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Life in the Anticommons
by Shubha Ghosh
If the show Seinfeld
was about nothing, then its descendent Curb Your Enthusiasm
is about everything. Both programs are the creative spawn of
Larry David, and while the show about two neurotics Jews, a shiksa,
and an inveterate shlemiel applied the microscope to the minute
details of our lives (like the placement of a button on a shirt,
a bit that began and ended the series), David's current show
about the insane in Los Angeles (where else?) tries in every
episode to connect all the details into one big picture. In
the first episode of Curb, for example, David's obsession
with the fold of his pants leads to erectile confusion with his
wife's friend, a resulting family squabble, and a series of lies
that does not end well for our anti-hero. In my favorite episode,
David's decision to be nice to a child leads to an elaborate
plot involving a doll's head, a broken bathroom door, a bottle
of water, and an angry mob that menacingly descends on David
at the end of the half hour. In Curb Your Enthusiasm,
a whole lot of nothing leads to something both bewildering and
exhilarating.
 That
something is a smart picture of what life is like in the anticommons.
For those of you who are not property theorists, or do not pursue
legal theory as a hobby, the anticommons describes a world where
everything is private. There is no public space, communally
shared or enjoyed. The world, both physical and metaphysical,
is sliced up into individual rights, guarded religiously.
The anticommons is the opposite of the more familiar commons,
a world where nothing is private and excessive sharing leads
to overuse of resources and eventual decline and fall. In the
commons, individuals allow their cattle to overgraze the unrestricted
pastures. In the anticommons, merely looking at someone else's
cattle can be cause for social sanction.
The world of Curb Your Enthusiasm,
which is either real Los Angeles or Los Angeles as extended metaphor,
is undoubtedly an anticommons. When Larry David discards an
apple core in a trash can by the side of the street, the owner
of the trash can reacts viscerally, threatening to kick David's
and anyone else's ass the next time the can is so violated.
(Unfortunately, the next perpetrator turns out to be Ted Danson,
who takes off in flight when the trash can owner sees him defile
his precious property.) The citizens of the anti-commons are
not only hypersensitive, they are shrewd and cunning in negotiating
their self-interest to satisfy even the most trivial wants and
needs. In an episode entitled "The Wire," David and
his wife attempt to convince their neighbors to help defray the
costs of putting an ugly, overhead wire underground. In exchange
for their agreement, the neighbors ask for only one thing: a
meeting with Julia Louise Dreyfuss, the female lead in Seinfeld.
The episode turns into the typical mess, this time involving
the failure to coordinate schedules, an overzealous fan with
a videocamera appropriating Dreyfuss' image, and David's little
black book that could very well have been stolen by someone in
the Dreyfuss' household. At the end of the episode, negotiations
break down, the offensive wire remains above ground, and the
Davids decide, out of necessity, to buy a new house. In the
anticommons, small transgressions become magnified through the
fluttering of easily ruffled wings.
The anticommons is a world
with too many individual rights, and in every episode of Curb
Your Enthusiasm, rights not only talk, they shout out, sometimes
gratingly, more often with great insight. Perhaps the two
best episodes that illustrate just how profound the show can
be about rights are the ones entitled "Affirmative Action"
and "The Group."
In "Affirmative Action,"
Larry David does what no person has ever done before on television
or, perhaps in real life (certainly in academics): admit that
he is completely clueless about race. The episode begins with
David unintentionally insulting his friend's dermatologist by
asking, in presence of the African-American dermatologist: "You
have him as a doctor? With affirmative action and all?"
Needless to say, the offended dermatologist storms off, and
David's friend asks (as all David's friends are wont to do):
"What were you thinking?" David gives the most honest
response imaginable: "I just don't know what to say to black
people". While some may use the incident to comment on
the need for sensitivity, and others to comment on the hypersensitivity
of minorities, and others yet to revive vestigal racial attitudes,
which are far from defunct, David has the guts to admit that
he, as privileged white male, just may not have all the answers.
He portrays himself neither as savior or as villain, but as a
clueless guy, just bumbling along.
The rest of the episode is
a brilliantly choreographed power play as David finds himself
having to get back into the good graces of the dermatologist
in order to have his wife's prescription for a skin rash medication
filled. Following a path strewn with insulted maitre d's and
irate pharmacists, the Davids wind up in the living room of the
dermatologist with a gathering of his equally successful African-American
friends. With his wife scratching an itch next to him, David
squirms to explain his earlier comment and return into good favor
through supplication.. David, however, falls from grace again
when one of the guests emerges from the bathroom and starts berating
him for not having any African-American characters on Seinfeld.
Rights scream, but the show is not cacophonous. The episode
demonstrates the complicated maneuvering that is mandated in
a post-civil rights world, where everyone is conscious at some
level of societal injustices, but ultimately clueless on how
to negotiate the racist demons of the past and their present
incarnations.
A different type of oppression
and victimhood is the subject of "The Group," an episode
in which David attends an incest survivor group to support a
friend and shares a wholly fabricated story about being molested
by an uncle as a child. When a member of the group, played
by Lorraine Newman, meets the uncle at the end of the episode,
the true incest survivor takes out her anger on the fictional
oppressor. While David's story of abuse is certainly a contrived
plot device, the need to make up such a story is consistent with
David's character and the episode's representation of victimhood.
