presented as a New Yorker among Los
Angelenos rather than a New Yorker among other New Yorkers like George Costanza
imparts to his neuroticism an entirely different valence from George’s even
when it is implicated in aspects of his character profile (e.g., his lack of
amorous success), that are likewise imported directly from his Seinfeldian counterpart, but I shall
“park” this valence alongside Shrug’s mental bearing and sartorial habitus as
matters to be considered in my consideration of ILYK’s Schaugeist and
thereby impel myself to consider the very last member of its comediae personae with a Seinfeldian antecedent, namely Jennifer
Grey, who by a process of deduction the reader will have correctly inferred must
be regarded as ILYK’s Elaine
according to this schema. But in what respects does she resemble Elaine closely
enough to have made this schema compelling to me in the first place? Why,
simply in being a woman and “being with a lot of men” and indeed in making no
bones about her non-monogamy, in constantly referencing recent and distant
rendezvous of hers that terminated in coition. Admittedly, to the best of my
recollection, a far smaller proportion of Jennifer’s lot of men than of Elaine’s
lot thereof are seen onscreen (and indeed, I can recall only one of these [even
if I am sure there were at least two more adult-male accompanists of Jennifer not
counting Robbie {see immediately below}]), but “in a certain very real sense”
this comparative dearth only underscores Jennifer’s promiscuity. Even a
beau-appearance fully spanning her plot-strand of a single episode à la that of
Elaine’s Mr. Spongeworthy and Crypto-Wiz, let alone one spanning nearly a dozen
episodes à la that of her David Puddy would have implied that Jennifer was at
least flirting with “commitment,” that she was going on successive dates with
her coition-partners; instead, given that she almost exclusively talks about
isolated coition-sessions we are led to suppose that her so-called sex life
consists almost exclusively of one-night stands. This aura of flooziehood or
sluttishness is allowed to spread even to the prominent Seinfeld-echo of Jennifer’s previous amorous involvement with
Robbie in the show’s so-called back story. While Jerry and Elaine’s mutual
ex-hood rarely imparted the merest soupçon of sexual tension to their
rapport—the single exception I can think of is “that one time” when a sudden
effulgence of such tension was made to serve as the central dramaturgical
engine of an episode only to be broken off at the end of that episode without
leaving a trace in any subsequent ones—it did provide a rich fund of shared biographical
particularity to which they frequently made reference, and upon which Seinfeld’s writers could and did often
draw for dramaturgical fodder. Robbie and Jennifer’s pre-ILYK-timeline involvement, by contrast, in being yet another
one-night stand, can only ever be gestured towards ostensively, in the perfect
aspect, as it were—as a single isolated event that happened exactly once. On
the plus side, as they used to say, the super-brevity of the Robbie-Jennifer
conjugation allows it to be dramatized in its entirety (within the constraints
and conventions of fin-de-millénaire
network television, of course), in a flashback-dominated episode depicting what
each of the comedia personae—or each
of them except Arthur, who had not yet arrived in LA then—was doing when an
earthquake hit. Now is perhaps no worse a time than any other for mentioning
something that must be mentioned at
some point in this essay—namely, that although dramaturgically speaking
Jennifer Grey corresponds to Elaine, she also provides formal continuity with Seinfeld (and Curb Your Enthusiasm) in playing or, rather, (because I have so far
talked of her only as a character) being played by herself. (Not that she, Jerry, and Larry are the only people played by themselves in any
of the three shows, for Seinfeld
featured occasional cameos from the likes of Jon Voight, Bryant Gumbel, and
Keith Hernandez; as mentioned before, Elliott Gould appeared as Elliott Gould on
ILYK [and he was followed a couple of
dozen episodes later by Estelle Getty]; and on Curb… well, obviously self-portrayed celebrities are so profusely
present on Curb that there is little
point in simply mentioning one to three of them [although this profusion itself
is worth descanting on qua yet another aspect of Curb in point of which it is inferior to both Seinfeld and ILYK {and as
I don’t know where else I am going to have an opportunity to descant on it, I
shall do so right cheer}. I suppose there’s nothing intrinsically objectionable
to having virtually every episode of a sitcom, center, as virtually every
episode of Curb does, on the comediae personae’s interactions with
real-world celebrities, although at least the present writer finds such a modus comediae intensely irritating, and
IYLK’s essential bereftness of such
episodes {for even in the abovementioned episode with a plot strand about the
recording of Shrug’s memoirs, Elliott Gould receives at most a minute of
screen-time} gives the lie to the notion that any show with a Los Angelinan
setting and an actor in its comediae
personae cannot escape such a modus
comediae]. But at least accidentally, any sitcom that succeeds at effecting
such centering will perforce run roughshod over the discerning viewer’s ability
to suspend disbelief. For a sitcom that consisted exclusively of interactions between the comediae personae and real-world celebrities would not be a sitcom
at all but a successsion of chamber dramas, or perhaps rather a “reality-TV”
version of a talk show; in order to survive as a sitcom, which is to say, to
generate and sustain plot-strands and other units of dramaturgy, it must draw
on and involve a roster or stable or pool of supporting characters understood
to be mere diagesis-sustaining non-celebrities, which means it must draw on a
roster or stable or pool of actors to play the barmen, barmaids, quantity
surveyors, bum bailiffs, and other sets of people with whom the comediae personae are to interact when
they cease to be preoccupied exclusively with one another. Chez the production of
any new or merely moderately successful sitcom, the casting-call for these
actors will as a matter of course attract absolute or relative obscurities
whose average-Joe or Jane-dom the viewer will reflexively accept. But chez the
production of a sitcom, like Curb,
that has been a darling of the critics since it was a twinkle in its creator’s
eye bright enough to attract the attention of one of their number at [insert
name of 2023’s rough equivalent of the Brown Derby here, if such an
establishment exists], actors who are often every bit as famous as the
self-portraying guest stars stampede over one another to get the minor parts,
such that when an actor playing such a part first appears onscreen, the viewer
tends reflexively to interpellate him as the actor himself rather than as the
character he is playing. And in Curb
itself, wherein the foreground parts are already monopolized by self-portraying
celebrities, this monopolization of the mid-ground parts by biggish-to-big name
actors generates a bizarre semblance of a two-tiered caste system wherein Larry
and the other first-class characters address each other by their real-world
names but appear to be blind to [or knowingly to overlook] the real-world
identities of their second-class screen-sharers à la the posh couple in Luis
Buñuel’s Discreet Charm of the
Bourgeoisie who toss the local bishop out the front door when he shows up at
their house in the gardener’s clothes.) Here a reader possessed of a certain
sort of personal history will be unable refrain from interjecting that the must I just emitted was an
overstatement-eme, that I could have more economically signaled that JG was
played by or played herself by simply typing “(yes, the Jennifer Grey)” after my first registration of her name, a
couple of hundred words ago. But the truth is that I could not have typed that
parenthesis, at least in good faith, because I do not share with such a reader
the possession of such a personal history, which is to say I did not know who
Jennifer Grey was before I first saw It’s
Like You Know…. For I can remember the very first occasion on which I saw It’s
Like You Know…—it was at or near the very beginning of its first season and
in the living room of the apartment I then shared with a longtime Seinfeld fan who was at least willing to
give ILYK a try (a try that seems not
to have lasted much if at all beyond Episode 5, “The Valley,” for my most
recent original-run-of-ILYK-derived
memory consists of a fragment of invective against the Pay Per Jew channel’s
presiding rabbi, and from my YouTubic viewing of the series I recall no other episode
in which such invective occurs), and on this occasion, somebody onscreen asked
Jennifer Grey (or asked somebody else about Jennifer Grey), “Jennifer Grey, the
actress?”; whereupon I inwardly (or perhaps outwardly—i.e., to my roommate)
interjected “Who she?” or perhaps, rather, “Is that the name of an actual
actress?” In other words, I hadn’t heard of Jennifer Grey, and I wasn’t sure
whether the referent of the mentioned Jennifer Grey was an actress in the real
world or an actress only within the diagesis of the show, whether she was an
actress in the sense in which Elvis Presley was a rock star or in the sense in
which Conrad Birdy was a rock star, in the sense in which Johnny Cochrane was a
lawyer or the sense in which Jackie Chiles was a lawyer. This isn’t to say I
had never seen Jennifer Grey in a TV show or movie, because I had seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off several times,
but the only actor from that film whose name I had retained in my memory was
its star, Matthew Broderick. To be sure, I had not—I am more or less proud to say, for reasons semi-obscure to me
[for I’m not sure exactly what genre of film this film is supposed to be,
whether, for example, it is properly speaking a chick-flick, such that I should
be more or less proud qua man for not having seen it]—seen Dirty Dancing, although I certainly had heard plenty about the
movie when it was at the cinema, but I subsequently remembered it solely as a
Patrick Swayze movie, and whenever—whenever, that is, right up until I
revisited ILYK at the Chewb only a
few months ago—I was prompted to recall the name of its female lead, I alighted
on Jennifer Beals, and quickly found
myself obliged to remind myself, “No: that’s the woman from Flashdance,” another movie I was more or
less proud never to have seen and that I tended to confuse with Dirty Dancing in the other direction
(i.e., by alighting on “Dirty Dancing”
when prompted to recall the name of the movie for which Jennifer Beals was best
known). I dwell at such length and in such detail on my personal non-history of
acquaintance with the career of Jennifer Grey qua Jennifer Grey both because
the fact that it is a non-history and because it would seem quasi-inevitably
either (if it is typical of the general cinema-going and television-viewing
public of today [sic on “today” in
place of “the very late 90s,” for what with today’s generally agreed to be a
decadent period in—if not the posthumous period of—both television and cinema, today’s
typical viewer of television and cinema is “in a certain very real sense”
better acquainted with the peaks and troughs of both media than the typical
viewer thereof of their respective or shared heydays {think, for example, in
this connection, of the popularity of television game shows of the 1970s among
people not even yet born during their original run}]) to vitiate my appraisal
of ILYK’s failure to become a runaway
hit or (if it is atypical) to suggest both that that failure was an instance of
dog-bites-man rather than man-bites-dog and that Grey’s specific gravity in the
comediae personae is slightly
different than I am imagining it to be by default. Certainly until I discovered
that the female lead of Dirty Dancing
was (or had been) Jennifer Grey I had assumed that that lead had been—not to
put too fine a point on it—incredibly hot;
so hot, indeed, that even after seeing a full episode or two of ILYK on the Chewb and thereby
discovering that Grey bore no resemblance whatsoever to Ferris Bueller’s
manifestly hot girlfriend I was faintly shocked on looking up the credits of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to learn that
Grey had played not that girlfriend but Bueller’s manifestly unhot, and indeed
borderline downright plain, sister. Of course, there are and always have been
such things as former ugly ducklings turned into swans, and there are and
always have been actors and actresses talented enough to make themselves seem less
attractive than they really are (not to mention couturiers, cosmeticians, and
directors talented enough to help them realize the imposture), but until the
fairly unlikely event that I see Dirty
Dancing I shall never know if Jennifer Grey at her mid-to-late-eighties moment
of peak photogenicity was a member of either such entity-class. (As Grey’s nose
job, whose radically transformative effect on her appearance is made much of
throughout IYLK from the pilot
onwards [having seen her only in Dirty
Dancing, Arthur Garment, on being introduced to her cannot believe that she
is the Jennifer Grey until he is
apprised of the rhinoplasty operation], was effected only after Dirty Dancing, it is entirely
irrelevant to the question.) I assume, though, that most of my late-90s
contemporaries, including IYLK’s
so-called creators had seen Dirty Dancing
and had therefore formed fixed notions of Grey’s degree of hotness. If, then,
the so-called creators had come to regard Grey as an if not necessarily the
epitome of late-80s feminine hotness, they needs must have regarded her
acceptance of her inclusion in the comediae
personae as something of a coup-cum-harbinger of the show’s success in the
ratings and consequently regarded the show as being first and foremost her
vehicle “in a certain very real sense.” If on the other hand they thought of
her mainly as Ferris Bueller’s borderline plain-Jane-ish sister and Patrick
Swayze’s DD character’s borderline
plain-Jane-ish dancing partner, then they most likely regarded her as a sort of
figure proleptic of (or exactly contemporaneous with) John Malkovich in the ca.
2000-released film Being John Malkovich,
wherein much of the humor arises from the fact that in real life its central
personage, the actor John Malkovich, was a relatively obscure character actor
known well and widely by face but ill and narrowly by name. It is true that she
does not terribly often encounter random Los Angelinos who recognize her, but
this infrequency is partly explicable by the parenthetically abovementioned
nose job, but by the same token, if she had still been an A-list celebrity in
the late 90s, the average Los Angelino (and indeed the average Anglophone
anywhere in the world) should have been familiar with her post-nose job
features. Against this, and in favor of her relatively timeless “iconicity” one
must consider her occasional encounters with people (perhaps most notably the
Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic) who bestow on her a degree of idolatry
historically vouchsafed only to the likes of Elizabeth Taylor. In any case,
however plausibly reflective of Jennifer Grey’s real-world trajectory this inter-episodic
thread is meant to be, in ILYK she is
shown to be constantly on the lookout for acting work and consequently engaged
in a mode of living that is at least metonymically associated with sexual
promiscuity, such that her “being with a lot of men” seems much more organic
(if the word organic be not too
skunked by this meta-90s-Los Angelenan context for a less-time-and-place-bound
use) than Elaine’s. I suppose I ought to say something about ILYK’s Grey’s temperament, cast of mind,
and the like (as opposed to about her lifestyle alone) before wrapping up my
discussion of her contribution to the comediae
personae, but in all frankness and candor, I have a great deal of
difficulty (in) thinking about such aspects of her character except in negative
terms, except in contrast with those aspects in the character of another member
of the comediae personae, Lauren
Wood, a personage who serendipitously happens to be the only member of the comediae personae whom I have not yet
discussed at length. And so on to Lauren Wood. Ah Lauren Wood! How do I love
thee? Let me count the ways. On second thought, as there are only two or three
of them, let me not. In any case, what these ways lack in quantity they
certainly more than make up for in quality, or perhaps rather, in salience, in
constituting the most fitting and meritorious ways of loving. First and
foremore or (if I end up finding that there are more than two ways in point)
foremost, I love her out of bedazzledness by her sheer well-nigh-insuperable
prettiness, which soundly eclipses or trounces the prettiness of late 1990s,
post-nose job Jennifer Grey and even that of Julia Louis-Dreyfus/Elaine Benes at
her early-1990s peak. Of course, I suppose many a reader who, being as
unfamiliar as I was with A. J. Langer’s filmography when I embarked on my
survey of IYLK (i.e., not familiar at
all) has just looked up a production or video still of her (and any reader who
is still as unfamiliar therewith had better look up such a picture, because I
am not going to describe Lauren’s features in any detail) will now exclaim “Get
out of here!” à la Elaine Benes and
yearn to be in my presence solely for the purpose of following the exclamation
up with the obligatory two-palmed shove to my thorax. But I think if such a
person reflects on his comparative appraisal of Grey, Louis-Dreyfus, and
Langer’s features he will have to admit that the superior prettiness that he is
ascribing to the two older ladies is actually a superiority in point of handsomeness as it was recognized in
George’s Jerry-lookalike girlfriend when Elaine said of her, “She’s certainly a
very handsome woman.” This is not to
say that either early-90s Louis-Dreyfus or late-90s Grey is not very pretty
indeed but that the photogeneticity (or, in old-timey aestheticians’ lingo, beauty) of both of these women is
composed not only of prettiness but also of an additional quality,
handsomeness, that is utterly absent from late-90s Langer’s photogenticity,
which is utterly exhausted by prettiness, such that Langer must axiomatically
be regarded as prettier than the two older ladies. Second(ly), I love Lauren
out of admiration of her sheer inexhaustible (and seldom even flagging)
ebullience-cum-exuberance. This is a quality that is never evinced by Grey and was seldom evinced by Louis-Dreyfus
except in Elaine’s very occasional moments of drunkenness. From the fact(s)
that I have just associated ebullience-cum-exuberance with inebriation and that
I have slightly less recently described Lauren as exceedingly pretty, the
reader may very well readily infer that Lauren is at least something of a ditz or even an airhead or a bimbo, but
few things could be further from the truth. For Lauren is also possessed of a
certain irresistible combination of aplomb, competence, and versatility (here
it appears that I do love her in at least three ways and possibly as many as
six) that is radically incompatible with mental vacuity. This combination is
hinted at at the very beginning of the pilot when, in her first chinwag with
Arthur, whom she has just met as her seat-neighbor on his first-ever NY-to-LA
flight, she informs him that she is both a process server and a masseuse. Being
one of Los Angeles’s most sought-after practitioners of both occupations, she
is constantly oscillating between the one and the other and indeed on one
occasion even practicing them simultaneously, thrusting divorce papers before a
massage client’s eyes with one hand as she kneads his neck with the other. Apart
from the abovementioned proto-Zoom-style religious services, ILYK’s inclusion of a character
possessed of such superhero-like mastery of two radically mutually dissimilar
métiers probably constitutes its sole moment of genuine prescience, its sole-plus-one
aspect in which it anticipates a genuinely new phenomenon of the twenty-first
century—in this case, the so-called gig economy about which so much eulogizing
and polemizing has been generated over the past decade or so. The negative
implication of the immediately preceding sentence is of course that ILYK is by and large and for better or
for worse “very much a product of its time” or perhaps even something of a
throwback, something that would have been more congruously placed in an earlier
time. And the fine-tuned truth behind that implication is of course that ILYK is both very much a product of its
time and something of a throwback.
And the more finely tuned truth behind that truth is by no means of course (at
least for the reader familiar with the generally reactionary cast of my mind)
that in those respects in which ILYK
is of its time it is so for the better and in those respects in which it is something
of a throwback it is so for the worse. It is of its time for the better in
simply (and seemingly without even trying to do so, in manner of a time capsule
that bears no marks of having been deliberately constructed as a time capsule, in
the manner of a particularly felicitous objet
trouvé) reflecting certain attributes of that time that contributed to its
superiority (in almost every conceivable respect: intellectual, moral,
aesthetic, etc.) to the present; it is something of a throwback for the worse
inasmuch as its throwbackishness does not take the form of, say, a revival of
some virtuous dramaturgical technique of yesteryear that had unfortunately
fallen into desuetude, but rather the form of the dramaturgical propounding of
assertions about the world that were no longer true in its time and that to the
extent that they ever were true probably need never have been asserted.
Unhappily for the viewer who would have the mellow of his enjoyment of the
show’s gemütlich of-its-time-ness
unharshed by any obtrusively or persistently harshing matter, the just-mentioned
naff throwbackishness is part and parcel of IYLK’s
overarching and governing dramaturgical backdrop—viz., the supposedly
innumerable differences between New York City and Los Angeles qua supposedly
radically incommensurable Lebenswelten.
