kimberlee rossi-fuchs looks at the ninth installment of louie…
“Looking for Liz/Lilly Changes,” this week’s installment of Louie, revolves around Louie’s attempts to locate two of the women in his life, Liz, his beguiling date from a few weeks back whom he hasn’t heard from since, and his daughter Lilly, who goes missing after having a bad day at school. While Louie’s separate searches for the two provide the bulk of the episode’s action, “Looking for Liz/Lilly Changes,” is just as much about his quest to understand these two women as it his about his attempts to literally find them.
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After a few weeks’ absence, we get the return of Louie’s stand up act to open the episode, here a funny bit in which he expounds upon the brevity of life and how, by age forty, you can barely wait to get that shit over with. (Louie’s summation of the human experience: “Buy some shit – use it, it breaks – try to fuck somebody, hope your shits don’t hurt too bad.”) The joke doesn’t really pertain to the episode as a whole, but more importantly, it’s funny and CK’s stand-up is always a welcome sight on Louie.
“Looking for Liz” begins with a shot of Louie asleep in bed. He appears to be in the middle of a fitful sleep, tossing and turning, and we see glimpses of his dream through quickly interspersed close-ups of Liz’s face. The images seem haunting and nightmarish at first, appearing at a startling pace and seemingly bathed in an eerie red light, but when they slow down and pan out, her face appears sweet and welcoming, and she silently mouths, “I love you.” Though we haven’t heard anything about Liz since their whirlwind date a few weeks back, she clearly still weighs heavy on Louie’s mind and after waking, he goes to look for her at the bookstore where they first met, only to discover that she recently quit.
Louie’s ready to abandon his search at that point, but Liz’s replacement (Chloe Sevigny) seems touched by the romantic gesture and at first emphatically encourages and then forcibly insists that Louie carry out his search. Louie’s clearly been touched by Liz in some way, stating “It wasn’t like any date I’ve been on before. She changed the way I feel about everything in one night,” but the nature of his feelings are vague even to him and he’s ready to quit looking for her once he learns she’s no longer employed at the bookstore. When he conjectures that he and Liz probably just weren’t meant to be, the new girl tells him to “make it meant to be,” and offers to go with him to Liz’s building to help him find her. Liz’s replacement is just as quirky as the original, complete with the requisite spunky attitude, goofy knit cap, and hipster nerd glasses, and as she and Louie walk off down the street together, the show seems to be setting us up for another manic pixie dream girl meet-cute.
But of course, this is Louie, where traditional sitcom rules don’t apply, and so things quickly go from cutesy to unsettling. She attempts to get Liz’s apartment number from her doorman, but comes away empty-handed since she can’t provide a last name or anything more than a vague description.
They head to a nearby bar, where she becomes increasingly insistent and agitated, urging Louie to hire someone to find her and scolding him that he can’t expect “love is going to flow into you like plankton into a whale’s fucking mouth!” When he declines further measures out of respect for Liz’s privacy, she screams, “You CAN find her!,” and then sticks her hand up her corduroy skirt and begins obviously and loudly masturbating, to the embarrassment/shock of both Louie and the on-looking bartender. Afterward, she informs Louie that she’s married and asks him not to come to the store looking for her, like he did for Liz, and quickly leaves the bar.
While the pay-off here fell flat for me (the public masturbation scene was more uncomfortable than funny), I like how the show continues to subvert the audience’s expectations. By having Sevigny’s character literally get off on a romantic fantasy she conjured in her mind, “Looking for Liz” draws a parallel between her insane behavior and Louie’s search for the woman who has been haunting his dreams and portrays just how silly the manic pixie dream girl myth really is. In the end, for both Louie and this crazy blond, Liz is a phantom who serves to fulfill a fantasy, but can never really be found.
“Lilly Changes,” the stronger half of the episode, wasn’t particularly funny either, but painted a vivid and amusing portrait of the anxiety of parenthood. The segment opens with Louie picking his daughters up at school. He finds Jane right away, but Lilly is nowhere to be found. The camera pans dizzily and anyone attempting to speak with him – including Jane and one of the teachers he briefly fantasized about a few weeks back – fades into the background noise as he nervously scans the crowd for his daughter. He eventually spots her in a corner, apparently being picked on by a group of other girls. Out of a fatherly protective instinct, he breaks up the bullying session, inadvertently embarrassing Lilly and leading her to storm away angrily.
On the bus ride home, he continues to play the supportive parent, telling her she can talk to him, to which she replies, “I don’t want to say anything for you to listen to.” Clearly out of his element when dealing with his newly surly preteen, he attempts to cheer her up with the tried-and-true childhood go-tos of the amusement park and ice cream (Louie’s palpable desire to see a smile on his expressionless, pissed-off daughter’s face as they circled round and round on the glaringly childish merry-go-round was a great visual gag) to no avail. Once back at the apartment, Lilly continues to be snippy and after Louie tells her not to take her bad day out on him, she retreats to her room, slamming the door behind her.
After hiding out in the bathroom for a while, Louie emerges to find that Lilly has, according to Jane, left the apartment. After a quick search of the apartment reveals nothing, he becomes frantic, knocking on neighbor’s doors (the helpful gay couple from last season, here too embroiled in their own argument to be of any assistance), calling her name out the window, and then heading out onto the street with Jane in tow. Of course, he doesn’t stop to call the girls’ mother, since doing so would represent an admission of poor parenting. A missing child is a terrifying experience for any parent, but is made all the worse here by Louie’s utter bewilderment at the situation. Previously, Lilly would never have done such a thing and without any prior history of such behavior, he has absolutely no clue of where she could have gone. For Louie, the fact that his daughter has seemingly morphed into a different person overnight is nearly as scary as the fact that he can’t find her. When Jane begins calling out for Lilly in Slovenian, a language Louie didn’t know she was learning, he looks at her in disbelief, as though he has no idea who his daughters are anymore.
After returning to the apartment and calling the police, Louie is forced to call his ex-wife to report that Lilly’s missing, when Lilly comes strolling into the living room, wearing her bathrobe and a large pair of headphones. She informs her father and the police that she’d hiding in her closet reading, something she apparently does from time to time, and once the annoyed officers leave, tells Louie, “I’m sorry for the way I acted before. I was in a bad mood.” He instantly forgives her sends her off to bed, relieved to have his daughter back, both physically and in the sense that the sweet, thoughtful side of her personality has returned.
“Looking for Liz / Lilly Changes” finds Louie seeking both the idea of a dream girl who doesn’t exist and the daughter whom he can no longer readily define. While Liz remains a mystery, by the episode’s end, Louie seems to recognize that although his daughter may no longer be the little girl whose happiness could be won by a ride on the merry-go-round, she’s still a generally good kid, decent enough to admit when she’s let her bad mood get the better of her. For an episode relatively light on laughs (again, the stand-up was pretty killer – particularly the closing bit about entrusting your children’s lives to exhausted cabbies from for foreign countries “where kids die all day and it’s boring”), “Looking for Liz / Lilly Changes” was alternately uncomfortable and relatable, but compelling throughout.
All Photos Credit: FX Network
