'Horace and Pete'

2016

Louis C.K.’s distributive innovations have more often put him under the limelight than the contents sold through them. His multi-episode TV play, Horace and Pete, is no different. It’s public announcement was made to subscribers to C.K’s email list under the subject line “A brand new thing from Louis C.K.” Surprised fans willing to risk five dollars then dove into that hour-long opening episode with no hint of what their experience would be. With the exception of a few think pieces and disclaimers from C.K. (“Warning: this show is not a ‘comedy.’ I dunno what it is.”), for the next nine Saturdays each episode popped up in subscribers’ inboxes with as little cause for expectation as the first. Each one was released the same week it was filmed, with no advertisements or teasers and no indication of the total number of episodes. Unlike a traditional sales pitch, it didn't promise you a certain level of commitment. You just had to keep watching until the end, whenever it came. 

That is the extent of what those who follow entertainment news but not necessarily Louis’ career have learned about the show. While it does, as has been covered extensively, introduce a new possibility for TV distribution and its sad, quiet tone is a departure from C.K.’s other projects, the show itself - about a Brooklyn bar run and inhabited by two brothers, Horace and Pete, played by C.K. and Steve Buscemi, whose fathers and uncles, also named Horace and Pete, have operated the same bar for the last one hundred years - continues a thematic through-line inC.K.’s development as an artist: that even in relationships people stay within their self-erected boundaries and accommodate their day-to-day actions to those boundaries. His understanding of this is what hits people at their core about his stories, whatever the medium. 

He first explored this theme in his 1998 feature film, Tomorrow Night, an expansion on his uncomfortably surreal short films. The film, which feels tailor made for those who take pleasure in discomfort and shock, centers on the unpleasant owner of a photo-development shop who gives himself sexual release every night by sitting in a large bowl of ice cream (!). Overwhelmed by his backed-up photo inventory, he tracks people down to have them pick up their photos. Through this, he meets and marries an octogenarian because they have “compatible lifestyles.” Things go downhill as she pressures him to have a child and they split up when she catches him performing his ice cream ritual. Too strange to gather a substantial audience yet not strange enough to maintain a cult following, the film never received widespread release (until C.K. posted it on his website about fourteen years later). But its basic story, about a man who is too stuck in his loneliness to reach out of it and can only sustain companionships that allow him to maintain the life his loneliness produced, is nearly identical to that of Horace and Pete. 

After that film, C.K. continued to explore personal isolation in his stand-up, marking the ways it is easy to be alone when one can easily dull the pain of an interior life. From compulsive eating (“No one’s happy in the Cinnabon line. It’s all guys like me or fatter saying, fuuck I’m getting a Cinnabon.”) to masturbating (“Some things I’m sick of like the constant perverted sexual thoughts. It just makes me feel like an idiot…I just wanna be a person in clothes walking in a store…”) to technology, his stand-up has focused on the distractions that we allow to shape our lives to the point that their brief unavailability unnerves us, like the guy C.K. says he sat next to on the first airplane ever to offer wi-fi service. When the internet briefly blacked out, the man immediately scoffed, “This is fucking bullshit!” These distractions and compulsions can easily occupy great importance in our lives because they taper over our ability to look at what causes us genuine pain. And the more importance we give them, the more they isolate us, just the way the photo clerk’s use of ice cream in Tomorrow Night contributed to his isolation. 

This was essentially how C.K. justified his dislike of texting during a 2013 appearance on Conan. “You need to build an ability to just be yourself without doing something. Because underneath everything there’s that forever empty. That knowledge that it’s all for nothing and you’re alone” and the ability to communicate with anyone anytime takes away a person’s capacity to live with that inherent emptiness. Our increased ability to communicate damages our ability to connect. In his stand up and his show Louie he argues that anyone who experiences a moment of genuine emotion, especially one of inexplicable sadness, is deeply fortunate because it connects them to the fact that they are alive (“Misery is wasted on the miserable”). Those feelings should be embraced instead of numbed down with a text or a donut. 

The show Louie deals with this quite a bit, especially in the isolated life its autobiographical title character leads between getting on stage and being with his children, which are the only times he seems to know what he’s doing. Otherwise, the business of truly connecting to others proves consistently elusive. But at least work and family provide him with a refuge. The characters on Horace and Pete have no such refuge. They live upstairs from the bar with their relatives who are also their coworkers, making work and family something they’re trapped in rather than something they can escape to for confidence and connection. They are unable to truly connect with anyone because they have never gone through the thick of their interior pain. This is most true of the spiritually defaulted Horace.  

Horace makes for an interesting protagonist given that he is defined by his passivity. His siblings have clear goals: Sylvia (Edie Falco) wants to sell the bar to help pay for her cancer treatment, hoping not only to stay alive but to free herself from her family’s history; Pete wants to make use of his freedom and normalcy after spending many years in a mental hospital due to uncontrollable, nightmarish hallucinations. But Horace feels no real motivation to go in any direction. He is miserable in his progenitorial role but lacks the will to break away from it. He feels no sentiment for the bar and is only there because his name is Horace and that’s the way it’s always been. His whole life he has been trapped and defined by his family and their history but he never knew how to find a life or a set of values to distinguish himself from it, which leads him unintentionally to repeat his family’s mistakes.

As the pieces of his life come together over the course of the series, viewers see that his family abused him as a child for his innate sweetness and insufficient toughness. As both a child and adult he swallows his humiliation when his father and uncle tell a laughing bar about how he wet himself during a little league game. And even though his mother took him and Sylvia with her when she escaped the bar and her abusive husband, that same man, his father, remains omnipresent. “I wonder if that’s where I’m gonna go” is his response to Pete’s story of an ex-girlfriend who believed the afterlife was a place where her father never stopped beating her.