We may gauge the degree of naffness of the notion of NYC and L.A. qua such Lebenswelten in 1999 by a remark made in
a 1983 Playboy magazine interview
with “TV’s zany David Letterman” (for so was the then host of NBC’s Late Night dubbed on the front cover of
the interview-containing issue), a remark to the effect that he had no interest
in guests who showcased material on the differences between New York and L.A.
To be sure, Chewbularly available air checks of Late Night prove that at least as late as 1982 Letterman was
humoring and even slightly egging on the L.A.-bashing pronouncements of one of
his New York-residing guests, the curmudgeonly raconteuse Fran Lebowitz, but a
lot can happen in a year, and in any case, one can hardly blame Dave for not
complaining to a guest’s face—and certainly not the face of a guest as
notoriously prickly as Fran Lebowitz—about her flouting of what he himself
doubtless would have belittled as a mere personal pet peeve. Not, to be sure,
that we should reflexively genuflect to Dave regarding each and every thing he
said but that because from its 1981 debut until Dave’s departure for CBS in
1992, Late Night, in virtue of its
domination by Dave’s licensed “zaniness,” functioned as a sort of Zeitgeist-spanning naffness-filter or canary
in the coalmine of anti-naffness, such that when the Dave of the Late Night years was jaded about
something, we should be inclined to believe that he was onto something in his
jadedness. Perhaps here I should explain, for the benefit of both non-Anglophile
readers and UK-residing readers who have already assumed that in virtue of my
Yankitude I am using “naff” and its derivatives incorrectly (and who by the
time I get to the end of this explanation may very well believe that their
assumption has only been confirmed thereby {not that that belief need shake
their confidence, for by then they will at least know what I mean by “naff”
etc.}), by “the naff” and “naffness” I mean (and mean specifically in the realm
of utterances or gestures readily turned into utterances [for there are
naffnesses of many other realms—for instance, and perhaps notably, that of
sartorial fashion]) not the flagrantly false or immoral but that which, while
it may be true is not worth saying, or that while true and formerly worth saying
is no longer worth saying because it has already been said enough times, or
true but only with certain qualifications that the sayer omits (whether
deliberately or inadvertently) to say. In connection specifically with Los
Angeles, probably the most salient sub-sort of naffness of the first sort is
remarkage on its weather-cum-climate, specifically on how miraculously if not
quasi-obscenely wonderful this
weather-cum-climate is by comparison with the weather-cum-climate in most other
parts of the U.S., very much including New York. It is undoubtedly true that
the weather-cum-climate in Southern California is much better than the
weather-cum-climate in almost the entirety of the rest of the U.S. for it is
one of the very few parts of the U.S. that features a climate that the boffins
call a Mediterranean climate—a climate signalized by lots of sun, low humidity,
warm but not hot temperatures, and very little rain. To be sure, this climate
is “not for everyone” and indeed probably not even for the present writer
specifically, but I think that anyone (including the present writer) who
affirms that he could “never live” in a climate like Los Angeles’(s) will find
on querying himself about what he would miss in being obliged to live therein
that he alights on certain admittedly inalienable concomitants or epiphenomena
of the typical weather of other climates—e.g., the sight of falling snow or the
crunch of autumn leaves underfoot—rather than attributes of that weather
thereof itself, inasmuch as “in a certain very real sense” good weather is
about immediate somatic comfort, and no kind of weather is more immediately
somatically comfortable than mild, dry, sunny weather. “That said,” the
superiority of Los Angelenan weather is not exactly a new discovery; presumably
it was noticed by the first settlers from “back East” who arrived in the 1870s,
and doubtless it was first noticed at
least a full century before that, by Junipero Serra, when he founded the
mission from which the town soon sprouted, for although Padre Junipero was born
and raised in Mallorca, an island with perhaps an even more notoriously perfect
Mediterranean climate than Los Angeles’s, his long journey to the Californian
coast took him through the full breadth of Mexico, a land rich with all sorts
of inhospitable geographies from stiflingly muggy rain forests to scorchingly
hot deserts. So one, or at least a sane one, would have expected the mania for
singing the praises of Los Angelenan weather to have subsided into a yawning
habit by the beginning of the twentieth century and certainly not to have
persisted at a rolling boil into the 1980s. But persist it did thitherto and
beyond and indeed up to the present day (September 15, 2023); and indeed, by
now naff remarkage about the spectacularity of Los Angelenan
climate-cum-weather has even spawned entire sub-strains of climate-cum-weather
orientated naff remarkage: for example, the topos of the “Floridian bad hair
day” that every Southern Californian supposedly haplessly stumbles into upon
setting foot in the Sunshine State for the first time owing to the sudden
exposure of his or her coif to unprecedented high humidity levels, which
supposedly causes each and every lock and tress either to lie as limp(ly)
against one’s skull as a wet lasagna noodle or to “poof up” as explosively as a
bag of jiffy pop–I can’t remember which, because I am after all a non-Southern
Californian man. All I know is that over the past, say, five years, I’ve heard
at least a hundred visiting or ex-Californians kvetch about this phenomenon as if
they were the first ever to observe it and consequently been irritated by every
one of these kvetchers but the first (and been irritated by the n+1th of these subsequent kvetchers more
than by the nth one). Of course,
“arguably,” any pronouncement about
any place’s climate or weather in a dramaturgical setting such as a sitcom is
naff in the sense of being even un-worth remarking on to begin with, inasmuch
as all dramaturgical modes deal first and foremost with social interactions
between people, and as Dr. Johnson famously queried when the abovementioned
LA-seeding mission, although already standing, was perhaps still missing its
steeple, “What is climate to happiness?” And as he elaborated on this
rhetorical question: “Place me in the heart of Asia, should I not be exiled?
What proportion does climate bear to the complex system of human life? You may
advise me to go live at Bologna to eat sausages. The sausages there are the
best in the world; they lose much by being carried.” On the praiseworthy
naff-debiting side, ILYK does not
explicitly present any of its comediae
personae as prizing the Los Angelenan climate as highly as Johnson’s
counterfactual Bologna-booster fetishizes sausages; at no point, to the best of
my recollection, does any one of those five characters assert or even imply
that he moved to Los Angeles exclusively for its climate. En revanche, though, ILYK
does not shrink from peppering itself with references to this climate as
liberally as I believe its most prominent auxiliary cast member, the overly
officious waiter at the café that serves as ILYK’s
analogue to Seinfeld’s Monk’s, at one
point peppers a customer’s plate with pepper from a grinder; and it does not
even shrink from centering an entire episode on this climate, albeit only
negatively, via the southern portion of the city’s supposedly antithetical contrast
with the San Fernando Valley, which the episode presents not only, à la Frank
Zappa or Martha Coolidge, as a sociocultural abyss, but also as a climatic
dystopia on account of its apparently unbearably high humidity: when a member
of the comediae personae (Robbie, I
believe) is obliged to visit to the Valley on an errand whose purpose now
escapes me, the minuscule jaunt is treated by the remaining members thereof
(barring, of course, Arthur, who is even less schooled on the Valley than on
the rest of the area) as a sort of Marlovian journey into the unknown center of
a more than figurative jungle in connection with which no mention is made of
the threat of bad hair probably only because it is swamped or little-personed
by the threat of death by heat exhaustion. Of course at this point the
discerning reader will want to interject that the centering of this episode on
the supposed unbearability of the weather in the San Fernando Valley was
doubtless intended to satirize Los Angelenos’ excessive preoccupation with the
weather, their jealous sense of entitlement to sunny, rainless bone-dry days,
that the writer’s (or, more likely, writers’) sympathies were doubtless with
Dr. Johnson on this point; that that writer (or a controlling proportion of
those writers) doubtless hailed from some part of the 97% of the United States
without near-perfect weather and wished it to be understood that the
appropriate attitude to take towards a brief sojourn in an uncomfortably humid
place was one of stoical detachment. And the discerning reader may very well be
right about this, but to the extent that he is right, he only points up the
naffness of ILYK in another register,
the register of
trueness-only-with-certain-qualifications-omitted-by-the-propounder. For while
the impetus to L.A.’s explosion from a sleepy mid-sized burg into a mighty
metropolis was indeed delivered by the settlement of the earliest film studios
there, such that a televisual depiction of life in early-to-mid 20th
century L.A. might have reasonably centered on a comediae personae bristling with the peccadillos of the set set
([sic] on the reduplication of set),
and that even in the late 1990s vampire-from-a-crucifix-like revulsion from
less than perfect weather may very well still have been characteristic of
certain Angelenos, Angelenos who like three-fifths of the comediae personae of ILYK
were fabulously wealthy or established in the film industry, by then the Angeleno
was far better typified by the typical inhabitant of the Valley: lower-middle
class, involved in a non-meta-cinematic trade or profession, and perfectly willing
to take the vicissitudes of the weather in his stride. At times, ILYK itself acknowledges this (dead) sea
change in L.A.’s Volksgeist, and
indeed half-acknowledges it in its very first scene, wherein Robbie and Shrug
are seated in a luxury convertible parked perpendicularly to the luxury shop
fronts of a particularly upmarket street (perchance, Rodeo Drive?) and debating
whether one of them owes the other $50,000 as a paunchy middle-aged white male construction
worker noisily pulverizes the sidewalk in front of them with a jackhammer
(a.k.a. pneumatic drill). “People like that,” Shrug says to Robbie, “make
America great,” and Robbie, after concurring, ruefully concurs, “People like us
don’t make America great.”
Fortunately for the self-regard of both of them, Shrug is resourceful enough to
rejoin, “People like us make America pleasant,”
but by then the damage to the old Angelenan Volksgeist
has been done: Los Angeles has been shewn to be inhabited by certain people
essential to maintaining the general top-shelf American system of life, these
people have been shewn to be different in social habitus from at least two-fifths
of the comediae personae, and the
upshot of a mid-run episode in which Robbie and Shrug journey to a motel dozens
of miles from L.A. in search of “real American women” is gainsaid many months
in advance. This register of naffness also permeates the show from the opposite
direction, so to speak, in that social phenomena that had long since gone
nationwide by the late 90s are recurrently presented as quintessentially
Angelenan. In one episode the live televised pursuit of a private vehicle by
the police brings all other activity in the city to a standstill as every
non-immediately involved Angeleno tunes in and keeps his eyes glued to the tube
for the duration of the chase. If one didn’t know better, as they say, one
might well assume this episode dated from early 1994 at the latest, for in June
of that year a genuinely overwhelming minority of Americans (i.e., 95 million
persons or well over a third of the country’s then-current population), the
genuinely overwhelming majority of them perforce based outside L.A., watched such
a broadcast of such a pursuit, the pursuit of the sport-utility vehicle of O.J.
Simpson-qua-murder suspect by an assortment of vehicles driven by officers of
the Los Angeles Police Department. After that moment, any attempt to point out
the absurdity of Angelenos’ car-chase spectatorship on behalf of the average
American could not but seem far more absurd than Angelenan car spectatorship
itself. But the Angelenification of American life had supervened much earlier
in much more prosaic aspects thereof, and ILYK
is (or was) no less keen to pretend that this supervention had never taken
place, as is instanced by an episode centering on Robbie’s shamefacedness at dating
a woman who is a full-time pedestrian. Of course, “in a certain very real
sense” there is “much nature” (as our old friend Dr. Johnson would [have] put
it) in this scenario: statistically speaking, the Missing Persons were quite
right in asserting way back in 1982, “Nobody walks in L.A.,” and despite the
development of a rudimentary subway system in the intervening years, by 1999
the full-time pedestrian population of L.A. was doubtless still effectively nil.
But would the MPs not have been no less right (statistically speaking) in
asserting, even as far back as 1982, “Nobody walks in Houston” or “Nobody walks
in Phoenix” or perhaps even “Nobody walks in Chicago” or “Nobody walks in
Poughkeepsie,” such that a counterfactual Robbie residing in one of these
cities in 1999 would have been just as embarrassed as his actual L.A.-residing
counterpart (to the extent that any fictional character can in any sense be
actual [there is doubtless an entire career in academic philosophy embedded in
the question of this extent]) to admit to dating a full-time pedestrian? Nay,
in the mid-to-late 1980s, was not Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister of the
United Kingdom, the country whose capital was (and had been and is) the
birthplace of the first subway system in the world, the London Underground, and
remained among the most mass transit-intensive cities in the world, reported to
have said something to the effect of, “If you’re thirty and still taking the
bus to work, you’re a loser”? Of course here nit-pickerly fact
checkers-for-fact checking’s sake will lunge in to demur that it was most
likely not Margaret Thatcher but some duchess or other who said something to
this effect, but whether Maggie herself actually said this is quite beside the
point: the fact that she was widely believed to have said it in ca. 1986 and
yet managed to hold onto the premiership until 1990 shews that the sentiment
was at least broadly expressive of the attitude of the Great British and
Northern Irish people (very probably including those Northern Irish who tried
to blow her up several times) towards pedestrians (or, if one insists on
word-mincing for word-mincing’s sake [as after all even the present writer has
insisted on doing on more than umpteen-million occasions], towards non-drivers
[for a person who is moving by the aid of a vehicle is technically not a
pedestrian even if he happens not to be driving that vehicle]). The latish (d. 2019) journalist and television
personality Clive James once said something to the effect of “Before you start
making fun of Los Angeles, you should realize you’re already living in it.”
(I’d like to be able, if only to avoid using the phrase “something to the
effect of” twice on the same page, to quote this quip verbatim, but it does not
turn up in any of the half-dozen “Clive James Quotes” lists in which I have
just searched for it and in one of which I almost certainly originally [and, as
of now, and only and finally] encountered it, about a decade ago. Perhaps it
has since been “scrubbed” for one of the usual sinister reasons.) In saying
this, James most likely meant something of the sort that pundits have
historically always meant about Los Angeles whenever they have said something
about it that they fancy is pithy. He most likely meant, namely, that inasmuch
as Los Angeles was the site of Hollywood, and inasmuch as Hollywood was a
“dream factory,” and inasmuch as every last swinging or jiggling appendage of a
person in the Anglosphere was addicted to that factory’s products (namely,
movies and TV shows) and indeed spent the preponderance of his or her time
fantasizing about inhabiting the worlds conjured up in and by those products, that
selfsame every last swinging or jiggling appendage of a person could be said to
be living in those products, and hence, synecdochically in L.A. itself, “in a
certain very real sense.” But what I would like
to believe he meant was that the “lifestyle” (itself a quintessentially
southern-Californian word, nicht?)
classically associated with L.A.—a “lifestyle” dominated on the one hand by
long commutes along multi-lane, dual-carriageway, limited-access roads while
seated behind the wheel of one’s own car; and on the other by shopping binges
in spacious air-conditioned indoor environments surrounded by acres of parking
space—had become so pervasive in the Anglosphere that the average non-Angelenan
would have been hard-pressed to distinguish the manner in or extent to which
his mode of existence essentially differed from that of his typical Angelenan
contemporary. I would like to believe he meant this because it is far less naff
than the usual dollop of pundit’s pseudo-pith and also quite true. Of course to
assert that it is true is not to deny that to this day there are millions of
people in the Anglosphere who are not
living the classic L.A. “lifestyle”—who spend little or no time driving on
U.S.-Interstate-type roads or shopping in gigantic shopping malls. Indeed for a
quarter-century that ended only three years ago, the quarter-century when he
resided in Baltimore, the present writer lived a “lifestyle” that could have
been made less L.A.-like only if he had joined the Amish. Throughout that
quarter-century the present writer walked or took public transportation to
virtually every destination and purchased almost everything for his everyday
use from small independent retail establishments sited within a few miles of
his abode. But at no point in that quarter-century could the present writer
escape the sense of being a failure in the abovementioned Thatcherian sense—or,
perhaps, not so much a failure as a fish out of water or dinosaur (or, yes, an
extinct fish out of water), because although he was all the while making ends
meet (and meat) he was all the while surrounded by evidences that almost
everyone else even in his immediate propinquity was living the L.A.-like
lifestyle, by privately owned-and-driven cars whizzing past him en route to the
outermost suburbs, by office and barroom chit-chat on the latest bargains at
so-called big-box stores that they could get to within minutes. And even though
my neighborhood of residence was a densely built-up area that made full-time
pedestrian living quite convenient, I could not have said the same of Baltimore
as a whole (and by “Baltimore as a whole” I do not mean the massive five or
six-county Baltimore metropolitan area but the tiny eighty-square-mile
land-patch constituted by Baltimore City itself); for I had only to wander a
quarter of a mile outside that neighborhood’s confines to find myself in much
more lightly developed precincts. And within a mile-and-a-half of those
precincts there was a dual-carriageway street or road called the Alameda. Whether the Baltimorean
Alameda was named after Alameda street in Los Angeles is unknown to me;
certainly, according to the online reference source of first resort, that
Angelenan street is old enough to have served as a not merely coincidental
namesake of the Baltimorean one, for it dates from the 1820s, when all the land
eventually traversed by the Baltimorean Alameda lay well beyond the city limits
and presumably consisted of a mixture of farmsteads and woodlands. And in any
case—and perhaps of much more material significance here than any appeal to
chronology or nomenclatural genealogy—the first time I watched an episode of ILYK from beginning to end and found
myself being speedily guided along a tree-lined dual-carriageway street in its
opening credits, I immediately suspected I was watching the wrong show, or that
ILYK was, contrary to my
recollection, set in Baltimore as well as in Los Angeles, for that street so
closely resembled the Baltimorean Alameda that I knew quite well from several
(if only several) bus trips to the shopping mall in suburban Towson and
numerous cab rides to the houses of friends residing in less centrally situated
neighborhoods of the city than my own, that I could not help mistaking it for
the genuine article. But why should that
stretch of street or roadage or any other randomly selected bit of Los Angeles not have put me in mind of Baltimore
given that for all its reputation “as one big suburb,” according to the online
reference source of first resort, in the year 2000 Los Angeles had a population
density of about 7,800 people per square mile or only a few hundred fewer
people per square mile than Baltimore in that year (and a few hundred more people per square mile than Baltimore
when I left it, in 2020)? Basically, the entire tableau reçu of Los Angeles as “one big suburb,” at least by the
standards of American urban geography, is and always has been a crock. To be
sure, if one defines ease of survival within a given delimited area according
to the ability to get from any given point A to any given point B within that area,
it is harder to survive as a pedestrian in Los Angeles than in most other
American cities, but that is because Los Angeles occupies a much larger
geographical footprint than those cities, not because it is less urban in
geographical consistency. In point of fact, given that Los Angeles is
appreciably more densely built up
than the average American city, caeteris
paribus it is appreciably easier
to survive as a pedestrian there, given that greater population density tends
to correlate, as they say, with closer proximity to commercial real estate—to
places at or in which one may sell one’s labor and purchase essential
provisions. Of course there is one—and really only one—American city that is so
much more densely built up and populated than Los Angeles that in its most
densely built-up neighborhoods it is rather more convenient than inconvenient
to a be a more-or-less full-time pedestrian (although of course even in these
neighborhoods anyone who can afford to do so will keep a car for vacations and
occasional day-trips to the suburbs), namely, New York; and such being the
case, ILYK’s episode centering on the
full-time pedestrian might have been redeemed had it been recast as an episode
satirizing her as an anomaly not vis-à-vis Los Angeles but vis-à-vis the United
States en bloc (perchance, further, as such an anomaly whom
Arthur managed to lure away from Robbie by dint of his greater ability to
“bond” with her merely in virtue of his greater experience as a full-time
pedestrian in consequence of his longtime residence in NYC). And indeed, the
New York of the late 1990s differed from the rest of the United States
materially enough that (although even here, what with the vein in question’s
having been heavily mined for decades, the naffness quotient is very high) a
fair proportion of ILYK’s
Arthur-mediated digs at L.A. and tributes to New York hit the mark. But as the
historically situated character of the immediately preceding sentence
intimates, these digs and tributes are best considered in the context of a
discussion of the abovementioned virtuous ways in which ILYK is “very much a product of its time,” to which discussion I
now proceed. First and very probably most, one notes (or at least I have noted
or noticed) the clothes worn by the male three-fifths of the comediae personae. Robbie favors
sporty-preppy long-sleeved button-down shirts of subdued solid dark hue (or one
of the subdued tartan patterns associated with flannel) worn unbuttoned and
untucked over tucked-in white undershirts and straight-legged lightly
stonewashed jeans held up with leather rope-belts. Shrug’s wardrobe is a
striking but ultimately subtle variation on Robbie’s: solid bright-hued
(electric blue seems to be his preferred color) long-sleeved non-button-collar Continental-cut
shirts worn buttoned up and untucked over khaki chino slacks. I own I have no
recollection of either man’s shoes. Perhaps they were not seen often enough in
the frame to stick in my mind. I find myself reflexively inclined to paste
Timberlane-type hiking boots onto Robbie and low-key Nike-type running shoes
onto Shrug, but if this impulse arises from memory, that memory is an
“unconscious” one. The style comprised by these two wardrobes is quite familiar
to me in an almost cloyingly gemütlich
sort of way, and how could it not be, given that barring the rope belts and the
imaginary shoes it is virtually indistinguishable from my own sartorial habitus
in my leisure hours of the 90s and indeed only slightly distinguishable from my
leisure-hour sartorial habitus today—distinguishable therefrom, that is,
inasmuch as I never wear jeans now and always tuck my shirt in before leaving
my abode? And yet these men are presented to us as leading lights of Los
Angeles’s beau monde such as it
was—multi-millionaires if not semi-billionaires who live in palatial mansions
and rub elbows and shoulders with movie stars, whereas I have always been a
social and financial nonentity. Does it not “say something,” as they say, about
the very late 1990s that a television sitcom produced and set in that micro-epoch
could present the masculine sartorial habitus of its ruling elite as one
attainable by a man of far less than modest means and station? Arthur’s wardrobe is unsurprisingly set off
from Robbie and Shrug’s: as the wardrobe of a New Yorker it is obviously meant
to seem more formal than theirs and to exude an aura of greater sophistication.
