No Way to Exit?
McConnell, Frank
to understand the central theme, for example, First Wife intones: "When change comes, it comes like fire no one knows who will live and who will be lost." But the flame of change,...
...I am now convinced that W.H...
...Respect for the past, once a form of ancestor worship, has become a source of secular identity in an inconstant universe...
...The series about "nothing" written by Jerry and George will not be made...
...That, I think, is comedy's real gift to us: medicinal anarchy...
...Kramer's stomping causes some malfunction in the plane, which is forced to land for minor repairs in a small Massachusetts town...
...They choose Paris...
...Apply todayl Commonweal 2 | June 5,1998...
...Were the Golden Child more subtle with its meaning, and The Herbal Bed more honest with its characters, the phoenix might struggle up more convincingly from the ashes...
...And doesn't it have to be the same for a sitcom of the quality of "Seinfeld," which was essentially a nine-year, episodic comedy of manners (albeit bad manners)--in other words one of the best written, best acted...
...And, writing in the early '40s (in Commonweal, it so happens, under the pseudonym "Didymus'), he remarked that while art can never make us want to be good, it can at least preserve us from the illusion that we already are...
...So here's what Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, the original writers, did, and it's brilliant...
...Sartre...
...o, what did you think about the last episode of "Seinfeld...
...Literary critics and psychologists love to talk about "closure," but really getting there is tough...
...I don't want to get too lit-crit on you here, but it's metacomedy: comedy, that is, about what comedy is for, what it's about...
...Of course, at the end, they're all found guilty and sentenced to one (not five) year to contemplate their inadequacies...
...Kramer videotapes the heist, while the other three make sarcastic comments--recorded, natch, on the tape...
...It sucked," said a girl in the front row, and two hundred heads nodded in agreement...
...It is, and always was, a story about silly people, little people, greedy, barbarous, and cruel...
...He's got water in his ear, you see, because he's just come from the beach, and....(Do you know how hard it is getting any "Seinfeld" plot down in properly grammatical, subordinated sentences...
...Anybody who's watched the show knows that these four characters are as irrecoverably selfish as the worst--which means the most u n f o r g e t t a b l e - - o f Jane Commonweal ~ 0 June 5, 1998 Austen's or Dickens's characters...
...And the quartet is then busted by the cops...
...But after the plane takes off Kramer begins stomping madly about the cabin...
...It's like trying to herd gerbils...
...Well, of Pride (Jerry), Lust (George), Envy (Elaine), and Sloth (Kramer): the four most unavoidable of the seven deadlies, that is, guilty of being human...
...Look...
...But the flame of change, burning through the household, does not entirely destroy the old truths...
...Not that there's anything wrong with that...
...Seinfeld" itself--to NBC...
...I think not...
...but the series has been made, and is concluding, but concluding in an infinitely-recursive loop...
...Auden was the greatest critic in the English language of this century...
...Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer will always be there, in their prison clothes, locked each within the other--since each of the seven deadlies is all of the seven deadlies--acting out for us, in rerun heaven, the gorgeously tacky comedy of being, just, human...
...They're going to buy the show...
...Kwong invites disaster when he forces his wives to accept baptism and stop offering ceremonial gifts to their ancestors...
...Virginia Woolf once observed that there are three rules for writing a novel, but, unfortunately, nobody knows what they are...
...And, as with Aristophanes, Plautus, the Shakespeare of Much Ado, Voltaire, Jane Austen, and Thomas Pynchon, it made us less silly by reminding us of how silly we really are...
...I asked my class on the morning of May 15...
...The last "Seinfeld" disappointed so many of the show's fans-not all--because it raised the ante, and most fans weren't ready to call the raise...
...But before Jerry and George leave, NBC--here's the only hard-to-buy departure from reality--grants them a trip in a private jet anywhere in the world with Kramer and Elaine...
...0 The Institute at Boston College Continuing a Tradition of Excellence in Educating Women and Men for Ministry Announces New Programs in Beginning September 1998 Degree/Certificate programs _9 M.A...
...Anyhow...
...Seems there's a new Massachusetts law, making anyone who witnesses a crime without trying to assist the victim liable to up to five years in prison...
...Later that day, when my wife picked me up, she told me both her classes reached the same consensus...
...T h e r e ' s something authentically Kafkaesque about this: "Guilt is never to be doubted," wrote little Franz in "In the Penal Colony...
...And I don't know another sitcom, not even the splendid "Dick Van Dyke Show," "Newhart," "Cheers," or "M*A*S*H" that managed to rise to that level of intelligence...
...The fun of writing a novel is writing the first sentence and the most herniatingly difficult part, apart from the stuff in the middle, is writing the last sentence...
...So I have to bet that if you watched it you agree with our students and the A.P...
...And here I am, your trusted media wallah, master of my domain, to tell you that you're wrong, wrong, wrong...
...How do you know when you're done...
...Since early on in the series, Jerry and George Costanza--George, the Jim Thorpe of fecklessness--have been trying to sell their idea for a "show about nothing"--i.e...
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...Has a wiser thing been said...
...But not before a trial that becomes a national media event--as the last "Seinfeld" itself was a national media event-covered by, in a beautifully self-parodic turn, our uncrowned king of schlockmeisterism, Geraldo Rivera...
...Now comes the genius...
...No Exit," said my wife Celeste after we watched the last episode...
...And in the stunning--there's no other word that serves--last scene, all four are in prison and Jerry is doing his standup act for the cons, and only Kramer is laughing at his jokes...
...But the clumsily staged scenes that frame the body of the play put a hokey, optimistic spin on things...
...And now they're put on trial--get it, put on trial--for the very sin that's made them funhouse mirrors of ourselves all these years...
...most consistent TV novels in the history of the technology...
...As the last episode begins, Jerry gets a phone call from NBC in Hollywood...
...Strolling through town, Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer witness a guy being robbed, at gunpoint, in clear daylight...
...The fire of change is a transforming fire, Golden Child suggests...
...During the trial almost every major/ minor character who has appeared in the series shows up to take a curtain call and to testify that, yes indeed, our four main guys were just as crummy, selfish, and mendacious as we all know ourselves to be most of the time...
...And when we got home and checked out the newspaper, we found that the Associated Press guy panned it too: unfocused, rambling, not funny...
...To the clash of Peking opera cymbals, the wizened ghost of Kwong's fundamentalist Christian daughter (Julyana Soelistyo) appears to her agnostic son (a role doubled by Kim), and persuades him of the importance of family...
...I don't know or care if Seinfeld/David planned it this way, but that's how it turned out...
...certainly nothing more apposite to the last episode of "Seinfeld...
...But guilty of what, precisely...
...Jerry and George are to leave New York for California, to make the idea of the TV show, "Jerry," the reality of the TV show, "Seinfeld" (got a little shiver of systematic self-consciousness up your spine, there...
...The Herbal Bed, by projecting the forces of change onto the personality of an inspired idealist, suggests the same...
...She's right...
Vol. 125 • June 1998 • No. 11
