“Life is short if you’re a child who died. But at 46 it’s
not short anymore.”
Louie is exhausted. That’s been a thread throughout the run
of the character’s eponymous show, but it rears its head here with a monotonous
vengeance. Life is long and full of so many days that must be gotten through.
You deal with friends, strangers and family, experience small victories and
numbing losses and eventually get to fall asleep before doing it all over
again. “Back” is minimal Louie, the
mild events of the day spreading to the next until the events stop, at least
for a moment. “Model” is a more adventurous story, but it has roots in the
mundane with the circular storytelling granting Louie a smile, if nothing else.
Both episodes are two sides of the same idea, exploring how even when the
situation heightens the man remains the same.
The rest of “Back” has encounters with recurring Louie characters, from the calmly
ruthless Todd Barry to the unsatisfied daughters to the poker table. The
highlight of the conversation with Barry sees a young man running into Louie
like a glitch in The Sims. The show is mocking this guy, but only to
the extent that it looks at any intrusive force in Louie’s life. It’s clear how
much of this is the exaggeration of his mind, making minor problems into
avalanches that weigh on him so much that he needs to see a doctor for his
back. Before that spasm, the final straw comes in the form of a sex shop. The
two women that work at the store talk casually, and the clerk is patient with Louie. She’s clearly seen this kind of customer before, the ones
who look down on themselves for something that shouldn’t cause shame. The scene
makes Louie, the person uncomfortable with his own desires, the butt of the
joke.
When Louie makes his way to the doctor’s office, he is
forced to listen to a lecture about how humans walk incorrectly, which is the
true cause of all back pain. We should be moving on our hands and knees, a
ridiculous notion that informs the episode’s preoccupation with getting through
the day in a number of ways. Chief among them is the idea that we’re all doing
something wrong; even our instinctual behavior is a dumb mistake that keeps us
from fully achieving happiness. The doctor tells Louie “every second spent
without back pain is a lucky second”. We may get a lucky minute out of this
eventually, but that’s about all. As the episode ends, Louie enters his
apartment with a solution to the “buying a vibrator” problem. Over this we hear
the beginning of another stand-up bit. “Lots of things happen after you die,
just none of them include you.” The thing that separates the years we’re alive
from the ones after we die is the fact that the former involves us and the
latter doesn’t. “Back” never hits a level of cynicism where the character truly
wants to die, but the fact that mortality comes up so often in a fairly humdrum
episode explores what’s on Louie’s mind. Death and life are in conversation
with each other, but death is a thing that happens and life is a thing that
simply is.
In “Model”, the situation is more surreal but the tedious
nature of life remains. After Louie tries and fails to hit on a waitress,
Jamie, he’s asked by Jerry Seinfeld to open at a heart disease benefit. Even
Seinfeld’s entrance here is bizarre; as the camera pans he walks into frame, as
if he has merely popped into existence. The entire episode feels dream-like,
which is even addressed at one point by Yvonne Strahovski’s Blake, a model and
daughter of an astronaut. Blake is the only one who finds any humor in Louie’s
set at the benefit. He shows up in a sloppy shirt and jeans, completely
underdressed and unable to sell clean material of any kind. He grows so
uncomfortable that he begins to dig into the wealthy donors for not
doing their own grocery shopping. When Jerry gets onstage he verbally tears
Louie apart, becoming an externalization of the bald cruelness of these surroundings.
Though she’s in the dark, we see Blake crumple at Jerry’s set, always out of
place with her peers.