And yet it is not all that different,
the only garment (apologies for the lowercase echo of the character’s surname
[whose symbolic significance continues to elude me, for if à la Joseph Surface’s
surname it were meant to signify that he is shallow and superficial, that he is
all “trappings and suits” and has nothing “within that passes show,” would not
this signification undermine the show’s critique of Los Angeles as the world
capital of depthlessness?] but it really can’t be helped) that is manifestly
absent from that of the two other men is his sport coat or blazer, which is
indeed conspicuous by its ubiquity irrespective of social setting, at least in
the early episodes. But it is not an insufferably super-preppy navy-blue blazer
with brass buttons but rather a comparatively egalitarian one with a subdued
hound’s tooth pattern, a blazer that a Midwestern public high-school math
teacher of the time would not have found too snooty for the classroom; and he
never wears this blazer with a tie but rather always over an open-collared shirt,
and the shirt in each case is impossible to distinguish from one of Robbie’s
sedater ones. And while he always tucks this shirt in, he tucks it into jeans
that are likewise indistinguishable from Robbie’s. And to be sure, while his
shoes are always black lace-up dress brogues (is it merely accidental that I
remember his shoes and not the other men’s, or did the “creators” or directors
go out of their way to give them prominence?), they are shoes of a make and
style that I have been wearing for thirty years despite having not had more than
a minuscule shoe budget at my disposal at any point in the past three-tenths of
a century. To specify what exactly three men of the same age and circumstances
would wear in the actual world of 2023 is difficult for the present writer for
reasons that he in turn has difficulty specifying. He conjectures that one of
these reasons is the fuzziness or patchiness of his acquaintance with the
couture of his slightly younger male contemporaries owing partly in turn to his
tenacious adherence (to the admittedly woefully inadequate extent made possible
by today’s clothing retailers) to the sartorial habitus of his youth; and that
another of them is his suspicion that men who are now both as old as Robbie,
Shrug, and Arthur were then (or still are now in the timeless world of
“fiction”) and are actually living in circumstances even roughly analogous to
the ones in which they were (or still are) living do not now exist in
statistically significant numbers. In any case, whether on any reliable
empirical foundation or not, he can at least say that he at least initially imagines
one such man wearing a narrow-lapeled two-button solid-gray two-piece business suit
at least three sizes too small for him over an open-collared white dress shirt
with its top three buttons unbuttoned (and no undershirt underneath) and another
such man in a short-sleeved untucked button-up shirt that is at least three
sizes two large for him, a shirt that is indistinguishable in cut from the type
called Hawaiian but patterned in an entirely different but no less loud or
off-putting way, over a pair of taper-legged jeans so tight-fitting that one
can almost see the gooseflesh of the wearer’s scrotum through them. But on
further exertion of his imaginative faculty, he finds himself picturing—and picturing
with a degree of conviction that meets but does not exceed that of the previous
pair of images—any such man as togged out in a dark gray so-called hoodie (more
specifically one discolored by stains of uncertain provenance, stains that may
as likely have been caused by a fresh outpouring of sweat as by an ancient
outpouring of pasta sauce) and a pair of knee-length so-called gym shorts so
close and yet so distant in hue to and from that of the hoodie that one can be
certain that no thought has been given to the coordination of the two garments
(apologies again for the lowercase namesake), that each of them was selected
entirely at hazard from a jumble of identically genred garments, most likely directly
from the laundry basket (or even moster likely, dirty-clothes hamper). In
short, whereas the outfits of all the men of ILYK were and are signalized by a combination of grace and comfort,
I picture these latter-day quasi-analogous outfits as ensembles that at their
very best, as in the case of the business suit, have their smattering of grace
nearly fatally undermined by their manifest uncomfortableness and at their
worst, as in the case of the hoodie-and-shorts pairing, have utterly sacrificed
grace to comfort. The attentive reader will have noticed that unlike in my
description of the outfits of the men of ILYK,
I have not differentiated any of these conjectural outfits by locale, that I
have not assigned any one or two of them to Los Angeles and the other one or
two to New York, and this is because I cannot conceive of any of them as more
characteristic of either city than of the other. I suppose one might be more
inclined to think of the business suit as a smidge more new-yorkais than the others simply in virtue of its genre’s intrinsic
heightened formality, but if one does, I do not share one’s inclination inasmuch
as I associate such a business suit most closely with musclebound sportscasters
and tend to think of sportscasters as provincial louts, and while the shirt of
the middle outfit certainly seems more L.A.-ish in virtue of its
quasi-Hawaiian-ness, the tight jeans thereof are decidedly reminiscent of the
original New York punk milieu of the mid-to-late 1970s. And of course, the
gym-going or jogging outfit is specifically evocative of neither city simply
because gym-going and jogging are equally common and popular in both of them. Assuming
that these three outfit-images have arisen out of and atop at least some reliable-ish empirical foundation, one might draw some valid and potentially
non-naff inferences from them, and I intend to draw just such inferences –but
only once I have begun binding together sheaves of inferences of parallel
purport from certain entities that have yet to enter the scene of my argument. At
the moment I am obliged to invite onto that selfsame scene a pair of those
certain entities—viz., the sartorial habituses of the female two-fifths of the comediae personae of ILYK. For after all, merely in asserting
as I have done that the clothes worn by the male three-fifths of the comediae personae number among the virtuous ways in which ILYK is “very much a product of its
time” I have ungallantly and therefore provocatively implied that the sartorial
habituses of the female two-fifths thereof do not number among those virtuous
ways (or, indeed any other virtuous ways, for I have already made plain that I
think that in the ways in which ILYK is
throwbackish it is not virtuous, thus precluding the possibility of Jennifer and
Lauren’s being togged out in Empire dresses or shirtwaists and shoe-length
skirts). But the provoked gentlemen (for I scorn to think that my male
empirical readers would be so ungallant as to let the female ones defend the
honor of their sex themselves!) may find themselves thinking twice about
slapping me about the face with their gloves and sending for their seconds once
I have explicated my implication, for the truth is that while I do not regard
Jennifer and Lauren’s ways of dressing as downright virtuous I am far from
thinking these ways downright vicious, and indeed, I would go so far as to say
that I at least regard them as comparatively virtuous, as better ways of
dressing than one would see in the leading ladies of a sitcom made today (if,
that is, one qua nom de guerre for
“I” had ever clapped eyes on a sitcom made in 2023, for I am not sure if I have
seen a sitcom more recently produced than the first season of Miranda, which must date from the late
twenty-oughties at the earliest). It’s
just that these habitus habituum mulierum don’t prompt one (or at least
[not] me) to shout aloud at the screen, “You just don’t see women dressing that
way any more!” in aghast admiration as did, for instance, Geena Davis’s outfits
in David Cronenberg’s version of The Fly
when I saw that film for the very first time in about 2019. Jennifer Grey’s
outfits always simply seem natural in a relatively timeless way for the
relatively timeless type she embodies—viz., the woman of easy virtue who takes
especial pains to preserve her “girlish figure” and generally look as
immediately appealing to men as possible. And lest anyone find this
characterization especially harshly “sexist” or “misogynistic,” I must point
out that it is repeatedly seconded by Jennifer herself at scads of points throughout
the series (and lest one demur that here Jennifer is merely ventriloquizing the
“sexism” or “misogyny” of the show’s writers, I must point out that ILYK’s most prominent writer was Seinfeld’s
Carol Leifer). She is always going out of her way to mention how frequently or
recently she has slept with this or that dude. In this respect, as mentioned
above, she is very much like Seinfeld’s
Elaine, but she is not exactly like
her therein, for Elaine was always at least nominally “dating” her
coition-partners and therefore not averse at least to shacking up with them
with them at least in principle (and indeed perhaps even in practice in at
least one case, that of David Putty), whereas Jennifer makes no bones whatsoever
about regarding coition as a contact sport played in a succession of pickup
games with first-time partners-cum-opponents. (To some extent this unapologetic
promiscuity can be chalked up to her métier as an actress with its institution
of the so-called casting couch, but only to a very limited extent, as a
significantly high proportion of these partners-cum-opponents, including
Robbie, hail from outside “the industry.”) Accordingly, she is on the whole
much more flashily and skimpily attired than Elaine, favoring bright-hued
short-sleeved shirts or blouses worn above skirts short enough barely to skirt
the top of an entirely bare kneecap-to-ankle stretch terminating at the
groundward end in less-than-entirely sensible shoes (i.e., pumps or heels). It
isn’t a look that I find particularly appealing, but I certainly wouldn’t kick
it (let alone the woman displaying it) out of bed for eating crackers, as they
say. As for Lauren, she is almost perpetually clad in a slightly more formal
and ocularly ingratiating version of the abovementioned gym-cum-jogging outfit—viz.,
a light-hued hoodie and full-length light-hued sweatpants that unlike those of
the abovementioned gym-cum-jogging outfit do always seem to be well matched
with their upper body-covering complement. Perhaps not quite needless to say, despite
its aesthetic superiority to its masculine counterpart of 2023, I don’t care
for this outfit at all, but I appreciate its diagetic plausibility and utility:
I understand that it is more or less exactly the sort of outfit one would
expect a combination masseuse-and-process server of the micro-epoch to wear.
And in truth, Laurel-stroke-A.J. is so insuperably pretty, so indisputably one
of those women who would look good in more-than-figuratively anything (gallantry precludes my
interjection of the boilerplate masculine follow-up to the immediately
preceding clause) that one can’t in good faith complain about the outfit; it
certainly would have been nice to see
her togged out in a more elegant and more emphatically feminine ensemble, but
one never finds oneself thinking of her two-piece tracksuit along lines even
remotely comparable to those along which Kramer thought of Audrey’s nose. And
of course it must be said in favor of an outfit so unrevealing, so baggy and
comprehensive, that it at least gives the viewer no cause to impugn Laurel’s
modesty, a virtue that she is dramaturgically compelled to preserve in being
the incessant object of the amorous yearnings of Arthur. (At this point I
should perhaps apologize for not having mentioned earlier that ILYK departs quite drastically from Seinfeld’s “no hugs” policy in thus
making the prospect of a sustained liaison between two of its central
characters a central plot-thread. I suppose it is mildly tempting to flag this
as yet another instance of retardataire naffness, but I ultimately prefer to
think of it as a harmless concession to the enormous popularity this
thread-genre had enjoyed in NBC’s sitcom roster since the premiere of Seinfeld, specifically in the Ross and
Rachel-centered will they?/won’t they? subplot in Friends and [even more proto-ILYKishly]
Niles’s long-undeclared enamorment with Daphne in Frasier. In any case, ILYK’s larger [i.e., than Seinfeld’s] comediae personae still left plenty of room for
non-meta-amorously-laden intra-cast banter, and the short lifespan of ILYK mercifully spared its writers the
ever-embarrassing problem of what to do with prospective amours when they
congeal into “relationships,” and its viewers the pain of sitting through its
version of the ever-unsatisfactory attempt to resolve this problem.) And in connection with this modesty, even in
the midst of our deprecation of the athleisureliness of Laurel’s wardrobe as a
wardrobe-in-itself—as a wardrobe presented for wearing not by insuperably
pretty women alone but by women of all degrees of attractiveness—we must be
thankful that a certain garment of present-day feminine atheleisurewear was not
yet available to her, or if materially available to her, then decidedly forbidden
to her by the late 90s’ standards of decency, as categorically forbidden
thereby, indeed, as any garment more revealing than the birthday suit itself. I am referring, of course, to so-called yoga
pants (or, in grammatically strict terms, the pair of yoga pants); otherwise
known as leggings (or, in grammatically strict terms, the pair of leggings).
For in virtue of their super-tight form-fitting properties, and their
consequent revelation of the minutest and most intimate contours of the
feminine form, together with their (at least to the present writer’s mind)
incomprehensible embracement by women of all walks of life and social strata, Yoga
pants have obliterated the distinction between modesty and immodesty in feminine
couture by rendering flagrant immodesty universal and ubiquitous. Not that
there are not still Occidental women who do not at least occasionally “dress
up” in a way that is recognizably continuous with the formal modes of earlier
epochs (although such women almost certainly constitute a smaller proportion of
the female Occidental population than they did a quarter-century ago and, as
with the abovementioned ill-fitting present-day men’s business suit, the present
modes are markedly aesthetically inferior to their predecessors) but that even
the up-dressing of these women is nullified qua index of modesty by their unselfconscious
self-presentation in Yoga pants in almost every informal public setting. Nobody
who has seen a woman repeatedly in Yoga pants at the supermarket or shopping
mall is likely to be intimidated by the sight of her in an evening dress or
skirt suit. (To be sure, the bikini had long since greatly undermined the
semiotic efficacy of more female formal jib-cuts, but the confinement of beach
vacations to a tiny fraction of the calendar year and to places far from the
vacationers’ regular abodes had imparted a mitigating aura of the carnivalesque
to bikini-wearing.) And the longer Yoga pants enjoy universal acceptance as
feminine casualwear, the lesser the likelihood that any empirical viewer of IYLK apart from the present writer
(perhaps along with the former JamesCanavanWagner, if he has not already
forgotten that he ever uploaded his IYLK
air checks to the Chewb) will be able to appreciate the semiotic valences of
Lauren’s wardrobe vis-à-vis Jennifer’s, to understand that Lauren by dressing
the way she dresses is presenting herself as a nice and relatively chaste girl
and Jennifer by dressing the way she dresses is presenting herself as more than
something of a good-time girl and floozy. After all, we have probably already
outlived the last person capable of appreciating the semiotic valences of the
outfits worn by characters in movies and TV shows produced on the far side of
the previous meta-sartorial divide, the one separating the “square” 50s from
the “swinging” 60s. In the eyes of everyone younger than these characters’
exact contemporaries (or, to be more ontologically precise, the exact
contemporaries of the actors who played them) the outfits favored by them in
their most casual hours have always seemed semi-formal at casualest because
they are far more formal than any casual outfit worn anywhere but on the set of
a(n) historical drama since ca. 1964, and I strongly suspect that any
present-day viewer of ILYK under the
age of 40 [and indeed many a present-day viewer thereof over that age {for rare
is the oldster who retains his youthful understanding about what is fitting and
natural uncorrupted by the degenerate habits and attitudes of his younger
contemporaries}] will find the outfits favored by its comediae personae (the male and female components thereof alike) far
too formal for present-day relaxed-fitted comfort. And now that I have opened
the worm-can—or, to recast the metaphor in positivity-accenting terms,
monkey-barrel—of disparagement of the 2020s on the sartorial plane, I might as
well plough straight ahead into my itemization of all the points at which ILYK points up the increasing
barbarization of the world since the dawn of the century-cum-millennium. These
points occur so early and often in the show that I fear this essay is doomed to
meet a Tristram Shandy-esque fate—in
other words, abandonment by the author when its subject is still in its
childhood (or, in this case, by strict arithmetical analogy, its fifth or sixth
episode), simply because hundreds of pages of material will have been produced
by then and proceeding any further would wear out the author’s patience along
with the reader’s. Indeed, we have already encountered the very first of these points
in the abovementioned moment in the pilot’s opening scene when Shrugg flags a
white male middle-aged construction worker as an example of the people who
“make America great.” It goes without saying that such a moment would never be
written, let alone filmed, now for fear—nay, for certainty—that it would be universally
regarded as a so-called dog whistle to Trump supporters, a veritable hypersonic
clarion call to white-supremacist insurrection. In 1999, the moment worked—at
least for the roughly double-dozen people involved in its production—because in
1999 any white-male construction worker at work would have been
interpellated—and this by any American regardless of his race, sex, etc.—first
and foremost not as a white male but as a construction worker, and because
“making America great” would have been understood to mean making America
universally admired for universally admirable attributes (including
well-maintained sidewalks and their subterranean infrastructure kept in good
repair with the indispensable aid of capably wielded jackhammers), not purging
it of the entire non-white portion of its population. The very next scene
featuring Shrugg and Robbie (this being the third scene of the show, the
intervening one being the airplane interior-set one that introduces Arthur and
Lauren) lobs another now-unfilmable moment at the viewer: Robbie asks Shrugg,
“If you could go back in time, would you rather go back to the invasion of
Normandy or Normandy Street and [some intersecting street whose name escapes
me] during the 1992 Rodney King riots?” (The framing of the question is
throwbackish to exactly the same short but noticeable temporal extent as the
abovementioned car-chase centered episode, recalling as it does the improvised
mini-quizzes in such mid-90s oh-so-Gen-X media productions as Reality Bites, Kicking and Screaming, and
the “Ginger-or Maryanne?” Budweiser commercial.) Shrugg unhesitatingly replies,
“The invasion of Normandy.” When Robbie understandably evinces skepticism, what
with Normandy Beach during the allied invasion having been a literal war zone and Normandy &
Whatever Streets during the 1992 riots having been a merely figurative one,
Shrugg explains: “Black people just don’t like me.” Here is another moment in which there is
“much nature” in the Johnsonian sense: would it not be entirely reasonable for
a white person in 1999 or 1992, or indeed in any other year of American history
to date, to assume that black people generally dislike him? And such being the
case, would it not be entirely rational in that white person to avoid the scene
of a riot motivated by resentment of certain white people’s treatment of a
certain black person? But of course received opinion of 2023 paradoxically
cries “Amen!” to the first of these rhetorical questions while interjecting “Whoa, whoa,
whoa!” with both palms raised against the second. Of course, the bienpensant of the present anno domini concedes, black people
dislike white people, and have every legitim—, erm, or rather just, reason to dislike them, what with
the United States’ having been an essentially and exhaustively white
supremacist polity ab initio, but (so
this bienpensant continues) that
dislike ought by no means to be adduced by a white person as grounds for his
declining to visit the scene of the Rodney King riots: first, because those
riots were the most notable precursor to the George Floyd Riots of 2020, the
most important event in American history, and King a sort of King David to
Floyd’s Christ, such that any threat to the perdurance of one’s biological
existence posed by one’s presence at that scene perforce must cut a very
miserable figure indeed alongside the privilege of being present on such sacred
ground at such a holy moment; second, because precisely because ([sic] on the
repetition of because) the United States
has always been a white supremacist polity, any white person should positively
welcome any opportunity to sacrifice the perdurance of his biological existence
to righteous black anger. Then no sooner has Grey made her first appearance
than she is announcing her intention to write a “relationship”-help book for
gay men entitled Men Are from Mars, Men
Are from Mars (i.e., in pointed contrast to the 1992 bestselling
“relationship”-help book for heterosexual couples, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus). Here again we have a
“nature”-oozing moment, for the title of the counterfactual book points up an
(even then) all-too-infrequently acknowledged attribute of homosexual couples
that makes them qualitatively different from heterosexual couples–viz., their
constitution by persons of identical sex.
