I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

  In person, I’d had contradictory reactions to Louis C.K. I found him cold and manipulative, but also charming and hilarious. He was attractive in a masculine, working-class-Boston sort of way; he was butch and stocky, a former mechanic who had trained with a boxer. His TV persona, in contrast, was a homely, pathetic sad sack. These two dynamics meshed effectively, making him an extremely powerful guy whom people felt sorry for. Every year since 2013, I’d requested him for a panel at The New Yorker Festival. He always said no. Then, in 2016, he said yes. At the time, Louis was on a big career upswing. He’d gone back on the road as a stand-up, playing venues like Madison Square Garden—and although Louie was on hiatus, he was producing multiple new shows. Some of them were personal experiments, like the melancholic Horace and Pete, a self-funded series that he marketed through his own website on a subscriber model. Meanwhile, he’d thrown his clout behind a bunch of female creators, among them Tig Notaro, whose one-woman show about her cancer he’d helped to distribute, as well as Pamela Adlon, his co-star on Louie, with whom he’d co-created Better Things. I was booked to interview Louis at Town Hall in midtown Manhattan, the biggest venue at which I’d ever done an onstage interview.

  Several weeks before the panel, I got worried. There had been rumors online, mostly about one particular story: Louis was said to have masturbated in a hotel room in front of two female comedians, more than a decade earlier, at the Aspen Comedy Festival—and according to that story, he’d blocked the door so they couldn’t leave. There was a linked rumor about another comedian, Jen Kirkman, who had recorded a podcast in which she talked about the double standards for female comedians who “worked blue,” complaining about a comic who sounded a lot like Louis. But then Kirkman put out a statement that her words had been twisted—and she clarified, specifically, that Louis C.K. hadn’t ever sexually harassed her. I didn’t know what was real. But I was worried that Louis was using me as a cover, a feminist shield. The idea nagged at me, even as I prepared, rewatching his show.

  So I started making phone calls. They came up dry, again and again. Every comedian I spoke to told me that she had read the rumors, but no one had any confirmation, some details were wrong, some of the names that had been named weren’t correct—and as the panel got closer, it seemed likely that the story wasn’t real. This was actually the second time I’d tried researching this topic: A year earlier, a colleague had asked for help looking into it. But I was getting more confident that it wasn’t true. People kept encouraging me to do what I was planning to do, anyway, which was to ask questions about themes of sexual violence in Louis’s comedy, to focus on the art, not the artist.

  And then one day, a phone call paid off. A male comedy writer I knew, out in Los Angeles, got me in touch with a female comedy team, and they turned out to be not the ones people had most frequently name-checked online but a different team, a wild, goofy, adventurous pair of writers and performers named Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov—chick comics, best friends, and longtime writing partners, who were originally from Chicago and whose specialty, much like Louis’s own, was working blue, doing a filthy, outrageous act full of jokes about sex.

  Dana and Julia spoke to me off the record, which in journalistic terms means they wanted to tell me what happened, but I couldn’t tell anyone else or write about it. They weren’t yet ready to go public with their story—for good reason, because they were scared of the repercussions. What they told me was that Louis had masturbated in front of them, in his hotel room, back at the Aspen Comedy Festival in 2002. The door wasn’t locked, but who cares. They’d freaked out in response: They laughed and then they screamed, in shock, so loud that the people next door could hear them. And Dana and Julia had, in fact, told other people in the comedy world about this—in fact, they’d told them right after it happened, because it was such an outrageous story. “We’d told everyone we saw,” they said. “We told the bellboys!” Talking about what happened, telling the story, had hurt their careers, they believed; and from what they told me, the blame lay not just with Louis but with Louis’s manager, a powerful industry figure named Dave Becky, who represented (and still represents) many major figures in the comedy world. Becky had told their managers that they needed to shut up, they said. The Aspen Comedy Festival was supposed to be their big break. Instead, when they moved to L.A., they felt marked by scandal—and they’d hesitated to even approach anyone connected with 3 Arts, where Becky worked. Word was out. What’s more, they told me, they weren’t the only ones out there with a story about Louis C.K.

