The beautiful disturbing nature of Horace and Pete: Episode 6

Last night I paid, downloaded and watched episode 6 of Louis CK’s latest creation ‘Horace and Pete’. I’m still thinking about it. There hasn’t been a feature film I’ve watched in maybe ten years that has lingered in my mind this strong.

How do I process the effect of this episode? Why am I disturbed so profoundly by the final scene where two siblings who hate themselves so much, one of the only ways they can survive their own existence is by destroying someone else’s happiness in a matter of a few minutes?

The awkwardness and meanness of this scene was so realistic to me that I did a rare thing. I verbally yelled out how uncomfortable the scene was making me feel. I yelled this out to my partner at the other end of our sofa. She was equally horrified by the sadistic and conscious destruction of Pete’s chance at happiness.

At times the dialogue reminded me of the writing of Harold Pinter. There was some response repetition there which Pinter was so fond of. Did this detract from the realism? Not for me. Overall though the scene really took me back to one of the most powerful scenes I’ve ever endured in my lifetime of movie viewing. The scene is in John Cassavetes’ 1974 film ‘A Woman Under the Influence’ where Mabel (Gena Rowlands) repeatedly asks for her father to stand up for her amidst a barrage of forces invested in committing her to a life of medication and even long-term hospitalization. The scene is awkward, natural and long. It also makes you want to scream and rescue Mabel and physically remove those around her from the scene.

I felt even more helpless rage as the passive viewer of this scene in ‘Horace and Pete’. I so yearned for Pete to stand up for himself with rage and self respect and decimate his mean ugly cousins (played incredibly by Louis CK and Edie Falco) for their blatant cruelty. But that would have broken the realism. People like Pete don’t get up or gain strength after they’ve been humiliated and silenced. They collapse and retreat and become the weak victim — a profile they have been repeatedly been bashed over the head with since childhood.

I don’t know for sure where this series is headed, but I have a strong feeling that there will be no feel-good resolutions. Not for any of these people, none of them. And that’s what makes Louis CK a very brave and bold artist. This series has to be the most commercially uncompromising project to recently emerge out of the United States that also happens to have a cast of major (bankable) actors in the lead roles. OK not bankable ‘product actors’ in the vein of Clooney or Jennifer Lawrence, but bankable ‘artiste actors’. If you listen to CK’s recent chat with podcaster/comic Marc Maron, you’ll hear in compelling detail how this show came about. I stopped listening about half way as both Maron and CK reveal some spoilers that are pretty major. But there are fascinating stories of how the creative flow was seemingly unstoppable as CK approached and landed these high profile artists to join the cast.

Horace and Pete is utterly out of step with the quickness and immediacy of our current entertainment culture. It’s slow and quiet and above all, really fucking bleak. But bleak can be beautiful. And CK has achieved that balance with stunningly inspired writing and profound performances from his ensemble as well as himself.

Now I just need a bit of time to recover from the devastation of episode 6 before buying 7.