Louis C.K. & the Alchomical Dream (Louie S4, 2014)

Since an existing humorist presents the closest approximation to the religious, he has also an essential conception of the suffering in which life is involved, in that he … exists so that suffering for him is relevant to existence. But at that point the humorist turns deceptively aside and revokes the suffering in the form of the jest. He comprehends the significance of suffering as relevant to existence, but he does not comprehend the significance of the suffering itself. … The first thought is the pain in the humoristic consciousness, the second is the jest, and hence it comes about that one is tempted both to weep and laugh when the humorist speaks. - Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript

PREFACE: IRONY, HUMOR, & THE HICKS BOSON

Post-WWII American comedy contains within its storied history a lineage more baldly subversive than any other American popular art-form. It doesn’t take long to generate theories as to why this is so. The comedian is by definition a marginal figure, & marginalia confirms a certain amount of freedom to say what one wishes to say. It’s not a stretch to conflate the stand-up comedian with the religious proselytizer, those sad sacks who ended their days stoned to death in times bygone for standing up & insisting to the hopeless masses the immanent Good News. There’s something primal & sermon-on-the-mounty about the whole enterprise: the lone voice in the wilderness, on stage in a dirty bar, a town in the middle of nowhere, elucidating for people who may or may not be listening (nor comprehending), just how it is, how things really are, or at least, how they seem to be. As usual, some take advantage of this opportunity, while some exploit it: there will always be hordes of Gallaghers, Mencias, & D. Cooks (as there are D. Browns & Koontzes), but the vast number of hacks visible in any medium do not take anything away from a Lenny Bruce, a George Carlin, or, of course, a Bill Hicks.

Songwriter & raconteur extraordinaire Tom Waits, in a list of his 20 most cherished albums of all time, listed Bill Hicks' Rant in E-Minor at #15 alongside the likes of the Stones, Zappa, & Beefheart, stating of Hicks: “blowtorch, excavator, truthsayer, brain specialist, like a reverend waving a gun around… He will correct your vision.” This is so true it’s become a sordid cliché: Hicks has been subject to a backlash from many comic-headz who yawn coolly about all the woo-woo YouBubers & Facecrookers sharing Hicks’ rants about LSD in the news. Maybe thank the Zeitgeist crew for using his “Just a Ride” bit (with which he ended his aptly-named 1993 special Revelations) as read by David Icke of all people, to conclude their own much-maligned opus, but it’s not really their fault. The extremely political nature of Hicks’ revelation made him utterly marginal in his own time, & it’s why he remains so even today despite a wider general awareness of his work. Hearing a Bill Hicks routine is akin to being accosted on the street by a raving lunatic you instinctively ignore but who just might, you suspect, be completely correct. I can scarcely imagine what it must have been like to come upon him in the infernal year of 1992, two years before his untimely death & twelve years into the George H.W. Bush administration.

Hicks is not alone in his marginalia: it seems to be endemic to this crowd, as even Lenny Bruce & George Carlin (to both of whom Hicks is indebted) have endured such backlashes. The common complaint is that these comics, lost in their political hangups, are simply ‘not all that funny.’ This is more true now of Bruce than of Hicks (in my opinion), but ultimately it doesn’t matter. The fact that they are supposedly not funny is in fact what makes them important. I would venture to say that these fellows could not have given less of a single fuck about being 'funny.’ Paraphrasing Deadwood-scribe David Milch (citing a writer whose name I’m failing to recall), laughter is the release of pain felt in response to the thing survived. Laughter to this crowd is a byproduct, an inevitable response to the truth told well. Kierkegaard made a distinction between irony & humor: irony being the superficial realm of the aesthete that masks a true despair, while humor conceals pathos in the moral human being. It is precisely this courage to not be funny, to use the venue of stand-up comedy to speak seriously (yet hilariously) about matters that truly matter, that makes them who & what they are: heroic individuals, a rare breed of renegade alchemist-comics who we will deem alchomedians,who have ventured into the seamy underbelly of reality, ingested its contents, & allowed it to churn in the fires of their comedic kilns until it emerges, shining in a manner uniquely their own.

Enter Louis C.K.