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
argued banally but not untruthfully that both the conflict and mystery of
heterosexual coupledom arise from the fact that men and women think
differently. Accordingly, the title Men
Are from Mars, Men Are from Mars ineluctably implies, no more untruthfully
and much less banally, that homosexual couples are perforce defective in both
conflict and mystery—and hence perforce less interesting than heterosexual
couples—because people of the same sex think alike. Such an implication is of
course anathema today because bienpensant
received opinion now holds that conventional heterosexuality is the least
interesting form of eroticism and that the less like conventional heterosexuality
a given erotic proclivity is the more interesting it is. But the implication works in the “universe” of
ILYK because that “universe” is
unabashedly “heteronormative.” “Not that,” in Seinfeldian parlance, it holds “that there’s anything wrong with”
homosexuality, but that like Seinfeld it
makes no bones about centering on a group of people who are exclusively
interested in coiting with members (in two or more senses!) of the opposite sex
and feel no pressure to make any bones about the exclusivity of this interest.
Indeed, as near as I can recall it overshoots (!) the Seinfeldian “heteronormative” remit in not even featuring an
episode with a single openly gay character (for Seinfeld does after all feature that one episode in which Jerry is
frowardly offended at not being taken for an openly gay man’s paramour). In
almost every episode of ILYK,
homosexuality, to say nothing of even more niche sexual proclivities, is as
little in evidence as in an episode of Leave
It to Beaver or The Dick Van Dyke
Show. The sole exception that I can
think of apart from the pilot is some episode about halfway through the second
season (so much for treating of the barbarization up-pointing moments in
sequential order) when Robbie and Arthur briefly debate whether the degree of
flirtatious attention they have received from gay men correlates positively or
negatively with their chances of “scoring” with women. And at about the same
late point in the series homosexuality is obliquely glanced at in a certain
jocular fashion, but so obliquely and jocularly that I would not even have
glanced at this at-glancing at all, however obliquely or jocularly, if it did
not point up the barbarization of 21st-century life in relation to a
different (if related) phenomenon—viz., so-called sexual harassment. At this
moment Arthur, having reluctantly accepted a position as a book critic at a
newspaper (I believe it is even mentioned by name as The Los Angeles Times [ILYK’s prevailingly Angelophobic Schaugeist virtually enjoined it to bid
defiance to anyone who would have sensibly demurred that the LAT was a serious organ of journalism
and “arguably” even superior to the NYT
in certain departments]), is required to purchase “sexual harassment insurance”
against the possibility of his making unwanted amorous overtures toward his
secretary, and in order to assess his risk for the behavior for the purpose of
setting his premium, the insurance company sends a conspicuously attractive
female agent (played by Mimi Rogers) to his house (or, rather, Robbie’s house,
where he is still residing) to comport herself towards him in a calculatedly
arousing manner. When he reacts by unambiguously making a pass at her, the
company concludes that he is too high a risk to be insured at all. And so
instead of assigning to Arthur the attractive young woman who had been
tentatively selected for him, the paper saddles him with a weedy, dweeby, skittish
young male assistant. Predictably if amusingly enough, within a few days of
starting to work for him, the young man successfully accuses Arthur of sexual
harassment on the basis of the briefest of instants of involuntary physical
contact. Of course this episode is a veritable flowchart of a currently
impracticable dramaturgical entity, not one of whose essential components would
have been mooted let alone approved in a writing room of 2023. Merely in
centering on sexual harassment the episode unpardonably makes light of an
experience now generally understood to be only slightly less traumatic than fully
penetrative rape; in presenting the young man’s accusation as well-nigh more
than figuratively preposterous it both anticipatively travesties the
commandment to believe all women and
(i.e., because to imply that it is absurd corollarily implies that same-sex
attraction is rare) reaffirms the show’s heteronormative orientation; and in
presenting the accuser as sniveling and cowardly it champions “toxic
masculinity” by implying that men should be able to stand up for themselves in
handling their points of contention with other men. An episode featuring a cop
show starring Siamese twins, one of whom charms Lauren into going on a date
with him and consequently renders his brother a third wheel in a materially
more-nearly-literal-than usual sense, would of course now receive an instant
and un-overridable-veto from the disability-cum-accessibility lobby (even if
the envelope pushed by this conceit is ultimately withdrawn back into with
imperturbable snugness when it turns out that the twins are actually two fully
freestanding and two-armed fellows under their shared shirt). An episode in
which Jennifer (with a typically hyper-bemused Shrug in tow) zealously attends
a candlelight vigil for a death-row inmate only to snuff out her taper when her
fancy is caught by a hunky clean-cut man (today he would be called a “chad”) participating
in a sympatric pro-death penalty demonstration naturally reminds one that ILYK hails from the by-now-proverbially
less divided pre-blue states-versus-red states America, when people of even the
most stridently divergent political outlooks could still be not only friends
but even “friends with benefits” [not that that phrase was yet current then].
But no sooner had I been reminded of the ante-rubracerulean provenance of this episode
and begun to look forward to immersing myself in a long warm bath of nostalgia
for the deuxième fin de siècle (a
bath whose aromatic salts naturally would have been heavily sourced from other
moments in ILYK that I have
approvingly remarked on in the preceding pages of this essay) than I realized
that for all its preferability to anything still makeable, ILYK fairly bristled with moments that pointed up certain
unwholesome continuities between the America of the very-late late 1990s and America
of the very-late early 2020s; of moments at which it became evident that in
many ways and registers, America of the very-late 1990s was already shaping up
to become the America of, let us say, the early-late 20-teens-and-since (and I
must emphasize that by the America of ca.-2016 onwards I mean an America that
was [and is] bad in a way that is specifically
characteristic of America of ca.-2016 onwards; for, for all my comparative
nostalgia for it as evinced in the immediately preceding pages, by my
ultra-reactionary standards very-late-1990s America was or were [even as I was
living in it] a fly-blown cesspit even in the most specific and characteristic
of its aspects in which it had least steeply declined from the America of
earlier micro-epochs). For example, in
the abovementioned episode featuring the Siamese twins-starring cop show, on
taking in the opening credits of the program, Arthur exasperatedly remarks,
“Great: you [i.e., you people who make television-drama programs] can’t manage
to show blacks, Hispanics, or Asians, but you’ve got room for Siamese twins.”
This is a decidedly bemusing line because taken at face value it cannot but quite
erroneously imply that blacks, Hispanics, and Asians were completely absent
from American television screens in the
very late 1990s and least debatably imply that this absence in itself and on its
own constituted a lack of something absolutely indispensable to good
television—or perhaps, rather, and what comes to the same thing (i.e., inasmuch
as Arthur’s point of view is implicitly presented as normative here), a lack of
something indispensable to the idea of good television harbored by Arthur Garment
qua upper-middle-class Jewish New Yorker whose favorite author was John Updike
(for in a certain episode Arthur mentions that Mr. Updike is his favorite
author). In reality, of course, such a person as Arthur Garment’s idea of good
television would have been Seinfeld (which
Arthur Garment himself could have watched, at least in reruns, for in a certain
episode of ILYK Larry David is
mentioned by name as the co-creator of Seinfeld),
a show with no “people of color” in its comediae
personae. Of course Seinfeld had
scads of “people of color” in its supporting cast, and even a few (e.g., the
lawyer Jackie Chiles, George’s immediate superior in the Yankees hierarchy, Mr.
Morgan [did he even have a first name?] and the Pakistani restaurateur whose
entire name escapes me [at this moment I hear in my mind’s ear the “Soup Nazi”
saying “You’re pushing your luck little man!”]) in its cast of returning
supporting characters, but this peripheral presence presumably retrospectively
smacked of “tokenism” in the eyes (or against the bottom) of ILYK’s ex-Seinfeldian writers, who by then (but only then) probably felt guilty about working on yet another show with an all-white comediae personae. So in Arthur’s
complaint we see an early affichage of
one of the cardinal articles (if not the
cardinal article) of the early twenty-first-century Hollywood producer’s
credo—viz., that the realistic (sic
on the absence of inverted commas) depiction of white people hanging out mainly
with other white people in any setting is in itself “racist” however amply
nonwhites may be represented in other tableaux, an article whose effectuation
has resulted in the manifestly unrealistic (sic
again on the absence of quotation marks) depiction of every non-“legacy”
amorous couple (i.e., any such couple old enough to have been already in
existence before the dawn of the millennium [say, Ross and Rachel from Friends as reunited in some
counterfactual proper diagesis-resuscitating reunion show as against the mere
cast-reuniting Friends reunion show
that was actually produced back in ’21 or ’22]) in every movie, TV show, and
commercial as either all-BIPOC or interracial. (In this complaint,
incidentally, we also see an early manifestation of another lamentable trend in
twenty-first-century cinema and television—viz., galloping
amnesia-cum-obtuseness-cum-po-facedness in relation to phenomena addressed
earlier with the exactly appropriate proportions of perceptiveness and humor. For
Seinfeld had already adequately dealt
with white guilt about mere whiteness qua whiteness in that episode in which
Elaine continues dating a man just because she thinks he is black while he
continues dating her just because he thinks she is Hispanic, and in which when
they simultaneously discover they are both “just white,” Elaine gamely proposes
a visit to the then-excellent [for I
have an all-leather belt that I purchased thereat in 1996 and that continues to
do me yeoman’s {if not yo man’s}] service] if admittedly undeniably “soul”-less
clothier The Gap.) Moreover, the stilted, census-box-ticking wording of
Arthur’s plaint “blacks, Hispanics, or Asians” anticipates a complementary (and
even more bizarre) article of the credo—viz., that the mere fact of not being
white constitutes a kind of social crazy-glue uniting all “BIPOC”s in
more-than-figurative indissoluble commensality; although this article had probably
already been more graphically presaged by a scene from the sitcom News Radio (I say probably not because I
am in any doubt as to the greater graphicity of News Radio’s presaging but because News Radio’s original run overlapped with that of ILYK by five-and-three-sevenths weeks—the
period comprising March 24, 1999 [the airdate of the last episode of News Radio] and May 4, 1999 [the airdate
of the first episode of ILYK]—and as
I have only seen the presaging scene in a now-unlocatable Cheewbial montage of NR scenes, I don’t know at which point
in NR’s run it aired (although the
gimmicky character of the about-to-be-mentioned governing conceit certainly
suggests a post “shark-jumping” date). News Radio, as its name suggests but
does not necessarily promise, was set in or at a radio station, and the presaging
scene occurs in an episode whose governing conceit consists in affording the
reader a glimpse of each of the disaffected station employees’ fantasies of the
station as they would like to see it constituted, and the fantasy of the
station’s only black employee, its female secretary, centers on the break room,
in which at lunchtime she is joined by another black person, an east-Asian
person, a Muslim man (we know he’s a Muslim because she addresses him as
“Mohammed” [whence my specification of his sex {for I have semi-forgotten that
of the other three}]), and an Hispanic person, who all commiserate with her on
finally being able to get away from the white folks if only for a few blissful
minutes. To be sure, I find it easy enough to believe that a black woman in
that secretary’s position would have felt alienated in being surrounded
entirely by white people during her work day and yearn for at least a few of
them to be replaced with black people (even if I find it extremely hard to
believe that I would ever feel particularly un-alienated in being surrounded
entirely by other white people during mine, seeing as how I worked for more
than twenty years in an extremely “diverse” office environment and the coworkers
I found most off-putting were certain fellow-whiteys who would perversely congregate
near my cubicle for water-cooler chinwags about the latest installment of Game of Thrones even though an actual
water cooler stood a mere twenty paces from me). But I find the notion that a
congeries of representatives of non-black non-white ethnicities would have pleased
such a woman as much as an equal number of members of her own “community” downright
laughable—and so will anyone who has spent a week in any part of America more
ethnically heterogeneous than mid-twentieth-century Omaha. But perhaps,
improbable as it might seem, for all the impeccability of the Seinfeldian credentials of the most
illustrious among them, ILYK’s
writing team did not come to the series with such a minimum quantum of time
spent in such an America-part under their collective belt. Such, at any rate,
is the impression imparted by the treatment accorded to Jesse Jackson in an
episode wherein he, or rather, presumably some actor impersonating him (for, at
the instar of Seinfeld’s presentation of one of its most celebrated recurring
characters, George Steinbrenner, Jackson is only ever seen face-down on
Lauren’s massage table [the device is recycled on at least one other occasion,
and quite a delightfully “edgy” one, the above glanced-at one in which Jennifer
is stalked by Slobodan Milosevic {whose portraying actor is therein concealed
by way of strategically placed shadows}]) figures as one of Lauren’s massage
clients. To be sure, Jackson is not accorded wall-to-wall po-faced reverence à la
the real Stacey Abrams appearing in the role of the president of the galactic
federation in that episode of Star Trek
from a year or two ago: we learn that the entire reason he is in Los Angeles is
to close the deal on a movie about a prospective all-black space mission called
Do the Right Stuff; this is a
flourish that obviously makes light of Jackson’s “civil rights activism” and
unflatteringly affiliates it with Spike Lee’s incendiary cinematic
race-hustling. Still, the tone of the satire directed against Jackson is
jovially Horatian throughout: he good-naturedly exchanges small talk with
Lauren as she kneads his neck, eventually evincing enough “empathy” with her
entire circle to offer kindly “relationship” advice to another member of the comediae personae (Arthur, if I’m not
mistaken) who happens to stop by. And when this by-stopper happens to receive a
telephone call from a third member of the comediae
personae while he’s there, he jocularly but by no means scornfully explains
his presence there by saying something to the effect of, “I’m doing my bit for
civil rights.” In short, the episode gives the viewer every reason to suppose that
the makers of ILYK have swallowed, or
would like to make him believe they have swallowed, Jackson’s self-presentation
as a selfless, disinterested campaigner for the dispossessed H, L, and S; that
they are ignorant or willfully heedless of any part of his multi-decade long
history of sh*t-talking, blarnifying, charlatanry, and chicanery, of the
shameless exploitation of “civil rights” as the flimsiest of screens for
gluttonous self-enrichment and the wanton propagation of barbarity. I cannot but suppose that such naïve
JJ-fellation would not have been in evidence in any sitcom made ten years or
even five years earlier. True, Lorne Michaels let JJ host Saturday Night Live in 1984, but SNL- hosting spots have always been double-edged swords both in
conception and in execution; to be offered one is to be offered an opportunity
not only to strut one’s untested stuff as a thespian but also to make a
thoroughpaced ass of oneself. True, Michaels
himself doubtless supported Jackson’s presidential candidacy in ’84, but the
hosting gig, in postdating the Democrats’ National Convention in which Walter
Mondale was chosen as the party’s nominee, could at best have served as a
consolation prize for his failure to secure the nomination, and Michaels
doubtless would not have dreamt of offering JJ the spot before the
convention—both because his behavior would have been as likely to reduce as to
increase his minuscule chances of receiving the Democratic nomination, and
because the majority of SNL’s
viewers, for all their presumable “liberalness,” could not have shared his
enthusiasm for Jackson and hence would have been bound to resent the
exploitation of SNL as a platform for
the Jackson campaign. After all, JJ’s brazenly anti-Semitic disparagement of
New York City as “Hymietown” at the beginning of the year could not but have
been fresh in their minds, and many of them would not have forgotten his not
yet-ancient tall tale-telling about his whereabouts and actions on the day of
Martin Luther King’s assassination. And JJ certainly did not trick anyone into
regarding him as a conciliatory civil-rights activist à la MLK (or at least,
which comes to the same thing public opinion-wise, MLK as imagined by the mass
of Americans thanks to judicious posthumous sound-biting) as the 80s progressed,
what with his full-throated bellowing of “Hey Ho, Hey Ho, Western Civ has got
to go!” through a bullhorn on the campus of Stanford University in 1987. In short, by the dawn of the 90s, Jesse
Jackson had enjoyed a long and distinguished career of failing to fool anyone
outside his so-called base (and probably even a goodly proportion of people
within that so-called base), a sufficiently long and distinguished one, indeed,
to lead one to take for granted that he would never be vouchsafed the hearty
dose of credulous good will he was destined to receive from and on ILYK. But when I “fast forward” from
pseudo-JJ’s appearance on ILYK to the
early 2020s, I find JJ’s feting therein a relatively mild anticipation of the
reflexively unqualified adulation and credence accorded to the coarsest race-hustlers
today. After all, JJ did at least emerge from the original civil rights
movement, a movement that had enjoyed a reasonably well-founded fund of
credibility; whereas today’s most celebrated ethnically correct denouncers of
“whiteness” are people who were traffickers in manifest untruths ab initio; for example, the “Reverend”
Al Sharpton, a man who divides his schedule more or less evenly between
peremptorily holding forth as a pundit on the flagship shows of the mainstream
news networks and delivering eulogies at the funerals of persons officially
deemed to have been killed by “racism,” first arose to national prominence as
the perpetrator of a racial-rape hoax that made him an object of universal
scorn and ridicule, a byword for shameless race-baiting that bade fair to
outlive Samuel Mudd, Pearl Harbor, and Pee-Wee Herman in point of infamy. That
that byword has instead become as unintelligibly obsolete as “prenzie” is of
course owing to the obliteration of any conceptual distinction between a
race-baiter and the airer of a genuine racial grievance, to the development of
the racial equivalent of “believe all women” from a slogan into a
presupposition. Pseudo-Jesse Jackson’s appearance on ILYK would therefore seem to mark a turning point in the Weltgeist or the moment of the Weltgeist’s first consumption of a sort
of gateway drug leading to the “stronger stuff” that would eventually result in
complete blindness to race-baiting. “True,” ILYK’s
writers may have collectively concluded at the end of lengthily “workshopping”
the inclusion of pseudo-JJ in one of their scripts, “JJ has lied a lot and is
more than a bit of a dick, but his heart must have originally been in the right
place, what with his having been pals with MLK, so let’s not make him look too silly in this episode.”
