Louie: "Subway/Pamela"

Season 2, Episode 6

You take the good, you take the bad…

Louie is clearly a romantic.

I don’t mean this solely in the love interest sense that we saw play out in the “Pamela” portion of tonight’s episode (though we’ll get to that in a moment.) No, Louie is a romantic in all the possible sense of the terms, someone who deep down is an idealist, and loves seeing the beauty in everyday things. He may not act like it most of the times, but as the old saying goes, beneath every cynic is a frustrated romantic.

Take the subway for example (or, if you prefer, “Subway”, so we don’t lose sight of the various vignettes.) As a form of public transportation, the subway is (fairly or not) derided in popular culture, as a place full of sadness and filth. C.K. isn’t above depicting this, but as the first scene, where we saw the violin player and the bum taking a bath side-by-side, show, sometimes is can be filled with beauty as well. The key is to keep your focus on the right thing. It’s this thinking that allows Louie to see a smart-mouthed kid spinning bullshit to some girls and write down a joke, or to look at a pool of godknowswhat in the seat across from him and see a possible opportunity to impress those around him. (The fact that he doesn’t show the extent to which is romantic side has been repressed by years of life shitting on him.)

It’s of course also this romantic side that causes him to pine away for Pamela, a woman that in many respects is just awful to him, yet he can’t help but love her. She’s relentlessly and vocally skeptical and critical of him, yet he sees her as the ultimate prize in the game of love. He believes it, and he manages to get us to believe it too (and almost convince Pamela herself) in a heartbreakingly beautiful scene where he spells out just how and why he loves her.

The speech doesn’t pan out at first, but Louie continues to spend the day with her and at the end, she gives him a quick subtle offer of bath sex, one that he misses, much to his chagrin. And it’s here that we see why Louie is the frustrated romantic that he is. Sure his attempts at love and beauty always seem to slip through his fingers, but the opportunity always seems to arise again, and so he must keep trying. Because what other choice does he have?

Quotes, Etc:

On several occasions, the show has played off the opening credits by having the first post-credits scene by Louie performing in the very comedy club that he enters at the end of the credit sequence. Tonight, we saw him exit the comedy club, get on the subway, and supposedly exit just in time to sync up with the beginning of the credits, yet he still enters the comedy club at the end of them. Weird.

“Yeah, I don’t know if this is my mouth, my pussy, or…” “Or?” “Yeah, ‘or’.”

“Kick a Jesus in the face, this is delicious.”

“I went on a Ferris wheel one time, and I screamed like a little girl who just saw a spider in her vagina.”