LOUIS C.K. VS. THE LIZARD PEOPLE

…who is without a doubt our generation’s inheritor of this legacy of American alchomedians dating back to Lenny Bruce, down through George Carlin & Richard Pryor, to Bill Hicks, Dave Chappelle, & other names I am surely neglecting. While Doug Stanhope stands nervously in the shadow of Bill Hicks as a talented comedian ranting against the evils of drug prohibition, Louis is an alchomedian & a star in the Crowleyian sense. He knows who he is, & as reviewers of his FX neo-sitcom Louie have pointed out repeatedly, he’s not much concerned with being 'funny.’ One episode in the first season of the show (“God”) barely had him in it at all, instead focusing on a flashback to an episode of his childhood in which he was subjected to an excruciatingly detailed account of the Crucifixion of Christ by a Catholic doctor (Tom Noonan, who played Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Double in Synecdoche, New York). The jokes are minimal, if there are any there at all. 'Where is the funny?’ certain people exclaimed in response. American audiences have been trained in irony: the aloof, the detached, the nihilistic, “the laughter of despair,” according to the Great Dane, since “the spirit does not allow itself to be mocked." In seeming opposition to this trend, Louie presents humor, derived from the acknowledgement & subsequent revocation of suffering, & humor is antipathy to the ironist.

Louis C.K. bucks the alchomical trend, however, because he is decidedly not marginal. He has a popular cable TV show which has won multiple Emmy awards, & crucially, unlike most comic’s TV shows, Louis has 100% creative control over the final product. He’s stated in interviews that he only agreed to do the show if the Bosses would agree to wire him the money for each episode, then not bother him at all until he delivers the episodes, with the understanding that they would not see the show until it airs. This is a lot of power to have, a rare deal indeed in the TV industry. There are not many artists in mainstream TV with an audience the size of Louis who have 100% control over their final product. I can’t even name one. In film, of course, there are more: David Lynch is one such artist (read David Foster Wallace’s essay on Lynch to learn more about his struggle to gain such control). Not so coincidentally, Lynch came out of his years-long Transcendental closet to play a central role in the brilliant & hilarious two-part finale of season 3.

Another such filmmaker was, of course, Stanley Kubrick (another S.K.), notorious for the maniacal attention & control he exerted over every detail of his films. Kubrick was an avowed fan of Lynch as well, having screened Eraserhead for the cast & crew of The Shining as an example illustrative of… something. Eraserhead was all Lynch: it’s likely Kubrick felt a certain kinship to Lynch’s auteurist vision, in addition to the oppressive atmosphere that film presents in relation to his goals for The Shining. Here is Stanley Kubrick directing 2001: A Space Odyssey:

Here is Louis C.K. in a sketch on a recent episode of SNL:

He’s playing Abraham Lincoln trying to make friends with an emancipated slave, yet curiously, he looks a lot more like Kubrick in the 1960s than he does Lincoln in the 1860s. Skeptics will question whether he intentionally made himself look like Kubrick for this sketch, but there’s no question that he courted Lynch for his TV show & that Lynch, who had not appeared on TV since his role in Twin Peaks, accepted. If Louis is indeed a true alchomic, then intentionality in this matter—drawing certain subtle parallels between Kubrick & himself as emancipated creative Individuals within a larger system of slavery—is within the realm of possibility. I might be asked to provide further proof of nods made by Louis to Kubrick, & will do so shortly.

But first, have a listen to this recording of Louis on the Opie & Anthony show, where he sat-in on an interview with, of all people, Donald Rumsfeld. It’s a masterpiece of political-comedic skullduggery, which to my mind proves 'to a moral certainty’ that C.K. is our generation's alchomedian extraordinaire. Aside from promoting his memoir Known & Unknown, what Rumsfeld was doing being interviewed on O&A is unclear. Likely it had to do with improving his image amongst the 'young & hip’ demographic, but with C.K. in the house, the backfire was spectacular. Clearly unimpressed by Rumsfeld’s pretensions to patriotism & not interested in the requisite ass-kissing reserved for the hosts, C.K. inserts himself into the conversation almost immediately & goes straight for the jugular: "But so, how does it feel… you’ve probably accumulated a lot of things that you know that you will never tell anybody on the planet earth, right?” Rumsfeld shakes it off, but Louis is undeterred, & raises the stakes by a notch with his next question:

It’s interesting though, because there are people who think, I mean here’s a guy who… met Eisenhower as a Congressman… & worked for Ford & Nixon & Reagan, & both Bushes, & there’s still those people out there that think, you know, Rumsfeld & Dick Cheney are… actually lizards. I mean literally there’s people who think they’re lizards from outer space who eat human flesh. I don’t know if anybody’s ever asked you directly, sir, but are you, are you a lizard?

