Louie Louie Louie Louieee

I will be writing about Louie this season because if you don't write strained thinkpieces about Louie then you are thrown in blogger jail.

Louis CK has been all over the talk show circuit promoting up a storm for the fourth season of his acclaimed FX show Louie, and the fact that he "took a year off" between the third and fourth seasons always comes up. His explanation is that he didn't really take time off, but just spent more time working on the show, and he thinks that this season is the best one. "Elevator, Pt. 1" is a great example of this, as it balances terror, love, exasperation, and believable urban serendipity all in a brisk 22-minute package. 

That's what this show does best--delivering sharply divergent emotions, themes, and experiences in jolting, memorable ways. It's a sign of how the show has matured that there don't need to be any overtly comic moments in the short film sections--CK is confident enough in his dramatic storytelling to just tell his stories, and rely on the interstitial standup bits to deliver the yuks, as they always do. When Louie started back in 2010, I was excited, but part of me wanted CK to just keep cranking out hour-long standup specials, since he had put together a run of three that were arguably the funniest and smartest of all time. Now I actually look forward to his short films more than his standup, which I never thought would happen.

This episode is classic Louie--two short films that have no direct connection to each other, besides featuring the same central character. In the first chunk, Louie takes his daughters on the chaotic underworld of the NYC subway system. His youngest daughter, Jane, begins the episode by being certain that her waking life was actually a dream, and she decides that a fun thing to do would be slipping off the train just before the doors closed. Louie, always very protective of his daughters, goes predictably nuts, but channels his panic into a surprisingly well-executed rescue mission. There was something thrilling about the gusto with which he laid out precisely how he was going to retrieve Jane to his older, more stable daughter Lily--"As soon as the doors open, we are running, running, fast, and we are going to go up the stairs and cross the mezzanine, go to the downtown side, get on the first train coming back going back downtown, and we're going upstairs, back outside, crossing Lexington and going back downstairs to find Jane!" It was a great example of how living in New York City is filled with so many complex variables that need to be juggled to accomplish every daily task, and how this is especially compounded when you are responsible for highly quirky children.

When Louie does reach Jane, and thankfully she is totally fine, except for having a very skillfully selected creepy, dirty hand with questionable rings placed on her shoulder by an inquisitive stranger, he explodes on her in a way we haven't seen before. Louie is typically extremely distant and awkward, but here he really unleashes his anger at how what he cares for most in the world could put herself in such danger so carelessly. He keeps yelling at her and shaking her until she cries, and tells her that she should be crying so she remembers how badly she screwed up. An intense example of the highly dramatic potential of the most ordinary event, like the early episode "Halloween" from years ago, when Louie is intimidated by costumed guys while trick or treating with his daughters. This had more tension and a huge emotional payoff though, while that one was sort of all atmospherics.

The second short film begins what will presumably be a multiepisode arc. We see an old woman with what seems like a Russian accent played by Ellen Burstyn stuck in an elevator, and she does not handle it well. Of course, it's Louie's apartment building and Louie happens to be the one waiting for the elevator when this happens, and he is stuck with getting the old woman's pills so she doesn't pass out or worse in there. After being given her apartment keys, Louie finds an attractive younger woman sleeping on her couch, who the old lady tells him is her niece. She didn't know she was home, so she asks Louie to go wake her up and so she can wait with her, and Louie, nice guy that he is, obliges.

Naturally, the niece, who speaks no English, freaks out when she is awoken by a casually obese red-haired man, and chases him from the apartment. Louie sprints out of there and up to his apartment, probably moving faster than we've ever seen him, and seems genuinely thankful that she didn't stab him.

The episode ends with the niece, who sort of has the same scuffled, used up brunette beauty you see in NYC that Parker Posey's character did in previous seasons of the show, bringing over a delicious homemade apple pie. The two get along famously, despite the fact that they can't understand a thing the other says. This is becoming a theme for Louie, as he ended season three with a scene of him laughing happily with Chinese people in a remote Chinese village, thankful that they were feeding him. This is an interesting recurring theme for a comedian and actor so skilled with communicating, and for whom communicating as precisely and logically as possible seems so important. It's a good bet that we'll see this relationship between Louie and the pie-bearing niece soon, and I'm looking forward to it. After all, he's had such bad luck with conventional relationships, that maybe he needs someone to share a simple, pre-linguistic, pastry-based understanding of companionship and warmth with?

