TV, its been said, is in a golden age. There are great shows and great criticism surrounding it. But every once and a while a single episode of a single show makes such noise that every Tom, Dick and Harry comes out of the woodwork to write a think piece about it.
Two years ago “Girls” stoked controversy with a polarizing episode in which Hannah enters into something of a fantasy weekend with a hot, wealthy guy played by Patrick Wilson. More recently, “Game of Thrones” stirred questions of whether or not a character was raped.
And in each case the headlines and articles are as contrarian, attention grabbing, thought provoking (and hopefully as intelligent) as the episode on which it is based.
This week, “Louie,” one of my favorite shows on television, hit a homerun with an episode that subverted tropes, pointed a finger at society and made Louis C.K., the show’s brilliant auteur behind so many of its elements, into a character we truly pity rather than laugh at.
“Louie” has done this before. Back in Season 2 Louie learned that an old friend was going to perform a last night of standup and then commit suicide, and whether Louie or his friend has the better case for living or dying is left somewhat up for grabs. In Season 3, Louie connects with a Latin American lifeguard in Miami in a relationship that seems more than platonic. These episodes were clear in their ideas, and they were celebrated because they provided us another point of view. C.K. forced us to think about how media and how society depicted ideas like homosexuality, masculinity, suicide and in other episodes religion, relationships and even the campaign in Afghanistan.
Anyone who knows C.K.’s comedy knows he’s actually quite the feminist, and this week on an episode called “So Did the Fat Lady,” he tackled a subject and a fear that for reasons he lays bare throughout the episode, feel close to home: dating as an overweight woman and the perception we carry about them.
The episode involves a chubby waitress named Vanessa (played by a now breakout performer Sarah Baker) who comes on strong and asks Louie out after he performs. She’s funny, charming and clearly into him, all of which offset the fact that Louie might be a little uncomfortable having a woman he’s just met be so up front. You constantly beg for him to say yes and just see what happens, but he’s got pressures in the form of Jim Norton lurking in the background saying “Yuck” as she walks away, Louie continuing to approach the comedy club’s other waitresses like “Sunshine” and his own weight being rebuked when he’s out with his brother on a “Bang Bang,” in which he eats two huge meals of different cuisines back to back.
But the episode’s most affecting, and polarizing, moment comes in a monologue by Vanessa when they finally do go on a coffee date.
That clip is really something. Any guy, whether they acted the way Louie did or not, has been on the other side of that conversation. And any girl, under different, but perhaps similar conditions, has taken out their frustrations on a guy over something that should be so simple but society makes so complicated.
But more specifically, this is a conversation about a fat girl and why it plain sucks to deal with the dating scene when you’re Vanessa’s size. Libby Hill’s A.V. Club piece says it perfectly.
“To tell a fat woman—who’s fully aware of her weight, her size, her body, who gets up every morning and looks in the mirror the same as anyone—that she’s not fat confirms all of her worst fears about herself: Ultimately, being fat is something to feel intensely ashamed of. It’s so shameful that loved ones will deny it to her face, lest her heart break at the realization.”
And as a female friendly, overweight comedian who has scoured the depths of his own relationship turmoil on the show and in his standup, there may be no better person than C.K who could have written that scene and made it as poignant as it is.
Yet I’ve read columns of people invalidating the monologue because C.K. wrote it (Willa Paskin at Slate called it a male “mea culpa” Sara Stewart at Indiewire’s Women and Hollywood blog called it a “mansplain”). He’s a man talking at us through his actress surrogate, and Baker didn’t even have any input. Hill again at the A.V. Club opined that C.K. can be championed while someone like Lena Dunham gets vilified for making the same point on “Girls” (for what it’s worth, Dunham gets plenty of praise, and it’s clear now that C.K. gets more than enough criticism). In Time Magazine James Poniewozik posits that because C.K. is ultimately the writer, he’s “checking his privilege” as a white male when it comes to gender or race.
That privilege, race or a question of who should be allowed to make what points on television come into play at all may be an aftermath of a recently controversial white privilege article I refused to hate read. Because it’s a mistake to presume that C.K.’s words and Baker’s monologue might entirely be speaking for all fat women or that C.K. should be the target of all of fat women’s misplaced aggression toward all men.