Twenty-something years later, the show-runners of any sort of network program would
make it their first order of show-running business to hop on the blower to get
in touch with Al Sharpton’s “people” in the ardent hope of recruiting him as an
all-purpose “expert” on the assumption that because he was a black man decrying
racism he must be absolutely right about absolutely everything. And one sees
other evidences of creeping “don’t kick-me-ism” on the meta-racial front in IYLK, evidences that even in the course
of the minuscule life-span of the show white people became appreciably less
comfortable about their relations with black people, and that by the end of
that life-span they had walked a great distance along the eggshell-paved
meta-racial path, that by then they “were in eggshells stepped in so far that
returning were as tedious as to o’er.” The reader will recall Shrug’s admission
in the pilot that black people don’t like him. Towards the end of the second
season the “creators” or show-runners evidently determined that that admission
could not be allowed to risk standing as an implied synecdoche for an inference
both common to white people and not entirely unworthy of sympathy, for in an episode
at this late moment Shrug tenders the admission again to two or three of his
fellow comediae personae apropos of
his having been coldly received by a youngish black man with whom he has briefly
rubbed shoulders, and on asking these other white people for an explanation of
this cold-shoulderdom, he is immediately proffered the usual catalogue of white atrocities qua open-and-shut case for unapologetic
black snubbery—i.e., one of these characters blandly says something to effect
of ,“I would think four hundred years of slavery plus a century of segregation
would be enough to justify it.” So by now Shrug has been condignly reproved for
his “white fragility,” and yet, bizarrely enough, the matter is neither allowed
to drop there nor work its way into the meta-racial comportment of the balance
of the comediae personae as a
“teachable moment,” for by some plot device that now escapes me, Lauren is soon
dating Shrug’s old shoulder-rubber, apparently without the slightest meta
racially-occasioned consciousness on either side of the couple or on the part
of Jennifer, Arthur, or Robbie, and yet Shrug still struggles to ingratiate
himself with the dude in vain. The two of them find that they even share a
peculiar passion that Lauren positively holds in abhorrence—namely, reading
books aloud, and so they come to meet à
deux, for long reading-aloud sessions, but at the end of one of these
sessions (an end that, I believe, coincides with the end of the episode, after
which the black fellow never appears in the show again [yes, yes, yes: just
like the big-boned woman in Taxi {at
this point, the reversions to older sitcom formulas in ILYK are stacking up so deep that it is perhaps time to entertain
the notion that some sort of theory might account for them en bloc }]), the younker, after admitting to Shrug that he’s been
having a heckuva time, shakes his head with a puzzled frown and says, “The
funny thing is, I still don’t like you.” So what the heck is going on here? Why
is Shrug being allowed to serve as the show’s sole scapegoat for “white guilt”?
Why, seemingly, because he is the comediae
personae’s resident weirdo. But is weirdness somehow paradoxically whiter
than the white-breadishness (or, perhaps, rather, white-and rye-breadishness)
embodied by the other characters? No, not in itself, but weirdness is nerdiness-adjacent, and nerd-dom was
the subculture most strongly marked as white in the 1990s, as is attested by 90s-TV’s
rule-proving sole exceptional black nerd, Erkel from Family Matters. But by the same token (!) in the 1990s, nerdiness
had not yet completely “colonized” all forms of literary erudition or “book
learning,” as is evident from the outset in ILYK’s
presentation of Arthur, who, as we have seen, is held forth above all else (apart
from as a neurotic, a Jew, and a New Yorker) as a literary man, a man who reads and aspires to write serious prose.
(When, my fellow miserable inhabitant of the 2020s, was the last time you heard
anybody articulate a disinterested
but intense interest in any body or
system of knowledge, very much including the works of a literary author or the
fashioning of a literary prose style, without preliminarily either flagellating
himself or submitting to flagellation by others for “being a total nerd”?)
Whence, presumably, the plausibility, according to ILYK’s apparent lights, of making Lauren’s new black beau a
bookworm, and further of making him intensely averse to that most “iconically”
black of all team sports, basketball. Such people, while already vanishingly rare by
the very end of the century, are not and never have been analytical chimeras,
for in my sophomore year in high school (i.e. in portions of the years 1987 and
1988), I took a creative writing class alongside a black fellow whose personal
motto, which he repeated with Wimpyesque frequency, was, “If it were not for
baseball, my life would have no meaning.” (Note that the motto itself bespeaks
another stereotype-annihilating trait—an impeccable command of a subjunctive
form chez a member of an
“underclass.”) As a general policy, I both shun and eschew “informatics”-driven
metaphors and conceits even when they are intrinsically fitting—not merely
because they are overused but because their overuse seems only to increase in inverse proportion to the degree that
“informatics” exerts (sic on the singular
form) an influence on the world, at least at the level or “resolution” of the
electronic nuts and bolts that serve as the (driverless!) vehicles of such
tr*pes. (Tr*pe [and I don’t mean tripe] has been “the other T-word” for me ever
since the present micro-epoch’s Wallis Simpson said it in an interview about
two years ago as of this writing [October 29, 2023].) But I shall and will
contravene this policy now because the “informatics”-driven conceit that I have
in mind is not only intrinsically fitting but also “sourced” from a
micro-micro-epoch in “informatics” so distant and superannuated that its
terminology is bound to seem refreshingly quaint even to those old enough and
intensively enough involved in “informatics” at the time to remember it, and a
micro-micro-epoch thereof, withal, that at its later end appositely abuts
against the micro-micro-epoch of ILYN.
The micro-micro-epoch in question is the early-mid-mid-1990s, which commenced
the only period in my life-history in which I have been the owner-operator of
an Apple-branded computer, a period that was still in progress when ILYK debuted and that ended only about
six months before ILYK’s disparation when I chucked aside my Mac
Quadra 605 in favor of a laptop-style so-called PC only because the latter,
being a few years newer, was more powerful in raw processing-cum-storing power
and had been “gifted” to me as a hand-me-down. Not long before this
micro-micro-epoch there had supervened the supposedly biggest modification of
the Mac operating system in its decade-spanning history: the transition from an
operating system called System 6 to one called (surprise, surprise!) System 7. And by the beginning of this micro-epoch, the
sub-version System 7.1 was standard for all new Mac computers. But in between
there had supervened yet another sub-version, System 7.01. System 7.01 had not
been a so-called Beta version of System 7.1 but a full-fledged sub-version of
its own, and yet for some reason it had not been granted the dignity of being itself
styled System 7.1. It was as if the Woz & co. (for Mr. Jobs’s re-takeover
of the company was then but a glimmer in his eye [or perchance Guy Kawasaki’s {horrifying
as it might sound, in the mid-mid-1990s, Guy Kawasaki joke-mongering was a kind
of subcultural Borsch belt within the Mac-using “community”}]) hadn’t been
arseable to admit that they weren’t ready to introduce a new sub-version—and so
for umpteen-dozen weeks umpteen-thousands of Mac users were stuck using a limbo
or mezzanine of an operating system that was “neither fish nor fowl.” The
episode of ILYK featuring Lauren’s
Shrug-disliking black boyfriend comes across as such a transitional operating
system on race relations: it contains certain modules, certain contentious or
absurd assertions masquerading as doxa, that are still in place in 2023 interacting
with certain other modules that have long since been discarded. By the
very-late 1990s the powers that be or (be’d) had evidently already decided that
white people had to hate themselves for being white and for hanging out mostly
with other white people but they hadn’t yet decided that absolutely no sorts of white people could ever effectively extirpate
their guilt through more extensive fraternization with black people; and while
they had probably already decided
that black people of a certain political persuasion did not count as really
black (for after all, Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings
were already nearly a decade in the past and Alan Keyes’s run for the
Republican presidential nomination had been met with jeers of Uncle Tom! from all Democrats), such
that a Republican-voting black sitcom character like Barney Miller’s police detective Ron Harris had probably long since
been unfilmable (or unvideotape-able), they were not yet prepared to disqualify
a bookish non-basketball fan from being black or to refuse to deduct hours
spent with such a black person from a white person’s whiteness debit card. I conjecture
that the whole Big Salad (to switch to a different metaphorical vehicle [and to
do so not entirely gratuitously, for we are after all now told by our masters
{!} and mistresses {!!} {not to mention mistrixes} that the Salad has
permanently displaced the Melting Pot as the appropriate metaphor for how
America should and does cohere at a meta-ethnic level]) managed to hold
together even as awkwardly as it did only thanks to the moribund persistence of
a distinction between the highbrow and lowbrow or genre-fiction-centered
literary worlds, a distinction that has effectively gone extinct in the present
century. We have already seen that
Arthur Garment’s Jewishness did not (sic
on the past tense, for I am now referring to Arthur qua inhabitant of a bygone
age not qua inhabitant of a living text under consideration) prevent his
selection of John Updike, a WASP, as his favorite author, and I daresay if ILYK’s writers had had occasion to flesh
out his pantheon of literary greats, they would have had him “name-checking”
James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison by way of showcasing not his solidarity with
black America but his familiarity with certain highlights of the canon of
serious twentieth-century American literature. (Here again, as with the
non-basketball-affecting black person, I can attest that embodiments of the
type in point do not exist merely in counterfactual sitcoms, for in ca. 1996 at
a party in Baltimore I met a young black man who averred to me that the pallid
bald native Marylander John Barth was his favorite living writer.) And had
Lauren’s black beau been suffered to stick around for another episode or two,
he might have been heard to “name check” Updike for exactly the same reason
rather than out of anything like “internalized white supremacy.” And the two
men would have been united in their adamantine disdain for genre fiction—for
science fiction, fantasy novels, detective novels, bodice-rippers, comic books,
and the like—all of which, incidentally, were then emphatically coded (as) ultra-white.
How tragic that blacks never embraced their imperviousness to genre fiction while
there was still time! That would have been something to be truly proud of—as
proud of, indeed, as their refusal (attested to me by yet another black
non-chimera known to me personally) to join their white compatriots in swapping
trousers for shorts on the very first day of the year on which the high
temperature exceeded sixty degrees Fahrenheit. But “that ship has sailed,” as
they (“they” being not blacks but pundits of all colors and textures) say
nowadays: over the past twenty years the number of Americans (and other
Occidentals) who know (!) that genre fiction is trash has dwindled to a statistical
nullity, and the trashiest sorts of genre fiction of all—comic books and
fantasy novels—have attained pride of place in the personal “literary”
pantheons of the highest (in two or more senses!) officeholders and tastemakers
in the land (and all lands). Meanwhile, even as increasingly brutalistically
primitive rap “music” engrosses an ever larger share of what is officially regarded
as authentically black “art,” the inundation of comic-book and fantasy-novel
movie-adaptation casts with black actors and occupation of comic-book writing desk-chairs
by umpteenth pressings of Stokely Carmichael like Ta-Nehisi Coates have
impelled black Americans to regard trashy genre fiction as as (sic on the repetition of “as”) organically
their own as so-called soul food. And the demographic catastrophe hinted at in
the last sentence but one ultimately explains why the interstitial “operating
system” described in the last sentences but ten and nine failed to “take.” You
see, or, more likely, re-see (for the state of affairs I am about to discuss is
not exactly a secret and I have none-too-obliquely already touched on it
numerous times), ILYK was an odd sort
of demographogenetic hybrid: officially the “creation” of a man hailing from
the dead center of the Baby Boom (Peter Mehlman, b. 1955 or 1956 [so the online
reference source of first resort {and how characteristic of a late-flowering
Boomer to be cagey about his birth year!}]), it seems to have been written by a
combination of Boomers and Gen Xers and definitely also starred a combination
thereof. The Boomers, as everyone certainly knows, were the largest American
generation of the twentieth century, while the Gen Xers, as probably not quite
everyone knows, were the smallest, and the Millennials, as probably everyone
knows, are an even larger generation than the Boomers. As their very name makes
plain, at the time of ILYK’s
production the Millennials had yet to make their imprint on the “culture”
except as juvenile consumers (in which capacity they were of course largely responsible for the boy-band, Pokemon,
and Brittney Spears crazes) but were just about to start making that imprint.
The Boomers, as everyone knows, invented the so-called counterculture, but as
not everyone knows or at least hardly anyone cares to reflect, they also
inherited the culture they were countering from their parents, the so-called
Silent Generation, which meant that although they were quite sincere and
passionate in their detestation of that culture they could not avoid at least
occasionally referencing and embodying the landmarks and mores of that culture
in their own cultural productions, such that as long as they remained at the
vanguard of the Weltgeist (and their
parents still in charge of the wellsprings of patronage), that culture could
continue to enjoy a superficially robust existence. Accordingly, the counterculture
could come into its civilization-annihilating own when and only when, in the
second decade of the twentieth-first century, the Millennials arrived at that
vanguard, and their parents, the Boomers, assumed control of the wellsprings of
patronage (their parents, a mixture
of the so-called Silent Generation and the so-called Greatest Generation,
having meanwhile died off). For the Boomers inculcated in their children, the
Millennials, that rock ‘n’ roll was truly great music and indeed the greatest
of music, the Lord of the Rings great
literature and indeed the greatest of literature, Marvel comics the greatest of
art and literature, jeans, T-shirts, and shorts proper clothes, etc. And so,
now that the Millennials are in their thirties and forties we are for the first
time living under the auspices of a truly hegemonic counterculture.
Consequently, the socio-geographical satire at the heart of ILYK no longer makes sense except in
historical terms. Nobody today would even think of making a satire on the
trashiness of contemporary Los Angeles in which New York figures as Los
Angeles’s elegant, sophisticated antipode because today’s New York is far
trashier than the Los Angeles of a quarter-century ago and just as trashy as
today’s Los Angeles. There is a touching moment in ILYK when Robbie and Arthur commune over the ineffable and inalienable
grace and allure of a quintessential young female New Yorker, dwelling with
particular eloquence on what one might term the dialectical interplay between
the formal and informal elements of her hairstyle-cum-headgear, the way her
ponytail alone is suffered to break free of the confines of her baseball cap,
itself an incongruously casual element of her wardrobe despite its materially
inhibiting function. For all the drastic differences in women’s couture between
the two epochs, an analogous interchange might plausibly have occurred between
two American men of the very end of the nineteenth century apropos of the
quintessential young female New Yorker of their time, with her hat
ever-so-fetchingly topped with a stuffed bird carcass, and I daresay there is such a moment in a Henry James or
Edith Wharton novel (and I shouldn’t be surprised if ILYK’s writers based Robbie and Arthur’s interchange on that
moment). Such an interchange would not be possible today not because women’s
fashion has changed even more drastically since the late 1990s than between the
late 1890s and the late 1990s (because “in a certain very real sense” it has
obviously changed much less) as because an unstudied blowsy slatternliness is
now the most prized look among the women of New York as among the women of the
rest of America. The ideal woman of 2020s New York is a tousle-haired morbidly
obese creature in a muu-muu who hasn’t showered in at least two weeks and whose
every fifth spoken or written word is “folks” (if not “folx”). And from the
lack of care to one’s person exhibited by this type we can “pivot” to the
forestalling of a certain perhaps otherwise unavoidable misconception about the
drift of the Welt-cum-Volksgeist in point—namely, that it
constitutes an L.A.-ification of the rest of the U.S., for as the habitus of IYLK’s two female central characters
shews, while the L.A. lifestyle of the late 1990s paid scant regard to grace or
elegance, it placed an extremely high premium on physical fitness and
attractiveness. The truth is that the drift of the Welt-cum-Volksgeist has
made L.A. itself and the rest of the country much worse than the L.A. of the
late 90s because the trend-setters and tastemakers of today’s America know and
care much less about what is worth knowing and caring about than the
trend-setters and tastemakers of LA back then did. For let it not be forgotten
that although Los Angeles of that time was the wellspring and seat of much in
American life that was most objectionably vulgar—in other words, most of the
products and activities associated with its flagship media industries—it also
was not lacking in cultural and intellectual amenities of the first rank: for
example, the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of
Southern California were among the United States’ (and hence the world’s) best
universities, the Los Angeles Philharmonic one of the United States’ (and hence
the world’s) best orchestras, and the Getty Museum one of the United States’
(and hence the world’s) best art museums. Hence, although in moving to Los
Angeles a cultural and intellectual super-snob like the Arthur Garment of the
late 1990s would have been obliged to be confronted with much that he found
laughable and contemptible, he would not have been obliged to sacrifice much
that he found edifying and admirable, and the fact that Los Angeles rivaled New
York and exceeded Chicago (America’s universally acknowledged “second city”
until some difficult-to-specify moment in the 1980s) as a desired city of
residence for young, hip Americans was no great slur on the cultural and
intellectual elite of the United States. Toward the end of the second decade of
the twenty-first century Los Angeles was exceeded in the affections of American
hipsters by a city that lacked any cultural and intellectual amenity of the
first rank—namely, Portland. The present writer supposes Portland has a
symphony orchestra, but he cannot specify whether it is the Portland
Philharmonic or the Portland Symphony or the Portland Music Engine, let alone
the names of any of its conductors at any point in its history, and as he has
been listening to serious orchestral music for more than forty years, he
supposes he would be able to do this if it were a superior ensemble to, say,
the Nashville and Utah Symphony Orchestras, both of which he can name and
recordings of both of which he owns. Portland’s principal university, Portland
State, is certainly not one of America’s great universities, and indeed it
functions principally as a so-called safety school for would-be matriculators
to the University of Oregon (located more than a hundred miles away in the
state capital, Eugene), itself not one of the brightest stars in the American
academic firmament. And yes, I’m sure
Portland’s flagship museum, whatever its s**ding name is, has got an excellent
collection of some twentieth-century painter that everyone is supposed to think
is Big One-scale earthshakingly important like de Kooning or Rauschenberg or (lest
the reader think I am merely high modernist-bashing) Wyeth—but the Metropolitan
Museum of Art or MoMA or the National Gallery of Art or the Getty it presumably
ain’t. Until the dawn of the present century, if not until several years beyond
that, Portland was nationally known as a sort of Omaha that happened to be
located in the Pacific Northwest—not,
mind you, as the Omaha of the Pacific Northwest, for such a
designation would have implied that the Pacific Northwest was rich enough in biggish
cities to have its own Omaha, whereas of course Seattle and Portland were and
remain its sole metropolises (which
is “worth pointing out” because it shews that the Pacific Northwest as a whole
axiomatically cannot evince any appeal to the full-bodiedly urbane); a city
that a non-Pacific Northwesterner never dreamt of relocating to unless his
“career path” required it (not that I can think of a single
Portland-headquartered so-called Fortune 500 company to furnish such career-path
stepping stones [such that, incidentally, Portland cuts a poor showing even
alongside such middling East-Coast burghs as Pittsburgh, the home of Heinz
ketchup and baked beans, and Cincinnati, the home of Chiquita Bananas]), a city
that East Coasters were even prone to getting mixed up with its minuscule
Mainean namesake when the qualifying postpositive “Oregon” was omitted. What
finally put Portland on the map of residential covetability was not its unprecedented
acquisition of something of peculiar interest to genuinely would-be cultivated people
but rather and merely the statistically unremarkable irruption within its
precincts, towards the end of the nineties, of one of the principal “scenes”
associated with one of the umpteenth pressings of the punk-rock subculture
(yes, yes, yes, one of that subculture’s Ta-Nehisi Coateses, if you will
[although given that we are now dealing with a subculture that fetishizes a
certain kind of pressing, that of vinyl gramophone records, an analogue drawn
from the annals of vinyl gramophone record-dom would be more apt]), a pressing
known, I believe, as cuddlecore (an
appellation that quite rightly suggests an unregenerately infantilized
orientation to the world), and exemplified and dominated by Sleater Kinney, a band
truly execrable even by the dubious standards of pop music and consisting of a
trio or quartet of young clock-stoppingly ugly anemic white women who were
easily mistaken for clock-stoppingly ugly anemic young white men and “sang”
like underfed young goats (yes, yes, yes, i.e., “kids”). Presumably not
coincidentally one of the members of Sleater Kinney went on to portray a
so-called transman or transwoman (what difference does it make? as the Moz or
Archie Bunker would say), one of the comediae
personae of Portlandia, which
might not inaptly be described as a counterfactually wildly successful It’s Like, You Know of the 20-teens, a
show that cemented and augmented Portland’s status as the city in which to be.
