kimberlee rossi-fuchs looks at the seventh installment of this year’s season of louie…
“Ikea,” the first half of this week’s Louie, begins with Louie unhappily bumping into Dolores, his depressing, fucked-up hookup from last season, outside of his daughters’ school. At first, Louie tries to keep things casual with an upbeat “How ya doin’?,” but to a woman like Dolores, that’s less a simple greeting than an invitation to unload all of her neuroses and problems. Apparently, she’s been dealing with “residual feelings” from their date (which consisted of her sending him on errands and having him spank her until she began sobbing, “Daddy, I’m so sorry.”) and asks Louie to attend a therapy session with her so she can confront him in the presence of her trusted therapist. When he understandably turns her down, she counters with a backup request, asking him to come to Ikea with her that weekend on a furniture buying excursion, since her son’s father isn’t around to do so. As added incentive, she grimly offers to suck his dick in return. It’s a proposal utterly devoid of sexiness and Louie agrees to the Ikea trip seemingly more out of a sense of obligation than the prospect of some contractual fellatio.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4m3qLkTVLw
We cut to Louie and Dolores walking through Ikea and it’s instantly apparent that he didn’t get off any easier by choosing Ikea over the therapy session. In fact, going to Ikea together is probably the more emotionally daunting of the two tasks, as anyone who’s ever shopped and inevitably fought in that hellish maze of Swedish pressboard furnishings can attest. Either way, the end result is the same – Louie is clearly there to act as some sort of marital punching bag for this sad, neurotic woman. Whereas she previously used him to act out on some disturbing daddy issues, here she’s asking Louie to be a stand-in husband, someone to argue with and berate over his lack of interest in her choice of rug. Things quickly devolve into a screaming match, followed by Louie’s hilarious rug apathy rant (“It doesn’t solve all my problems, but it doesn’t make me angry…It’s not coated with AIDS…It doesn’t make me cum, but it’s FINE.”) and finally a total breakdown on Dolores’ part, forcing Louie to console the hysterically sobbing woman before tucking her into a child’s display bed to cry it out.
As Dolores, Maria Dizzia is such a needy, miserable black hole that you can’t help but laugh at her. I loved how she could quickly turn from sobbing mess to all-business, calmly telling Louie to “notify me when you want me to suck it,” before launching into a discussion about rattan chairs.
The second half of the episode opens with Louie beginning his first piano lesson, but quickly wanders off from there when his lesson is interrupted by a phone call from Maria, his comedian booty call from a few weeks back, notifying him that he has crabs. Unsure of whether she gave it to him or vice versa, she ends the conversation with the sublime, “So fuck you. Or sorry. I don’t know which one.” (Maria Bamford’s brief guest appearance here was much funnier than her last one and her line readings during their phone conversation were hilarious.) Louie abruptly ends the lesson and, after taking a scream-inducing cell phone camera close-up of his infested genitals, heads to the pharmacy for some medicinal crotch shampoo. At the pharmacy, we get a typical Louie non-sequitur, as the majority of the scene revolves around the pharmacist’s intentional humiliation of a pain in the ass elderly woman by forcing her to publicly discuss the texture of her last bowel movement. Although having nothing to do with anything that came before, it was a funny little moment, worthwhile solely for Louie’s amused smirk at the woman’s discomfort.
“Ikea / Piano Lesson” felt more like three separate vignettes as after Louie’s crab-purging shower, the episode veers off into yet another storyline, with Louie attempting to repair a rift between him and fellow comic, Marc Maron. Flipping through the channels, he catches some vintage standup footage of himself (CK was so comparatively fresh-faced in the clip, I initially thought it was an actor doing a CK impression – no wonder Louie was depressed by his appearance) and a very young Sarah Silverman. He calls Sarah and the two laugh about her old material, but when Marc Maron makes an appearance, Louie begins to lament the ten year rift in their friendship, realizing it had been his fault all along. Sarah convinces him to reach out to Marc and the next day, Louie goes to his apartment to apologize.
The ensuing scene between the two plays out like a weird therapy session, with Marc sitting aloof in an armchair while Louie spills his guts out on the couch, seeking absolution for being an asshole for the past decade. Marc patiently listens then reminds Louie that he made the same exact apology five years earlier and suggests that Louie should just ask him to hang out sometime rather than coming over to apologize for not speaking to him again in another five years. Although Marc’s good-natured enough about the whole thing, he’s clearly annoyed and recognizes that the apology is more about Louie selfishly clearing his own guilt rather than any true expression of sorrow or a desire to rekindle their friendship. Like Dolores, Louie is simply using Marc to fulfill a psychological need, in this case to be told that he’s not an asshole.
This third sequence was by far the weakest thread of the episode for me and while it was fun to see those throwback CK and Silverman performances (Silverman felt a bit underused in her cameo, though), the apology scene wasn’t particularly funny. “Ikea / Piano Lesson” wasn’t the best of the season, but as always, there were some great bits, particularly Dolores and Louie’s Ikea brawl and Maria Bamford’s hilarious crabs confession / accusation and it’s moments like those that make even a weaker episode of Louie eminently watchable.
All Photos Credit: FX Network
Kim continues to deliver sharp/witty breakdowns week in and week out. Very good writing.