I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

  On the show that Louis C.K. created, wrote, and starred in, he was a Charlie Brown, surrounded by kinky, scathing, boundary-violating Lucys. It was a self-pitying fantasy, but it was also, in its way, as prescient as Nostradamus. In hindsight, his show seems like an extended anxiety dream about what might happen if women turned the tables.

  Then, in those final two seasons (which were filmed as the tides of rumor began to rise), Louis did something strange but interesting: He made the Louie character less of a victim, more a man with power—and, often, a creep, a less likable persona for fans who had been trained to pity the sad sack. Suddenly, Louis was the pursuer. He was ogling and stalking women, or sometimes, seen more generously, he was active rather than passive, being honest about his desires. These were the episodes that many viewers, including me, found so alienating, in part because they were also frequently more pretentious, stagier, more didactic. But there was something real buried in the wreckage.

  In Season 4, Louie pursued a woman named Amia who didn’t speak English. He mooned after her, insisting that she was his soulmate. He behaved, in essence, as if he were in a romantic comedy; she acted much more as if she were in a Lifetime thriller. I can’t read Louis’s mind and that’s not my job, exactly. There’s no way to say how conscious he was about these themes, or how they were beginning to dominate the work. But something cold seemed to be seeping to the surface: a stain spreading, just as the show came to an end.

  Soon after that season aired, in his self-funded series Horace and Pete, a melancholy drama about a family of bar owners, Louis wrote a scene that, in retrospect, was genuinely shocking. He devoted a whole episode to a person confessing to having masturbated in front of someone without clear consent. Once again, he’d switched the genders: For nine minutes, uninterrupted, the camera gazed directly at the tormented features of the great Laurie Metcalf, as her character unspooled, step by step, a sordid story about her father-in-law. They’d had an affair, one that began with her flashing him from the backyard, uncertain if she was disgusting him or turning him on. Finally, late in the story, the camera turned to reveal the face of the listener—the priest to this shame-soaked confession of sin—and the viewer saw Louis’s face. His character, Horace, was revealed to be the Metcalf character’s first husband, from whom she was long-divorced; she’d remarried and they hadn’t spoken in years. Horace asked, “Why are you telling me this?” That was the punch line, sort of.

  It’s a grueling scene to rewatch; I had to force myself to do it to fact-check this piece. Poignant and manipulative, it’s a story about two compulsives desperately trying to explain their worst behavior, and then, finally, absolving each other, granting one another grace. “Forgive yourself,” Laurie Metcalf’s character tells Louis’s Horace, who cheated on her with her own sister, years before. The Louis character gives his ex-wife a similar, if unspoken, absolution. When the episode came out, every critic praised it as the bravura experiment of an unconventional genius. Me too.

  I can’t see it that way, now: Rewatched, the sequence seems much heavier, more lurid, self-indulgent. What does it mean to be repelled by a show you thought you loved? When I look back, in 2018, late Louie seems like a show in which Louis repackaged his own confusion about sexual consent as a form of sophistication—and I worry that this was catnip for a critic who was eager to see ambiguity everywhere. Then again, my own responses don’t make that much sense to me anymore, now that my heart has closed.

  In The Outline in July 2018, Daniel Kolitz wrote a wonderful essay about a David Foster Wallace conference, capturing another fanhood as it was in the midst of adjusting to bad revelations about their hero. In it, he described the way that Wallace’s aficionados—who ranged from critical academics to ordinary readers—have been struggling with a similar question: How should they read and write about Wallace’s work, now that they knew the author had terrorized his ex-girlfriend, the writer Mary Karr? Responses varied widely. The conference attendees adored Wallace’s novels, short stories, and essays; they wanted to be ethical, honorable people. They wanted to see the work they loved—fiction that was itself intensely concerned with morality—more clearly, too.