That one line is the greatest extent to which Horace contemplates his past. Otherwise, he shapes his life around avoiding any genuine self-reflection. Viewers learn that at twenty-two he entered a marriage with a woman nine years his senior and ended it by entering a sexual relationship with her younger sister. In the spellbinding third episode, Horace’s ex-wife (Emmy nominee Laurie Metcalfe) reaches out to him for advice on her current affair with her father-in-law and expresses some understanding for why Horace cheated back then. “I made [you] marry me when [you] were still used to listening to your mother.” But he rebuffs, “I cheated on you. That’s the story.” He likens cheating to an insurance fire for a bad marriage, saying that it is much easier to give someone a clear reason to push you away than to negotiate through the muck of long-term intimacy. 

Even though the divorce causes Horace’s son to disown him and his daughter (Aidy Bryant) to hardly stomach him, he does not change his approach to relationships. The first episode begins with him living with a partner who genuinely loves him and ends with him asking her to move out. When Sylvia presses for a reason why, he says “The only thing worse than living with someone who doesn’t love you is living with someone who really loves you a lot.” Then in a later episode, he discloses one of his life’s most intimate details to a one-night-stand. (She responds with the news that she may or may not have been a man in the past). Indeed, more than once in the series Horace uses his ability to make one-night stands happen for him as his outlet for vulnerability. With emotional distance established and the possibility of an implicative future discarded, he finds it easier to make himself vulnerable. He cannot bring himself to engage in genuine intimacy with another because that requires self-examination, the ability to see how you affect another person at their core and how they affect you. He feels safer in a scenario like a one-night stand where detachment is a prerequisite.

As Horace allows his relationships to become defined by his efforts to detach himself from his own pain, the pain his family originated, he repeats their mistakes. At the end of the first episode, Uncle Pete (Alan Alda) reveals that he was not in fact Pete’s uncle but his father, meaning that while Horace and Pete grew up as brothers, they were in fact cousins. The disclosure Horace makes to his possibly-trans one night stand is that both his ex-wife and his sister bore his children at the same time and were raised by his ex-wife as siblings even though they were technically cousins. So the very act of refusing to examine how his family’s deep-held corruption affected him leads him to propagate that corruption. He marries an older woman simply because the pain of his upbringing left him directionless and forces the marriage to end in order to avoid the sort of introspective intimacy that might have exposed that pain. His avoidance is what traps him in a history that continues to damage him. And he resigns himself to this, not once exploring his behavior or attempting to change even after Uncle Pete’s revelation; not once does he directly acknowledge the parallel situation to which he subjected his children. 

Pete attempts to craft a life of his own despite bearing the brunt of familial neglect more directly than Horace. He doesn’t allow himself to be consumed by the news that he was left to be raised by the abusive Horace Sr. when his aunt escaped with Horace and Sylvia, simply because Uncle Pete refused to raise him. He attempts to define himself apart from his time in the mental hospital, even shunning a fellow former patient who comes to visit him at the bar just to show him affection. He finds love with a younger woman who Horace and Sylvia all but deliberately push away by revealing Pete’s history at the hospital before Pete feels comfortable doing so. After learning that his medication has been recalled and he will need to be readmitted to the hospital, he and the former patient run away together. She tries to help him beat the hallucinations when they come back but they overcome him and cause him to physically beat her away and disappear. Even in the clutch of his hallucinations, however, Pete understands that the only way to overcome his past is to keep it from further informing his future. He ensures this when he returns to the bar and kills Horace. But what truly kills Horace is the accumulated history of familial neglect, in the form of a mad, knife wielding Pete, blinded by “monsters that come from your own fears that you always have to look at.” 

Yet while this particular family story ends, the series denies the possibility of ever truly abandoning or disowning a family. (“If someone’s part of you, how do you stop them from hurting you?”) In the last scene, as Sylvia packs up the bar, determined to leave it behind no matter what the financial potential of selling it would be - it is interesting to note that it is mostly the women in this series, like Sylvia and her mother and Tricia the fellow patient, who possess abilities for forward-motion and renewal while the men remain stuck in place - Horace’s son enters, wanting to know, now that the possibility is gone, what his father was like. “He was nothing really,” begins Sylvia’s impromptu eulogy. “He was no kind of man. He wasn’t particularly funny or smart or kind. He was just some guy. But he was your father.” The power of that last sentence collapses her into a chair where the last shot holds on her crying. The only refuge for a nothing guy, she realizes, is his family. There is no other outlet for him to find a sense of importance or connection in his life. That Horace never tries to move beyond the internal corruption of his birth family to form one of his own or make a real life of his own, is his tragedy.

It is terribly easy to function one compulsion at a time without ever really forming a life. Louis C.K. has shown this throughout his work but never as deeply as in Horace and Pete. Anyone can turn out like Horace because anyone can form boundaries that dull the pain of an interior life and evade the self-examination that would open up that pain. Maybe this explains on some level why he distributed the show the way he did, allowing us to find something unexpected and new in our inboxes without any indication as to where it would go or how it would make us feel. Maybe it is only by removing the expectations built into everyday life that we can have the ability to experience genuine, liberating, painful emotion. Whatever the truth, at least Louis’ fans have the reassurance that in between the noise they will always have the gift of experiencing this artist’s continuing maturation, whatever form it takes.