Why Louis C.K.’s “I Love You, Daddy” Should Never Have Been Distributed in the First Place
Take Glen’s relationship with Grace. He’s the showrunner, doing the hiring and firing of actors; yet his sexual relationship with Grace is depicted as her idea, undertaken, she says, not for the good of her career but because of her desire for him. That relationship comes off not as him taking advantage of her but as a power move on her part. Grace is depicted from the start as a sex symbol: while Glen is on the phone with her agent
.. What Louis C.K. never does, in “I Love You, Daddy,” is consider in any practical or emotional detail the reasons why the relationship between a seventeen-year-old woman who hasn’t filled out a single college application and a sixty-eight-year-old man of wealth and accomplishment might be inadvisable—why the difference between them is more than a number.
.. the movie takes pains to put China and Leslie on equal footing.
.. China’s trip with Leslie and his retinue is her education, an education greater than college, and it’s also his artistic inspiration.
.. The result is, in effect, an act of cinematic gaslighting, an attempt to spin the tenets of modern liberal feminism into shiny objects of hypnotic paralysis.
.. The movie declares that depredation is liberation, morality is tyranny, judgment is narrow-mindedness, shamelessness is creativity, lechery is admiration, and public complaint is private vanity.
.. In scene after scene, “I Love You, Daddy” depicts or evokes women making decisions—in private life or in the professional realm—that men feel constrained to accept. In short, it says that whatever authority men have isn’t really worth much, but it’s all they have and they’re entitled to it.
.. There is no ambiguity, no ambivalence, no second level of meaning, no irony, no glimmer of self-doubt—nothing but the channelling of a revolting sense of entitlement, of rights exercised without responsibilities.
.. no responsible distributor should ever have decided to buy the rights to the movie from him