Watching Louis CK’s New Movie and Saying Goodbye
November 11, 2017 by admin
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Scandal is way too small a word for what’s happening right now in the world of Hollywood, and Washington, and the tech industry, and the restaurant business, and—I guess it’s quicker and more comprehensive just to say “the world.” Scandal implies an aberration in a system, a disruption in a previously stable field. This is something deeper and more unsettling: The revelation that the whole system was rotten all along.
We need a name for whatever the thing is that’s happening, though, because it’s apparently just going to keep on happening. Now Louis C.K., maybe the most influential comedian of the past decade, has been felled by the scythe of sexual misconduct allegations that’s clearing a swath through our popular culture. This is an especially hard one, in part because, as has been eloquently expressed elsewhere, Louis C.K. was especially gifted at writing, performing, and presenting himself to the public as an artist engaged, to what now seems an obsessive degree, with questions of sexual exploitation and consent. His TV show Louie returned multiple times to scenes of ambivalently coercive encounters between men and women, with Louie sometimes playing the aggressor and sometimes, as in a memorable car-sex scene with Melissa Leo, the victim. I remember laughing alone on my couch at that scene, loving how bold it was in its reversal of conventional gender dynamics, and how honest. How brave.
I was alone on my couch for a reason: My partner, who normally likes the same shows I do, couldn’t get into Louie, nor quite express why. He abandoned it a few episodes in, which I considered a lapse in taste I would generously overlook. But I continued watching on my own, saving up a few episodes to consume in a row as a treat. I’d be teased, on my way to watch “my Louies,” about my crush on Louis C.K., sometimes with variations on the theme of how, the more perverse his humor got, the more I liked him. And here’s the hard part to write now: that characterization wasn’t inaccurate. His willingness to visit what seemed like the darkest places of his own psyche (as it turned out, there were darker places) read as vulnerability. And vulnerability—God damn it, even this observation sounds creepy now—can be sexy.
Now that the stories of his pressuring women to watch him masturbate have come out, it sounds gross to talk about, but plenty of Louis’ fans had this kind of crush on him. I saw him do a live stand-up show in New York in 2011, just two seasons into his then-groundbreaking new series. It was a virtuosic hour of comedy, later released as the stand-up special Live at the Beacon Theater. Louis was on his game: raunchy, of course, but also introspective, surreally funny, and—once more, I thought at the time—honest. One of the bits he did involved miming masturbation to completion, in the context of talking about how demeaning and abject the act of male onanism was. What made this gag work was how long it went on. Rather than the two-second jerk-off motion often seen in casual conversation, this was a complete performance with a distinct beginning, middle, and … er … end.
In I Love You, Daddy, Louis C.K.’s latest and now probably last movie, which was pulled from release by its distributor the day after the allegations broke, a character played by Charlie Day performs the exact same gag, including the no-longer-comic extended duration. But Day’s character, Ralph, isn’t standing alone at a mic, re-enacting his private shame before an audience. He’s in a TV executive’s office with two other people in the room, the exec (Louis) and his producer (Edie Falco). For the most part, they ignore him and go on with their conversation, a high-stakes argument about the fate of the television series they’re producing together. That, it’s implied, is just the way Ralph is.
As the post-Weinstein Pandora’s box of abuse stories was beginning to open up in the past few weeks, I was kibitzing with some movie critics on Twitter about the impending release of I Love You, Daddy, which some of us—not including me at that point—had already seen. We knew rumors were swirling around Louis C.K., though not necessarily just what their content was, and we wondered whether the reporting would come out before the movie opened. Some of us, including, I un-feministly confess, me, were hoping against hope it would turn out not to be true. “I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop,” I tweeted. One of the wisest critics on the thread replied, “The film is itself a shoe.”
And that’s all you need to know about I Love You, Daddy, really: If you were waiting for another shoe to drop, the movie is that shoe. I didn’t get to watch it until Friday, the day after Jodi Kantor, Melena Ryzik, and Cara Buckley’s exhaustively reported story about five women’s experiences with Louis C.K. broke in the New York Times and just hours after the decision not to release it. I watched it not as a critic preparing to summarize its merits or flaws to an audience of readers curious whether it was worth their time to see it, but as a sickened and disappointed fan, saying an unsentimental but still sad goodbye to one of her cultural crushes. Under those circumstances, I Love You, Daddy seemed less like a movie than like a series of symptoms presented, with shocking directness, for the viewer’s clinical consideration.
