When the villain makes himself home
The whole world’s a comic stage and Louis CK returned to it this week. After 10 months of hardly a squeak, the orangish funnyman came back to the limelight. According to news reports and the resulting outrage, he apparently showed up at a comedy club unannounced and performed for the crowd. By the end of it, he got a round of applause and left the stage as if nothing happened.
Let’s rewind a bit here.
Almost a year ago, he was accused by several women of indecent behaviour. Something he accepted unconditionally and apologized for his sins. With no room left for doubt, as an aftermath, his popularity took a hit and so did his contracts with many an ambitious project that he was supposed to helm. Long story short, it seemed like he was done and we won’t hear from him ever again. If anything, it also appeared like justice can be delivered super-swift in the age of social media.
Except that the definition of justice depends on how you want to look at reported events.
The reason I am highlighting ‘reported’ is whatever we consume as news is basically second-hand, third-hand, fourth-hand, etc. information. We, as a minority of an individual, seldom have a say in what happened when and who did what to whom. Being consumers, we read something and choose our sides. Obviously, we tend to stick with the weaker party because our moral high ground wants to be on the right slide of history. But it doesn’t mean we have the authority to pass a verdict on others. In our personal space, we can rant as much as we like about failing virtues (of society) and flaws (of person). Yet, in sheer practicality terms, we are not sufficiently equipped to see things right, let alone make them right.
That’s the job of the justice system.
We can’t call someone criminal just because we are restless and waiting for the gallows to be filled. There is an anti-criminal procedure in place to check that the law of the land is followed. In Louis CK’s case, none of the accusers decided to go to the court. Whichever way you see it, the victims couldn’t avail the legal means to drag a known (in the circle) sex miscreant to jury. That’s the truth of the matter. We are feeling uncomfortable with the news of his presence today mainly because we know that the legal proceedings didn’t take place. Lacking which, there won’t ever be a closure.
As a consequence, we’d like to see the perpetrator’s career stalled, if not destroyed completely. Is this a fair approach? Maybe not. Is it effective? Clearly not.
This is also where Trump’s ascendancy and the ensuing Me Too Movement played a part in Louis CK’s downfall without him even having to attend the court. A poetic nod to the fact that he committed sexual offences without even touching his victims. And by the end of the saga, nothing really mattered, does it? Going by the overwhelming backlash, we are supposed to believe that the core of a person doesn’t change. Once an offender, always an offender. At least that’s what the ongoing argument suggests. Which, again, makes sense — to some extent — because his victims didn’t change with time; the damage he did to them remains. So, by all probability, he hasn’t changed either.
When the online kangaroo court hammers that gavel on your timeline, there is no coming back from it. You are meant to be shut out. Once pariah-ed, the person can’t return and if he does, he’ll be reviled as long as humanly possible. On one hand, we’ll talk about rehabilitation of the misguided souls into our society. But we prefer to set slightly different standards for the powerful-cum-wealthier ones. They’ve grossed enough from the rest of us so they don’t need our mercy anymore. They can genuinely fuck off and never show their moisturized faces again.
In conclusion, we ought to accept certain uncontestable realities. One, we don’t know everything. Two, we can’t know everything. Three, we must watch the video of his ‘comeback’ performance to understand what exactly did he say to earn a standing ovation.