O&A’s discomfort once they realize what C.K. is up to is palpable, & unintentionally the funniest thing about the whole conversation. I won’t bother to recapitulate the whole exchange (listen for yourself, it’s quite entertaining) but suffice it to say that Rumsfeld never acknowledges the question. The joke being, of course, that he never actually denies being a lizard (ie, Reptilian), so therefore there must be something in the lizard brain that renders him incapable of lying about it. Whether or not you buy into the Reptilian hypothesis, or the more digestible notion that it’s a metaphor for psychopathy & the reptilian brain, the fact that Louis kept a straight face through the whole affair, never making it clear that what he was doing was a joke, is enough to illustrate the points I want to make: that Louis is well-versed in contemporary “conspiracy theory” (for lack of a better term), & that perhaps for him, indeed, it wasn’t a joke at all. This goes back to the notion of the true alchomic as being decidedly not funny, making jokes that are in fact not jokes at all but various iterations of the Truth related in very amusing ways.

ACT ONE: THE FOOL FALLS

Now, here’s where I get down to the nitty gritty & bring it all back home. Through varying degrees of osmosis I have demonstrated links between S. Kierkegaard to Louis C.K. to Bill Hicks, David Lynch, back to S. Kubrick, & conspiracy theory, but now I will turn to the Work itself to nail it to the wall, so to speak, the Work in question being season 4 of Louie, currently airing on the FX network. For those number-crunchers out there in sync-land, note that the season will run on Monday nights for 7 ($$) consecutive weeks at 2 episodes per week for a total of 14 episodes. I want to focus on the fourth season’s second episode, entitled “Model,” as the most overtly explosive of the four that have aired so far. Be warned: what follows is a psychotically in-depth breakdown of the whole episode, which lasts twenty-three minutes & eleven seconds. Also note that I will refer to the character played by C.K. as 'Louie’ & will use either 'C.K.’ or 'Louis’ to refer to the man himself.

The episode begins with Louie attempting to ask out a waitress at the comedy club where he performs. She won’t let him even get to the asking part though: “Hey, um…" "Please don’t. Please don’t do it. Just… please don’t make me say no to you, all nice &… just don’t ask, okay? Just don’t, I don’t wanna… live that, right now. Okay?" Ouch. Keep this moment in mind because we will come back to it at the end. After this harsh rebuffing, Louis is immediately approached by Jerry Seinfeld, who asks Louis to open for him at a benefit in the Hamptons after the original comic bowed out. Louis agrees, but finds himself woefully wrong for the part. Seinfeld provides only the bare minimum of instruction, asking him to "work clean,” the show “starts at 5,” assuming Louis has read “the manual,” so of course Louis shows up late, underdressed, with nothing prepared in the way of “clean” material. Needless to say it is all hilarious in the understated, self-effacing & vaguely sad manner that Louis has perfected over the years, particularly due to the stellar chemistry between Louis & Seinfeld, who is in rare form (“Can you not say… dirty… sex, poop, dogs… having sex, with vagina dirt?”). Louis bombs in spectacular fashion, but certain details of the event bear close (you might say excruciatingly so) inspection before moving on to the second part.

The venue of the benefit, seen in the above screenshot, is a massive Rothschild-esque mansion attended by people Seinfeld refers to as “billionaires & trillionaires.” In fact the mansion is Oheka Castle, built by Otto HErman KAhn in 1917 for $11 million, still today the second largest private residence ever built in the USA. The whole affair is a farcical version of the Somerton episode in Eyes Wide Shut, complete with an array of sleek, black luxury vehicles & imposing security guards.

Louie: Who are all these people? They look like celebrities but I don’t recognize any of them. Seinfeld: These are the billionaires & trillionaires of Hampton beach! Louie: …there are trillionaires now? Seinfeld: Yeah.

