Say it ain't so, Lou

I’ve wanted to write something about the recent spate of celebrities laid low by accusations of sexual misconduct, but just couldn’t find an angle of entry on the subject that I found useful. Rehashing all the standard admonishments was a bit uninspired, and anyway, I can’t write a blog post just because I feel like there’s an issue out there that needs to be acknowledged on my blog. I need to have my talking points come rushing out of me, with their only escape being my fingers on a keyboard.

That moment has finally arrived.

Before the arrival of that moment, I had considered writing about the fact that I’d seen Harvey Weinstein not once, but twice in my one weekend at Sundance in 2007. However, the connection between having seen him personally and him being a sexual criminal couldn’t be fleshed out in a way that made any sense. It threatened to verge on the wistful, as it incorporated my romanticized notions of Sundance. “Wistful” is not what Harvey Weinstein deserves.

Then when the Kevin Spacey news hit, I didn’t know what to do with that because I was initially on the wrong side of it. Before I knew that it was just the tip of the iceberg, I condemned the idea that the advance was toward a minor, as anyone would/should, but couldn’t see how it was all that similar to the Harvey Weinstein episodes. My initial public comments about it – “public” as in “on Facebook discussion threads” – were that I condemned it but didn’t see how the Weinstein allegations were what prompted Anthony Rapp to come forward, as there seem to be a false equivalency in the abuses of power. I’ve abandoned that line of thinking, you’ll be glad to know.

But now … now.

Now Louis CK is an exhibitionist and serial masturbator. It would be bad enough if it were toward strangers, but making it all the more Weinsteinian is that it involved situations with fellow female comedians who were either asked into his office/dressing room, or he went to theirs, or it was over the phone. Although I’ve been loath to read all the details, there may have been an implied it not outright stated promise to help, or threat to hurt, their careers.

The era we find ourselves in forces us to turn on a dime with our affections toward these people. Usually when the news comes out, it’s well past the stage of “innocent until proven guilty” – if there is not already an abundance of accusers when the news breaks, they proliferate soon afterward. So we don’t even get to delude ourselves into “Well, maybe he didn’t do it” and take a wait-and-see approach. He did it, and now, without even pausing to catch our breath, we must hate the man.

How can I hate Louis CK? He is been the center of some of the most brilliant comedy of the last ten years, both in his stand-up and his TV show. He hadn’t made a huge splash in the movies just yet, but his film I Love You, Daddy was about to premiere – with frighteningly relevant subject matter for the accusations against him, I’ve heard. Now it may be his The Day the Clown Cried. Will we ever see it?

To make matters worse, he’s a fellow Bostonian.

The thing that’s so difficult about this one is that he seemed so likable. Something about his face and his manner just radiated benevolence. He was a sad sack, or at least represented himself that way, but he was a loveable sad sack whose heart was in the right place. While Weinstein was always a bully and a blowhard, and Spacey always had that cold sociopath quality to him, Louis CK seemed like a genuine, regular guy, one whose overwhelming success of late felt like it couldn’t have happened to a nicer person.

Well, there are a lot nicer people out there.

And I realized, two paragraphs ago, that I am referring to CK in the past tense, as though he’s dead. Which, for all intents and purposes, he might as well be.

The best parallel is to Bill Cosby. The warmth I feel toward CK is similar to the warmth I felt toward Cosby before Cosby was unveiled as a serial rapist of historic proportions. I still sometimes “forget,” only for a moment, that all this stuff happened with Cosby. It’s like my affection for him was so deeply ingrained that I can’t imagine not loving him. Yet that love was ripped away from me, and it can never come back.

Masturbating in front of people against their will is not the same as drugging them and having sex with them. But it seems difficult to imagine that CK can be reclaimed. He will fall hard off that pinnacle of comedy success and will probably never make inroads to getting back there. How can you joke about sex, a major part of his routine, when you yourself are a sex criminal? How can you joke about anything?

I need to try to get myself to a place of not wanting Louis CK back. But only hours after I first learned about his transgressions, I’m obviously not there yet.

The thing I do wonder is if this wave of victims coming forward against these Hollywood types will eventually be so widespread that Louis CK, that Kevin Spacey, even that Harvey Weinstein will be just small players in the grand scheme. It’s probably a bad analogy, but I wonder if this will be like the steroid era in baseball. Numerous names were tainted by steroid allegations or actual positive tests, but the lingering memory of those accusations/positive tests has only clung to a few key figures, like Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro. “Lesser” figures have largely escaped the taint, including some (Ryan Braun, Nelson Cruz) who are still playing, with fans already kind of forgetting about their suspensions and lame apologies.

Will Louis CK be a Barry Bonds or a Nelson Cruz? If enough others are implicated as sexual deviants/predators, will he come to seem like a “lesser” deviant/predator? Will he get another chance in five years, ten years? Do we even want that for him?

I suppose how and whether you apologize has something to do with that. But sexual assault, even if it is not physical, seems harder to come back from than the controversies that have surrounded Mel Gibson over the years, for example. Mel Gibson must be thinking “Not so bad now, am I?” And if you want to know whether a tainted celebrity can ever come back to be funny, well, Mel Gibson is appearing in a comedy, Daddy’s Home 2, next month.

If I were a little more enlightened maybe I would just get on my blog to call Louis CK scum and recommend his immediate imprisonment. Today’s social media climate makes it so that anything less than a full denouncement of the person in question is an indication that you are condoning and even contributing to the problem. If you want to be a truly good liberal, you can’t cling to warm feelings you had just hours ago. You can barely even acknowledge having had them. You must deliver upon that person the full weight of your unambiguous scorn.

But I’m a human, a human who loves comedy, a human loves drama, a human who loves the complex interplay of the two in our everyday interactions and struggles in the world.

This was something Louis CK specialized in, and now, he won’t be giving us any more of it for a long, long time. If ever.

So today, I’m just mourning that.

I’ll try to give you my full scorn some other day.