For the last couple of days I have been reading with great interest your posts as you expressed your feelings about the final episode of Seinfeld. Finally, with your help, I have come to feel I understand what Larry David had in mind with the finale. My feeling is that his concept of how to end this series was brilliant but the execution was flawed.
Many of you thought the finale "sucked". I would invite you to consider this: Don't we all create our own prisions by our self-serving attitudes and judgements? I feel this is the point Larry David was making with this episode....and really, with the whole series. For nine years we laughed and snickered and hooted with glee over the whining, selfish, nit-picking self-indulgences of Jerry, Elaine, George and, to a lesser degree, Kramer. He somehow comes off as more innocent than the other three.
Where this series broke new ground was in confronting the private fears, guilts and prejudices each of us harbors on some level....all the taboos were laid right out on Jerry's table for our consideration. I can't think of anything worth snickering about that they missed: masturbation, nipples, "shrinkage", the "pick", bathroom habits, you name it, they talked about it...very artfully. We revelled in the fact that their self-serving attitudes, their graceless behaviors, their petty putdowns were being enacted every week by these characters as standins for our lesser selves. I think this accounts for the universal appeal, and the long run of the show: They represented our darker side.
And in the end, I think Larry David wanted to drive the point home that we (represented by the Fab Four) really live very isolated lives when we separate ourselves from the vast majority of others by our prejudices, criticisms and petty judgements of others who we feel are "separate" or different from, or somehow lesser than us. And so he contrived a way to have Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer "convicted" of this crime, and showed us their isolation in that eerie little cell in the final scene.
I'll bet Larry David's first "vision" of how this series should end contained the mental picture of the four main characters in that cell together, still petty, nit-picking and not "getting" it--which was the defining moment of the whole episode. The way he chose to have this happen was admittedly clumsy but just a tool to get to that final scene. I think we must forgive any discrepancies from the real law that it may contain -- the Good Samaritan Law -- it was a means to an end, and, as I said earlier, this episode was flawed. But I think we must look beyond the flaws to get to the essence of the episode if we are to find any peace with it at all. Because it did leave us feeling uncomfortable.
Which of us, does, after all, "get" that the world was not made solely for our amusement? Which of us does not have to struggle to find our way and cooperate with others rather than make them wrong when they are different from us in any way? Beginning with our our own families as George's relationship with his parents so eloquently expressed.
I think we might even take this episode to a higher level and say it represents "Judgement Day" for each of us. But I think someone else here has already made this observation.
As for the finale not being as funny as we are accustomed to, I think it was not intended to be funny, but mind-boggling. Someone alluded to their comments about Russia being "bleak". Couldn't that have been a subliminal message? Life IS bleak when we behave in the ways that Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer behave. I daresay there are other inferences to this inner bleakness in the final episode as well, but that is the one that leaps to my mind.
I also had the feeling expressed by many of you that none of the actors lived up to their previous acting abilities in this episode. I don't know how to explain this except to wonder if they weren't all sad knowing that this was the last time they would be together in this format. Or maybe they were just tired!
Thanks for listening to my view.
Beverlee
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