Indeed. Louie finds himself swaddled uncouthly in an ill-fitting security guard’s jacket & thrust on stage to a waiting audience (seen in the above picture). The jacket bears an American flag on one shoulder, indicating who is the true patriot in the room, & the security eagle emblem on the other. Louis C.K. here has cast his fictional self, the comic, Louie, in the role of the security guard, his humor acting as a buffer of protection between Us & Them. The benefit in question is for something called the “World Heart Alliance,” a subtle nod to vampirism: the literal draining of blood (or, as the case may be, psychic energy) from both human beings (women & children, mostly) &, metaphorically, the “world heart” via the criminal financial system. Additionally the word “Alliance” scans as “a-lie-ance.” The alliance is a lie. The red drapes are another obvious nod both to Eyes Wide Shut (they figure prominently in the Somerton episode) & Twin Peaks (also referenced in last season’s episodes with David Lynch), not to mention to the red, red groovy that is the World Heart Alliance’s nightly snack. Louie’s routine is a spectacular failure in the eyes of his in situ audience, but to us folks at home it’s a home run for sure.

Louie’s one pre-written piece of comic material, which he writes on the way to the event, is a joke about chickens. “Chickens are dumb,” he says, stumbling through the joke. “Right? How long have we been eating chickens & they’re not, they don’t… get a little wary, at this point? They don’t… haven’t risen up… there’s been no Martin Luther… Chicken.” As previously established, Louie is working a crowd of vampires. He’s talking about us, himself, the masses. We are the chickens, stupidly allowing ourselves to be farmed & eaten for the pleasure of our Archonic masters. But “chickens” also calls to mind the trenchant remark made by Malcolm X about the JFK assassination: “The Chickens have come home to Roost.” Not only are they vampires, they are cannibals: wise chickens eating ignorant chickens.

After the chicken joke flops, Louie goes for broke & starts to improvise, though of course staying on point thematically.

You know when you go to the supermarket? Not that any of you would ever do your own shopping. Uh, I know that you guys don’t shop for yourselves, of course. Because you all have slaves, somehow still. Uh, no, I mean, y'know, I just mean people that work for you that… you don’t pay. You came… this is your, uh… soul-laundering service?

I’m not sure how much clearer a reference to psychic vampires you can get without just coming out with it. The general FX crowd can watch & laugh at this, confirmed in their vague idea that rich people take advantage of the rest of us, somehow, & go about their increasingly-lower-class days, but the smaller, not insignificant portion of us watching with, in Hicks’s phraseology, “their squeegee’d third eye,” know what Louis is doing: communicating deep, occult truths about the nature of the human predicament in a form easily digestible by the masses. Hicks labored in obscurity because he couldn’t help but say things that, for various reasons, cannot be said in America to large audiences even today, things like “It’s not that I think George Bush is a bad guy; it’s that I think he is a demon sent here to destroy the planet Earth.” That was just the kind of guy he was, & bless his memory for saying what needed to be said. Louis C.K. is a different kind of person, living in a different time, but his ontology is fundamentally the same as Hicks: Evil exists. Only instead of raging in the face of it while telling Dick Jokes, C.K. quietly demurs in self-effacement, while slipping a knife in Evil’s back (& telling Dick Jokes). But wait, there’s more.

This shot in particular struck me as particularly Kubrickian, possibly an oblique reference to the opening shot of 2001. What can’t be conveyed in a screenshot is the camera movement, which tracks around Louis in a semi-circle from one side to the other, much in the shape of the crescent moon seen in 2001. M. LeClair's assessment of the 2001 shot as being a reflection of the theater itself, shot from a perspective set behind the movie screen, with the Sun acting as the light from the film projector, & the sliver of visible Moon being the backlit heads of the audience, resonates here (& everywhere). In that film, the screen on which the projection is cast is the Monolith, but here the projection is cast onto the broad shoulders of Louie himself, the spotlight trained on the Comic, eternally clad in a slate black t-shirt, his chosen outfit for all his performances, his shadow self landing on the red drapes behind him (pictured above).