  In the piece, Kolitz coined a phrase for what everyone around him seemed to be longing for: “a cogent and nuanced permission structure.” Permission to look, permission to praise or condemn. Permission to treat the work as something that was more than merely healthy or unhealthy. Permission to acknowledge the hard-to-label experiences that New York Times critic Wesley Morris—in a beautiful and searching essay about Bill Cosby, “cancel culture,” and the morality of criticism—described as “what is messy and tense and chaotic and extrajudicial about art.” Permission to see more deeply without having to ignore what was in front of your eyes. No such structure has emerged yet, but these are early days.

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  —

  Back in the early 1990s, when I’d spend hours hanging out at Charis Books in Atlanta, the venue that had hosted the reading with Pearl Cleage, I had a friend at the counter. She was a funny, mouthy lesbian-feminist who kept on telling me true stuff that I believed was wishful thinking, just rumors, where’s the proof, like that the singer Melissa Etheridge was gay. One day, my friend told me that for the next year, she was planning to read only books by women. I didn’t argue, but privately, I scoffed. Why limit yourself that way?

  Yet the truth is that, more than a quarter century later, my path through the year of #MeToo has required a similar discipline. Part of this has meant simply imagining what it might have been like if women’s work had been the default setting back when I was growing up. What if the model of male genius (and most often, white, straight male genius) was not the force that the rest of us needed to get around, to go through, to become who we were? What if men had not been the vast majority of talk-show hosts, the talking heads, the auteurs, the rock stars, the comics? What if genius was harder to recognize whenever it wasn’t wearing lipstick? What if I’d absorbed the style of feminism that younger women had been fomenting, these fiery days, more radical, less tolerant of certain compromises that my cohort found acceptable?

  Women’s voices had been pouring in on television, my specialty, for nearly a decade. In 2012, Girls and Scandal were novelties, under enormous pressure to represent everyone. Both shows were celebrated but also slagged for their “unlikeable” heroines, misunderstood for their refusal to offer easy inspiration. Five years later, dozens of shows had emerged in their wake, from Broad City and Orange Is the New Black to Top of the Lake, Fleabag, The Mindy Project, Lady Dynamite, Happy Valley, Jane the Virgin, Transparent, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, GLOW, Insecure, Chewing Gum, Big Little Lies, Sharp Objects, Call the Midwife, CLAWS, One Mississippi, I Love Dick, Queen Sugar, Marvel’s Jessica Jones, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Dietland, The Bisexual, Russian Doll, Shrill, PEN15, and many more. Some of these shows were better than others (a few I disliked), but that was progress, too. There were finally enough visionaries—enough egotists and eccentrics, enough philosophers, builders, nurturers, gurus, and gleeful chaos-slingers, all the flavors of “genius”—that no one aspirational female artist had to bear the hideous weight of the pioneer.

  Often, the shows that spoke to me the most directly were those that were in conversation with the work of all those troubled male geniuses. They were the hair of the dog that bit me. The female artists who had risen in Louis’s wake became the ones to critique him, to scribble on him and rewrite him.

  My panel with Louis C.K. took place in October 2016. The next February, I watched a screener for the Girls episode “American Bitch.” In it, the main character, Hannah, meets a famous dirty-talk novelist, who is played by Matthew Rhys. She plans to confront him about online rumors; then, as they talk, he alternately praises her and debates with her, until she slowly abandons that plan. By the episode’s final scenes, Hannah’s guard is down and Rhys’s penis is out. His grand apartment bore a strong resemblance to the pal
atial Upper West Side pad where Louis lived when I wrote my profile about him. One wall showed a painting of Woody Allen as a Byzantine saint: He had a gold halo and held a gun to his head. I saw some parallels in the plot to Louie, too, like the fact that the Rhys character had a biracial child and black ex-wife, from whom he was estranged. In one scene, the novelist’s daughter played the flute; that, too, felt like a subtle shout-out to the scene in which Louie’s daughter had played the violin for him and Amia. But maybe I was seeing things.

  “American Bitch” debuted months before the Weinstein story broke, but it was a hint of what was coming, a sharp allegory about feminist collusion—about the lure of “himpathy” and the kind of story you could never tell, or at least, tell in full. Like Rosemary’s Baby, it was a fable about deals with the devil, ones made in an Upper West Side Classic Six. For me, it was a killing-me-softly moment. I wrote a pretty decent column about “American Bitch,” although I didn’t mention Louis, because, among other considerations, I was hesitant to reduce a great episode to a blind item.

