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.

The obligatory post-Louie Pootie watch

If you're like me, you saw Pootie Tang within a year or two of its 2001 release, and didn't really know what to make of it. You knew there were some good parts, but overall you thought it was definitely a misfire.

If you're like me, you then went on to fall in love with Louie C.K., who happens to be the writer-director of the aforementioned Pootie Tang. In fact, when you first saw Louie C.K. perform, you remembered him as the guy who your friend at MTV Films once described to you as this promising young comedian who had written and directed this new movie called Pootie Tang.

If you're like me, not only do you love Louie, C.K.'s half-hour comedy-drama program ("sitcom" does not seem like the right word) currently airing on FX (though not again until 2014, unfortunately), but you even loved Lucky Louie, C.K.'s underappreciated first effort to break into half-hour programming on HBO. Okay, "loved" may be a strong word -- that show was rough around the edges, even more than it intended to be -- but "liked very much" would be fair.

If you're like me, you thought it was now worth going back to watch Pootie Tang again, to see if you could see in that movie the origins of the successful star C.K. has become.

So if you're like me, you watched Pootie Tang on Saturday night with your wife, who was seeing it for the first time.

If you're not like me, you've never heard of either Pootie Tang or Louie C.K. and have probably stopped reading by now. But if you haven't stopped reading, it's probably time for me to tell you a little bit about Pootie Tang, though the above poster certainly gives me a tremendous assist in that effort.

The title character (Lance Crouther) is a specimen of pure cool shaped into human form. He's loved by everybody despite selling out to nobody (or maybe because of that). He dresses in what one would consider to be a pimp's attire, but one of Pootie's many attributes is his respect for the women who adore him (which doesn't keep him from sleeping with them, but only when a mutual respect has been established). He's defined by being above the fray. He even speaks his own language that's a hybrid of English and made-up words ("Wa da tay!"). Lastly, he has the ability to dodge bullets (smacking them away with his braids) as well as to kick anyone's ass with the help of a pseudo-magical belt he can remove from his waist as quickly as any old West gunslinger draws his pistol. Despite his incomparable fighting skills, Pootie exists to bring peace and love into the world -- as long as these things are also groovy.

The movie Pootie Tang is essentially the story of this character as he is put through trials and manipulated by a nefarious corporate entity into endorsing a lot of very un-Pootie things. And it's actually considerably more straightforward, plot-wise, than I'd remembered. I had this memory that one of the reasons the movie didn't work was that it had a bunch of unrelated scenes strung together in an order that was neither chronological nor logical. That's not the case. To call the movie a conventional narrative would not be accurate either, as it does contain a number of asides, and the character's unique rhythms will never be effectively translated to everyone. But it's not avant garde and inaccessible like I'd remembered.

Outside of the general narrative spine that keeps the plot moving forward, the movie can best be described as a series of scenes that feature what would seem to be tall tales about this larger-than-life figure. All the scenes where he comically whips a variety of adversaries with his belt fall into this category, as they are intentionally cartoonish but also shot in an exciting fashion that gives them pretty good action movie credibility. That Crouther is so good wielding the belt has a lot to do with why these scenes are so crackling. Then there are also some great apocryphal moments from Pootie's childhood. Legend goes that he was always a heartbreaker, and that when he was a child, women three times his age could not resist him. One funny scene involves a distraught lover throwing Pootie's belongings out of her apartment as he stoically looks on from the street below. Since he's only 8-10 years old, one of the items she tosses out the window is his Big Wheel tricycle.

And I have to admit I dug it a lot more this time around. Not only did these scenes flow better on a second viewing, but as I said before, they made more sense as part of a cohesive whole than they did originally. Some movies are just like that, and it does not surprise me in the least that Pootie Tang is one of them.

The supporting performers played a big role in why I enjoyed this movie better the second time. Not only were there the reliable contributions of Chris Rock in several different roles, but Wanda Sykes is great as Biggie Shorty, a streetwise woman who is almost always seen dancing emphatically to unheard music playing through her headphones. (She's mistaken for a prostitute because she dresses in short skirts and does this dancing immediately adjacent to a group of actual prostitutes). When I saw the movie the first time I was unfamiliar with J.B. Smoove, who has one of the largest roles, and it was great to see him now that I know and love him. There are also some great cameos, most notably from David Cross as a fake Pootie Tang sent out to be a corporate shill at the openings of Pootie's Bad Burgers fast food restaurants.

The question that interested me the most about Pootie Tang, however, was whether I would be able to see C.K.'s brand of humor present in this film. Strangely, the answer there is "Not really." Whereas C.K.'s TV show is perhaps one of the most brutally realistic shows on television in terms of how the things that happen to him rarely have good explanations and rarely end happily for him, Pootie Tang is pure satire, rarely tethered to reality in any significant way.

There are, however, a couple of things I can point to as revealing these two C.K.s to be the same man. For one, both Louie and Pootie find space for absurdism. Even as realistic as I have said Louie is, it does have the occasional dream sequence or other flight of fantasy that's totally out there. The show wouldn't work nearly as well as it does if it didn't have those sequences. Another thing I see in common is C.K.'s abhorrence of typical narrative structure. His TV show is structured in a way you simply don't see anywhere else on television, with most shows divided into one short story and one longer story, but only on days that C.K. is feeling conventional enough to adhere to even his own loose guidelines. Pootie Tang may be deceptively conventional in its structure (or more conventional than I thought it was), but the pacing and the placing of scenes are almost as idiosyncratic as we see on the show.

But on a deeper level that may speak to both of the things I've just identified, what I see in both C.K.s is a certain rebelliousness, a certain WTF attitude, a certain "take it or leave it" approach to comedy. Clearly, C.K. couldn't have made it to where he is by playing it safe. Pootie Tang was an early attempt to throw the spaghetti against the wall and see what stuck. His ensuing television shows were a much more successful attempt to do the same -- to strike out on his own, as a unique personality, and see if the public wanted more. Eventually, they did. A lot more.

You could say that Pootie Tang was the best flop ever to happen to Louie C.K. If Pootie Tang had been a hit, who knows what direction that might have taken C.K.'s career. At that age maybe more than now, he probably would have been tempted by the trappings of fame, and maybe he would have spent the next five years making increasingly less successful variations on Pootie Tang, as long he was being paid handsomely to do so. He may never have gotten to the profound insights we see weekly on Louie, because many of those were honed by years of struggling rather than years of succeeding.

If C.K. had never made Pootie Tang, though, I think the world would be a lesser place. There's something deliciously odd but also sweet about it, and my second viewing has confirmed: I'm glad it's something that exists in the world.

Now, get here fast, 2014, so we can see more of Louie C.K. as we have come to know him.