The Co(s)mic Zero, ie, The Fool, whose jokes fall flat, is hung out to dry & tasked with the thankless job of introducing the Magician, played here by Jerry Seinfeld, who has read the Manual & knows the tricks. He’s played this game for years. Trick #1 is revealed when Seinfeld finally comes out & tells a joke about (what else?) golf, the preferred leisure activity of the World Heart Alliance, or as LeClair has aptly named them, the Nazi Golfers From the Future. This arrangement was presented similarly in the previous season’s David Lynch story-arc, wherein Seinfeld was apocryphally tapped to replace the retiring David Letterman on the Late Show (a prophetic plotline indeed), while Louie the Fool interviews for the job as a predetermined flop to get Seinfeld the Magician to lower his asking price.

ACT TWO: MANIC PIXIE MOONCHILD

That was all before the first commercial break. When we return (coincidentally[?] timestamped at 9:11 on my video file), Louie is outside the venue trying to call a cab when he is joined from afar by a young woman who, we were shown earlier, was the only person laughing at his performance. They shout at each other from opposite sides of the parking lot: he can’t understand a word she says. She likes him though, so she invites him for a ride in her convertible, during which ride they shout at each other from their respective seats in the car. Louie asks her name; she struggles to hear him over the wind. He repeats the question & she responds with “I like your hair,” reaching over to rub his head. A theme of distances & the impossibility of communication between the two of them seems obvious.

They arrive at her mansion after the sun has set. She disembarks suddenly & runs toward the ocean. Louie chases after her while she yells back at him: “Oh my god, what a beautiful night!" she says. "Isn’t it always beautiful here?” he responds. “Yes, but I never notice, I hate it here. Tonight I love it, because I’m laughing." She strips off her dress & runs into the surf, shrinking into the dark, blurry background while Louis takes one or two small steps forward on the beach in the foreground, watching. If it all sounds cheesy & dreamlike, that’s because it is. It is textbook Manic Pixie Dream Girl behavior, but the action is not presented in a manner evoking the trope’s customary tone of carefree flirtatiousness. Quite the opposite in fact: the beach is sunless, & the sound of the surf overwhelms. The distance between them is palpable. She appears blurred & indistinct while Louie is reduced to a silhouette.

The scene is starkly lit & barren of color. The tide is strong, & for a moment it feels like there’s a chance she will jump into the ocean & not resurface. It is all quite lonely. In fact there is something positively lunar about the scene, & not just in terms of the Moon’s salient influence on the tides (&, perhaps, the woman). The grey footstepped sand on the beach might as well be the lunar surface: Louie has found himself set against an alien landscape, dealing with a person with whom he cannot communicate & who behaves more like a fantasy than a real human being. She takes a quick dip, then returns uneventfully. "Come on, let’s go inside.” He follows, wearing a face that has come to expect the worst. Commercial break number two.

Upon returning, they are entering the house. She’s dripping wet & squeegees out her hair by hand, an ecstatic smile on her face. Louie performs some physical comedy here, slipping as soon as he steps through the door (the Fool, again, falling). She finally stops moving. They stop & face each other, for the first time able to hear one another. She’s not bashful, remaining barely clothed, not bothering to towel herself off. Louie is clearly uncomfortable, not sure if this is really going where it seems to be going. As with the beach scene, there’s a conflict of tones: the moment has all the hallmarks of typical sitcom titillation, but there’s an awkwardness. She is completely exposed physically & yet remains anonymous. There is no true intimacy; she appears as in body only, the human being inside remains veiled. We see her but do not see her, much as we do Alice in the opening image of Eyes Wide Shut. The sheer gulf of space between them has shrunk but remains as the third character in the room. “Is this your house? This is crazy.” “I know," she says, continuing to laugh at seemingly everything.

The lunar theme remains, as the house appears to be lit by moonlight itself (note pearly-white decor & the prominently displayed spherical white lamps), but is made explicit by the photograph of an astronaut in the middle of the frame. "Is that your father?" Louie asks. "Yeah," she says. "He walked on the moon," a phrase which she repeats, deepening her voice & standing up straight in the manner of a Serious Man, then laughing at her own joke. "Well, so, then what did he do?” Louie quips, & she doubles over with more laughter. “Exactly!” She’s right: it’s a good question. Apparently being an Apollo astronaut confers astronomical wealth & a membership to the World Heart Alliance. Further inspection reveals that the photograph is in fact of Buzz Aldrin, the man who followed Neal Armstrong to the lunar surface on Apollo 11. No stranger to occult theories about the solar system, he nevertheless made headlines for punching moon-landing denier Bart Sibrel in the face after Sibrel confronted him, though “confront” is a tepid description of the incident: Sibrel got in Aldrin’s face & called him a coward (not a smart move), but nonetheless the fact that Aldrin punched a moon-landing-denier is significant because of what happens later in this episode. Of course, it’s well-known that NASA is full of high-ranking secret-society types, & who knows better how to keep a secret than 33° freemasons like Armstrong & Aldrin?

