Christine's World

 

 

Watching Louie Anderson perform Christine Baskets on the FX dramedy/comedy/hell-I-don-t-know-what-to-call-it-really Baskets is not actually about watching someone perform:  it's watching someone be.  Anderson is so damn good you lose track of what he's doing, and you find yourself completely enmeshed in what Christine is doing, saying, acting like, thinking even.  It's the kind of acting that can only be seen on TV because you need several episodes of it for the whole process to sink in, and then suddenly an epiphany happens and it's there:  we're witnessing brilliance.  Let's call it "art."  Why not? 

 

The epiphany for me came in the third episode, and my adoration just grew from there:  Chrisitne curled up on a couch, covered in a shimmery quilt, talking about the beauty of the curly-fries.  Louie is in drag in the scene of course, in the whole show, playing Zach Galifianakis' somehow inert and yet completely overbearing Republican mother, Christine, who lives in a suburban dreamhouse in Bakersfield, California stocked with Costco items of every sort.  The drag is really just a way to get there:  not a lot of makeup, simple hair, blowsy, beautiful, no-nonsense, older-lady clothes that are only noticeable because they are designed not to be (except for the incredible Easter bonnet Christine wore in the Easter-themed episode, which is probably the best Baskets I've seen so far).  Christine seems to have stepped out of someone's actual life, stumbling Purple-Rose-style onto the FX platform, ready to go.  It's effortless, what Louie does, and yet his contribution has the nuanced, steely-eyed essence of someone really knowing how to make shit matter.  

 

Even though the show focuses primarily on Galifianakis' inept clown-wannabe (he went to a French clown school only to flunk out and return to Southern California to be a rodeo-clown), and that's OK, it's Christine who is the center of the show's universe.  The atmosphere and ethos of the show emanate from Louie's way of being her, a style that cancels out style but somehow manages to be better than stylish:  it's drag without camp.  Instead of parody and mockery, Louie, and the writers/creators of Baskets (Galifianakis, Louis CK, and Jonathan Krisel) seek homage in the bleakest and most banal of places.  The show gets off on absurdity, but not the kind that makes people look weak and worthless; it's absurdity that somehow saves people from themselves, even while they figure out how shitty everything is.

 

Christine is not really brave or incredibly intelligent, or really worth our time.  She just is.  And her existence is significant because it's not.  She lives in her own bubble of Ronald-Reagan wishes and Costco dreams.  She doesn't seem mean-spirited, but she is sort of gnarly and vindictive in the best of ways.  She can do a passive-aggressive one-off with the best of them, and yet you truly believe that she loves herself and the people she chooses to love.  She seems to have a heart made of two-by-fours and vinyl siding, and that's a compliment she would approve of I think.

 

I keep thinking of Raymond Carver when I think of Christine too, and Louie's way of pulling the whole thing off.  Carver wrote beautiful blunt and nuanced short stories about nobodies, most who live in California.  His stories have the same rote, sweet no-nonsense intent that Louie gives Christine.  Baskets totally benefits from that sensibility.  What could have been a Galifianakis lark about a down-and-out rodeo-clown with French inclinations opens up to become a minimalist and stark meditation on what it means to be a nobody in a world of nobodies, with Christine the empress of it all, a queen driving around in a maroon Chevy four-door sedan going to pick her elderly mother up for church, or eating a hotdog at (yup) Costco, commenting on how inexpensive it is, and you also get a drink.  Carver's stories opened up from closing down, and Louie's sense of timing and shaping of scenes, the way he uses his face not to register feeling but thought, is that same process of closure being the door to something else:  he's writing a book of short stories about Christine Baskets every time he enters a room. 

 

So here goes:  Louie Anderson is now a genius in my book, and while Baskets is funny and sweet and filled with odd and off-kilter laughs (as well blessed with another great performance by the gorgeous deadpan Martha Kelly as an insurance agent with a broken arm and a humble need to go missing), it's really not the show as much as Christine's world I'm interested in.  And I don't want a spinoff ala Laverne and Shirley or The Jefferson by any means.  I'll watch Baskets just for those few minutes when Christine appears, saunters through, says something stupidly on-target, and then goes back to hosing off her driveway.   



