Louie

Louie – According to media critics, the five episodes (second season) of this sit-com (I use the term advisedly) Louie represents The Rite of Spring of TV comedy, Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon of Cable dramedy. The show is supposed to be epochal, groundbreaking, revolutionary. I don’t know if it’s quite as exciting as the journalists claim, but the program is certainly startling, brilliantly made, and completely gripping. In form, the series resembles Seinfeld to some degree – Louie C. K. is a middle-aged comedian who lives in Greenwich Village (or, at least, performs stand-up in that neighborhood.) The show ordinarily starts with Louie performing his stand-up routine in a drab-looking club called The Comedy Cellar. The stand-up defines a theme, although only vaguely, and, then, the show proceeds to provide parables or short anecdotal illustrations of that theme. Louie C.K. is divorced, has two charming and precocious daughters, and interacts with zany characters. In its premise, the show is completely derivative and uninventive. The distinction between this series and other similar shows, however, can be defined in three related ways. First, Louie is not an eccentric monster of libido or selfish egotism – rather, he is an extremely patient, decent, ordinary man. He is beset by crazies of the most fearsome sort – but he always acts reasonably and with kindness. Second, the program has the vivid stench of reality about it – Louie’s dilemmas are cringe-inducing but, always, plausible. Even when the show veers into the grotesque, the bizarre behavior of people around Louie always seems a believeable, a heightened or stylized version of reality. Third, Louie, who directs the show, is an auteur of tremendous, atlhough unostentatious, talent. He is a master of the short form. The series’ mise en scene features long sequences with no rapid-fire cutting, hand-held camera, and extraordinary, if austere, precision in camera placement and editing. An example of Louie’s directorial skill is a scene set atop a tall building in midtown Manhattan. Louie has climbed up hundreds of stairs to reach the rooftop with a date who seems to be frighteningly crazy. The scene on the rooftop is quietly terrifying – I have rarely experienced such a sense of dread. But the technique by which this dread is conveyed is completely invisible – a matter of acting and framing. The show conveys a sense of height, fear of falling, and vertigo far greater than any of the stunts in Dark Knight Rising. A fourth factor is worth mentioning – the show isn’t really funny. You don’t laugh during any of the episodes, much of the material is too dark, and Louie doesn’t seem to be very good stand-up comic. But the series conveys a strangely haunting sense of the character’s loneliness, his essential decency, and his desire to reach out to others in a meaningful way. The first episode which involved issues of sexual etiquette (reciprocation for oral sex) seems at first to be a typical Cable Tv “gross-out”, something intended to titillate the viewers by pruriently transgressing “standards and guidelines.” But the show, which featured Melissa Leo, relentlessly goes so far down its chosen path as to approach the heart of darkness. The interaction between Leo and Louie in a parked pick-up truck, and involving a blow to the head that shatters a window, is fantastically stark and frightening. The second episode involves a cringe-inducing misunderstanding – Louie is invited to participate in family gatherings of a large, warm Hispanic clan in Miami and is mistakenly assumed to be homosexual. In the third episode, Louie meets an intriguing woman at a bookstore and asks her out on a date. The fourth episode chronicles the date. Parker Posey plays the woman. She seems to be manic and is so full of life and energy that she terrifies Louie. An enormous sense of menace looms over this episode and Parker Posey gives the performance of a lifetime – the way the vitality drains out of her eyes on the rooftop, causing her whole body to droop and slump is simply extraordinary. The fifth and last episode is really comprised of two short films – a parable about a funeral that involves Robin Williams and that is worthy of Gogol or Chekhov and, then, a more conventional, but still very disturbing, anecdote about a very bad boy. The show isn’t funny, but it’s consistently fascinating, and Louie’s guest stars treat their appearances like Shakespeare or Beckett – they act up a storm.