Right after Louie’s quip, this still-nameless moonchild closes the gap between them & kisses him, as he fumbles around to cover her up with his security jacket. Conflicted, he eventually gives in to her advances, & we cut to Louie in bed, still donning his slate-black 'monolith’ tee, sighing & looking vaguely disgusted with himself. “Are you okay?" she asks.

Yeah. Yeah, no, I, yes. Yes, very okay, this is, o-kay. Yes. I just don't—y'know the thing is, I don’t generally do the whole, I mean, it’s not… it’s just like, a very beautiful, astronaut’s daughter….model? Okay, let’s throw that in there… model, kind of people, type of person, doesn’t usually take me home & have sex with me. It’s not my usual, it’s not how I roll. ”Mmhm. Well, maybe it’s not really happening.“

She gives Louie the people’s eyebrow, then again laughs at her own joke, to which Louie responds, ”You’re very weird.“ This is another well-worn aspect of the MPDG trope, but context is everything & the way in which Louis uses the trope drips with significance. C.K. has so far in this episode made a direct link from a) the Elite vampire class to b) the Apollo moon-landings to c) the Model as moonchild & thus between the exploration/conquering of outer space &the transhumanist effort by the Elites to become like God & 'perfect’ the human form (a process portrayed ultra-seductively by Kubrick in 2001). The idea that the experience "isn’t really happening,” beyond a true-but-overworked “life is but a dream” interpretation, is a veiled admission that the drive to leave the planet & conquer outer space is a fantasy, a metaphorical reflection of the hypermasculine compulsion to fuck the sky & produce a perfect human being while at once molding it into the most desirable state. In practice, the process is in fact the conquering of inner space, which is the only kind of space there is, by convincing the general masses to believe in a series of mass-mediated lies, chief among them the myth of landing a man on the lunar surface using phallic, saturnine rocket-technology. The Apollo rocket was, after all, named the “Saturn V.”

The plot takes a turn when the Model, who has been laughing all night at Louie’s jokes, tries to turn the tables & make the Comic laugh. “You don’t look like you laugh a lot," she says. Of course not: the alchomist cannot laugh as he is too busy acknowledging the suffering he sees all around him. Laughter is for the audience, not the alchomist. She wants to make him laugh, though, & insists, over his serious protestations, on ticklinghim, only to find out that Louie, we’re later told, is ”violently ticklish.“ Instead of laughing he flinches hard & accidentally (or should we say unconsciously) elbows her in the face, knocking her out cold. In my interpretation this action signifies the natural human response to the manipulation described in the previous ¶: if we are pushed hard enough, tortured enough under the guise of 'pleasurable’ tickling, we will respond violently, without even thinking. The next shot is an ambulance taking her away. Commercial break number three.

ACT THREE: COMPENSATION FOR DAMAGES

When we rejoin our hero, Louie is in the hospital calling Jerry Seinfeld to ask him for help. Jerry is incredulous as to how the incident occurred:

Seinfeld: "Oh, Louie! Why did you hit her? Louie: She was ticklingme. Seinfeld: Oh, right.