Blake explains her infatuation with Louie in the next
scene: it’s not the he was funny on purpose, but rather that he stood out so much from the
rest of that world. The camera pulls her into focus when she explains why she’s fallen for Louie. She’s sick of the emptiness of wealth, at least
temporarily. Of course, however tired of society Blake is, she still takes him
back to her gigantic house on the beach. All credit to the show for never
turning her into a cartoon; though she spends much of her time giggling, Blake
is something more than a reaction to the shallowness of the one percent. She’s
clearly never struggled in any real way, embracing the definition of “cutting
loose” that only the rich can afford. But it’s in the way that she reacts to
Louie’s “so then what did [your father] do” that makes both the character and
Strahovski’s performance vital: she laughs a little too hard, but then she says "exactly". She isn’t an empty vessel for Louie to react off of, and she isn’t the
dream she later jokes about being. She is a person that likes that this man
makes her laugh and wants to have fun with him. The episode subtly turns this
trope on its head; it’s kind of selfish to think that a model wanting to sleep
with him is all about him. She’s the
one that wants to have sex and hang out.
In a way, “Model” works as an impressionistic response to
last season’s “Daddy’s Girlfriend”. Yes, both Parker Posey’s Liz and Strahovski’s
Blake are odd ducks. But Liz plays so heavily into the Manic Pixie Dream Girl
archetype in order to make her emotional pivot have the gravitas it does. Blake
is just looking to have a good time, to get away from the malaise of high
society for at least a night. She’s never noticed just how beautiful the
physical world around her is. You get the idea that even before she’s
sent to the hospital, this would be an episode in a show about her life as
well, which can’t always be said about the minor characters on Louie.
The end of the episode sees Louie go to the hospital, jail,
and a small beige room with a lawyer (Victor Garber) full of bad news. Blake’s eye
is permanently damaged from Louie’s reflexive punch, and her family is suing
him for five million dollars. He’ll be paying this mistake off for the rest of
his life. The scene is brutal, causing more sighs than laughter. As the lawyer
says, “people are under the misconception that the rich can’t sue the poor.” He
then says that a trial would end with money winning out as well. The scene
buries Louie, sending him back to the waitress with whom the episode began. She
finds this miserable tale so hilarious that she’s all over him, even offering
to get them both drinks. And here is a victory in the eyes of Louie. After one of the show’s cruelest
conversations, Louie is positively giddy. Everything hasn’t changed, but
something good came out of this series of mistakes.
This is not a show overflowing with sentimentality. Most
heartwarming moments are undercut in some way, and having those moments at all
is rare. But this is also not a cynical show, one comfortable with resting on
the idea that everything is a waste. That worldview doesn’t speak to the
approach of something as ambitious as last season’s “Late Night” trilogy, or
even the fleeting serenity present here. That all being said, those glances of
something more do play against the notion that Louie can’t even remember what
makes him laugh. This delicate balance of the beating and the uplift, and the
tension between the comedy of humiliation and the drama of existentialism defines Louie. Mel Brooks’ famous take on the
genre divide goes: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall
into an open sewer and die.” Louie is
such a confrontation of a character, while simultaneously being locked into his
mindset, that it’s at times impossible to know if we’re looking at a cut or he’s
looking at a sewer. The mixture of the two is present throughout “Back”
and “Model” in a precise way that’s found nowhere else on television. Whether
we’re meant to laugh, cry or groan, I’m glad to be in that space once again.
Grades
“Back”: A-
“Model”: A-
Miscellaneous:
- Louis CK sent out an e-mail to subscribers on his site earlier tonight, and said that after the first three episode, we'll be getting a six-part story, a three-part and then a two-part. The three-part is titled "Pamela". This is shaping up to be a fairly exceptional time.
- The “Dear AIDS” homework assignment is especially great after Louis CK’s recent twitter tirade.
- Bad Beatles impressions are among my favorite things in the world, so I has overjoyed to see them make their way to this show, especially in the closest thing to a happy scene the first episode has.
- “What is it, a panini?”
- “They look like celebrities but I don’t recognize any of them”: a great way to make the episode easier/cheaper to cast while adding to the surreal nature of the satire
- Though the new 24 gave her much less to do, tonight was an all-around great showcase of Yvonne Strahovski’s underrated talent. She’s sublime here, especially in her second delivery of “He walked on the moon”.
- “Martin Luther Chicken” is incredible, but the biggest laugh of the night is easily…
- “Chickens are dumb.”
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