Sometimes even your favorite shows don't connect. For the first time this season, FX's Louie failed to excite me. It wasn't that it was bad, it just felt tired and rote. I think it was the first time that I haven't laughed at an episode even once.
"Looking for Liz", the first segment of Thursday's episode, starts with Louie asleep, dreaming of Parker Posey's character from "Daddy's Girlfriend", Liz. Liz is telling Louie that she loved him, but he couldn't hear her. When he wakes, he is driven to reconnect with her. He goes to the bookstore where she worked, and instead finds Chloe Sevigny.
Sevigny's character (who fittingly remains unnamed until the final credits) is Liz's replacement at the bookstore; Liz had quit after her night out with Louie. Sevigny's Jeanie senses that Louie is mourning his lapsed connection with Liz, and throws herself into reconnecting the two. She says, "I want to make a romantic thing happen." She is far more passionate about this than Louie. So passionate it's disturbing. There's some fine camera work here, including a series of progressively tighter closeups that underline her pressing involvement in Louie's affairs.
As the segment progresses, Jeanie becomes more and more obsessed with seeing this through. Until in a surprising and self-gratifying turn, it becomes apparent that she is in this purely for herself. Just like Louie. Her apparent selfless actions are merely a way for her to get herself off. I wish I could say that I found this even interesting, but it's just a shock joke and not a particularly funny one. I appreciate the desire to present not a foil to Louie's selfishness but a grotesque; it's just that it doesn't connect. Worse than that, it negates a brilliant passage delivered a few moments before about taking action:
I think that "It wasn't meant to be" is bullshit. You're tested in life, you know. Things aren't just put in front of you for the taking. You have to go through something to get what you want. ...You have to prove yourself. You have to make things happen and choose.Yes, Jeanie was making a choice and taking action by helping Louie, but by the action being ultimately masturbatory, it is utterly unfulfilling and disconnected.
The second and stronger sequence returns us to familiar ground as we get the longest bit about Louie's kids this season. "Lilly Changes" starts with Louie picking up his girls from school. Jane is waiting patiently but Lilly is nowhere to be seen. This will become the theme of the segment. In fact most every piece of action from the carousel ride to bellowing her name on the street is centered around Louie looking for his not so little girl.
I like the ways that Louis C.K. shows that Louie "losing" his girls is his own fault. He doesn't know about the budget cuts at school. He makes the ultimate dad dick move by thrusting himself into what he perceives to be Lilly getting bullied. He refuses to see that his girl is growing up by taking her to the carousel. He isolates himself in the bathroom to shit, surf and smoke. When Jane wants in to tell him something, he won't open up, and when he does come out Lilly is gone. His search through the apartment is cursory at best, and he refuses to call the girls' mother lest he look like a moron. My favorite of these disconnections though is that he doesn't know that Jane is learning Slovenian; how wonderfully absurd and perfectly apt.
When the Lilly location punchline comes, it is at least delivered a little more assuredly than the one in "Looking for Liz". Just the reaction shots of the cops were enough to make the moment a moment. I liked this second segment more, but only because it was instantly relatable. I get the fear that comes from watching your daughter become a different person. The sense of I-Can't-Fail-You-But-Oh-God-I-Have. But it really never went there. Unlike the brilliant Halloween episode last year, here I felt no sense of urgency and no real threat to Louie's position with his girls. This isn't going to change anything for them. But that wasn't the point of the piece, which is too bad because that in and of itself would be a fascinating and interesting thing to watch.
Something must be said about the final joke in the stinger at the end of the episode. It's a stand up routine at The Comedy Cellar. After talking about how he makes a big deal of his kids buckling their seat belts when he's driving, when they enter a cab, he allows them to roll around the seat. He allows their fates to be "determined by the profit motive of an exhausted man. From another country. Where life is shit cheap. Where kids die every day and it's boring." It's an obvious build of uncomfortable material, and lingers awkwardly in the mind. The final bit is delivered on a blank, black screen. I sit here much later still frowning over it.
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