Of course, thanks to the increased prestige of rock music even chez the Gen-Xers (most of whom were
raised by Silent Generation-ers but felt a keener anxiety of influence in
relation to their generational older siblings, the Boomers), the United States
had already had a sort of dry run for this phenomenon in the non-accidental trendiness
of Seattle in the years following the explosion of the so-called grunge scene
occasioned by Nirvana’s topping of the pop charts, but Seattle unlike Portland
was not entirely lacking in old-school cultural amenities—what with the
University of Washington being at least one of America’s better universities
and the Seattle Symphony at least one of America’s better orchestras (and any
town that had hosted the birth and upbringing of a writer as witty and
wide-ranging as Mary McCarthy could not be altogether banausic at bottom);
whence the facility with which it (had) served as the setting of Frasier, whose eponym had been the house
snob in the bar of the 1980s’ flagship sitcom, Cheers (which of course had been set in Boston, a city that in many
registers outstripped New York in point of snob appeal). Portland was the first
trend-setting American city to whose trendiness culture in the traditional
sense was completely extraneous, the first such city whose allure was
completely exhausted by its hospitableness to social deviancy. To get the full
“Portland experience” all one had to do was bind one’s breasts or tuck one’s
balls, accumulate one’s chickenshit gender studies degree four credits at a
time at PSU while slinging mocktails at a smootheria, and march down the street
with Molotov cocktail in hand every first Saturday after some right-wing
politician said something deemed offensive to BIPOCs or queer folx by Rose City
Antifa. At this point the discerning yet adversarial reader will doubtless
demur that however trendy Portland may have managed to become despite its lack
of traditional cultural amenities, those selfsame amenities survive and indeed
flourish in the metropolises in which they originated—that, for example, MoMa, both
non-MLB-affiliated Mets, and the Philharmonic are all as indubitably in
operation (would that opera companies alone were in point, that I might exploit
the pun!) in today’s New York as the workhouses were in Scrooge’s London. And
of course I am not unaware that most of the top-shelf orchestras, opera
companies, museums, and the like that were in operation a quarter-century ago
are still in operation now, but I would describe their operative condition as
one of subsistence rather than of flourishing and maintain that it has only
been by humoring the banausic mindset of this age of Portlandification that
they have managed to cling to life. And so, yes, one can still tour the Museum
of Modern Art, but not without strolling through a gauntlet of ethno-kitschy bric-à-brac
produced by demographically appropriate daubers and tinkers; or tour the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, but not without enduring a series of lectures on
the “problematic” character of its European and American masters. And one can
still attend an ostensible performance of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, but
only to hear a version of Beethoven’s Ninth in which the choral finale has been
replaced by a rap “composition,” or to watch a live Crime Scene Investigation of
Beethoven’s death in which mere scraps of his music serve as pieces of
“evidence,” or to endure a program in which Brahms shares billing with
Radiohead or some local synth-pop group that make Depeche Mode sound like
late-period Schoenberg. And one can still take in an opera at the other
non-MLB-affiliated Met, but only if one is willing to sit next to an oversized
slug in pajamas and so-called Crocs and behold four hours of uninterrupted
metastasized Eurotrash—which is to say, a style of mise en scène in which every human figure in the scène looks like either a perpetrator or
a victim of p(*)********a. (The “academic postmodernism” of the Met’s 2020
production of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck
that I decried in an earlier essay certainly partook of this mise en scène, but I am hesitant to
posit an absolute co-extensivity of academic postmodernism and metastasized
Eurotrash, inasmuch as the 2010 Salzburg Festival production of Berg’s Lulu that I decried in an even earlier
essay was pretty darned metastasized-Eurotrashy despite being not very
postmodernist at all.) Of course I cannot deny that in many registers and
domains of their activity these traditional cultural institutions maintain the
standards associated with them in earlier epochs; indeed, I am at least
prepared to entertain the notion that in certain of these registers and domains
they now excel their late-1990s selves. But at the same time I am prepared to
assert that this maintenance of standards is largely the effect of inertia and
cannot be expected to be maintained itself. Of course none of America’s best art museums
has simply burned and smashed to pieces its entire inventory of traditionally
classic art, but almost all of them have yielded to and are continuing to yield
to the temptation to sell off portions of that inventory to allow themselves to
purchase manifestly inferior works or to fund a series of “initiatives” that
somehow or other undermine their core traditional mission of presenting that
inventory to the general public; and as there is no discernable movement afoot
within the ranks of their trustees or administrators to resist the temptation,
it is entirely reasonable to suppose that eventually, and perhaps even “sooner
rather than later,” they all will have ceased to fulfill this mission
altogether and become dedicated exhibitors of vacuous trash in dedicatedly vacuous
fashions. The same is true, mutatis
mutandis, of symphony orchestras and opera companies: they are not going to
chuck out Beethoven, Brahms, Verdi, Wagner, et al. altogether and overnight,
but they are inevitably going to perform and produce them ever more ineptly and
perversely, and they are going to force them to share an ever-larger share of
concert programs with inferior composers and sub-composers until these
composers and sub-composers—who perforce exact lower technical standards from
performers—have completely displaced them. In connection with this terminal and
precipitous down-dumbing I am reminded of something Paul Valéry said to Andre
Gide when they were both still fairly young (and so shortly after the apogee of
the Symbolist movement of which Valéry was one of the leading lights) something
to the effect that nobody would ever dream of inventing poetry then, at the end
of nineteenth century or beginning of the twentieth, if it did not already
exist, because experience was no longer of such a nature as to impel anyone to
attempt to articulate it in anything constituted like a poem. And of course as
everybody (at least everybody who knows anything about Valéry [i.e., hardly
anybody]) knows, Valéry decided to stop writing poetry in his early thirties
and devoted the long remainder of his literary career to essays and novel-like
compositions, and while the mere existence of the entire tradition of great
modernist poetry may seem to invalidate both his assertion and his decision,
one cannot reasonably deny that since the end of the nineteenth century poetry
has been a marginal mode of expression even within the domain of “high” culture
(the inverted commas around “high” are in this exceptional case not
“ironizing”[like the ones just placed around “ironizing”] but self-abasing,
inasmuch as while I am certain that there is such a thing as “high” culture and
that it is superior to pop culture, I am
not quite sure that “high” is not the
best denotator of that superiority), that even the reader desirous of
encountering the most uncompromisingly precise and subtle verbal presentation
of some aspect of the world seldom finds himself reaching for a volume of
verses rather than for a novel and that even writers desirous of producing such
a presentation seldom find themselves struggling to write a poem rather than a
novel. Pace Adorno (and yet at the
same time probably more or less in concurrence with him [for I cannot
immediately call to mind any passage in his writings in which he praises a twentieth-century
poet as highly he does Kafka or Proust in countless passages therein]), long
before Auschwitz the Weltgeist had
moved on from poetry, and that on-moving was a sad commentary on the Weltgeist, an attestation of its
barbarousness by comparison with the last golden age of poetry, the Romantic
period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. And at about the
end of the second decade of the present century the Weltgeist moved on from “high” culture en bloc and insgesamt
when for the first time it fell into the hands of a generation of “elites” for
whom “high” culture meant nothing, a generation of “elites” who if they had
their druthers would banish listening to the “three Bs” (Bach, Beethoven, and
Brahms) et al., reading Shakespeare, George Eliot, Proust, et al., and viewing
the paintings of Botticelli, Rembrandt, Kandinsky, et al., in favor of
listening to pop music, playing video games, reading comic books and “fantasy”
novels, watching “anime,” writing and reading “fan fiction,” and “larping” as one’s
favorite comic book, “fantasy,” video-game, and “anime” characters. “What’s
going to happen to the children, when there aren’t any more grown-ups?” queried
Noël Coward in the middle of the twentieth century. Now we know what was then
going to happen because it has longish-since happened. And if in the teeth of
all that I have already said in efficient preemption of such cavillage the
reader should pigheadedly query what the big deal is and point out that comic
books and pop music have been around for more than a century and fantasy novels
and animated cartoons for more than three-quarters of a century, that even
video games are nearly a half-century old, and that however inane or barbarous
these popular-cultural forms and genres may be, civilization, including its
high-cultural component, has somehow muddled through their slough of inanity
and barbarism, I shall and will take the reader by his porcine ears and shake
his porcine skull while screaming, The
difference between now and the previous century is that people grew out of
their infantile pop-cultural obsessions as they became acquainted with the more
adult-worthy antecedents of the objects of those obsessions, and now they don’t
grow out of these obsessions because they are never required to become acquainted
with those antecedents! before more temperately adducing a case in point in
illustration of that difference, namely my own trajectory as a consumer turned
ex-consumer of infantile pop-cultural pabulum. As a pre-teenaged youngster I
was as fascinated with and by The Lord of
the Rings as any pre-teenaged youngster of today is by that novel-cycle and
its umpteen subsequent pressings ([here the reader is of course entitled even
as I berate him to interject “Again-a with the pressings!” in a sing-songy
Italian accent appropriate to the vehicle of the metaphor) by the likes of J.
K. R*****g, and I derived all my original knowledge of the Greek gods and
heroes from that cinematic gallimaufry of Hellenic and Nordic mythology, Clash of the Titans. But as I entered
and progressed through my teen years, I gradually learned from my elders and my
own investigations that Tolkien had pieced together his “universe” out of his
findings as a linguist learned in tongues of numerous language-trees, a scholar
of medieval English literature, and a nostalgist for the same pre-industrial
English countryside more “realistically” evoked by Thomas Hardy; and that Zeus,
Hera, Pegasus, Perseus, et al. subsisted in written memory largely as names
fleetingly mentioned in plays and epic and lyric poems dealing with less
vividly colorful figures rather than as full-fledged characters in filmworthy
tales of their own. And once I had learned this, I permanently found it
impossible to engage with anything either answering directly to the name of
“fantasy” literature or anything that while not answering to that name made use
of that mode or genre’s arrogated privilege—the privilege of selecting
personages and topoi from a diversity of more or less ancient historical
periods and synthesizing the presentation of these personages and topoi under
the auspices of the literary and cinematic techniques of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. “I am” (to quote an expression of David Hume for what must
be the hundredth time [and to point out that I am quoting it for what must also
be the hundredth time]) “as certain as I am that I am over five feet tall” that
I have evolved beyond the capacity to appreciate such rubbish, for it
invariably participates in a phenomenon that one of my professors in graduate
school, a man now deceased (and whom I shall forbear from naming only because
one of his sons is one of the world’s most dedicated champions and ardent
propagandists of the notion that video games constitute an “art form” and so
might strive to make my life difficult if he discovered me representing his
father as a man categorically averse to notions of that sort) termed “the prosaification
of the supernatural” in specific connection with the obtrusion of
Tolkien-inspired story-submissions into the creative writing class of a
colleague of his, who had responded to the submitting students with an
interjection of “No fucking elves!” We must accept the personages and other entities
of fairy tales, sacred scriptures, old chronicles, and the like as they have
been transmitted to us by those documents and accordingly resign ourselves to
finding those personages and other phenomena strange, mysterious, and more than
occasionally ridiculous rather than attempting to make them more “relatable” (a
Millennialism I loathe with more than my usual fund of anti-neologistic passion
because it doesn’t even have the decency to encompass the concept from which it
is derived [for in finding something simpatico
one does not “relate” it but “relate to”
it]) by putting into their mouths and minds words they—or to be more precise,
the people who originally committed them to paper (for it is only through paper
that we can ever know them)—never could have said and thoughts they never could
have thought. But the current
custodians-cum-conduits of the Weltgeist do
not acknowledge this requirement—I do not say that they refuse to acknowledge it because that would imply that they are
actively rejecting it, which in turn would imply that they at least dimly
understood it, whereas I get the distinct impression that they are not even
aware of the requirement and would not understand it even if it bit them on the
arse, as they say (or, rather, as the “they” of a generation-and-a-half ago,
exemplified by Denis Leary’s military history-and-cigar gourmandizing “asshole”
[a figure transparently hailing from the so-called Silent Generation], used to
say). In the thirty-something-year-old eyes of even the most literate of these
people, Gandalf the wizard (or some pressing [I dare employ the olive-press yet
again!] of him from the Harry Potter
novels [I am proud to say that in my proud ignorance of the Harry Potter novels I don’t know the
proper name of that pressing, although the ubiquity of chitchat about the Harry Potter novels has prevented me
from remaining ignorant of that pressing’s presence therein]) remains as he was
when they were in their single digits—both more portentously wise than Solomon and
more approachably down-to-earth than Bob the Builder, because they have yet to
read a novel of more ancient pedigree than The
Lord of the Rings (if even that ancient) or any narratively constituted book
that is avowedly “non-fiction,” with the result that they tend to regard just
about any pie-in-the-sky chimera as prosaically practicable in the real
external world or to regard even the most immediately practicable improvement
of the real external world as too prosaic for their notice, and because they
wield considerable administrative power, this real external world is suffering
keenly from their indulgence of these tendencies—suffering from it in the
ubiquitously observable progressive deterioration in the provision of basic
services (a deterioration inevitably arising from a belief that one can clear
away any material obstacle by only barely figuratively “waving a magic wand”)
and equally ubiquitously observable ever-increasing hideousness in all aspects
of personal appearance (a hideousness inevitably arising from the belief that
one’s true self is not the person as whom one presents oneself in everyday
external life but the wizard or warrior princess as whom one “larps” at comic-book
conventions or within the confines of a “virtual” environment). Of course at
this point at the latest the least pigheaded of readers—at least even the least
pigheaded of readers who is not well acquainted with my body of previous
essays—is entitled to wonder how and why I, a person who has “outed” himself as
a cultural paleosnob, a person who at his very downest down-to-earth is no more
kindly disposed to pop culture than Arthur Garment, ever came to address himself
to an essay on a television sitcom, for after all, television has been
officially institutionalized as a “vast wasteland,” as a repository of the very
dregs of pop culture, since Mr. Minow made his famous-cum-notorious speech more
than sixty years ago. I suppose the answer to this question, or these
questions, is that I find It’s Like, You
Know far more enlightening about the trajectory of the Weltgeist than most high-cultural productions of the very end of
the twentieth century because as is becoming clear only belatedly, some twenty
years after its effective demise, television, like radio before it (and rather
unlike cinema alongside it) affords the most capacious view of what one might
term the ego-ideal of the nation or society, the manner in which the nation or
society chooses to imagine itself. In virtue of having been adopted by all
social strata more or less all at once, of its self-confinement to a schedule
and to “seasons,” of its extraneously imposed confinement to a handful of
transmission frequencies (at least until the effective universalization of
premium cable television channels in the late 1990s [which universalization
effectively put an end to television by making its products formally
interchangeable with those of cinema
{whence my dating its demise back as far as twenty years}]), and of the
transnational simultaneity with which its products were consumed by default
(and by necessity until the popularization of home video recorders in the early
1980s), television, at least at its prime-time vital core [for weekday daytime
programming was indeed aimed more or less exclusively at housewives and weekend
daytime programming more or less exclusively at children], could not afford to
appeal to specific subcultures to the exclusion of others. Polemical exceptions
like Hee-Haw aside, there were never
any substantive prime-time televisual equivalents of Blaxploitation or “women’s
pictures,” let alone the Novel Targeted at Anybody but the Little Old Lady from
Dubuque (the “narrowcasting” orientation of which explains its typical
inadequacy as a prompt for the sort of essay I typically find myself writing,
however strongly I might desire to read or aim to read or write such a novel).
