Accountability in Entertainment • Page 58

I've been a fan of Louis CK's stand-up for a long long time. I know he's capable of writing material that can have his usual crassness without being necessarily "controversial". Why not start out with that kind of stuff to ease your way back into people's good graces? Makes no sense to me. Ugh.

 

I'd rather see him start with demonstrating genuine remorse and evidence of changed behavior tbh

 

I've never been a fan of his, and now I think he's a complete piece of shit human being, but I will admit it would have been nice to see him step up to this idea that I hear fans of his peddle that he's smart and honest and deep and not afraid to expose uncomfortable truths and actually address what he had done on stage in a meaningful way. Do some serious soul searching and actually examine what he had done, maybe look at why and why he was able to get away with it. I am talking about something on the level of Hannah Gadsby's "Nanette" special only with the focus inward on himself.

Getting up and just saying 'I like to jerk off, and I don't like being alone' is not that. That is just making a mockery of your victims.

Apparently he got a standing ovation though, so it seems many of his fans don't care. It is a very strange phenomena to watch play out in real time because of the nature of who he is and what he does as a stand-up comedian. He now comes out and jokes about this, whereas someone like Brock Turner fades from the public eye. We don't have to see him on TV saying things like [trigger warning] 'hey dumpsters are cool, and sex is easier when they don't move around so much, right?'.

 

because he thinks he's the victim in the scenario not the women whose lives he ruined

 

I know what you mean but I dunno if I'd call it strange or a phenomenon. This reaction and apathy towards a male figure repeatedly harming women while being completely unrepentant feels very, very par for the course. Brock Turner was and is a nobody - and even then, the public outrage didn't match up with his actual sentence/was more of the phenomenon.

 

The aspect of this situation that I thought was a strange phenomena - to me at least - was that Louis CK coming right back and acting like nothing happened means he then goes on and makes specific jokes about the situation in a very public manner, whereas someone like, say, Kevin Spacey coming back and just resuming their career means going back to playing a fictional politician on a Netflix show and being in movies. This seems like an extra slap in the face to his victims and an even more egregious 'f--- you' to them in that he's specifically making crappy cheap jokes about their trauma. And receiving a standing ovation from the crowd!

He's a very famous and successful comedian, and I know that there's no prerequisite that says he is not also a complete scumbag - but the fact that a not exclusively male crowd then went on to give him a standing ovation blows my mind. I guess it shouldn't, in that it's not a random room full of people pulled from society at large, like a good cross-section of society, it is instead a room full of people who paid money to see him do what he does.

 

I think everyone would agree that you’re right about how terrible it all is and how much of a shame it is that he still has an audience, but no part of that is “strange”. It’s basically par for the course for every single person who has done this throughout history.

 

Ugh. He doesn't get it. Louis, it wasn't that women watched you jerk off, it's that they did so against their will. You can enjoy to be watched all you want with willing participants!

It's this bizarre persecution complex that drives me insane. The world isn't against him. He's making everything worse. He's done all of this to himself. We don't want this. We just want accountability.

 

Fun, right? I'm always bouncing between being convinced C.K. and people like him understand EXACTLY what they're doing and are doing it intentionally when they miss the point, and believing that they are so far up their own asses that they honestly believe they are the real victims here. Maybe it's both.

 

I couldn't recall someone so specifically and so flagrantly referencing the actual thing that they had done in such a terrible way and getting such a positive response from the audience, but I do see that it should not have struck me as strange.

 

I think the point is the brazenness of walking out on stage and just saying the quiet part out loud. Par for the course is more when people like Louis get back out there and go on like nothing happened. They don’t explicitly rub people’s faces in it like this. It *is* kind of surreal, to be honest.

 

I don’t know, I can think of a lot of artists who make works about their crimes/abuses and throw that in everyone’s face.

 

Lets not forget we’re talking about a dude who made a movie with a subplot about a dude masturbating in front of women that was shelved because of the New York Times article about how he masturbated in front of women.

 

Yes thank you! I meant to mention that this isn’t even the first time Louis himself has done this, much less abusers as a whole.

 

it was also an homage to Woody Allen's Manhattan, a movie about a middle aged man dating a teenager written by, directed, and starring a middle aged man who dated teenagers

 

Yeesh

 

No, Brad, no!

 

Fuck that entirely. Someone very close to me (another survivor) was close friends with Lasseter for years and her response to finding out what he'd done was to end the friendship, not defend him with this age old "it's hard to stop being awful" rhetoric. It's not that hard.

 

I really don't get it because I would never feel safe around a "friend" like that again- I guess it must be different if you're a man and part of the power structure lmao

 

Good

 

how is this possible,like if me a normie knows someone is a creep how do people in the industry not know, not calling him a liar it's just fascinating

 

I never cease to be amazed by what people are capable of not knowing if they just really really don't WANT to know

 

even if for some reason he didn't know about the allegations beforehand, he certainly found out about them pretty quick and still had a bad response or no response really because he just tried to redirect the conversation somewhere else anytime he was asked