Lester Nygaard: The Rational Evil of Small Men

Lester Nygaard on the FX series Fargo is the serialized attempt to depict William H. Macy’s character Jerry Lundegaard from the classic film of the same name, and it sure adds a lot of layers that, in some respect, put the original filmic character to shame. Lester, played by the ubiquitous Martin Freeman, is an unassuming, unfailingly polite salesman, in the same way that Lundegaard was. It’s a thin politeness, though, used as a bulwark against having a substantive personality beneath the pleasantries—politeness as a shield, a life raft. This is a man who has never asserted himself or set boundaries to the liberties that others can take with him. As always with such characters, we wonder how they’ve managed to even carve out their modest family and professional lives, being as meek as they are.

In the film, Lundegaard’s wife is sort of a mirror version of himself—just someone who was equally nonthreatening and satisfactorily attractive, which makes a kind of sense. But in the show, Lester’s wife is a bully who takes every opportunity to remind him what an ineffectual loser he is, constantly telling him to man up and make his own success in the insurance sales world, to which he offers neutral, hasty agreement. Eventually she actually dares him to take action against her, fully confident that he won’t, and she ratchets up the insults, bringing flooding back all of the abuse Lester suffered in high school. Of course, he lashes out and bashes her skull in with a hammer, freshly confident from his chance hospital encounter with the free floating mass of malevolence Lee Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton).

Lundegaard was a man who was desperate to get money by any means necessary after a life of meekness left him without any other recourse, so he hired psychopaths to hold his wife for ransom to his wealthy father in law. Nygaard is a man who had been bullied his whole life, and convinced by Malvo that the man, Hess, who bullied him and bloodied his nose even as an adult, deserved to die. Nygaard didn’t explicitly tell Malvo to kill Hess, but it was left vague enough that a man as unfettered by laws or morals as Malvo could interpret it widely. It might not be accurate to say that Nygaard is glad that Malvo killed Hess, but the series of events that the murder inspired, especially with the verve he gleaned from it to club his wife to death, seems to offer more of a definitive direction to his life than he’d ever had.

People who have a life history of not healthily asserting themselves and looking out for their own interests will eventually overcompensate by making up the deficit of self-assertion in an antisocially sudden way. They aren’t aware of the harm that their sudden overly dramatic course correction causes the wider world, because they are so energized by the idea of not just being nothing anymore. And that is the root of the evil depicted in Nygaard’s type, and really to the Walter White type, who was a similarly milquetoast man innervated by the late in life discovery of the seeming limitlessness of his own gall—the excitement of suddenly not being simply nothing obscures the fact that one should step carefully in the world, being aware of the impact one has on one’s peers and surroundings. Smacking his nag of a wife in the skull with a hammer was the first true act Lester Nygaard ever committed, and certainly the most alive he’d ever felt. But this of course is an aliveness that has no purchase in the wider world, as it can’t be shared, and it had to come at the expense of someone else’s life.

The question arises—what other option did Nygaard, or Walter White, have? Can we really imagine people as meek as that ever healthily asserting themselves, expressing their values and opinions in a meaningful public context, proclaiming their worth and selfhood? The world as experienced from such a perspective really is an impossibly unfair place, ruled by the pushy and the baselessly confident. There is very little reason in the public sphere as viewed by such men—actions, relationships, experiences, none are ever adequately articulated or given a kind of context that can inspire faith in the logic and order of the human enterprise. So such men, in order to merely not feel bad for once in their pathetic lives, enact in distilled, immediate form the entirety of their experience of the illogic of the human situation, rather than doling out illogically aggressive but ego forming behavior in accretion.

Is this a new trope, the ineffectual, neutered professional male who finds healthy self-assertion so utterly beyond the pale, so steeped in illogic, that he can only find his true self through antisocial outbursts? Has the world become more observably absurd that the kind of unironic engagement with it necessary to form and sustain a healthy adult ego is viewed as more hopelessly beyond the pale than before? Or is this how evil has always been, an unsubtle attempt by the socially awkward to eke out a sliver of self-actualization that isn’t earned or natural, because doing so in the light of day seems to require more absurdity than can be comfortably engaged with? For such people, standing firmly and setting a line that the world cannot cross is less valid or possible than killing your wife with a hammer.