A Hero of our time?
An apologia for Larry David would go something like the following.
This week B has been watching all of Curb Your Enthusiasm front to back again. And, naturally enough, I've been watching a good deal of it with him. Over dinner last night, I mentioned that with this kind of intensive exposure to the show, I can feel myself taking on some of Larry David's mannerisms and (perhaps more disturbingly) viewpoint on the world.
Of course this is more a product of my tendency to sympathetically over-identify with whatever strong personalities I am exposed to than anything else. But it provoked a discussion of the merits of the show and, in particular, of Larry David's "character". The center of the discussion, from my point of view at least, was whether or not the viewer should find David's character (i.e. David) at all sympathetic.
The case against this claim is simple enough. David is dominated by his own petty egocentric concerns to the degree that he regularly causes real pain to those around him - or, at the very least, causes whatever passes for pain among the rich and pampered Hollywood elite and their hangers-on. He is, in effect, someone who lives within a set of barriers constructed out of his own, only partially intelligible, rules and principles for life - a set of barriers which prevents him from having much in the way of satisfying or genuine interaction with others.
But just this, I think, is the basis of what - in the end - makes David so sympathetic, at least to me. After all, one thing he plainly is is a man of principle - even if these principles are idiosyncratic and irrational. And this - his principled nature - is the basis for nearly all of the action that takes within the series. For nearly every plot-point within the series is based on one or another objection David makes to the normal or conventional pattern of behavior - and these objections are always based on some obscure principle or another of his own.
Thus, one way to think of David's character is as a sort of parody of the rule-governed Kantian moral agent - albeit one whose selection of principles is surely not guided by anything like the Categorical Imperative. Still, whatever David's failings, one of them is not that his principles are draw from the prevailing social conventions and norms. Rather, David is both deeply principled and deeply unconventional. Thus, his difficulties may be understood as the product of the struggle of a man of principle to interact with a world whose conventions do not fit with his principles. And this struggle, at least, is something that anyone who sometimes feels disgust at the petty and irrational conventions which govern social interaction should be sympathetic to.
In fact, as David makes clear, to be principled today in an unconventional manner is no small achievement. For, in today's climate of conformity disguised as deviance, achieving a truly principled non-conformity may require the sort of absurd behavior that David displays. After all, the principles that guide an agent will either be intelligible in terms of our accepted conventions and norms for action or else they will possess at least some of the absurdity that David's principles possess. Perhaps this is something of a reductio of the very idea of a principled non-conformity, but - so long as we find this ideal attractive, as I still do - we should find something in Larry David to like, and even to admire.
This week B has been watching all of Curb Your Enthusiasm front to back again. And, naturally enough, I've been watching a good deal of it with him. Over dinner last night, I mentioned that with this kind of intensive exposure to the show, I can feel myself taking on some of Larry David's mannerisms and (perhaps more disturbingly) viewpoint on the world.
Of course this is more a product of my tendency to sympathetically over-identify with whatever strong personalities I am exposed to than anything else. But it provoked a discussion of the merits of the show and, in particular, of Larry David's "character". The center of the discussion, from my point of view at least, was whether or not the viewer should find David's character (i.e. David) at all sympathetic.
The case against this claim is simple enough. David is dominated by his own petty egocentric concerns to the degree that he regularly causes real pain to those around him - or, at the very least, causes whatever passes for pain among the rich and pampered Hollywood elite and their hangers-on. He is, in effect, someone who lives within a set of barriers constructed out of his own, only partially intelligible, rules and principles for life - a set of barriers which prevents him from having much in the way of satisfying or genuine interaction with others.
But just this, I think, is the basis of what - in the end - makes David so sympathetic, at least to me. After all, one thing he plainly is is a man of principle - even if these principles are idiosyncratic and irrational. And this - his principled nature - is the basis for nearly all of the action that takes within the series. For nearly every plot-point within the series is based on one or another objection David makes to the normal or conventional pattern of behavior - and these objections are always based on some obscure principle or another of his own.
Thus, one way to think of David's character is as a sort of parody of the rule-governed Kantian moral agent - albeit one whose selection of principles is surely not guided by anything like the Categorical Imperative. Still, whatever David's failings, one of them is not that his principles are draw from the prevailing social conventions and norms. Rather, David is both deeply principled and deeply unconventional. Thus, his difficulties may be understood as the product of the struggle of a man of principle to interact with a world whose conventions do not fit with his principles. And this struggle, at least, is something that anyone who sometimes feels disgust at the petty and irrational conventions which govern social interaction should be sympathetic to.
In fact, as David makes clear, to be principled today in an unconventional manner is no small achievement. For, in today's climate of conformity disguised as deviance, achieving a truly principled non-conformity may require the sort of absurd behavior that David displays. After all, the principles that guide an agent will either be intelligible in terms of our accepted conventions and norms for action or else they will possess at least some of the absurdity that David's principles possess. Perhaps this is something of a reductio of the very idea of a principled non-conformity, but - so long as we find this ideal attractive, as I still do - we should find something in Larry David to like, and even to admire.
posted by kds at 9:53 AM
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