  Then, in July, I watched a preview screener for another show I loved: Tig Notaro’s One Mississippi, the stand-up comedian’s semiautobiographical comedy about a lesbian podcaster coping with her mother’s death. The show was produced by both Louis C.K. and his agent, Dave Becky, the same manager who Dana and Julia believed had stood in the way of their careers. The episode, titled “I Can’t Fight This Feeling,” featured a more unambiguous Louis stand-in: a sleazy producer, a guy who keeps praising Tig for her “dark material,” who masturbates beneath his desk during a business meeting. Like Dunham, Notaro was using Louis’s trademark genre—the “traumedy”—against him. Unintentionally, the episode formed a perfect bookend with “American Bitch”: Here, the focus was not on the Louis character, but on the women, and specifically, on the mindfuck of knowing something happened and having the man who did it deny it.

  In the process, Notaro slashed the cord that tied Louis C.K.’s name to hers. In my review, I finally described the rumors in print, writing that they deserved investigation. Just after I closed the piece, the Weinstein story broke. The portal opened. At first, I thought this moment would be short-lived—that any exposé needed to come out fast—but I was wrong. More than a year later, it’s still unfolding, changing by the day.

  The next May, in 2018, I went to see an off-Broadway show called Nanette. It was a one-woman show by Hannah Gadsby, a Tasmanian stand-up comic. All that I knew about Nanette, going in, was that it was some kind of “anti-comedy comedy show.” It sounded like fun. Instead, the show ended up feeling like a bomb tossed into my house, right when my house needed some blowing up. I walked around mulling over Nanette in my head for weeks, recommending it, feeling challenged by it, adoring it, arguing with it, considering it obsessively, a fan. It changed me, maybe even neurologically, which is all you can ask from art.

  The only time I’d seen Gadsby before, she was playing a version of herself on the lovely Australian show Please Like Me, which was created by Josh Thomas—another “traumedy,” a beautiful one about a young gay man whose mother was institutionalized after a suicide attempt. That Hannah was a patient at the mental hospital, a deadpan Eeyore of a character, a wit who was paralyzed by depression. The actual Hannah Gadsby had a similar history: She was a soft-spoken butch lesbian who had been homeless and suicidal. But she wasn’t paralyzed in real life. In fact, Gadsby was a hardworking stand-up whose productivity mirrored Louis C.K.’s own: Like him, Gadsby produced an hour of new material each year. A staple at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, she was a comic’s comic, as Louis had been early on, with an unusual specialty: She had a graduate degree in art history.

  Nanette was something new for Gadsby. It was framed as a farewell to comedy, a kind of public career suicide, incendiary and experimental. The show began calmly enough, with the sort of jokes that Gadsby had been perfecting for seven years, a series of gentle self-mocking anecdotes about her early life: a fight she’d had at a bus stop with a man who thought she was flirting with his girlfriend; the story of how she came out to her family. Initially, Gadsby delivered these gags with a stuttering self-deprecation, although her eyes flickered with some hidden emotion throughout. “I identify…as tired,” she told us, a small line that got a big laugh.

  And then, gradually, Gadsby began to flip these jokes open, as if they were watches, coolly explaining their mechanics. The mood shifted. The humor began to flicker, as if it were on the fritz. By the show’s final moments, Gadsby had entered a state of undiluted rage as she poured out all of the details of the stories from the first half, the ugliness that she had edited out in order to make us laugh: a rape, a beating, the venomous homophobia that made her believe she deserved it. To transform her most painful experiences into jokes, she argued, she had had to injure herself, for her chosen art form. There was no room, in stand-up, for a “gender non-normal” (Gadsby’s phrase) to tell her entire story. There was no space for her to get past the punch line—the one-two trap of joke-making—to the healing part, the catharsis.