That may be initially hard to swallow. “On behalf of all the fat girls, I’m making you represent all the guys,” Vanessa says early on. C.K. even implicates the audience by having Vanessa point to the camera and ask us what we see when we see them as a couple. And the rest of the episode is so transparent about the weight issue that this hits hard.
And yet “Louie” has always been a show filtered through the mind of Louis C.K. In this episode’s companion episode “Model” from last week, Alan Sepinwall at Hitfix points out that this trope of television, i.e. the fat guy landing the dream girl, is not uncommon, but that this episode works in a dramatic, surreal way because its events and the behavior are clearly how Louie perceives it. In “So Did the Fat Lady,” Baker is speaking generally, but she’s addressing Louie and the preconceived notions and fears he clearly and specifically harbors. She challenges him if he’s ever dated a woman heavier than himself, and she correctly asserts how he would’ve acted differently had she asked him to fuck or looked like the model in the previous episode. Surely this can’t be the situation of all men or women.
There’s even the question of whether C.K. “gets it right”. C.K. can’t possibly know what it is to be a fat girl, and its naive to believe he’s striving for universal accuracy. Danielle Henderson’s Vulture article says C.K. turned Vanessa into a pitiful mess and someone who’s anemic to dating and sexual experience. “I was bothered that he took this previously badass woman, a fearless street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm, and turned her into a pathetic showcase of hidden weaknesses just looking for the right man to unleash her unhappiness upon,” Henderson writes. But when a character like Vanessa describes that she’s relocated to New York and is blunt enough to say she got her period when she was 9, it’s easy to believe she might just want a stable relationship in which a guy is proud to respect her and be with her.
Many of these reviews have even neglected to point out the visual nuances that make this such a personal encounter. This entire sequence, up until its cute tag with Louie’s joke that gives the episode its title, is done in one nearly seven and a half minute long take. The way C.K. has staged it, the audience is suddenly put into the POV of Louie himself, feeling all the uncomfortable bobbing and weaving of the camera as though an awkward and dejected Louie is trying to hide his shame and embarrassment. He gives us unflattering images of Baker from his own high angle POV and from behind her back as though we were part of that conversation. There’s awkward pauses, there’s Louie fumbling for any words and there’s Vanessa taking her time and searching for the right ones.
Baker’s monologue isn’t the perfect, Sorkinesque diatribe with Baker standing valiantly on a pedestal so she can shame mankind. It’s this particular woman’s frustrated experience with men and Louie’s star struck reaction. And it all happens before Louie finally performs the tiniest, pitiful gesture of holding her hand as a way of doing what little he can to make her feel appreciated.
It’s hard to know what the rest of Season 4 of “Louie” has in store, but it’s likely that Louie will go back to clumsily hitting on women too attractive for him and that Vanessa will not return for later episodes. That’s because this was an episode about thinking differently and observing individuals, not preaching to correct all of society’s or TV’s or this character’s problems.
What C.K. could’ve done was made this episode more about him. He could’ve had Louie get out of his funk and actually come up with a plausible rebuttal to Vanessa’s claims. He could’ve turned it around and said that its just as hard for men who look the way he does, regardless of the extra clout he has on stage. He could’ve had Louie stick to his guns and ended the episode on a sour note.
But instead he gave a single fat woman a voice, and he invited writers, commenters and fans everywhere the courage to share their own.
I thought that this scene was smart, however, that’s the point why I didn’t like it as much as others. I felt like it was too much of a rant, and not much of an actual conversation I’d see myself having with somebody who was considered “fat”. For Louie’s show, it’s another reason as to why his show is so great, but this scene in particular just felt too off for me. Thankfully, Big Red himself was there to save the day with a joke I may be using quite some time in the future. In all delicacy, of course.
That’s exactly the problem I point out in the piece with a lot of the reactions to this episode. They feel it didn’t relate to them or that it wouldn’t be something they would say or do or that all fat women would say or do, but this is how Louie would act, and this is how this female character would act. Although in a way it is trying to be more, it’s not trying to be a universal catch all for everyone and every situation. It does feel familiar and it does feel thought provoking, even if you or I might’ve carried ourselves differently.