{"id":1746,"date":"2014-06-18T12:37:38","date_gmt":"2014-06-18T16:37:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/?p=1746"},"modified":"2014-06-18T12:45:02","modified_gmt":"2014-06-18T16:45:02","slug":"louie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/louie\/","title":{"rendered":"This Is Not That Thing: LOUIE, GIRLS, and What We Are Owed"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"tweetbutton1746\" class=\"tw_button\" style=\"\"><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/share?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Flouie%2F&amp;text=This%20Is%20Not%20That%20Thing%3A%20LOUIE%2C%20GIRLS%2C%20and%20What%20We%20Are%20Owed&amp;related=&amp;lang=en&amp;count=horizontal&amp;counturl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Flouie%2F\" class=\"twitter-share-button\"  style=\"width:55px;height:22px;background:transparent url('https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-tweet-button\/tweetn.png') no-repeat  0 0;text-align:left;text-indent:-9999px;display:block;\">Tweet<\/a><\/div><div id=\"fb_share_1\" style=\"float: right; margin-left: 10px;\"><a name=\"fb_share\" type=\"box_count\" share_url=\"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/louie\/\" href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php\">Share<\/a><\/div><div><script src=\"http:\/\/static.ak.fbcdn.net\/connect.php\/js\/FB.Share\" type=\"text\/javascript\"><\/script><\/div><p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Does <em>Louie<\/em> have obligations to us? This a question I&#8217;ve pondered again and again, certainly during this most recent season, where my own impressions have been both ringing and clashing with a lot of other viewers&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>Let me state up front: I am not here for Lou-splaining. I am not a\u00a0<em>Louie<\/em>\u00a0apologist. I first saw Louis C.K. doing standup in 1993. He had hair and he did a funny bit about motorcycles. There were nine\u00a0other comedians in the showcase, but he was the one I remembered and made a note to watch for again.\u00a0Over the years, I&#8217;ve loved some of what he&#8217;s done and less-than-loved other of it. For instance: I love\u00a0<em>Pootie Tang<\/em>, hate<em> Lucky Louie.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In regards to FX&#8217;s\u00a0<em>Louie<\/em>, I&#8217;m all over the map. Much of the show&#8217;s first two seasons had\u00a0that sloppy, early draft, suppressing-a-satisfied-smirk quality that I already didn&#8217;t like from <em>Curb Your Enthusiasm<\/em>. Most episodes, I&#8217;d watch quietly, end\u00a0with a shrug, and then go read a review that gushed about what I&#8217;d just seen. I was never convinced. The last two seasons have been far more interesting to me, as C.K. played with the world of his show\u00a0and seemed to want to reach for something deeper.<\/p>\n<p>A\u00a0mood&#8217;s been swelling in the critical media and social media I follow: The current (just-finished) season of <em>Louie<\/em> has been brilliant to some, problematic for others, and, to a vocal bunch, a flat-out\u00a0betrayal. Google &#8220;Louie not funny&#8221; and you&#8217;ll find\u00a0a flood of <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/search?q=louie%20not%20funny&amp;src=typd\" target=\"_blank\">posts<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/television\/comments\/268kdu\/an_enormous_louis_ck_fan_weighs_in_louie_is_not\/\" target=\"_blank\">rants<\/a>, and <em>Gawker<\/em>\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/gawker.com\/when-louie-stopped-being-funny-1592069970\" target=\"_blank\">thinkpieces<\/a> about where the show&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/blogs\/browbeat\/2014\/06\/17\/louie_on_fx_season_finale_pamela_is_great_but_burnishes_myth_of_louis_c.html\" target=\"_blank\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">gone wrong<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>(That <em>Gawker<\/em>\u00a0piece I just linked to, by the way, is the one most worth reading: It&#8217;s not merely\u00a0about the lack of comedy in season four &#8212; it&#8217;s about feeling soured on the shitty, dangerous, hurtful choices the character&#8217;s made, choices that feel weirdly condoned by Louis C.K. himself. Whether this is true or not, it&#8217;s an important discussion.)<\/p>\n<p>As I&#8217;ve watched Louie &#8212; and as I&#8217;ve rewatched those first two seasons with my kids &#8212;\u00a0here&#8217;s the thing I&#8217;ve had to keep reminding myself: If I\u00a0want a tightly structured, half-hour comedy filled with jokes, I\u00a0have roughly <em>six decades<\/em>&#8216; worth of shows\u00a0to choose from.<\/p>\n<p>But this is not that. This is something else, and it&#8217;s <em>always<\/em> been something else. Is the six-episode\u00a0&#8220;Elevator&#8221; arc,\u00a0or Todd Barry sucking up ten minutes to recap his day, really any more form-breaking than season one&#8217;s &#8220;God&#8221;? Or\u00a0&#8220;Dr. Ben\/Nick,&#8221; from even earlier in that run, an episode where less than nothing happens? Or the pilot, which is just two half-formed short films? He was telling us from minute\u00a0one that this was going to be the show, and yet we still keep trying\u00a0to jam our TV-comedy notions around it.