  Nanette was a show with a thesis, designed to provoke debate. But the experience of watching it made it feel like something else: It was the comedy of complicity. Every time Gadsby lobbed a punch line, we laughed, and then she analyzed our laugh; she noted when we went silent, too, observing the tension as it passed between the stage and the crowd, expanding the tension and then contracting it, a bold show of control. It was a physically challenging experience to watch Nanette; not unlike Louie, it was art made to trigger anxiety, not merely laughs. (As a critic, I thought that was a good thing.) People cried; at one show, they snapped along in activist-style applause; sometimes, they glared or looked away, as if feeling accused. Sometimes, they were accused: In each audience, Gadsby selected one man as an experimental subject to direct her story to. These men became a crucial part of her act.

  About a half-hour in, Gadsby tore into the problem that had been troubling me, the problem of separating the artist from the art. “Why don’t I not!” she shouted, as her pupils lit up with disgust. And then, when Gadsby dropped the skillful jokes and began to make her case, she also threw off her cloak of stuttering charm, trusting the audience to go with her. We did.

  I saw Nanette twice, off-Broadway. Then I interviewed Gadsby for The New Yorker Radio Hour. I was nervous about meeting her. With her tense grin and her gleaming eyes, Gadsby was a likable figure onstage but a fragile one, too, intimidating in the way that fragile people can be—I realized how worried I was about taking a wrong step. After all, I wasn’t sure that I agreed with her on every point. I’d always loved harsh jokes, cruel jokes, including certain rape jokes—I’d spent my life, as a critic, defending just that kind of thing. (The old Sarah Silverman joke: “I was raped by a doctor. Which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.”)

  But the interview was a pleasure. In person, Gadsby was sharp, warm, and lovely, adding fascinating details to my understanding of the show, among them, the revelation that she had been diagnosed as autistic. “I wanted to say, look what these kinds of brains can do,” she told me, about the development of Nanette.

  A few weeks later, the Netflix special of the show came out. This version of Nanette struck me as slightly less effective when I watched it—maybe that was because I’d seen the show before, but to me, it lacked the punishing thrill of being in her presence, of reacting and responding to her ideas in real time, as if we were in a church service. It was still powerful, though. And nearly immediately, it became a viral phenomenon, a symbol of the larger feminist critique of the comedy world, part of the newest stage of #MeToo. Its creator, despite her original intention to piss people off so much that she’d wreck her own career, had become a global celebrity. The space left empty by Louis C.K., the man acclaimed by critics like me as a scathing comic philosopher, was suddenly filled by Hannah Gadsby.

  Arguing with Nanette felt more invigorating than agreeing with ot
her people’s shows. My skin had prickled like mad, in particular, during Gadsby’s climactic set piece about Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso. “I hate Picasso,” Gadsby announced. “And you can’t make me like him.” In a brisk, satisfying diatribe, Gadsby proceeded to puncture every excuse that I made for the male artists who had fascinated me—exploding, as if pricking balloons, the myth of genius, the romanticization of madness, the notion that there was a sort of troubled, disordered rule-breaking psyche for whom abuse was inevitable, necessary, and maybe even a bit beautiful. She painted a sympathetic but critical portrait of van Gogh: He wasn’t a mad genius ahead of his time, neglected by a cruel public. In fact, his best work came less from his illness than from his treatment—those sunflowers were inspired by the foxglove his psychiatrist prescribed, which made him see bright yellow. If he couldn’t sell paintings, that was because he couldn’t interact with anyone, couldn’t schmooze. It was his human connections—particularly the compassion of his brother Theo—that made his art possible, not his much-valorized alienation.

  As for Picasso, he hated women. That was not such a controversial statement. But for Gadsby, Picasso’s hatred canceled out the value of his paintings—and as she sketched out how she saw it, she made the argument that Picasso’s misogyny was itself a mental illness. The difference was that misogyny was a sickness the world excused. Picasso’s mystique sold his art. She dwelled, with disgust, on Picasso’s seduction, when he was in his forties, of the seventeen-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter. She mocked Picasso’s claim—which was so similar to Polanski’s claim about those private-school girls—that he and Marie-Thérèse were ideal for each other. Like Polanski, he had written that both of them, himself and his teen lover, were “in their prime.”