“Come On, God”
When I was a sophomore in college, two things happened to me at the exact same time: I realized that I was no longer a conservative Christian in any real sense of the term, and I realized that many of the hottest women on my campus were conservative Christians and they were dating several attractiveness levels below themselves. Now, granted, most women marry men slightly less attractive than themselves, just because that’s how we’re evolutionarily wired to behave. But the disparity here was pronounced. I’d come out of that world. It wouldn’t even be that much of a fake to slip right back into it and keep on keeping on. Any moderately good-looking guy with the ability to stave off losing virginity until marriage was all but guaranteed to end up with an incredibly, incredibly attractive woman, pleased to have found that unusual thing for someone in her late teens or early 20s: a guy who didn’t seem to be constantly thinking of sex.
I was put in mind of this during tonight’s first episode of Louie, “Come On, God,” for obvious reasons, I would imagine. Louie, who’s agreed to appear on Fox News’ Red Eye to defend masturbation, of all things, from a woman named Ellen, who says sexual purity should be maintained until marriage, finds himself greatly intrigued by her. And, of course, she’s a gorgeous woman (excellently played by guest star Liz Holtan), but she’s also so intriguing because she’s something completely and utterly new to him. Louie views sex and masturbation as a matter of course. These are just things people do, and in the case of the latter, it’s something people do often. To Ellen, they’re something sacred, something to be saved for the special person and the time being right. The episode doesn’t demonize her point of view; it just finds it almost incredibly alien.
And yet that alienness is a kind of turn-on, all the same (remember how the episode ends). Ellen and Louie do hit it off, even when he makes a bungled pass at her. He’s certainly much more at ease with her than he is with the woman he meets in the elevator, the woman he later fantasizes about stuffing an entire bag of dicks inside of. (Louie’s masturbatory fantasies have the same quality as a lot of people’s dreams, what with the odd plot shifts and the Asian guy who wanders in to offer advice from the sidelines.) After their drink, the two return to her suite—it pays well to be in the anti-jerking off league—and have a frank conversation about how much she would like a relationship where sex wasn’t on the table, where she and Louie just talked to each other and were honest with each other and eventually worked up to chaste kisses and, eventually, marriage. I love the look on Holtan’s face in this segment, as you can see just how pure and spiritual this all is for Ellen, how that’s perhaps a viable way to live her life but probably not one someone who’s already had sex and all of the messiness that goes with it could ever go back to.
The easy thing here would have been to make Ellen a hypocrite. She would get drunk and have sex with Louie, and then she’d be mad at him for taking her virginity or reveal that it was all a lucrative scam she was running on the conservative Christians of the country. That’s a path millions of other comedies have taken, and I’m sure Louie could have found something interesting to do with it. But that’s not what Louis C.K. does. He, instead, chooses to portray that, yeah, Ellen is pretty happy with the life she’s chosen, but it’s necessarily a life that shuts out certain experiences. She’s happy because she doesn’t really have a choice not to be. The second she starts to question the fantasy she’s built for herself, well, the sooner all of those walls are going to come tumbling down, and the sooner everything she’s built falls apart.
And, yeah, you can be happy living your life in that fashion. But Louie can’t be because he’s living his life honestly, in a world where, yes, he’s pretty miserable a lot of the time, but he’s also honest enough to admit that sometimes all he can think about a woman is that he wants to have wild sex with her. Masturbation is, after all, a highly personal act, the sort of thing that is rarely shared with someone else, and opening up about it to us is the sort of raw and honest thing the show does frequently. It’s a risky thing to do an episode about masturbation, simply because Larry David already kind of made this his territory on Seinfeld, but C.K. finds a new way to tell the story, and he has the added benefit of making a woman who seems like she’s a kook turn out to not be a kook at all, just someone whose frame of reference doesn’t contain certain things Louie considers an important part of his own life. And it’s also hysterically funny, one of the funnier half-hours this season.
And that’s the thing: You can shut off your frame of reference. You can turn off certain parts of yourself if you want something badly enough. Louie probably could have stopped masturbating if he really did want the same thing as Ellen, really did want the pretty girl badly enough. But, ultimately, he didn’t. He took the messy, honest, painful, depressing side of life over a side of life that requires shutting off so much that it would no longer resemble what he had before. I sometimes wonder if those guys I knew in college—all of whom are still married to their girlfriends of the time, mind—are as happy as they seemed to be. Probably. Could I have been one of them? Nah.