Every male character is a thinly cloaked stand-in for some ruinous aspect or other of male sexuality. John Malkovich plays a respected film director hounded by rumors of long-ago child assault—essentially Woody Allen with a goatee and a cravat—who appears to have his sights set on Louis’ character’s teenage daughter (Chloë Grace Moretz). The TV star played by Charlie Day is a gleeful horndog untroubled by social norms, as seen in the extended masturbation joke described above. (In a different time, I might have observed that Day’s kinetic, all-in performance somehow makes his character endearing despite his glaring faults. But watching him Friday, I couldn’t crack a smile.) And Louis, of course, plays Louis, his fictional name changed this time, but still the same bundle of ambivalence, neuroses, and unregulated desires. He never could really act the part of any character but himself. This was something he himself joked about, and it made up a part of his charm, back then.
Mallory Ortberg, who is now Slate’s advice columnist, wrote a maliciously funny sketch in 2013 for the Toast, sending up a very particular social type. In it, she imagines Louis C.K.’s beleaguered ex-wife finding herself at a party with a group of fans who conflate his TV persona with the real-life man. As she listens in eloquent silence, they gush on about how hot her famous ex is and how they’re sure he must be “such a good dad.”
I’m guilty even of that last assumption, though I like to think I’d be polite enough not to express it to his ex. I saw Louis C.K. a few years back outside the Standard hotel in Manhattan, where there’s a tiny, chalet-style ice rink we sometimes skate at over the winter holidays. He didn’t go out on the ice, just sat with some other parents at a table drinking hot chocolate and watching while his daughters and their friends hurtled around the rink, crashing into my daughter and her friends. It’s nice to see an artist whose work you admire out on the town, seeming to enjoy his well-deserved success. He looked happy, and I was happy for him. And today I’m really sad—not for Louis, but for his daughters, his ex-wife, and the women he hurt, the five who spoke up and whoever else may be out there. In a less acute but still painful register, I’m sad for the rest of us, too, anyone who got something from his comedy, whether it was laughter or insight or—for the many younger comics influenced by him—inspiration.
I’m not sure if this way of framing the fall of Louis C.K.—that I once found him both hilarious and hot, and when I think of that from now on, I will always feel dirty, compromised, and gross—is appropriate or ladylike or even professional. I know I’m supposed to assume the proper critical distance and evaluate his latest movie as a work of art, then ponder abstractly what the proper relation between a life and an artistic legacy should be. But like a lot of women right now, I’m sort of past caring how I sound. I haven’t noticed a lot of men suppressing what might generously be called their impulse for self-expression.
Read more in Slate about Louis C.K.
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Senate Plan Could Increase Taxes on Some Middle-Class Workers
November 11, 2017 by admin
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Both the House and Senate bills would cut the corporate tax rate to 20 percent from 35 percent and provide business tax benefits, such as the ability to immediately expense purchases of equipment.
The Times analysis, using the open-source software TaxBrain, found that roughly one-quarter of families in the middle class would see their taxes increase in 2018, by about $1,000 on average. By 2026, the share seeing an increase would rise slightly, to about one-third, and the average increase would rise to about $1,600. For the majority of middle-class families that receive a tax cut, the average savings would be about $1,300 in 2018 and $1,700 in 2026.
Who Will See Tax Cuts From Senate Plan?
Under the Senate bill, four out of five high earners would receive tax cuts in 2018.
Note: Includes all households, not adjusted for household size. | By THE NEW YORK TIMES
How Much Would People Save?
People across income brackets would see savings from the Senate plan in 2018. But for many in the middle class, the savings would be relatively small. The table below shows the average savings, by income, for those who would receive a tax cut.
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Times analysis defines the middle class broadly as those earning between two-thirds and twice the median household income, or about $50,000 to $160,000 per year for a family of three. To focus on families, the analysis excluded individual filers and households headed by people 65 or older and is adjusted for the size of each household.