His reaction to this news is amusing considering what was said above about the alchomedian & laughter. Jerry, the Magician, does not seem all that surprised: he knows that you never try to make the comedian laugh. He gives Louie the number of a lawyer & that’s the last we hear from him. Immediately following this, Louie is accosted by the girl’s astronaut father, clad in a tux with bright blue bowtie (odd considering the benefit was a black-tie affair). Going from the picture, this must be Buzz, & indeed it does kinda resemble the man himself (contrast with above). Of course, he approaches Louie & punches him in the face in almost the exact same manner that the real Buzz punched Sibrel. I can’t underplay this moment’s significance: Louie is placing himself in the role of Sibrel, the moon-landing denier. Was Louie knocking out the moonchild a crypto-denial of the reality of the Apollo moon-landings & thus the entire false edifice of 'consensus reality’ forced on us by the vampire elite? The Big Lies (9/11, JFK, etc) are the Big Threads in a tapestry that, if tugged hard enough, quickly unwinds. It’s my contention that this is in fact what C.K. is doing. It’s too perfectly aligned to be otherwise, though I welcome disagreement.

We’re nearing the end now. Louie meets with his lawyer in a pale green Matrix-esque interrogation room, where we finally learn the girl’s name: Blake. Of course, Blake is typically given to a male, & appears to have been used as a nickname for children with either a "very light” or “very dark” complexion. This contradiction is perfect in terms of the moonchild agenda: the Model has an androgynous name, another indication that the polarities of human experience are being intentionally dissolved to the pursuit of a transcendent being. Except it seems Louie has unintentionally thrown a wrench in this plan. His lawyer (played with deadpan genius by Victor Garber, who, you may recall, was the Chief Architect in James Cameron’s Titanic) tells him: “She’s going to be okay, generally. She has some serious damage to her eye. Like some permanent damage to her vision…her pupil is paralyzed. And she’s a professional model, so, that’s not good." Ouch.

This bit about Blake’s pupil is worth examining in more detail. It’s an oddly specific injury, & is crucial to her work as a model, as the Lawyer mentions. The pupil, you likely are aware, is responsible for dilating or constricting to allow sufficient amounts of light into the retina. Having a paralyzed pupil would be like having a camera with a broken shutter: too much light & your picture of reality is busted, awash with light. You would not be able to see properly in light nor in dark. The significance of this injury occurring to our model/moonchild Blake seems vast. If we take for a moment the traditional metaphor of 'light’ as representing 'truth,’ we can say that Blake’s picture of reality has become fixed: no longer able to stand as vampire-bait in the overwhelming light of model-space, you might say that Louie has corrected her vision. But it will cost him: the family, who are "not people you want to upset … want compensation for damages. … People are under the misconception that the rich can’t sue the poor. They can. They want you to pay.”

Specifically, it turns out they want to extract 10 million dollars from poor Louie as compensation, as apparently this is the cost of an unusable moonchild. The Lawyer, helpfully, thinks he can get that down to $5 million. He will be making monthly (moon-ly) payments. They have a small exchange on the nature of Louie’s crimes:

Lawyer: If we took this to trial, with the lawyers & the influence they have, it would be easy to imagine a case of criminal negligence. Louie: How? Lawyer: You were naked in a bed with a stranger. You took that responsibility. Louie: People do that. Lawyer: You didn’t know this person & yet you were as intimate with her as if she was your wife, & you didn’t know her name, & she didn’t know that you were violently ticklish. I’m just telling you where this is headed. Louie: Well, wait a minute, because she was there too. I mean, she made the same choice to do it, so, she’s at least 50 per cent responsible. Lawyer: Which is why I think I can get it to 5 million.

There is an overtly conservative, moralistic tone to this story & I do not mean that as an insult: as a Kierkegaardian humorist, this is the traffic in which Louis C.K. must sit. In a society that makes claims toward total freedom & sexual liberation, where literally any type of sexual act, ranging the gamut from tepid to perverse, is not only permitted but viewable in High Definition in two clicks of a computer mouse, it’s considered perfectly normal (even healthy)behavior for men to avail themselves of whatever pornographic category suits their fancy. No matter the state of their marital affairs, it’s accepted as a given that people (mostly men, as it’s the male gaze that both makes & markets it) watch pornography. It’s not cheating, we tell ourselves & each other, because it’s not 'true intimacy,’ & yet, if we overlay the Lawyer’s admonition onto such an act, we see that this is what C.K. is talking about: “you [don’t] know this person & yet you [are] as intimate with her as if she [is] your wife” he says in the crucial close-up.

