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.   



Drag without Drag

 

 

Drag can be a drag sometimes, a rote activity performed because it's "drag," not because it's exciting or unique or funny or astute.  Drag-shows (the ones in gay bars, on Logo, and a lot of other venues across the entertainment spectrum) can become as one-two-three as old-school stand-up routines or kitschy sing-alongs, so self-conscious and people-pleasing you want to push a dollar-bill at it all and then walk away.  I've been to, and seen, a lot of those kind of shows, with lip-syncing queens acting all busy and fierce in shiny costumes that seem worn out as much as the music and poses.  Drag to me is about an off-kilter celebration of what you are trying to emulate; it is askew and yet also somehow straight-on, judgmental enough to make a statement but also lovely enough to rise above the judgment and make a statement about the inevitable worthlessness of every situation, the absurdity of trying too hard to be somebody in a world that usually just does not give a shit.

 

So with all that said, ladies and gentleman:  Candace Devereaux, as performed by Fred Armisen on Portlandia.  The inaugural episode of the fifth season of the sparkly, slapsticky, on-target sketch show features an all back-story segment (framed hilariously by an innocent newsletter writer stumbling into Women and Women First, wanting some bare-essential information to put into the neighborhood newsletter, and Candace and her partner Toni [played to perfection by Armisen's eternal sidekick Carrie Brownstein] taking it as a major opportunity to tell their story and have it written down).   From this mini-movie, we discover why Candace and Toni wound up in feminist bookstore obscurity.  What I really want to celebrate is Armisen's exactitude and total love for Candace, in which Ms. Devereaux is given to us as an early-90s career woman fiercely focused on being the top dog in a book-store-chain empire overseen by male chauvinist pigs.  It is probably the funniest 30 minutes I have seen on TV in recent years, specific, dynamically stupid, calmly over-the-top, kind of like Armisen himself.

 

I've seen this episode now about 10 times.  Whenever I feel down or troubled, I go to it.  It makes me lose it every time, especially the gorgeous dance sequence, when Toni and Candace have a dance-off to Snap's 1990 classic, "I've Got the Power" in a fluorescently-lit happy-hour club.  What could have been a drag in this scene turns into a revelation, as Armisen performs Candace's early-90s machinations through a series of horrible and glorious dance moves involving posing like Murphy Brown and pulling her hair away from her face like a super-model with the fan just turned on.  It's all red-hot-camera-sessions, arrogance, and power-envy, blurring into a sort of caricature that isn't a caricature:  it's a portrait, a tribute.  Armisen really seems to love being Candace, inhabiting her life and skin and facial expressions with the ease of Meryl Streep doing a Hungarian accent.  He slips into the guise effortlessly, and then finds huge amounts of joy in playing through her hilarious, professional rages ("We have a story to tell.  So listen.  And WRITE IT DOWN!!!"), her man-hunger, her appetites that seem formed from intense personal politics as well as trends bullet-pointed in a 1992 Cosmo article.  Candace has no shame or remorse about it:  she is goddamn sleeping her way to the top!

 

I think a lot of the credit has to go to the director of the series, Jonathan Krisel.  He is the perfect documentarian for drag.  He lights, photographs and edits this episode with the deft, hilarious care he does in all the other Portlandia episodes, giving both Armisen and Brownstein a stage on which to be totally stupid and perfect.  There are scenes in "The Story of Candace and Toni" that seem to be mocking and/or paying homage to great 80s and 90s glossy thrillers like Fatal Attraction, Single White Female, and a number of Demi Moore vehicles where she played a hot executive in search of either a lover or a killer or both, all of that simulacra fashioned into a love-letter to Candace's persistence in being Candace, her flourishes, her furies, her wonderful Candace-ness.

 

This is the kind of drag I'm talking about:  dumbfoundingly on-target, effortlessly silly, and a tribute to what is being mocked while mocking without any reverence or fuss.  And it is so hilarious I can't stop going back to it to find some other morsel of joy. 

 

Candace Devereaux for President!

 

  

Pop Art Snark

Saturday Night Live is going through one of its sucky periods (even when Justin Timberlake is on board), but don't fret.  There is now a delirious alternative.  Sketch comedy has never been done so stylishly and meticulously as Kroll Show, Nick Kroll's funky, Pop-Art/Snark extravaganza on Comedy Central.  (They are working on Season Two right now.) 

Watching all eight episodes on-demand is like witnessing a James-Rosenquist painting diorama, with a jolt of good old-fashioned infomercial kitsch and hootspa.  The graphics on Kroll Show are 50% of the kick.  Created by Nick Kroll, Jonathan Krisel, and John Levenstein, Kroll Show has a peacock flourish that gets worked out through the way every skit looks, moves and jitters.  Krisel seems to be the main creative force behind the show's visuals.  He is one of the geniuses behind the preeminent high-style nonsense of Time and Eric's Awesome Show, Good Job and Portlandia, both TV sketch comedies that riff on, and rip off, reality-show/infomercial Day-Glo iconography and visual languages.  Krisel uses trashy graphics and jump-cuts to produce universes of junk that have both a sinister sheen and a mind-boggling verisimilitude.  Paying such close attention to pop-culture bull-shit makes the humor somehow deepen into the best kind of meaninglessness. 

Krisel is at the peak of his powers in Kroll Show, collaging bits and pieces of Bravo-TV-reality gorgeousness and cheap local TV ad desperation to frame in the equally at the-peak-of-his-powers Kroll.   Kroll's menagerie of fools includes Bobby Bottleservice, a macho-freak stand-in for all those macho-freak street-magicians and pranksters that populate almost every direct-cable network, Gil Faizon, co-host of the cable-access prank show Oh Hello, and number two of a pretentious uptown NYC senior-citizen duo that also includes Georg St. Geegland, and most incredibly the Workaholic Liz, who is the main foil to the I-Wanna-Have-a -Great Life Liz in the reality show PubLIZity. 

PubLIZity features two extremely annoying ladies running a PR firm in Los Angeles.  The un-workaholic Liz is played by the incredible Jenny Slate.  Kroll's Liz is the penultimate 21st Century Bravo-TV/E-TV reality maven, all vocal-fry, sparkly, sparkly lips sucking on big-strawed ice-coffees, constantly self-congratulating while running her fingers through her perfectly streaked blond coif.  The mannerisms and plot points of PubLIZity are so succinct and perfect they become a virus in your head.  Try watching Millionaire Matchmaker or Kim and Kourtney Take Miami after watching PubLIZity, and you'll find yourself richer for the experience.  Kroll Show mockery makes you feel more connected to what is being mocked somehow, a good-spirited meanness that allows the joke to encompass almost every aspect of media.  And the Lizes' penchant for amazeeeing cupcakes and "events" really gets at the way almost everybody lives now in this egotistical, media-soaked age.  It's excitement fetishized into a prepackaged sense of entitlement, glossy and sad and extravagant, but never satisfying.  The Lizes  are the poster-ladies for 2013 "Entrepreneurship," making sure their business-sense savvy and "brand" are always the topic of the conversations they have with possible "clients" who always end up completely underwhelmed. 

There's nothing underwhelming about Kroll Show.  It's on a shiny, ridiculous path to greatness.