A prime-time television show had more than figuratively to have “something for
everyone.” And one mustn’t confuse the demographic profile of a given show’s
setting or comediae personae with
those of its target audience: everybody regardless of race or income level
watched The Andy Griffith Show and Good Times even though the one centered
on a white sheriff and his son in an all-white southern small town and the
other on an all-black family in the projects of Chicago. Moreover, one mustn’t
confuse television’s fulfillment of its obligation to provide something for
everyone with its much-decried (and in hindsight perhaps over-decried) tendency
to “pander to the lowest common denominator,” for that everyone included double-domed highbrows as well as sub-philistine
louts—whence, for example, the presence of the Goethe-gourmandizing Detective
Dietrich in the comediae personae of Barney Miller, the figuration of the
terminology of Riesman’s Lonely Crowd
in the bavardage of a victim’s roommate on Columbo,
allusions to Milton and Shakespeare on Star
Trek, and the next-door neighbor Wilson’s regular quotation of thinkers as
serious as Kant and Samuel Johnson in Home
Improvement. And such appeals to the highest
common denominator were not infrequently well received thereby, as witnessed by
the Yale lit prof Paul de Man’s incorporation of an interchange between Archie
Bunker and his wife Edith into a lecture on deconstruction, by the pianist
Glenn Gould’s religious fandom of The
Mary Tyler Moore Show, and his
colleague Charles Rosen’s equally ardent viewership of Taxi. And such being the case, it is entirely fair to use even an
utterly mainstream prime-time sitcom like IYLK
as a more or less comprehensive volks-cum-zeit-cum-welgeistig barometer (or, to cast the metaphor in more palpably
augural terms, cultural weather forecast), to infer from the cultural hierarchy
that such a program implicitly postulates a sense of the trajectory of the Volks-cum-Zeit-cum-Weltgeist as a
whole. And for all its muscle memory-like retention of certain points de repère of the old cultural
hierarchy, IYLK propounds what one
might term a hard-Boomer cultural
hierarchy, a cultural hierarchy in which the points de repère of the
Boomers are the central totems. One sees this most graphically in a certain
episode in which the phrase “the saddest thing I ever heard” becomes a sort of
scale-model analogue of the show’s eponymous phrase, which is to say it keeps
being uttered as a naturally motivated utterance by characters unaware of the
previous occurrences of it. And to the best of my recollection, all roughly
half-dozen of these occurrences of the utterance
barring the last one are prompted by tidings that would tend to prompt the
utterance of the phrase in real life, i.e., tidings that are pathetic in the vulgar sense rather than
tragic—e.g., someone’s failing to claim a jackpot-garnering lottery ticket, or
missing out on a plum job for flubbing the boss’s name in the last seconds of
the interview, or (to double-invert the denouement of the Seinfeld episode “The Millennium” [which denouement is itself in
danger of being the saddest thing ever heard only by a rabid Seinfeld fan who thinks of Newman as the
show’s hero]) showing up a year early for an end-of-the-millennium party for
want of realizing that the last year of the millennium was December 31, 2000
and not December 31, 1999. But on Arthur or Robbie’s uttering the last of these
all but last occurrences in a chinwag between the two of them in the very last
seconds of the episode, whichever of the two didn’t utter the phrase says to
the other, “No: the saddest thing you ever heard was when Paul McCartney said
after Linda’s death, ‘I’ve just lost my girlfriend.’” Whereupon the utterer
nods in grim unqualified acquiescence as the last credit is displayed and the
scene fades to black (or commercial). Immediately
on spectating on that final scene and taking in those words about Paul
McCartney the new widower, I did the scornful-cum-outraged version of a
spit-take (as I was in the perfect meta-oral-cum-meta-potational condition to
do, for I was watching this episode, as I had watched all its predecessors and
would watch all its successors, over a “liquid breakfast” [and not a Lincoln
Continental one at that]). How, I asked myself as soon as the last fleck of
spit had cleared my lips, could anyone—let
alone specifically a pair of men too young to have bought even Abbey Road as a new release (each of
them having been in 1969 too short to see over the countertop at a record store
even in the unlikely event that he had preferred the tunage of the Beatles to
that of the Banana Splits)—have thought of even the worst thing that had ever
happened to Paul McCartney as the saddest thing he (Arthur or Robbie, not Paul)
had ever heard? But no sooner did I finish wiping my mouth dry than I came to
see both Arthur or Robbie’s remark and Robbie or Arthur’s reaction to it as
entirely natural and indeed well-nigh inevitable in the light of ILYK’s Boomerian provenance. For after
all (I said to myself), the Fab Four were more than figuratively gods to the
Boomers, for John Lennon had been neither missing the mark by a micrometer nor
exaggerating in the slightest when he termed the Beatles “more popular than
Jesus” in 1966 (a moment at which popularity with the Boomers was more or less
coextensive with popularity tout court
inasmuch as the Boomers were then perhaps at their demographically most
formidable); and indeed, in virtue of their just-parenthetically-mentioned
demographic formidability, the Boomers enjoyed possession of a notion of a kind
about these gods that not even Christians had enjoyed possession of about
Christ when “the Sea of Faith was at the full”—the notion, namely, that every
other living person on earth, regardless of his age or place of origin or
residence, revered these gods as abjectly as they did. And there is most
certainly no other moment in ILYK in
which any other “creative” figure is apotheosized as Paul McCartney is
apotheosized at that episode-concluding moment; the closest approach thitherto being
Arthur’s much-abovementioned interpellation of John Updike as his favorite
writer, an interpellation that apart from its comparative lukewarmness, its
evincing of mere veneration rather than full-blown idolatry, is robbed of any
normative force by its presentation as an interpellation peculiar to him, one
that is ho-humly shrugged off by the other members of the comediae personae. And such being the case, ILYK seems to mark a decisive break and a great leap downward in
television qua cultural barometer-cum-weather forecaster, a moment at which
high culture was decisively toppled from atop the cultural hierarchy of a
would-be ego-ideal-defining program and pop culture installed in its place. For
Seinfeld, despite its relentless
flaunting of Jerry’s and George’s lack of serious intellectual interests,
evinced quite a high regard for the canons of high culture, especially that of serious
(a.k.a. “classical) music (not that literature exactly received short shrift from
the show [see the episode entitled “The Cheever Diaries”]), as witnessed by the
monopolization of the incidental music of one episode by the overture of
Rossini’s Barber of Seville; the
centering of the plot of an episode on the attending of an opera performance; the
incorporation of an orchestra conductor, a concert pianist, and even the most
obscure of the “Three Tenors” into its guest comediae personae; and Jerry and George’s “name-checkings” of
Beethoven’s “Waldstein” sonata and Schumann’s descent into madness; while its
level of esteem for pop culture (including pop music) seldom rose above the
level of affectionate disdain, as witnessed by the assignment of fandom of the
“yacht rocker” Christopher Cross to the rebarbative and contemptible figure of Newman
the obese postman and the foregrounding of the fatuity of Star Trek’s metaphysical aspirations in Jerry’s quotation of The Wrath of Khan at George’s late
fiancée’s graveside (a moment that shews that the just-mentioned flaunting of
J&G’s lack of serious intellectual interests was certainly not tantamount
to the postulation of that lack as a norm). Frasier,
too, kept itself well to the aft of hard Boomerism, even if at first blush its
placement of its eponym’s cultural snobbery at the bull’s eye of its satiric
squibbery may seem to suggest otherwise, for while the show did indeed position
Frasier’s down-to-earth father as a salutary foil-cum-counterweight to his
elder son’s (and for that matter, his younger son’s) impossible loftiness, it
would be wrong to say that it presented Martin Crane as a full-blown norm, a figure in whom the viewer might
discover the show’s moral and epistemological center. Rather, the relation of
father and son(s) to that center was dialectical
in the most wholesome sense of that word. If Frasier’s hyperfastidiousness
about clothes was pilloried as foppish, if not downright effeminate (such that
he was made belatedly to realize that he had been “hit on” by another man only
on recollecting that he had initiated a chinwag about men’s fashion with him),
Martin’s complete indifference to them was hardly championed; for if it had
been how could his complaint of having splurged in spending 15 dollars on a
pair of trousers been played for laughs? If Frasier’s wine connoisseurship was
pilloried as ludicrous in its ceremonial intricacies, Martin’s obdurate
adherence to Ballantine beer in every possible culinary setting was shown to be
equally ludicrous in its one-note unceremoniousness; if Frasier’s opera fandom,
with its endless retailing of his spectation-cum-audition of performances of
legendary singers such as Renata Tebaldi was seen to be absurdly hifalutin,
Martin’s fandom of sixties action heroine Angie Dickinson qua supposed pinnacle
of cinema thespianism was seen to be absurdly downmarket. In short, if Martin’s
down-to-earthness nicely complemented such virtues as his stoicism and honesty,
virtues that had stood him in good stead in his honorable and perhaps even
heroic service as a police officer, it was still seen to be defective for
wanting so much as a soupçon of Frasier’s elegance and sophistication. Something
too much of this—the discerning reader (and perhaps even the fairly
undiscerning reader) is now doubtless inclined to interject: as you have just postulated that ILYK is
situated to the fore of a chronologically situated divide between a certain
kind of goodness and a certain kind of badness and that not only Seinfeld but also Frasier, a show that although certainly better than most sitcoms is manifestly
inferior to Seinfeld (and that,
incidentally but doubtless significantly, remained on the air many years after
the disappearance therefrom of both Seinfeld and ILYK), are situated to
the aft of that divide, are you not obliged to retract the very assertion with
which you began this essay and which seems to have constituted its principal
impetus and very raison d’être—viz., that ILYK constitutes a worthy (and indeed
the worthiest conceivable) continuation of Seinfeld? No, but it does indeed
require me to recalibrate, reframe, reappraise or what have you (provided it is
a verb beginning with re) the
ultimate intellectual and moral purport of the notion of a “worthy continuation
of Seinfeld.” Fortunately, I have
already done a goodly portion of the work of that recalibration autc. in “teeing up” the
postulation the discerning or even relatively undiscerning reader has just
mentioned. For in stating as I did some pages above that ILYK was a show that propounded a “hard-Boomer cultural hierarchy”
I was axiomatically implying that Seinfeld
propounded a soft-Boomer cultural
hierarchy, a cultural hierarchy in which, while the points de repère of the
pre-Boomer dispensation remained the central totems, certain points de repère of the Boomer dispensation occupied a much loftier position
than in the pre-Boomer dispensation. And indeed, I have already touched on
certain of these Boomergenetic elements of Seinfeld,
albeit not in explicitly Boomer-referencing terms—for example, the show’s
dramaturgical emphasis on all four central characters’ maintenance of an active
and variety-rich “sex life” and its admittedly residual and partly adscititious
presentation of those characters as insufficiently “empathetic.” And
in-double-deed, the second of these elements is closely related to another Boomergenetic element of Seinfeld that I have not yet discussed—viz., its presentation of
what would was once known (and still would have been known to Jerry Seinfeld,
Larry David, and their older writers well into their young adulthoods) as the
American WASP elite, an elite whose displacement and supersession every Boomer
was conscious of participating in and most Boomers were enthusiastic about
participating in even when they happened to hail from that elite themselves. While
this presentation is not particularly acrimonious, it is most certainly not
affectionate or respectful either, for the conspicuous smattering of elderly
WASP characters are portrayed as characterologically dominated by a combination
of “uptightness,” mirthless loopiness, and “passive-aggressive” spite. One sees
this combination in fullest flower in Mr. Pitts, the dour, ultra-formal elderly
bachelor friend of the recently deceased Jackie Kennedy Onassis as whose
personal assistant Elaine works for a rather long succession of episodes—sees
it in his habit of eating Snickers bars with a knife and fork and his
delegation to Elaine of the task of not merely purchasing his socks but also of
his helping him to try them on afterwards, a task whose demeaningness is
amplified by the perversity of the interchangeability and
one-size-fits-all-ness of the socks themselves, a bushel of the blindingly
white “tube crews” seldom unselfconsciously worn by anyone over the age of ten
(the incongruity of such socks with Pitts’s presumptively bespoke three-piece
dark blue suits, like that of the Snickers bars with his presumptively bespoke
china and cutlery, seems intended to suggest that the WASPs are not even to be
relied on to maintain the standards of elegance they quasi-single-handedly
set); or perhaps, rather, in the Rosses, the parents of George’s fiancée Susan—Mrs.
Ross an uncannily tight-lipped and impeccably coiffed and made-up twenty-four-hour
drunk, Mr. Ross a perpetually sullen and brooding closeted homosexual secretly
pining for his youthful days as the paramour of the abovementioned John
Cheever, both of them seething with a hatred for each other exceeded in
intensity and tenacity only by their contempt for their traditional social
inferiors—a contempt hilariously evinced by their gameness for being driven for
two or three hours to the tip of Long Island by George for the sole pleasure of
exposing his lie of possessing a mansion in the East Hamptons. So are you now undermining the raison d’être
of the present essay even further—nay, making mincemeat of the very raison
d’être of that raison d’être—by averring that Seinfeld was not even worthy of continuation? By no means, first because
there is enough “nature” in Seinfeld’s
portraits of elderly WASPs to redeem them qua quasi- Theophrastian character
sketches despite their turpitude qua conduits of Boomerism, and second because
these portraits and the other Boomerist elements of Seinfeld are now of interest to me not qua elements of Seinfeld—in which they are “low-profile”
enough not to vitiate the show as a whole beyond the point of
moral-cum-aesthetic defensibility, but rather in their capacity as aids to the
further interpretation of the moral-cum-epistemological schema of ILYK. In this capacity, these elements
shew us that “New Yorkism” in the Boomer mindset of the 1990s was not neatly
consubstantial or coextensive with sophistication or elegance in an
old-fashioned or “establishment” sense, such that in taking in a Boomergenetic mise en scène such as ILYK wherein “New Yorkism” is presented
as a normative mindset, we should not reflexively expect to find an absence or
even a comparative lack of sophistication or elegance in that sense in the
entities presented as antithetical or inimical to that mindset—which entities
in ILYK’s case are of course the
entities that embody “Los Angelesism.” And indeed on taking a closer look at IYLK with this aid-to-interpretation
ready to eye, I have discovered scadlets of moments in which “Los Angelisism”
is derided precisely on account of
its possession of a comparatively high degree of such sophistication and
elegance. For instance, there is the moment in a fairly early episode in which
the abovementioned Elliott Gould elicits murmurs of scandalization from an
entire jam-packed drawing room at an L.A. society lady’s soiree when he admits
that he is the driver and owner of a certain midmarket or even downmarket-model
of car (perhaps a Honda Civic) just spotted parked outside. He huffily defends his
drivership-cum-ownership of the car on the grounds that it is “practical”—but
to no avail. And why, if one considers the matter from a certain historically
relatively transcendent point of view, should
the argument that the car was practical have cut ice of any weight with the
people at that party? After all, they were all rich or very nearly rich people,
people who were under no financial pressure to weigh “practicality” into their
choice of a car or any reason to suppose that a movie star, a man as rich or
richer than themselves, had weighed “practicality” into his choice. They were
people who could afford to give pride of place to luxury and style in
making that choice, as the show-runners of ILYK
went out of their way to make clear by frequently showing Robbie behind the
wheel of an exceedingly luxurious and stylish convertible sports car—presumably
either a Jaguar or a Mercedes (if a Mercedes is ever a sports car). And indeed
Gould’s argument from practicality puts me directly and vividly in mind of a
ca. 1994 essay by the academic literary critic Stanley Fish in which he—a
virtual professional pejorator of his fellow academics—tried to explain to the
general reader why university professors nearly always drove Volvos despite
their manifest hideousness. These profs would, he said, always say that they
preferred Volvos because they were “practical,” but (he added) this
fetishization of practicality was but a stalking horse for a combination of
their quasi-Marxist aversion to being associated with the ruling elite (or, at
any rate, to divulging their unavoidable association therewith), their lack of taste,
and their lack of respect for people who did not lack it. In ca. 1994, Fish could
write such an essay in full confidence that it would be met with a warm and
mirthful reception, for in the America of 1994 the stylelessness of university
professors was both widely known and widely derided; indeed, as I recall, in
the autumn of that year one of the three or four nationally circulated
newspapers (it may even have been the Los
Angeles Times!) published an article on that year’s MLA convention (the
annual conference of literature professors) that described the attendees as a
cohort of people for whom “gravy stains are a fashion statement.” All the same,
it must be admitted that while Volvos are ugly, they are not particularly cheap
or light on frills; that early 1990s academics’ predilection for Volvos showed
that they were not prepared to break ranks with the non-ivory tower-dwelling haute bourgeoisie to the extent of
buying cars that might have typically been driven by, say, elementary school
teachers. The scene of Elliott Gould’s divulgence of his ownership of such a
car in ILYK shows that by 1999, the Welt-cum Volksgeist-stewards had overshot the academics of ca. 1994 in point
of studied stylelessness-cum-unpretentiousness; it shows that by 1999 America’s
tastemakers at least wished to believe that it was perfectly acceptable for anyone,
be he ever so rich or highly placed, to drive a car that was not only ugly but
cheap and unluxurious. Of course here a certain type of reader—not a stupid or
even inattentive one but rather a magpie-eyed one with an allergy to
dialectical thinking—will interject that the mere fact that Elliott Gould was
(and is) a movie star precludes his serving as a norm within the moral
landscape of ILYK, inasmuch as the
entire logic of that landscape is predicated on the notion that movie stars are
shallow, airheaded, morally vacuous people. But such a reader has failed to
consider or recall that ILYK’s notion
of a typical movie star is Jennifer Grey, an actress known exclusively for her
work in inescapably trivial film genres, for her work in teen comedies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and “chick
flicks” (or, per my far-above hesitation, quasi-“chick flicks”) like Dirty Dancing and that in presenting
Elliott Gould as at loggerheads with Shrug in the abovementioned recording
session it perforce distances him from the Gestalt
comprising the L.A.-based three-quarters of the comediae personae, a Gestalt
defined by its shallowness and flakiness, and thereby “casts” him as a very
different sort of movie star from Jennifer Grey, as an altogether better sort
of movie star. And indeed the ILYK production
team would have found and presumably did find it entirely natural to “cast” him
as such a figure, for after all, despite his occasional turkeys like the Disney
flick The Devil and Max Devlin (in
which he starred as a latter day Faust-cum-Jabez Stone to the then utterly
un-notorious and indeed universally beloved Bill Cosby’s Devil), Gould was
preeminently known for his work in the films of Robert Altman, Hollywood’s most
outrageous maverick, who was forever biting the hand that fed him, and in particular
for his (Gould’s) “creation” of the role of Hawkeye Pierce in Altman’s M.A.S.H., perhaps the central text in
the cinematic portion of Boomer Scripture (I say perhaps because that central text may be The Big Chill, but there is no seriously entertainable third
contender. M.A.S.H., the namesake and
basis of the far-abovementioned wildly popular sitcom, was a 1970 military sex-comedy
film that presented the Korean War as a dedicated prolepsis of-cum-stand in for
the Vietnam War, a film whose comediae
personae was unevenly divided between guys like Hawkeye, happy-go-lucky
sexually uninhibited types with a jaundiced attitude to the war, who were
presented as the heroes; and po-faced sexually repressed hawks like Robert
Duvall’s Major Burns, who were presented as the villains (of course there is
presumably some sort of Freudian pun embedded in the antithesis between a dove
with a hawk’s eye [i.e., an eye for the ladies] and an “eye”-less [and hence
castrated or impotent] hawk). Such being the case, M.A.S.H. was generally interpreted not merely as an allegory of the
Vietnam War but also as an allegory of the entire American system of life and
an attack on the American “establishment,” very much including the
establishment of Hollywood, then still seen as dominated by po-faced sexually
repressed hawkish studio executives. Whence the presumptive naturalness to ILYK’s show-runners of presenting Gould
as a different, better sort of movie star, with “better” being envisaged as
coextensive not only with “deep” or
“substantial” but also with “subversive.” So Gould is effectively a fifth
columnist in the Los Angeles of ILYK.