Under the House bill, The Times has found, about half of middle-class families would pay more in taxes in 2026.
The analysis did not seek to calculate how workers might benefit from a steep cut in the corporate tax rate, which both the Senate and House bills would reduce to 20 percent from a top rate of 35 percent today, or project how the bills might increase economic growth and, with it, Americans’ wages.
On Friday, the independent Tax Foundation released an analysis of the plan’s growth effects. It projected that the Senate bill would increase gross domestic product by 3.7 percent over the next decade and raise wages by 2.9 percent across the economy.
For taxpayers earning more than $1 million a year, the Senate bill offers a more limited upside and downside than the House bill.
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The Senate bill is less likely than the House bill to yield tax increases for high-income Americans, in part because it cuts the top marginal personal tax rate, while the House bill creates a so-called “bubble rate” that would actually raise taxes on many high-salaried workers.
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The Senate measure would also produce a smaller average tax windfall for high earners than the House version, in part by offering less generous benefits for owners of businesses known as pass-throughs, which are not organized as corporations.
Under the Senate plan, “Americans are especially likely to face a tax increase if they have a smaller family, have mostly wage income instead of investment income, or claim some of the many deductions that the bill repeals, like those for state and local taxes and employee business expenses,” said Lily Batchelder, a professor and tax specialist at New York University Law School, who worked on economic policy in the Obama administration. “They are increasing taxes on many in the middle class, while concentrating their tax cuts on the wealthy.”
The Senate bill appears much better for the very wealthy than it is for the somewhat wealthy. About half of families earning between two and three times the median income — or about $160,000 to $240,000 for a family of three — would pay more in 2018 than under existing law. But among the richest families, those earning more than about $500,000 for a family of three, nearly 90 percent would get a tax cut.
The findings come with an important caveat: The Senate bill, as written, appears unable to muster the 60 votes needed to avoid a Democratic filibuster, meaning Republicans will need to amend it to comply with the budget reconciliation rules and allow permit passage by a simple majority. Those changes could likely include putting expiration dates on some of the bill’s major provisions, which could make the final version of the bill look less favorable to the middle class, particularly in later years.
The Times’s figures are based on an analysis of Census Bureau data using a tax model from the Open Source Policy Center, a Washington research organization affiliated with the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. Because the analysis is based on publicly available data, not actual tax records, it may not capture all the intricacies of Americans’ household finances.
The Senate bill differs sharply from the House version in its approach to cutting taxes on businesses. But when it comes to taxes on individuals and families, the bills are more similar than different. Both would double the standard deduction while eliminating a raft of deductions and credits. Both would make the child tax credit more generous. Both would restructure federal income tax brackets to impose lower marginal tax rates at most income levels, although the Senate approach, unlike the House version, doesn’t eliminate two brackets entirely.
The Senate bill includes features that would make its plan more favorable to the middle class. It preserves some popular tax deductions and credits that the House bill initially would have eliminated, and it makes the child tax credit somewhat more generous and widely available. On the other hand, the Senate bill, unlike the House version, would eliminate the deduction for property taxes, which could lead to higher federal taxes for homeowners in areas with high property tax rates or expensive housing markets.
Aparna Mathur, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, said senators could improve the bill with further changes, such as expanding the earned-income tax credit and extending the benefits of the child tax credit to more low-income taxpayers. “We clearly need to do more to help the lowest-income families,” she said. “At the same time, we can engage in more base broadening for the highest-income households, perhaps by eliminating and not just capping the mortgage-interest deduction.”
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The Times analysis found that roughly one-fifth of the Senate bill’s cuts in 2018 would go to families and individuals earning $1 million or more, and close to half would go to people earning at least $200,000. Between 10 million and 15 million taxpayers earning less than $100,000 a year would pay more than under existing law.
Families earning more than $1 million a year would see their after-tax income rise by about 1.7 percent in 2018 compared with what they would make under current law, nearly triple the gains enjoyed by those earning less than $200,000.
Over all, the Senate bill would cut individual income taxes by about $30 billion in 2018, and by $900 billion over the next decade, according to Congress’s nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation. And most people in all income groups would see a tax cut, although the cuts would be modest for most lower earners.
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