The Depressing Fall of Louis C.K.

Ugh.

How else to react to the news that Louis C.K., famous for his self-flagellating comedy specials and his  emotionally raw series on FX, had been taking self-exposure to the extreme in his private life?

I feel sorry for my son, who so admired Louis’ comedic daring and honesty.  I know how it feels.  As a kid I practically memorized all Bill Cosby’s records.  And then I graduated to Woody Allen movies in my late teens.  Now I feel that a large swath of my youthful enthusiasms are covered with slime.

Maybe there really is something in the DNA of comedians that causes bad choices.  One of the oldest clichés in the book is that people with difficult childhoods and damaged psyches find an outlet for their pain and self-loathing in stand-up comedy.  After all, a great deal of contemporary stand-up revolves around self-lacerating stories – stories that pick at a comedian’s most obvious wounds.

This cliché certainly does not apply to all comics.  If Jerry Seinfeld or Jim Gaffigan were accused of sexual deviancy the shock would be so intense that I’d give up watching comedy altogether.  But there are many comedians who do seem to have screw loose.  As Mark Twain purportedly said, “The secret source of humor itself is not joy, but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.”

The list of sexually abusive comics is not short.  It goes all the way from C-listers like Andy Dick to stars like Al Franken.  The power they hold over audiences seems to embolden them to act out off-stage too.

Louis C.K., however, is in a class of his own.  He was known for years as a “comedian’s comedian,” using material that went right up the edge of what an audience could stand. His FX show started out as a word-of-mouth hit among comedy nerds.  I mostly liked the show but it always made me uneasy, which I gathered was the point.  Don’t let the audience get too comfortable.

In the very first “Louie” episode I ever watched, there’s a scene where Louis is stopped by a TSA agent at the airport who finds a tube of gel in his luggage.  He straightforwardly explains that it’s the “lube” he’ll be using for self-pleasuring when he gets to the hotel.  The TSA agent is dumbfounded and mildly disgusted by the matter-of-fact way Louis owns up to behavior is usually considered shameful.

I have to admit it creeped me out, but not enough to stop watching.  I was also unnerved by the frequent references to self-abuse in his comedy specials but assumed he was just pushing the envelope.  Who was to know that a comedian lauded for being a truth teller was actually telling the truth when confessing to audiences that he was a pervert? (And if you want to know what I’m talking about watch this clip:

Louis is now in celebrity purgatory.  The theatrical release of his new movie “I Love You Daddy” has been cancelled and HBO has removed his specials and other material from their streaming services.   Kevin Spacey has suffered a similar fate for his own sexual abuse scandals.  Netflix cancelled the upcoming season of “House of Cards” and he is being completely excised from Rideley Scott’s new movie “It’s a Shame,” with his scenes tossed out and reshot with Christopher Plummer.

The effort to make previously lauded entertainers disappear from our consciousness is typical of our overheated social media-driven culture.  In the old days we would stone sinners or cut off their hands.  Today we shame them on Twitter until they vanish.  I can understand that the entertainment business is a business and that no one particularly wants to see a new movie starring Louis C.K. or Kevin Spacey right now, but to pull existing content off HBO Go is vaguely reminiscent those Soviet-era May Day parades, where Politburo members who fell out of favor were erased from photographs.

And to be honest, it’s a bit rich for HBO to get politically correct on Louis C.K. when it profits so fabulously on violence against women on “Game of Thrones” or “Westworld.”  Just saying.

These spasms of morality always seem to be applied unevenly too.  For example, we have one sitting President of the United States accused of sexual assault and one former President accused of rape.  Apparently we hold our comedians to a higher standard of conduct than we do our national leaders.

My guess is that Louis C.K.’s career is not over. At least he had the grace to admit his sins and ask for forgiveness. And unlike Bill Cosby, his behavior was not completely contrary to the persona he presented on stage.  I expect an apology tour in a year or two, with a less sexualized performance, and maybe even a grudging concession to the benefits of conventional bourgeois behavior. Because if one good thing comes out of these scandals it’s that being outrageous on stage doesn’t give you a free pass from basic human decency.

 

Frank Keane RIP

My father-in-law Frank Keane, who died this morning (on the 242nd birthday of the Marine Corps), was not old enough to be in the “Greatest Generation,” but he was still representative of a very good generation of men who built the country after World War II.

He was himself a Marine, an old school journalist, and the stepfather to five kids at a crucial time in their lives.  I forgave him for being a Yankees fan because he was an original Boston Patriots fan way back when they played at Fenway Park.  He knew his sports and history inside out and read the New York Times every day until the last weeks of his life.

