LARRY DAVID LIVES IN HELL
Los Angeles-based series perfectly captures ease and irritation of the Westside
In the 1940s, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht spent five years in exile, most of them in a tidy white house in Santa Monica, Calif. He didn't love it.
And so he wrote Hollywood Elegies, a lyric cycle about a city that chewed up writers and spit them out. “In these parts,” Brecht lamented, “they have come to the conclusion that God, requiring a heaven and a hell, didn't need to plan two establishments but just the one.”
Nothing captures this doubleness, the sense of the Westside of Los Angeles as paradise and perdition, better than the product of another writer-in-exile: Larry David.
Seinfeld, the Manhattan-set NBC series that made David rich enough to live in these parts, famously captured that other west side as a land of improbably large one-bedrooms, sticky diners and strivers driven to hilarious forms of madness. Its successor, Curb Your Enthusiasm, now nearing the conclusion of its 12th and final season, stars David (as “Larry David”) and renders L.A.'s Westside as the end point of all that neurotic New York aspiration — a heaven of greenery, blond wood and square footage and a hell of cranks in Rivians who seem to have lost some essential tether to the world.
I know this because I, too, am an exile in David's neck of the (well-landscaped) woods. I walk or drive past Curb locations every day; I've been to the restaurant with “the Ugly Section” and attended a dinner party up the block from Larry's faux-Tuscan castle. The show's sharpest stabs at the Westside vibe may be more spiritual than physical, but in this city so often reduced to cliché, Curb has been admirably precise about the geography, too. By now, David's series has spent nearly a quarter-century constructing one of the great L.A. stories, and it nails the milieu gloriously: a realm of tremendous ease and perpetual irritation.
In Los Angeles, neighbourhoods north of the I-10 (effectively a historical redline), can be defined by their relationship to Hollywood. The farther west you go, the more money residents tend to make out of that relationship. Young aspirants populate the hipster Northeast, writers cavort in Silver Lake and Los Feliz, and actors climb the hills of Hollywood. But the Westside belongs to the producers, the possessors of Tesla Model S's and overall deals.
David's domain is even more specific. The Curb Belt is a crescent running from the northern parts of Brentwood and Santa Monica up through the coastal canyons of the Pacific Palisades. There are palm trees on Curb, but its predominant vegetation is more varied and lush: crooked coral trees sprouting brilliant red flowers, fig trees fractaling into manicured florets, bougainvillea and birds of paradise. The houses are similarly florid and eclectic, if not always as pleasing to the eye.
At the start of the series, David and his TV wife, Cheryl (Cheryl Hines), live in something like the lair of a giant hobbit; soon they move into a monstrous palazzo. “L.A. is an incredible architecture city,” novelist and longtime Westsider Antoine Wilson says. “And yet the houses that these characters live in reflect this weird kind of tastelessness and conformity.”
This sense of ersatz style — eclecticism flattened into pastiche — permeates the many real places featured on the show: the fake Tudor facade of upscale Italian spot Amici Brentwood clashing with the Connecticut barn decor of the Brentwood Country Mart (a mall), the New York-style pizza place that owes its authenticity to the owner being the son of an actor in The Godfather, the cosy-sounding Palisades Village (another mall) that resembles nothing more than a hamlet of Apple Stores, the vaguely neo-Victorian mansion housing a restaurant called the Victorian. Everything is so studiously different, yet exactly the same.
David is not a cog in this machine; instead he throws sand in the gears. On Curb, he expresses his individuality by making a nuisance of himself at dinner parties (“Do you respect wood?”) or berating “pig parkers” along the Curb Belt's retail corridors. In doing so, he punctures the Westside's surface of ease. But what is David really tilting against, beyond his own inconvenience? For one thing, an alien culture in which the frankness and frisson of New York are replaced with mysterious rules and empty niceties.
No setting epitomizes this contrast quite like a golf club, a setting in several episodes of the current season. (It's closely modelled on David's own Riviera Country Club.) In episode 3, he eavesdrops on a golf lesson intended for Oscar-winning deaf actor Troy Kotsur. Fortified by the lesson, he soon launches a ball way down the fairway — and it hits Troy square on the back. David waves silently, figuring Troy wouldn't hear “Fore!” The usual ruckus ensues, then an argument. To make amends, David offers Troy a free meal via Postmates. The golf pro whose lesson he has just stolen scoffs: “`Deeply and profoundly sorry' — and you offer him Postmates?!” David has broken several (literally) unspoken rules. His way out of this etiquette conundrum: exposing his testicles to repulse the club's irate owner.
Sure, the setting is rarefied, but what makes Curb a hit is that his cathartic rebellion is contagious and universal. It's safe to say every human on the planet, Westsider or not, has at some point wanted to Larry David out — to snap at a minor slight that also reflects the existential crisis of living among other humans.