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not here to defend Louis C.K.&#8217;s\u00a0writing, and I&#8217;m sure as hell not going to defend some of the show&#8217;s fucked-up moments with women. (Also known as <em>Lou-splaining<\/em>.) I am here to defend his right to tell the stories he wants in the ways he wants. He has no obligation to us. If we all stop watching, then he&#8217;ll know. If we all keep tuning in to see how he&#8217;ll disappoint us this week, then that&#8217;s on us, isn&#8217;t it?<\/p>\n<p>Do we, the collective viewer, ever have a right to expect a certain kind of show? We just don&#8217;t.\u00a0Again:\u00a0Six decades&#8217; worth of other stuff we might like better.\u00a0Hell, if you want a one-camera, half-hour comedy about a scruffy, misanthropic\u00a0comedian making a mess of his relationships, <em>Maron<\/em>&#8216;s running <em>right now<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>I like Louie because even at its basest, or at its most pretentious, it <em>engages<\/em> something in me. When I wrestle with <em>Louie<\/em>, I&#8217;m using a lot of the same muscles I use when watching\u00a0<em>GIRLS<\/em>. I can watch a half hour of <em>GIRLS<\/em>, not like any of the characters, not especially love what I&#8217;ve just seen &#8212; and yet, I&#8217;m still satisfied. It&#8217;s pushed some buttons somewhere inside me. Lena Dunham and her team have made me something I can&#8217;t see anywhere else, and while it&#8217;s not the way I&#8217;d make it &#8212; well, that&#8217;s the point, isn&#8217;t it? It&#8217;s not the thing I&#8217;d make. It&#8217;s not the thing I&#8217;m used to. And it not only makes me think about what I like and why I like it, it challenges me when I&#8217;m writing my own work.<\/p>\n<p>If either of these shows were incompetent or inarticulate, I couldn&#8217;t make a case for them. But <em>GIRLS<\/em> and <em>Louie<\/em>\u00a0each have a distinct point of view, one presented artfully, confidently. <em>Mind of Mencia<\/em>\u00a0and <em>Californication<\/em> had distinct points of view, too, also presented with plenty of confidence. But neither was especially artful (nor even competent), and there you have the difference. Do you have something to say? Do you have an interesting way to say it? Are you interested in challenging your characters, or even your\u00a0initial\u00a0viewpoint? If not, why are you here?<\/p>\n<p>In my Thursday fiction workshop, we&#8217;re doing something new. I normally assign weekly reading &#8212; a short story, a novel excerpt, an essay &#8212; but since all the students are working on novels, one of them asked if we could read a novel, week by week, as a group and talk about the craft of how it&#8217;s made. But\u00a0as will happen, a discussion of craft necessarily gives way to a discussion about art.<\/p>\n<p>The book I chose was <em>The Leftovers<\/em>, by Tom Perrotta. A number of my students are working on books with themes of spirituality or out-and-out magic, and <em>The Leftovers<\/em> is about what happens when The Rapture has happened and millions of people have simply vanished from the Earth. Several people are working on stories with multiple\u00a0points of view, and <em>The Leftovers<\/em> has that, too. Nearly everyone is working on something with a Big Theme, and I don&#8217;t know that you can get bigger than the whole &#8220;why are we here\/does God care about us&#8221; theme. Finally, most of my students are working on commercial fiction, and <em>The Leftovers\u00a0<\/em>has been\u00a0adapted as an HBO series, premiering this month.<\/p>\n<p>Also, I&#8217;d never read <em>The Leftovers<\/em>, so I could go in with the same expectations as everyone else.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve read Tom Perrotta since the mid-90s, so I knew we&#8217;d be in capable hands. I went into this experiment thinking we&#8217;d be ticking the boxes from week to week: How&#8217;s the plot proceeding? How does Perrotta teach us who his characters are? Do they feel like distinct characters from the start? How are the transitions? All the stuff we talk about with my students&#8217; own work.<\/p>\n<p>Reading <em>The Leftovers<\/em> has turned out to be a master class in This Is Not That Thing. Every week, it&#8217;s like a six-person brawl has broken out, and it&#8217;s exhilarating. From the start, reactions were divided. Some people felt like it took forever to start moving (we&#8217;re reading in 60-page chunks over a 6-week period), some people felt like it rushed past the Rapture stuff. Some didn&#8217;t engage with any of the characters, some did. Some thought\u00a0the writing was nothing special, some thought it was gorgeous.<\/p>\n<p>The one constant issue in the group is with regard to the story itself. For a book with such a high-concept premise &#8212; the Rapture happens and those LEFT BEHIND have to sort out why they&#8217;re still there and whether they can move on &#8212; it is brazenly unconcerned with anything to do with the Rapture. Nearly all the action happens in one town, Mapleton, and most of the story&#8217;s told via the scattered members of one family &#8212; a family that didn&#8217;t actually lose anyone to The Rapture. (It&#8217;s a non-Christian Rapture, btw, or at least it didn&#8217;t play by modern evangelical Christian rules.)