This may seem at first to be a digression from what we have been observing up to this point, but in fact it’s intimately related & the crux of the entire episode. C.K. has made a link between the Elite vampire class to the Apollo moon-landing/moon-child & the limits of our televisual reality—the mass-mediated Deep Events that delineate the boundaries of what we are allowed to question. The inclusion of pornography as part of the control mechanism is essential as it is yet another form of mass-mediated delusion, specifically in its degrading effect on intimacy: the human being whose sexual synapses have been shaped via the televisual act has reduced sex to a process of objectification, & if sex is objectified then not only do we objectify each other, we objectify ourselves. As the late Rik Clay observed, the appellation of 'XXX’ to pornography is a dead giveaway, & as he also points out, the energy being dispensed by human beings into this activity is immense & it is this energy that the vampiric elite desire. This is the ultimate end-goal of the transhumanists: to get us to see ourselves & the earth as a biological waste-dump: a happy accident of materiality, billions of supposedly higher primates fucking each other in machinelike fashion, straight into oblivion, so they may reap the psychic rewards. We emerged from oblivion & we will return there soon enough. It’s a psychopathic shitshow wherein we are the main dish. Reject it. General Ripper was portrayed in Dr. Strangelove as a deluded fool, but he had at least one good idea: deny them your essence. In Kubrick’s typical crypto-misogynist fashion, Ripper's them was Woman, but this is obviously false. Those that want your essence use Woman as a scapegoat, justifying systemic oppression of the feminine in their bid for the hypermasculine ideal. Ripper’s renegade bombing order acts as blowback: he has simply bought into their charade, unable to discern reality from the lies his teacher tells him, & has followed it to its logical conclusion: Total Annihilation.

CODA

During the recent episode of Always Record on which I was a guest, Alan Green pointed out that season 4, episode 2 (or S4E2 as delineated in torrent-speak) encodes 42. I didn’t hear him at the time as I was lost in a nervous attempt to explain my thoughts on the show, but it’s perfect, as in The Shining Danny, the adolescent moonchild from 2001, wears a prominent 42, watches Summer of '42 on TV, etc. I just wanted to acknowledge that great catch since I failed to do it on the show. Also: I said Edgar Mitchell punched the guy when I should have said Buzz Aldrin.



The final joke of the episode returns us to the beginning, turning the show into a perfect cyclical loop: we cut rather abruptly back to Louie in the bar, sitting with Jamie, the waitress who rejected him in the opening moments. “That is the worst story I’ve ever heard in my entire life. Oh my god. Oh my god!" she says, clutching his arm, before bursting into laughter. ”So you have to pay them 5000 dollars for the rest of your life?“ More laughter. ”Oh my god. Do you want a drink?“ "Yeah, sure.” “Okay, don’t go anywhere I’m going to get us a drink, okay?” “Okay." She exits the frame & the credits roll over Louie’s face, finally satisfied. He got his date, someone to talk to & sympathize with him, to see the humor in his misfortune. It’s a humorous, emotionally resonant ending & like all that came before, pregnant with meaning. It again calls into question the veracity of the events described: if we return to the beginning of the loop we notice that Louie is approached by Seinfeld literally immediately after he’s rejected by Jamie. What is Seinfeld even doing there in that club? Where did he come from? Where is he going? Louis C.K. might be a hugely successful comedian but Louie the character is not: he plays small clubs & does not have much money. We see now the strong possibility that the whole story was a fantasy concocted by Louie to get a girl to feel sorry for him. His nose does appear broken, but there are any number of ways to get punched in the face in New York City.

Is all of this, then—by which I mean the preceding exegesis, the vampires, the grand "conspiracy theory"—just a veiled way of getting someone to talk to us? Or just to me? Is any of it really true? Perhaps, perhaps not. To bring us all the way back home to the Great Dane, Kierkegaard’s treatise Either/or: A fragment of life presents two opposing ways of dealing with reality, which he refers to as the "aesthetic” life & the “ethical” life (correlating to the “irony” & “humor” referenced earlier). This either/or dichotomy is indeed only a fragment of life: it is the road to despair. Life is not an either/or proposition, it’s both/and. True & not true. True enough.

If it’s even true enough, then Louis C.K. can be said to be, in keeping with my thesis, not just a real funny guy but a true alchomedian & one of the most gifted mass-media artists of our time. A Magician in Fool’s Attire. I thank him for his Service.

That’s that.

- 2014