  I liked Dana and Julia immediately. I believed they had been screwed over. I blew up. Furious, I planned to cancel the panel with Louis. I knew that canceling would cause a scandal. If I canceled, I wouldn’t be able to explain the details of what Louis had done. Dana and Julia didn’t want their names out; in the pre-Weinstein period, that felt like a life-destroyer—not worth the risk and, also, not likely to have any major effect. Maybe someday. The two comics said they were okay with me either doing the panel or canceling it; they trusted me to make the right choice. But canceling felt right. It was the moral call, the braver one.

  It was also the one I didn’t make. Because after that initial reaction, step by step, as I made my reporting calls clarifying the details, looking into various stories, I got—and I am ashamed to say this—cold feet. The reporting that I was delving into, like many stories about sexual harassment, felt complicated. The events had happened years ago, before Louis’s profile blew up, in a workplace with muddy boundaries, one I wasn’t confident I understood. Not every detail could be confirmed; not everyone was comfortable talking; and, once in a while, there were questions I couldn’t answer. The panel was coming up. And there was a middle way, because I was a critic, not an investigative reporter. I knew I couldn’t ask Louis about these stories onstage, because that would only give him the chance to lie, as he’d done before to journalists. The story was incendiary; I didn’t want to be the one to blow it up. And, of course, this path was easier for me. The ditch that I’d been digging my entire life was the one I fell into: my confidence, or maybe my hubris, about separating the artist from the art.

  But, of course, I wasn’t interviewing the art. Before the panel, I called Louis, as I always did with guests, to discuss topics of conversation. It was Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement; I stepped out of services to speak with him, sitting on a stoop in Brooklyn, shivering in the sunlight. If you want to know what our talk was like, I can’t tell you, because that, too, was off the record, but you could watch the episode of Lena Dunham’s Girls called “American Bitch” and imagine how quickly I might be sedated by a line of bullshit and an embarrassingly effective level of making me feel sorry for him. (You could diagnose me with “himpathy,” to use philosopher Kate Manne’s term. It’s a lingering condition that recurs.) The panel itself wasn’t recorded, because Louis’s representatives had turned down The New Yorker’s request to do so, not an uncommon decision from stand-up comics. Perhaps they thought I’d ask some questions that I never asked. Still, as anyone who attended could tell you, it was a collegial enough event, with a few notably tense moments.

  For my final clip, I showed the most troubling sequence from the final season. In it, Louie comes home and wakes up his crush, Pamela, who is babysitting his kids. He tries to kiss her. She says no. And then he begins wrestling with her, as she protests, mocking him, pulling away—until she runs for the door and he blocks her, penning her in with his arms. He’s huge, she’s tiny. Pamela squirms, disgusted, and finally gives in to his demand for a kiss, wincing as if she were a kid eating broccoli. When the clip ended, there was an uncomfortable ripple in the audience. I asked, “Was that an attempted rape?” Louis responded with an extended, messy, and illuminating answer. He talked about how much he and Adlon had laughed during the shoot. He said that someone had suggested, while on set, that it might get them in trouble online. He explained that it was a scene about the fictional
Louie having a “dumb,” “old-fashioned,” “John Wayne” attitude, believing it was his job to “make something happen” sexually.

  But Louis added, too, that the character he played sensed that the Pamela character wanted something to happen. He emphasized, several times, that Pamela was a tough person—both that the actress was tough in real life and that she was playing a tough fictional character—so tough that Louie’s behavior wasn’t a threat, even though she had a line saying, “This would be rape, if you weren’t so stupid.” I failed to ask a strong follow-up question (“So you’re saying he knew she wanted it? She was too tough to traumatize?”). Then the audience questions were awful, all about what a great man Louis C.K. was. One question was, quite literally, “What does it feel like to wake up and know what a great man you are?”

  Afterward, I felt relieved, because it seemed like I had handled a morally complex situation the best way I could. It was a bad time for many reasons, most of which had nothing to do with Louis C.K.: It was one month before Donald Trump was elected president. The Access Hollywood tape emerged on the same day the panel was held. Later on, I told myself, when things were calmer, I’d write a thoughtful reported piece about misogyny and comedy, when I had time to get it right, to nail the facts down and put them in their context. But I didn’t do that. Instead, every day for the next year, I felt worse. So if you’re wondering who colluded with at least one man who did bad things: That would be me. I was five when I first became a fan of Woody Allen. I was in my mid-forties when I became a fan of Louis C.K., inflamed by my desire to see things in an ambiguous light, to dwell in gray areas, to jump past “we can’t” to “can we?”