<\/p>\n<p>Every week, we get further into this story, and every week someone is bothered by the book&#8217;s lack of urgency. &#8220;Why isn&#8217;t anyone looking for what happened to these people?&#8221; &#8220;I don&#8217;t buy that everyone just went on living after this huge, global, unexplainable event.&#8221; &#8220;Nothing much is happening with these characters.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I struggle a little with the book, too, and I think it&#8217;s because of That Premise. But the thing is, Perrotta tells you with the <em>prologue<\/em> that this isn&#8217;t going to be that book. He starts out after the Event has happened, and then the book jumps in time by three years. None of this is accidental. Perrotta, going back to his early short stories, or to <em>Election<\/em>, has always been a writer interested in <em>choices<\/em>. He doesn&#8217;t care why the Rapture happened. He&#8217;s interested in seeing what people do now that it has. And he operates from a position that seems very real to me: That people would be traumatized and upset, but that we&#8217;ll always go back to our old ruts and habits.<\/p>\n<p>If you were in NYC during 9\/11, you know this already. The day it happened, I was in Brooklyn and later (when the F-train opened back up) Manhattan, and strangers really were hugging each other on the street, crying in each other&#8217;s arms. A bunch of us, not knowing what else to do, ran to hospitals and donated blood. And then time passed. For the nightmare surreality of that day, and for all the horrible change it wrought in the lives of those who lost loved ones, the rest of us got right back to where we were in alarming time.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s the book Perrotta is writing here. What do you do <em>after<\/em>\u00a0a cataclysmic event? Especially if there are no &#8220;hero&#8221; stories to distract you from the horror? Especially if you&#8217;re a self-absorbed American in the early 21st century? Do you try to make everything right again, or do you try to find a new way of living? And can you ever &#8212; and this is the question of nearly all fiction &#8212; change who you are? That&#8217;s what he&#8217;s writing. The Rapture ends up lending the book its dark humor &#8212; an unexplainable, unimaginable global event\u00a0has happened, and we&#8217;re all still worried about dating, or whether or not to smoke &#8212; but not its storyline.<\/p>\n<p>If you want a book about people LEFT BEHIND after a Rapture, you certainly have other choices. This is not that thing. Yet, for me it&#8217;s not dissatisfying. Perrotta&#8217;s telling the story he wants to tell &#8212; not the one we thought were\u00a0signing up for &#8212; and he&#8217;s telling it well, and he&#8217;s challenging his characters, and he&#8217;s challenging the reader.\u00a0What else do you want? And there&#8217;s nothing wrong with wanting to read about a world where the Rapture&#8217;s happened, by the way.<\/p>\n<p>But with any piece of art, you have to put aside what you wanted to see and ask: <em>What are they showing me? <\/em>And judge it on that.<\/p>\n<p>I started this by talking about <em>Louie<\/em>. I&#8217;m more engaged than ever by\u00a0that show, but I do\u00a0worry that C.K.&#8217;s interests in expectation-pushing will exceed his abilities as a storyteller. There comes a point, sometimes, where you can feel a writer just fucking with you, and that&#8217;s not fun. Late in the <em>Sopranos<\/em> run, there was a lot of that. You could feel David Chase saying, &#8220;Oh, you think these people are interesting? You think they&#8217;re fun to watch? Well, HERE.&#8221; A lot of people have that reaction to<em> Game of Thrones<\/em> and <em>The Walking Dead<\/em>: These stories feel sadistic &#8212; towards their characters, toward the audience.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a fine line between challenging and antagonistic. Antagonism, like shock value, like artifice, like formlessness, is goddamn cheap. I hope <em>Louie<\/em>\u00a0sticks with challenging.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div id=\"tweetbutton1746\" class=\"tw_button\" style=\"\"><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/share?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Flouie%2F&amp;text=This%20Is%20Not%20That%20Thing%3A%20LOUIE%2C%20GIRLS%2C%20and%20What%20We%20Are%20Owed&amp;related=&amp;lang=en&amp;count=horizontal&amp;counturl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Flouie%2F\" class=\"twitter-share-button\"  style=\"width:55px;height:22px;background:transparent url('https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-tweet-button\/tweetn.png') no-repeat  0 0;text-align:left;text-indent:-9999px;display:block;\">Tweet<\/a><\/div><p>This season of LOUIE has left a lot of viewers feeling cheated. What does a creative work owe us, anyway?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-what-are-you-watching","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1746"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1749,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1746\/revisions\/1749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}