Jerry gets his car back from a valet and finds it entrenched with a terrible smell that ends up ruining his and Elaine’s lives. Meanwhile, George discovers Susan has become a lesbian after breaking up with him, only for Kramer to accidentally steal her girlfriend.
Written by: Larry David & Peter Mehlman
Directed by: Tom Cherones
This feels like a plot that you would find in Twin Peaks. Seinfeld does have this slightly surreal feel to its tone that mainly comes with preoccupation with banal behaviours that are stranger than ordinary life but not impossible, and the smelly car only just pushes the point of plausibility. I’ve never had a smell quite so bad or quite without some plausible source, but I have had lingering, terrible smells that I couldn’t get rid of. Also, we’ve talked before about plots intersecting on this show, but this is a rare one that feels like it infects the plots around it; Elaine’s story feels like it could have played out in a totally different way had the smell not entered it.
What’s interesting about this plot is how it explores the nature of Jerry and Elaine’s platonic male/female friendship. Normally it’s Elaine giving Jerry advice on women – if they give each other advice at all – but here Jerry gives Elaine insights into the male psyche as he understands it, and his fairly blunt interpretation of behaviour that strikes Elaine as vague is incredibly funny even outside its accuracy. He’s certainly right about me – I will not be up early if I don’t have to be, let alone skipping sex for it.
Meanwhile, this has a classic story of George discovering Susan has turned to lesbianism after dating him. This is another story that could have gone horribly wrong, and obviously I’m not the one to tell any particular lesbian she’s wrong for how she reacts to this, but for my money, not only do I think the story comes out great, I think George even comes out looking sympathetic!
It helps significantly that the episode, characteristically, doesn’t linger on his feelings of humiliation – long enough to be funny, not long enough to be whiny. The ironic thing about the show having such good comic premises is that it had the sense not to draw overt attention to the cleverness of said premises, simply letting their existence be enough. The nuances of George’s situation are therefore more carefully chosen; it’s incredibly funny to me that George actually respects that lesbians seem to have the sense not to go after men (or at least men like George). Even better is the way that George tries to relate to Susan after she’s been dumped; another classic case of the characters sincerely trying to help someone.
This, of course, leads me to the most potentially problematic aspect of this plot: Susan’s girlfriend dumps him for a man. There is a very old problem lesbians have had to deal with, in which men hit on them trying to leverage the idea that they simply haven’t had the right dick. Again, I’m not going to tell any individual lesbian she’s wrong for not liking this part of the story, but I think it works in that Kramer is played as a kind of supernatural figure rather than one you relate to; not only is everything he does wrong, everything he does works out the opposite of what it’s supposed to. This is just another aspect in which he breaks the universe.
TOPICS O’ THE WEEK
- “What am I, hard of smelling?”
- Some have suggested the smell is pot, but Jerry’s a New York comedian, he knows what pot smells like.
- As another example of Seinfeld only showing us what’s funny and nothing else, we only see Elaine’s boyfriend sniffing her before moving on.
- Rochelle, Rochelle returns, now on videotape.
- I love that you know things are going to go bad for George as soon as he commits to not returning the tape.
- “Is it possible I’m not as attractive as I think I am?”
- We get our first mention of Steinbrenner. Obviously, he’s a real person, but the show would develop him considerably as a comedy character.
- “The woman Susan is lesbianing with…”
- This is an incredible showcase for Jonathan Wolff’s work on the show’s score. It carries us across time and space with an incredibly intuitive sense of when to go fast or slow, long or short, and makes the whole experience so much more joyful.
- Great moment of acting from Julia Louis-Dreyfuss when she desperately gets her boyfriend to smell her hair.
- “I’ve already taken six strokes off my game.” / “That’s the least of what you’ve accomplished.”
- Beloved commentor Raven Wilder has remarked on how the show is happy not to show us conclusions, and the episode simply ends with Jerry not even getting his car stolen.
- “This is the way we’re designed. We move, we stink.”
Biggest Laugh: This is not a show that often goes for subversion of cliche, but it lands perfectly here.
Next Week: “The Handicap Spot”