  Is Louie still one of my favorite shows?

  Here’s the truth: My mind locks up whenever I think about the series. When I first began writing this essay, in late 2018, Louie was canceled, deleted: If you searched in the HBO or FX archives, Louis C.K.’s shows didn’t come up. (There was one image of him on the FX site, but when you clicked “more,” it looped back to the home page.) Then, while I was editing this piece, Louis made a surprise appearance at the Comedy Cellar. His act got an ovation, then a backlash, then a wave of support, and so on—and as of this writing, he’s continuing to show up onstage, often without notice, rumored to be preparing a new special. He’s defended and derided on various podcasts, a social experiment in action. I do own a DVD copy of his early show Lucky Louie, whose pilot includes a scene in which the Louie character’s wife, played by Pamela Adlon, opens a hall closet and is shocked to find him inside, whacking off. But if I never saw Louie again, or Louis again, I’d still know the show by heart. I’m its creature, the way we are all creatures of the art we care about, even if we decide to throw it in a garbage can.

  The most anxiety-provoking elements of the series—the show’s fascination with masturbation as rebellion and compulsion, its solipsism, the ick factor—can’t be sliced from the apple. If you don’t eat the apple, there’s a lot you can’t know. Like Cosby, like Woody Allen, Louis C.K. embodied a fantasy, and one designed not just for men but for women. Like Bill Cosby, he embodied the fantasy of the feminist genius who respected women—a divorced, middle-aged man who did comic rants about how he preferred women his own age. As with The Cosby Show, television got bent by Louie, permanently. The deal that he cut with FX was unique, at the time: The network agreed to give Louis C.K. a small budget in exchange for him refusing all network notes, letting him make every creative decision without oversight. No female comedian could have gotten such a deal. But once Louis C.K. got it, it was possible. His show became a catalyst for a wave of autobiographical comedies, many by women, made by creators who were fascinated, just as he was, by sexual compulsion and shame, forgiveness and blame. This included shows by Lena Dunham (who dressed as Louis C.K. for Halloween the year Girls debuted); Phoebe Waller-Bridge (who called Louie her key inspiration for the first season of the feminist series Fleabag); Michaela Coel, who created the rude, vaudevillian Chewing Gum; Jill Soloway, who created the confessional Transparent; Amy Schumer (who, after a conversation with comedy writer Jessi Klein, abandoned her conventional talk show concept and texted her executive producer, saying, “Cancel my pitch, I want to make my Louie”); Tig Notaro (One Mississippi); Louis’s own creative partner Pamela Adlon (Better Things); Frankie Shaw (SMILF); and Maria Bamford (Lady Dynamite). Après Louis, le déluge.

  Louis’s final work to debut in public was the movie I Love You, Daddy. I saw that film during an early screening when, as many of us present knew, the Times story was on its way. I Love You, Daddy is a movie about the same subject as this essay: It’s about the question of how to deal with (collaborate with, be influenced by, reject, embrace, denounce) male artists who have done bad things. In it, a Louis-like TV showrunner meets his hero, a Woody Allen–like film director, who begins to seduce the showrunner’s teenage daughter. The movie is a visual homage to Manhattan. But it’s a hollow work of art: a slick, empty, fake-sophisticated fable, whose conclusion is the ultimate ethical easy out, “We’re all perverts,” a line that is delivered by a black teenage girl with a crush on the showrunner played by Louis C.K. When one character asks the Allen character whether he “really fucked that kid, like everyone says,” the director laughs, then says approvingly, “You’re the first person to come out and ask me that question.” After the credits rolled, I stumbled home and slept for five hours, as if I’d been poisoned, which maybe I was.

  A week later, the New York Times story broke. By this point in time, the accusations against Weinstein had already toppled the mogul and #MeToo was well under way. Dana and Julia—to whom I’d spoken as the process unrolled—knew that this was their chance to go public, at last. The Times story included enough women telling their stories to back one another up, so that none of them had to stand alone.

