THE REAL AND SPECTACULAR SINGLE WOMEN PLAYED BY JULIA LOUIS- DREYFUS.
WHEN JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS PLAYS SINGLE WOMEN, THEY’RE REAL AND THEY’RE SPECTACULAR
Who’s the one woman on television who has epitomized what it means to be a deliciously selfish single woman? Kim Cattrall as Samantha Jones, or any of the women on Sex and City, might come to mind. But it’s actually Julia Louis-Dreyfus, whose characters have done the most to reframe what it means to be a single woman.
Unlike Murphy Brown and Sex and the City, shows that put their characters’ single statuses front and centre, Louis-Dreyfus’ s characters just happen to be single. First, she gave us Elaine, who could match her guy friends for number of partners, sex drive, frank sex talk and emotional detachment. Then she played Christine Campbell, a divorced mom who maintains a close relationship with her ex- husband while running a business and doing pretty well on the dating market. ( Scott Bakula, Blair Underwood and Eric McCormack were among her suitors on the show, The New Adventures of Old Christine.) And now her Veep character, Selina Meyer, has gotten all the way to the White House as a single mom with a sex life.
Although Louis- Dreyfus has been married to writeractor Brad Hall for nearly 30 years, she has spent most of that time modelling for us how to remain happily independent while demanding from our dates not just what we deserve, but maybe even a little more. Hey, a woman doesn’ t rise from hang- ing with George and Jerry to president of the United States by pining for Prince Charming.
Let’s start with Elaine. At the time she was conceived as a character — in 1990, when NBC demanded that show creators Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld add a female character after an Elaine-free pilot episode — pop culture hadn’t seen a female character like Elaine Benes. As the only major female character on the show that dominated the 1990s, she became the model for single womanhood for a generation and beyond, via reruns. From her, Gen X women learned to care as much about sponge-worthiness and cunnilingus as they did about romance and marriage.
David and Seinfeld based Elaine on what they considered a rare bird: a woman Jerry could date but remain fri ends with after ward, modelled on the relationship David had with Monica Yates, the daughter of novelist Richard Yates. Singlehood was built into Elaine’s character, and her relationships tended toward either total weirdos — the Maestro, the guy obsessed with the song Desperado. Or “mimbos” — hot guys who gave her great sex, but little else.
She isn’t merely picky, like Jerry. She seems to be actively choosing guys with whom she has no future. Elaine is stalked by Crazy Joe Davola and burned by her attempt to be “friends with benefits” with Jerry. She breaks up with one guy for not offering her pie, another for being pro- life. She loses “The Contest” when JFK Jr. shows up at her gym and starts asking about her. Her longest relationship is with a schlub named Puddy, whom she dates out of sheer inertia.
Sure, she isn’t exactly a people person, and her dancing is a national embarrassment. But she’s also smart and sexy as hell. Where typical romantic comedy heroines play off their adorableness, Elaine pushes her friends in the chest and yells: GET OUT!
“I’m sick of being single,” Elaine once told Jerry. “I’m getting out.” And yet there she was two years later in the Seinfeld finale, hanging in a jail cell with her deadbeat guy friends Jerry, George and Kramer, further from “getting out” than ever. Elaine may not have modelled the ideal life — what was she still doing, hanging out with those three guys nearly a decade after we first met her? But she showed us there was life beyond the sitcom wife, beyond even the idealized single- woman stars of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Murphy Brown. She bridged the gap from Mary’s sweet perfection and Murphy’s kick- ass careerism to Carrie Bradshaw’s frank sex talk.
A judgy grandma type might say that it’s no wonder Elaine ends up alone. Elaine displays few, if any, signs of generosity or reciprocity in relationships. But at the time, these traits represented bold choices for a female character, giving us a corrective for the continuous women’s magazine headlines worrying us about what men want. Elaine occasionally expressed a desire to get married, but she was not in any apparent hurry. And she wasn’t about to start caring about what men wanted just to get herself down the aisle.
Elaine’s antics, while exaggerated, gave us a vision of singledom more realistic than the Nora Ephron romantic comedies of her time ( When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail). Elaine showed us that men and women can be friends — and that friendswith-benefits rarely end up together after a mushy New Year’s Eve declaration of love.
Dating is a series of breakups for no good reason (pie) and for plenty of good ones ( abortion stances). Women masturbate, can have unemotional sex and can’t resist a pretty face any more than men can. These ideas came later, fully formed, in Sex and the City, but that was on a show about women, mainly for women. Seinfeld brought these fairly radical-for-the-time ideas to a huge, mainstream, largely male audience.
Louis- Dreyfus’ characters since Seinfeld have only furthered Elaine’s legacy. Christine Campbell unapologetically dated her kid’s dreamy teacher (who even switched jobs to be with her) and her therapist, among several inappropriate dating choices she totally owned.
President Selina Meyer takes Elaine’s selfish- singlewoman mandate to a new level. As a divorced mom, she has become president without the encumbrance of a first dude — an unlikely scenario, given Americans’ obsession with family values.
Could a single, female president be in our future someday? If so, we have Julia Louis- Dreyfus — and Elaine Benes — to thank.