He was widely admired within the newspaper world in Providence, Rhode Island, as outlined in this piece from the Providence Business Journal, which I’d encourage you to read here.

He was gentle, dignified, and kind but also a tower of strength within the family.

He was a loving grandfather too.  Here he is horsing around with my son 20 years ago.

Rest in peace.

Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid

With the huge ongoing success of “The Walking Dead,” “American Horror Story,” “Stranger Things 2”  “It” and “Get Out,” I’m tempted to say that horror is having a cultural moment, except that horror is always having a cultural moment.  There is hardly an era in which this supposedly disreputable genre hasn’t had a massive audience.

The popularity of movies that scare the bejeezus out of us goes back to the silent era, with “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Nosferatu.”  “Dracula” and “Frankenstein” were among the first blockbusters of the talkie era.  And every decade since then has had its own variation on horror movies.

As with any genre, there’s always a definitional issue with what is and isn’t horror, but classic horror seems to be about scaring viewers deeply enough to get their hearts pumping, using horrifying situations that involve a supernatural or non-rational event.  A scary movie with a psycho killer is a thriller.  A scary movie with a ghost is a horror movie.

TV is a relative latecomer to horror.  Given that horror exploits viewers’ revulsions and terrors, the powers-that-be used to believe that it was not suitable for TV, where unsuspecting kids might be watching with their kindly grandparents and end up scarred for life.  Those concerns seem hopelessly antiquated now, though, when any child with a smartphone can easily call up the most horrific videos of ISIS atrocities.

There were early TV shows that attempted to creep audiences out and scare them — within reason.  “The Twilight Zone” and “The Outer Limits” were occasionally disturbing but always kept in line by network censors.  It wasn’t really until 1990 that a truly frightening horror series made it onto the air:  “Twin Peaks.” That David Lynch series is usually not included in the horror canon, although it contains all the genre elements including fright, eeriness, and supernatural explanations.  Among its other impacts, that series did demonstrate that there was an appetite among many viewers for creepy dramas.

Horror as delivered by “Twin Peaks”

Before “Twin Peaks,” TV’s aversion to horror was that the genre concerns itself with a fearful topic that is rarely appropriate for a device that sits innocently in a living room – death.  And not just the kind of death you see on a medical or crime show, where it’s sad when someone dies but at least they’re dead. No, horror reflects a profoundly unsettling death where the natural order is disrupted and everything we thought we knew about the subject is turned upside down.

The barely submerged fear that that there might not be a heavenly afterlife explains the enduring fascination with vampires or zombies — beings that were once dead but are now living – or inanimate creatures or animals that become animated with supernatural power.  Consequently horror is populated with ghosts, monsters, possessed children, werewolves, demons, Satanism, gore, vicious animals, evil witches, sadistic clowns, and cannibals.

The rise of cable TV and its niche targeting, combined with the loosening restrictions on televised violence, have created the opening for TV horror.  After decades without any truly terrifying TV shows, we’ve been deluged with them: “Penny Dreadful,” “Bates Motel,” “The Vampire Diaries,” “The Stain,” “Scream Queens,” “The Originals,” “Slasher,” etc, etc.

Personally, I think that horror is ill-suited for television, or at best a watered-down experience of watching horror at the movies.  Going to the movies is a proactive choice – you get out of the house, drive to a destination, pay money for tickets and find yourself in a dark space with a massive screen.  Usually this is an event that you plan with friends – maybe it’s even a group bonding experience like riding a roller coaster.  In other words, movie-going is an immersive event where the experience can be over-powering.  It gives you a shock that reminds you you’re still alive.

Watching TV is completely different.  The room is well-lit, the screen is smaller and half the time you’re watching by yourself and distracted by your smartphone.  It’s a solitary, not a social event and it doesn’t have the same impact as watching in the theater.  Viewers will frequently scream out loud at a horror movie, but rarely scream at home.

At yet, horror is very popular on TV.  There are people who watch murder, mutation and mutilation week after week.  All the philosophical justifications for horror – that it provides a cathartic release from death-related anxiety – melt away when watching horror transforms from being an occasional thing to a weekly or even daily event.  How much catharsis does a person need?

There’s a legitimate concern that too much horror makes people numb to it and in need of bigger and bigger doses, like any sensation junkie.  And at a time when there are no cultural overlords to impose order, who knows where it will end.  Let’s hope it’s somewhere short of live executions and murders.  We’ve already got the Internet for that.