David's character seems to suffer from a persecution complex,
perhaps exacerbated by the hypersensitivities of everyone he
encounters. He sees himself as perpetual victim and consequently
acts out in a ways that brings out the victim in others. Some
undoubtedly would take offense in even broaching the subject
of incest in a humourous manner. But the point is to illustrate
the dynamic of victimhood and the need to lash out at the oppressor,
even a wholly imagined one. Rights do not talk or scream in
the episode, but signify the power play among individuals in
a fractured and fragmented world.
If Curb Your Enthusiasm
was solely about people getting mad at each other over trivial
or grave transgressions, the show would be no different from
reality television. But there seems to be a trajectory to the
series over the three seasons that I, HBO-deprived, have been
able to spot on the recently released DVDs. The first season
set the framework for the world as anticommons. The second
season turned up the volume on this motif through a series of
absolutely brilliant episodes that gave depth to the fractionalized
world. The third season, however, struck me as less impressive
and entertaining than the other two. While this change in tone
was disappointing, my reaction to the third season did not reflect
a decline in the show's quality. Instead, the episodes of the
third season show the characters attempting to find a moral center
and retreat from their well-honed self-absorption. The lack
of edge to the third reason reflects the dilemma of moving out
of the quagmire of the anticommons.
For example, in the episode
entitled "The Terrorist Attack," David is told in confidence
that Los Angeles is about to be attacked by terrorists. After
a failed attempt to use the threat to get out of an obligation
to attend a fund raising event with his wife, David uses the
information to negotiate good will with the wife of a friend,
whom he feels he has snubbed. The self-serving moves are not
surprising. What is different is that David, for some reason,
cares about the opinion or feeling of another human being.
In "The Special Section," this nascent empathy takes
on a deeper dimension. David returns to Los Angeles from a
business trip in New York to be informed by his father that his
mother has passed away (and that the funeral was last Monday).
For the first time, David seems distraught and emotionally
devastated. That feeling appears shortlived when David tries
to use his mother's death as negotiable currency to extricate
himself from social obligations. But the feeling makes a shining
and memorable reappearance when David learns that his mother
was buried in a special section of the Jewish cemetery because
of a tattoo on her buttocks. David, committing one of the few
unselfish acts in the series, bribes a gravedigger to have his
mother dug up and interred in a more respectable part of the
cemetary.
The third season also demonstrates
David being able to move comfortably across racial and religious
lines. In "Krazee-Eyez Killa," David gets along quite
well with the eponymous African-American rapper, even advising
him on the placement of "motherfucker" in the lyrics
of a work-in-progress. When Killa bestows the honor on David
of calling him "my nigger," David returns the favor
by letting the rapper know that "you are my Caucasian."
In "Mary, Joseph, & Larry," David performs penance
for disrupting the baptism of his sister-in-law's Jewish fiancé
(resulting in the cancellation of the wedding and a heated Jewish-Christian
exchange) by hiring a group of Christian actors staging a manger
scene to perform at his house during the holidays for his visiting
in-laws. But do not think for a moment that humanity has been
restored to the anti-commons. The bond with the rapper breaks
when David, perhaps accidentally, perhaps not, spills the beans
to the rapper's fiancee about his infidelities. And the ecumenical
ties with the actors are severed when David comments on the figure
of the actress playing Mary, sending Joseph into violent rage
against the man of good intentions.
Nonetheless, season three ends
optimistically, on a hopeful note for those who think that all
is lost in the socially splintered anticommons. The running
plot of the third season concerns David opening a new restaurant
with his friends and colleagues. This transaction, itself, suggests
a movement from the Hobbesian world of previous seasons and the
emergence of pacifying and sweetening commerce. In the anticommons,
transactions are the main way of building bridges across individuals.
But David manages to connect with other people at another level
as well. In the final episode of season three, entitled "The
Grand Opening," David sees a bunch of high school students
who have shaved their heads as a sign of solidarity with a classmate
undergoing chemotherapy. David comments, showing for once some
depth to his character, that he would like to do something so
noble one day. His time comes on the opening night of the restaurant
when his head chef, who suffers from Tourette's Syndrome, breaks
out in a bout of loud and unprintable swearing. The guests stop
eating, and David and his partners are paralyzed in their response.
Finally, David has his moment, perhaps the key moment of the
series, and he covers up for the chef's affliction by swearing
very loudly himself. Soon, everyone in the restaurant begins
cursing, David's partner, his father and uncles, his wife's family,
and a host of other characters from past episodes. The denizens
of the anticommons engage in their first communal act, transcending
their selfish, protectionist tendencies in a profanely shared
moment.
So after three seasons perhaps
there is hope. I cannot wait for the fourth season to come out
on DVD so I can see if life in the anticommons has evolved any
further. In the meanwhile, I have three DVD sets which have
a special place in my library to serve as my portal to a world
where social rules and a sense of social solidarity have disintegrated
into self-concern, self-aggrandizement, and self-absorption.
Hey, they are more entertaining than a faculty meeting or an
AALS convention and come with an off button.
Posted March 1, 2005
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