But a fifth columnist hailing from what sort of enemy polity? He is not, as we
have already established, attacking the Angelenan system of life from the point
of view of a New York-style snob, and triangulation of his Altmanian CV with
his automotive preferences suggests an affiliation with what would probably now
be called (and may already have been beginning to be called by then) Green
Leftism. To be sure, he does not directly defend his choice of a downmarket car
on the grounds that the car is “environmentally friendly,” but “practicality”
is often a stalking horse for “good gas mileage,” and “good gas mileage” is
often defended on environmentalist grounds. We might conjecture that Gould here
is halfway to being a full-fledged Green Lefty of the twenty-twenties, that at
a soirée-scene set in the present he would be disclosing his ownership of an
electric car; or perhaps, rather, as electric cars are still very expensive and
hence still amenable to being mistaken for old-fashioned “status symbols,”
disclosing that he was a full-time pedestrian—a conjecture strongly supported
by the sympathetic treatment accorded (via the satirical treatment of Robbie’s
embarrassment at being associated with her) to the far-abovementioned full-time
pedestrian dating-partner of Robbie. But one needn’t insist too strenuously,
“lean too heavily,” as they say, on Gould’s formal sinister verdure, for in
“lived” quotidian terms contemporary Green Leftism amounts merely to an implacably
prescriptive asceticism in the domain of everyday creature comforts (for of
course as regards the purely intercorporeal [and intracorporeal!] sins of the
flesh today’s Green Lefties are apostles of unbridled sybaritism in the
tradition of Hawkeye Pierce and co.), such that the Elliott Gould of ILYK has already caught up with today’s
Green Lefties in substance and has only to catch up with them in degree. In
contemporary “lived” quotidian terms, the Green Lefties’ agenda takes the form
of a relentless carping, canting, nasal plaint of “Do you really need the nice version of Product-or-Activity
X? Why don’t you just opt for the shitty version of it, or better yet, opt for a
great big glob of shit instead of Product-or-Activity
X?”—as in, “Do you really need a
heavy-duty clothes dryer? Why don’t you buy a light-duty drying machine, or
better yet hang your clothes out to dry, or better yet, never change them so
that you never have to wash them or dry them?”; “Do you really need to take a ten-minute shower or to shower every day? Why
don’t you just take a five-minute shower twice a week, or better yet, it lieu
of showering at all, just step outside whenever it rains?” “Do you really need
to change your clothes every day? Why not change them just twice a week, or not
at all, or better yet, throw out all your clothes and wear a muumuu woven out
of a combination of your own pubic hair and bellybutton lint?” “Do you really
need to eat the flesh of real vertebrate animals? Why not subsist on a diet of
insects, or better yet, of your own excrement straight from the chute?” “Do you
really need to drink distilled water? What don’t you drink tap water, or better
yet, your own urine straight from the spigot?” This last Mad Libette in the
catalogue makes for a perfect (some would say all-too-conveniently perfect) segue to my second moment-scadlet of ILYK in which “Los Angelisism” is
derided precisely on account of its possession of a comparatively high degree
of such sophistication and elegance. The scene is once again a soirée hosted by
a woman hailing from the cream of Angelenan society (here is as good a place as
any [except of course the passage in which I first mentioned the previous
soirée], to point out that in even still possessing a society at all, let alone
a cream-topped one, the Los Angeles of ILYN
is far more sophisticated and elegant than any Occidental city of the 2020s),
who for this event has managed to snag the metropolis’s most coveted caterer, a
chef whose canapes are second-to-none and doubtless described by more than one
guest as “to die for” (albeit most likely not as “TDF” [as “texting” was only
just beginning to become a “thing” then]). At a certain point about midway
through the episode a particularly bumptious guest (I’m almost certain it was
Shrug) finds his way into the kitchen, where he finds the master at work
replenishing trays with his masterpieces and has the effrontery to ask him to
what his canapes owe their unsurpassable excellence. Although irked by the
intruder’s inquisitiveness, the chef is sporting enough to tell him that the
excellence is owing to “a secret ingredient,” and most of the rest of the
episode is devoted to a guessing-game among the guests regarding this secret
ingredient, and all sorts of extremely recherché and expensive commodities like
platinum dust and bird-of-paradise brains are tendered as guesses only to
suffer a devastating deflation in the concluding seconds when for some reason
or other the caterer decides to “go nuclear” and reveal that the SI is nothing
other or better than tap water; whereupon everybody naturally starts vomiting like
Mr. Creosote into his or her cocktail napkin. Hey, as I’d be the first (and, in
the light of my near-solitariness qua ILYK
viewer, most likely also last) to admit, I take a certain amount of shame-lack
in my withers’ being only lightly wrung by that episode punchline, for although
I now happen to drink bottled water almost exclusively (or, rather, to misquote
the central personage from the [at least to my mind] last genuinely
entertaining television advertising campaign, “I don’t always drink water, but
when I do I prefer it from bottles”) owing to certain qualities of plumbing of
my present abode that it would be indecorous of me to specify, I have nothing
in principle against tap water and indeed consumed it gamely if not exactly
enthusiastically throughout my nearly quarter-century of residence in Baltimore
(although I plan to avoid drinking any of it there in the future in view of a
“recommendation to boil water” from the city’s government that I happened to
see about a year-and-a-half ago [and that could not but put me in mind of
Tchaikovsky’s supposed death by unboiled water during a cholera epidemic]).
Natheless, an aversion to tap water and insistence on drinking bottled water is
hardly the most fastidious, extravagant, or other-inconveniencing of pet
peccadilloes-cum-pet preferences. It is not like an addiction to caviar as a
universal condiment or proper champagne (as opposed to mere “sparkling water”
of unspecified provenance) as a bathtub-filler, let alone that most notorious
of all Hollywood pet peccadilloes-cum-pet preferences, Jerry Lewis’s refusal to
wear the same pair of socks twice. One does not need to be a movie star or even
a television star to finance a bottled-water addiction; one can indeed quite
comfortably finance a bottled-water addiction on the wages of, say, a roofer
(to name a very low-paying blokey livelihood) or a supermarket cashier (to name
a very low-paying womanish one). It is about as expensive as a two-pack-a-day
chewing-gum habit, and even back at the turn of the millennium, when cigarette
taxes were much lighter than in 2023, it was considerably cheaper than a
pack-a-day cigarette habit. Such being and having been the case, it can only
serve as a satirical target in a satirical schema that posits a properly
Spartan existence (even one in the fullest sense!) as a norm, that presents any
degree of luxury above the level of biological subsistence as abnormal. And such being and having been the case,
must you not at long last give over even trying to defend ILYK qua supposed
worthy continuation of Seinfeld? No, but such being and having been the
case, I am duty-bound to concede that a sane, decent, and would-be-civilized
inhabitant of the early-to-mid 2020s can fully appreciate ILYK only by reading it against the grain, so to speak—in other
words, by giving over any attempt to enter into its satirical attitude towards
Los Angeles and viewing even (or perhaps even especially) the Angelemes it
presents as most outrageous or contemptible as elements of a more civilized
system of life than the one that obtains in present-day America (or anywhere
else in the present-day Occident). To appreciate ILYK fully for what it has to offer is to see its satirized Los
Angelenan side and its normativized New Yorkean side as two halves of a whole
that is deserving of normativization in relation to an America of the 2020s that
is in turn worthy of satirization—an America in which the distinction between
vulgarity and refinement has been obliterated; in which vulgarity and
refinement now stand at one end of, not a “spectrum,” but rather a stark
antinomy whose opposite pole is insanity, infantilism, and chaos. For just as
hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, vulgarity is the tribute
barbarism pays to civilization. The vulgarian wears a gold lamé suit or has
gold plumbing fixtures installed in his bathroom (and yes I am thinking of the
bathroom of a particular vulgarian;
the most notorious vulgarian now alive; a man who is most ardently loathed not
because he is vulgar but because his vulgarity has not a whiff of the prosaified
supernatural about it) not only because he knows that gold is expensive but
also, and even more significantly, because he appreciates the same beauty of gold
that is integral to the sculptures of Cellini (the ostentatiousness of whose
autobiography in turn befits the vulgarity to which his medium is ineluctably
prone). The vulgarian who keeps Hooked on
Classics or a James Last album in constant rotation on his stereo keeps
them thereon not only because he lacks the “attention span” to appreciate a
full-length symphony but also because he genuinely appreciates the rich
sonority and (at least intuitively) the voice-leading capabilities of a
symphony orchestra. Accordingly, if there is one type of person who would singularly
benefit from a comprehensive viewing of ILYK
it is probably the type of American who has been described as the “Blue-state
conservative” and (in an appellation that itself reeks of the peculiar rot of
our epoch in virtue of its Tolkienian provenance) the “dark elf”; the type of
American who sympathizes with the concerns and preoccupations of people in
so-called flyover country but says that he cannot tear himself away from the
coastal metropolis in which he resides because he is too closely attached to
the cultural amenities that (according to him) still abound in coastal
metropolises. Of course even in describing such a type in such a fashion, I
have, despite having striven to fashion as narrow-circumferenced a conceptual
net as possible, cast far too broad a conceptual net, for in reality many a
“dark elf”-stroke-“Blue-state conservative” is as lacking in true cultivation
as his shitlib compatriots and supposes that easy access to Malaysian,
Ethiopian, and Uyghur-Chinese cuisine (I have of course over the years banged
on ad nauseam about the
low-rentishness of culinary snobbery insgesamt,
but any otherwise genuinely cultivated person who insists on its
high-rentishness will at least behind closed doors concede that French cuisine
is the only cuisine really worth being snobbish about, what with its having a
centuries-old tradition of snobbery more than figuratively baked into it) and to
reunion concerts by turn-of-the millennium indie-rock bands (regarding which
any parenthetical disclaimer is naturally superfluous) constitutes the ne plus ultra of cultural amenity. But
presumably at least a more-than-minuscule minority of DEs-cum-BSCs still sincerely
appreciate old-school high culture—still like to go to old-school symphony
orchestra concerts with programs exhausted by the works of serious composers
and unframed by childish gimmicks; to museums displaying the works of serious
artists absent disclaiming lectures on their connections to the slave trade;
and to opera-performances in which it is possible to draw some connection
between what is being sung about and what is happening on stage—and still fancy
that this O-S HC is still available in abundance in coastal metropolises, still
have yet to realize that the entities doing business under the names of these
institutions are merely a congeries of so-called skin suits but poorly
concealing their utter lack of affinity with the essential qualities thereof;
they still fancy this and have yet to realize that either because they don’t
get out as much as they suppose, such that they have not yet even been afforded
a proper view of the degeneration, or because, like the god-awfully hackneyed
but unavoidable proverbial frog in slowly boiling water, they have been getting
out so frequently over such a long stretch of time that they have not yet noticed
how much everything has changed for the worse—and for how different a sort of
worse than the old one. And lest the defender of coastal metropolises come to
suppose that he still has an ace in the hole or t***p card in the so-called
arthouse cinemas sited therein, I shall interject here that less than 24 hours
before the moment of this writing [4:46 a.m. on December 4, 2023] I saw a film—or,
at least the first minute-and-a-half thereof—that exemplifies the skinsuit
phenomenon to a nauseating turn and that I believe may fairly be said to typify
the offerings of such cinemas inasmuch as I spectated on it via a so-called
streaming service that was simultaneously hosting at least a half-dozen movies
I had seen at Baltimore’s main [and essentially sole] so-called arthouse venue
in the late twenty-teens. The film
was—and is—a 2021 adaptation of Balzac’s novel (or, if one regards each of its
parts as a novel in its own right, trilogy) Lost
Illusions. The book(s) recount(s) the intertwined life histories of two
friends in the French provinces: one an enterprising printer who is trying to
come up with a form of book-paper that is sturdier and cheaper than the current
standard, the other a poet who longs to see his verses appreciated by
discerning readers. The poet moves to Paris where he is quickly distracted from
his true calling by the more immediately lucrative livelihood of journalism;
his success as a journalist encourages him to live a “champagne lifestyle” and
consequently to run up enormous debts, debts that his friend back home, being
surety for them, is obliged to discharge; and being unable to discharge them,
the friend is obliged to spend a disagreeable term in the local debtor’s
prison. The moral-cum- sociopolitical upshot of this plotline, a plotline to
which the bifurcation of the protagonists is essential, is of course that in a
modern commercial society it is not enough to live a good life oneself, as
one’s fortunes are always tied up with people who live emphatically bad lives.
Within the abovementioned first minute-and-a-half, the film makes it
eyeburstingly and earburstingly clear, via both the mise en scène and an accompanying voiceover, that it has
obliterated the just-mentioned bifurcation—that the printer and poet have been
merged into a single character, into
a poet reduced to the shift of printing his own verses. As soon as my eyes and
ears had been burst by the discovery of this act of obliteration, I more than
figuratively exclaimed, “Check please!” and switched over to Claude Chabrol’s
1991 adaptation of Madame Bovary, a
film which, however dubious its moral-cum-sociopolitical upshot may be simply
in virtue of its being an adaptation of Flaubert’s novel (what with the
moral-cum-sociopolitical upshot of that novel’s being highly dubious indeed, as
Jean Améry [q.v.] eloquently argues in Charles
Bovary, Country Doctor) at least possesses the virtue of keeping Emma
categorically distinct from her husband. The reader unfamiliar with the Balzac
work will doubtless think that the consolidation of the poet and the printer is
some minor if regrettable bit of dramaturgical streamlining like Laurence
Olivier’s elimination of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Hamlet and reassignment of a handful of their lines to Polonius,
but I can assure this reader that it is far more serious and far more grotesque
than that; that it is at least as egregious as would be the consolidation of
George and Kramer in a Seinfeld
“reboot,” or of Arthur and Shrug in a reboot of ILYK. “That said,” such an act of dramaturgical brutality is
entirely par for the course in Millennials’ treatment of established
personages; it is merely another instance of their predilection for wresting
such personages entirely free of their established context, whether historical
or fictional; it is exactly the kind of thing one would expect from a
generation that has delightedly produced and consumed Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer and Pride and Prejudice and
Zombies, and that in its hierarchy of cinematic modes accords pride of
place to Japanese animation, with its blithe and ever-quasi-pornographic
mingling of human and animal characteristics in a single personage (e.g., a
schoolgirl with cats’ ears and a puppy-dog’s tail), and pointless displacement
of characters to alien settings (e.g., Sherlock Holmes to twenty-fourth century
Mars).
In 1971, the abovementioned
Jean Améry, a man who had spent a great deal of time observing and analyzing
the changes and continuities in the Occidental way of life of the mid-to-late
twentieth century (and who had recorded the fruits of his observation and
analysis in his highly enlightening 1964 book Preface to the Future), delivered a
lecture in honor of the hundredth anniversary of Marcel Proust’s birth, a
lecture that he concluded by championing continuing attention to Proust work on
the grounds that “as long as we are stuck here in and with this epoch, which is
every bit as much a late-bourgeois epoch as in Proust’s day, we cannot get by
without him.” And at that moment, Améry’s assertion of the essential
late-bourgeoisness of the present must have been unchallengeable. After all,
the following year, 1972, saw the release of Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, which proved wildly popular
throughout Europe and North America, and pace
my preceding strictures on the “narrowcasting” tendencies of cinema, it is hard
to imagine that a film that flaunted its monomaniacal obsession with the
bourgeoisie in its title would have been an international hit if the
bourgeoisie had been a marginal social force, let alone a relic of a bygone
age. But as I believe the preceding pages of this essay have at least credibly
suggested if not exactly trenchantly proved, we have at some point in the past
twenty years ceased to live in a definitively late-bourgeois epoch—an epoch in
which while dogged industriousness may not have been universally esteemed,
unregenerate laziness was still universally stigmatized; and in which while
very few people may have had decent taste, everyone still appreciated beauty
within the limits of his aesthetic capacity—and begun to live in a definitely
post-bourgeois epoch—an epoch in which sloth and ugliness have become normative;
and while I—a Proustophile’s Proustophile who was not even (albeit only barely
not even) born in 1971—am certainly not going to sit here, let alone stand
there, and say that it is no longer worthwhile to read Proust (even if “in a
certain very real sense,” I have already said just that way back in the
mid-20-oughties, in the essay “Proprietary
Names: the Name / Proprietary Names: the Place” [and
inasmuch as the names of the entities inhabiting the trash so ardently beloved
of the Millennial generation at least seem
to function in a manner not dissimilar to that of proprietary names, one cannot
but suspect that the Aufstehen of the
proprietary name is implicated in the Untergang
of the bourgeois epoch in some fashion {not to mention but hope that that
fashion proves rich and coherent enough to yield a sequel-essay to “Proprietary
Names: the Name / Proprietary Names: the Place”}]), I am going to sit here (and would be glad to stand there) and say
that in order to understand the transition from the bourgeois epoch to the
post-bourgeois one we would do best to study the television of the micro-epoch
of that transition (why the television and not the cinema or belles lettres thereof I have already
made plain several pages ago [and hinted at only a single sentence ago]) and
that inasmuch as the tipping-point of that transition seems to be situated at
the very tip of the tipping-point between the second and third millennia, we
would be best of all served thereunto by studying It’s Like, You Know. And in closing I must dot-connectingly emphasize
that the understanding of this transition today will conceivably yield a very
different sort of fruit from that yielded by an understanding of the bourgeois world
fifty or sixty years ago—and “arguably” a much more fruitful sort of fruit; for
in the twilight decades of the bourgeois epoch, an improved understanding of
the bourgeois world could perforce merely yield an understanding of how to get
along in that moribund world, whereas an understanding of the transition from
the bourgeois to the post-bourgeois epoch will perforce allow at least the
understanders with residual bourgeois tendencies to perceive what was lost in
the transition and thereby, conceivably, to facilitate their less fortunate
contemporaries’ “detransitioning” back into proper bourgeois subjects and
concomitantly usher in the restoration of the bourgeois world, which if hardly
a full-fledged utopia was at least a proper and halfway decent topia.
THE END
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