Elaine Benes: A Tribute
I was born in 1989, the same year Seinfeld started airing, however, I did not give it a chance until I, and the show, were 26 years old and we were in the age of streaming and binge-watching. This was how I met Elaine Benes, who, 26 years after her creation, still walked into my heart, like she was written for my generation.
Unlike Friends, or any other show about a group of friends, I feel like Seinfeld is not about who ends up with who or who dates who along the way, but about small, funny things in life. The joke is that it is a show about nothing, perhaps because so many of the things that make up our lives, we take for granted and are almost invisible to us. Sure, many unlikely and crazy things happen on Seinfeld, yet much of the drama and comedy come from things like a dot on a sweater, forgetting where you parked your car or going on a date. While I feel like many of the jokes on Friends or How i Met Your Mother come from the extreme, one-dimensional characters getting into trouble because of their extreme, one-dimensional personalities, the characters on Seinfeld get into trouble that I feel we could all get into. More so, I find it interesting, that the Internet is full of tests like “Which Friends character are you?”, when I have never known a Monica, Ross, Phoebe, Joey or Rachel in real life, maybe a Chandler, but not really. Why? Because nobody is just one of those characters, we all have at least two of them in us, most of us have all of them. We have a vain Rachel side, a dumb/primal Joey side, a nerdy/insecure Ross side, a quirky Phoebe side, an obsessive Monica side and a goofy Chandler side.
However, I definitely know or have known Jerrys, Georges, Kramers and Elaines — maybe less funny, well-written versions with fewer one-liners, but still people who are, at their core, like these characters. This makes a whole lot of sense when you think about Jerry Seinfeld playing (a version of) himself on the show and the character George Constanza being based on Larry David himself. These are TV versions of real people, not Breakfast Club-archetypes who are put together for comedy. The characters on Seinfeld are not opposites, instead they share many opinions and feel the same way about many things — it feels realistic that they would be friends, they laugh together as well as at each other. The only odd one out, Kramer, the least believable one to be part of the group, is the neighbour and often includes himself without being asked. To me, Kramer is the kind of character who is almost more part of the environment than he is a character, like the colourful townies on Gilmore Girls or Kato in the old Pink Panther movies. He could also have been a bad dog or a naughty kid, a tenacious part of Jerry’s life that he can not get rid of.
When I sat down to watch the show and let the few first episodes roll over me, I felt immediately, that this was something special. Sure, it is a classic sitcom in many ways, but it is a sitcom about real people with real problems, which is more than you can say about most sitcoms. I felt like I was watching the sitcom version of a good Woody Allen movie, rather than that of a mediocre rom-com.
So, this is how I met Elaine Benes, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. This was such a break through role for women in comedy, but of course I did not get the full effect of that, watching it for the first time in 2015. I have grown up with busloads of funny women on TV. However, my mind was still blown by Elaine. First of all, she is extremely funny, but often not in ways that have anything to do with her gender, as most of her lines could be said by a man as well. Second, she is intelligent and intentionally funny. Third, she is friends with the guys but she is not one of the guys, she has girlfriends and likes to do girly things. This is very refreshing to see, since she is not the girlfriend of one of the guys, though she used to be, and therefore has claimed her own spot in the group. Very few episodes do they explore the fact that she is a woman and they are men, and rarely do they have to. It is a group of four friends who have fun together — so what if one of them is a woman? Fourth, she is sweet and warm, not hysterical like so many women are portrayed for comedy. She has her quirks that will get her going, but so do the guys. All four of them are loopy in their own ways.
Recently I read what Natalie Portman has said about her role in Garden State and the whole “manic pixie dream girl” thing, and I like that she pointed out that it is a problem when the girl character is only there for the boy. For him to develop and have his arc. Were Elaine a character in an indie movie, she would be a dream girl, but on Seinfeld she is a person. They never use her to bring the boys to new places, she is part of the gang that goes places. As much as I love Penny on Big Bang Theory, and the show, she sometimes feels like she is only there to help the boys develop or be funny. Because she is their opposite, a non-book smart, street smart, socially intelligent woman, she enables them to truly show how nerdy and socially awkward they are. She is Harry Potter who knows nothing about the wizarding world and needs to be explained everything, the viewer’s ticket into their world as well as their ticket into our world. She is a tool for us as well as for the boys. Elaine is never a tool. Sure, she challenges the boys, and they challenge her, but never more so than that they always are and stay on the same team. It is not that I do not believe in having friends who are very different from you, I think that is very important, I just think that there is a big difference between that and being so different that everything is about how different you are, which goes on a lot in sitcoms. When that happens friends become types more than friends, because you have no common ground.
Elaine has a lot in common with the three men, especially Jerry, yet she teases them and lets them know when they are being ridiculous according to the values that they more or less all share.
For me, the most unrealistic thing about Seinfeld is that the three guys are not completely in love with Elaine all the time. I would be, was she real.