True Bromance

Louis CK's TV show Louie (on FX Thursday nights) is a merging of all kinds of different worlds and sensibilities, a collage hodgepodge of moments captured in a cinema-verite' style that somehow transcends both movies and sitcoms.  As I watch each new episode I get the feeling Louis is referencing literature, not pop culture, and yet there's nothing starchy or explicit in those literary references.  He isn't doing Shakespeare, God knows, or even John Cheever, but there's a feeling inside each of his little 24-minute movies on Thursday nights that has the deft charm and seriousness of a really good short story written by someone who wants to both manufacture a masterpiece and also try to reconfigure what a "masterpiece" means in this really crazy and kind of creepy Reality-TV day and age.  

The transcendence and ambitiousness seems to emanate from the man himself.  A lumpy, embarrassed, middle-aged guy with a look of hope turning into hopelessness in his eyes at all times, Louis' character on the show is an avatar for the man himself of course, but it's not a docudrama or docucomedy by any means.  The show has a sloppy sense of continuity on purpose (different actors play the same characters sometimes in the same episode), but a strict sense of aesthetic purpose.  Louis always gets that 1970s Sidney-Lumet/Francis-Ford-Coppola light just right, and the romance of that smoky melancholic attention to detail gives the show a way out of itself.

The best episode I've seen so far this season details a trip Louie takes to Miami, in order to perform stand up.  The details pile up slowly and dreamily:  an anonymous hotel room facing a crowded beach, Louie overeating on a plush hotel bed, Louie adventuring out to the beach in black clothes, leaving his wallet and clothes on a beach-chair so he can go for a swim.  And then one of the staff taking the beach chair away while Louie is swimming.  Louie panics.  The lifeguard on duty thinks he's drowning.  The lifeguard in this case is a gorgeous, dreamy-eyed Cuban.  Louie and the lifeguard become fast friends in a breezy series of encounters that reminds you of those first friendships you make on playgrounds as a kid -- an intensity that far outweighs the significance of the acquaintance.  Louie basically falls in love with this guy.  The sexual implications aren't hilarious, in the way they might be on other sitcoms.  There are no easy jokes here, just easy access to human emotions.  By the end of the show, you totally understand how a straight middle-aged guy can fall in love with a young male lifeguard, and not because the older guy is horny or closeted, but because he feels all alone.  That might be one of the best examples of "gay" ever put on TV, dislocating static binaries, and providing enough space for actual feeling.

Louie is a TV show that somehow matters.  In a world overwhelmed with media and bull-shit and pundits, Louis CK has staked a claim to simple, effective, beautifully shot authenticity. 

Love and Hate

Louis CK is a genius because he is pissed off and trying to figure it out, without allowing his rage to become his schtick.  He deals in taboos (chief among them both loving and hating your kids, loving and hating your friends, loving and hating the whole damn world really), but he does not seem like he is conspicuously pushing buttons just to go blue.  His new TV show, Louie, on FX Thursday nights at 10:30, is a revelation.  Low-budget (the network made a deal with him to give him minimal money upfront for each episode promising no network-exec notes), fidgety and full of feeling, Louie feels like a cinema-verite 1970s movie with a long haired Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman sauntering somewhere around in the background.  Louis CK basically plays himself, and in the episode I saw the whole thing was a slice of his weird, boring life done so stylishly drab it felt like art.  Intermingled with the scenes of domestic "bliss" (like his daughter bitching because she doesn't get a Popsicle like his other daughter did, or his middle aged pregnant sister farting in the ER) are bits from his hilarious standup.  Louis CK is the 21st Century Jerry Seinfeld in the standup gigs:  foulmouthed but genuinely interested in real life, finding laughs in banality but also miffed that reality is so stupidly funny and banal.  "Performance art" is one of those pretentious terms we often slap onto whatever seems smugly self-contained and well just plain obtuse.  I'd say Louis CK is a "performance artist"  let out of the constraints of that trope:  he brings new insight into what performance means, while creating a small, sharp TV show that's reinventing what "TV shows" can do and be.