  Within days, Louis’s career appeared to be over. Distributors pulled I Love You, Daddy, before it ever debuted in the United States. Streaming services yanked his TV shows and comedy specials. Fans and critics began disavowing his work. My friend and fellow television critic Matt Zoller Seitz, who had written his own raves of Louie, argued that putting the comic’s work aside was the correct response. “There’s no reason to have qualms about stamping their work ‘Of Archival Interest Only,’ ” he wrote, about disgraced artists in the post-Weinstein era. In a later conversation, he clarified: He doesn’t think these men’s work should be “deleted” or “canceled,” exactly, but treated as a museum piece—historically relevant, but also toxic. The focus should be instead on “moving on to something new—not just new work, but a new paradigm for relationships in show business, and all business. The women who came forward opened themselves to being ostracized and re-traumatized. The only reason they spoke up is to make show business, and the world, safer and more humane. Time to listen.”

  I nodded when I read that. That was true. It was the compassionate response to the correct people—and it withdrew compassion from those who had hogged more than their share, including from me. Zoller Seitz’s final line mimicked the last line of Louis C.K.’s public statement, in which he confirmed that the accusations were true. “I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want,” he wrote. “I will now step back and take a long time to listen.”

  But there were other truths, too. One was that I didn’t want to look away. My old method had been the sociopath’s approach: Treat the artist and the art as separate. There had to be some way to write without blinders on, even if I couldn’t imagine it yet.

  I had been following the writer Laurie Stone on Facebook throughout the fall as the men fell. She wrote frequently about #MeToo, with a degree of personal confession that I’ve never been capable of, and also, a greater willingness to offend. She talked about her own experiences, including childhood sexual abuse. She also talked about the kind of mucky interpersonal dynamics that weren’t so easy to label—about celebrating female sexual aggression, a
nd also about the danger of painting the lives of women as nothing but victimization. One day, she wrote about the art made by bad men. “On whether it is kosher to engage with the art of people you don’t like: If something turns you on, it turns you on,” she wrote. “If you love something, you love it. If you find beauty somewhere others do not, you have found beauty. Nothing good is clean. Nothing interesting is pure. Beauty includes tension, contradiction that cannot be resolved, the comedy that life is complex and meaty and cellular and not transcendent. No tyrants, no gods, no purity, no bibles.”

  Feminist criticism, she argued, shouldn’t steer around the art made by bad men. It should confront it. Feminist critics, she wrote, were obliged to think about “how conscious and unconscious expressions of patriarchal values mute, main and trivialize works of art. That is still our contemplation.” I agreed with Zoller Seitz’s argument. Stone’s was the one that swayed me. When, later, I called Matt to talk about all of this, he sent me a beautiful essay by the rock critic Ellen Willis, “Beginning to See the Light,” which begins, “On November 7, I admitted I was turned on by the Sex Pistols.” In it, she writes about a punk song full of woman-hate: “The extremity of its disgust forced me to admit that I was no stranger to such feelings—though unlike Johnny Rotten, I recognized that the disgust, not the body, was the enemy.”

  And when I thought back on those final two seasons of Louie—the ones that had seemed so alienating—they made more sense to me. Not as biography: No art is pure confession. But Louie had been a show that was haunted, from its early episodes, by visions of moral payback: It was a dark comedy about a depressed, paralyzed man, who was a pig about food and money, a former Catholic who, when he wasn’t being a decent single father, was a shame-riddled fuckup who expected the ax to drop any day now. The show’s violence had always been violence directed at Louie—which was something you could see, in retrospect, as a manipulative trick, a way of making a victimizer look like a victim. In one episode, a woman climbs up onto Louie’s face, forcing him to give her oral sex; in another episode, he smacks a beautiful supermodel, and although it’s an accident, as a result, he loses it all—his career and all his money. Louie’s daughters mock him when he’s beaten up by a woman. In the same season in which he forces Pamela to kiss him at the door, the Pamela character rapes Louie when he is wearing drag: She encourages him to put on a dress and makeup, then penetrates him, without clear consent, in a scene I could never rewatch, it’s that uncomfortable.