C.K.’s public statement confirming the accusations said pretty much everything a person in his situation was expected to say. It concluded with, “I’ve brought pain to my family, my friends, my children, and their mother. I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want. I will now step back and take a long time to listen.”
Did he, though? One of the binding motifs in “Sorry/Not Sorry” is C.K. seeming as if he’s not actually seeking forgiveness or making amends, but tamping down the possibility of lasting consequences, in a way that ultimately seems a variation of danger-seeking behavior, where the main goal is to see how far you can push or how low you can go without losing everything forever. C.K. pushed things very far, hid for a few months, then returned to work. If you look at his career through that lens, the post-apology era feels like the ultimate escalation of risk, as well as the ultimate trickster’s victory.
In my review of C.K.’s film “I Love You, Daddy,” I compared him to a flasher, in that a sizable portion of the perpetrator’s adrenaline rush comes from making others doubt that they’re seeing what they are indeed seeing because they simply can’t imagine that anyone would be so disgusting and blatant in public. In that spirit, “I Love You Daddy” stars C.K. as a father of a nubile daughter who loves wearing bikinis, and John Malkovich as a Woody Allen-like director who becomes her lover. There’s also a scene where another character loudly pretends to masturbate and ejaculate in front of a woman in an office.
The movie was shot and completed in 2016 and early 2017, when a contentious election capped by Trump’s inauguration and assorted charges of predatory behavior were all over the news, and anonymous accusations against C.K. were swirling around the Internet. The finished film debuted at the Toronto Film Festival in September, 2017, as the Times investigation was being finished, and slated for national release Nov. 17, 2017. The Times piece and C.K.’s confession/apology ran Nov. 9, scuttling the release. The picture painted by “Sorry/Not Sorry” makes you wonder if that two month period was the most anxious of C.K.’s life or the most thrilling. Possibly both? Interviewees express incredulity not just at the movie’s timing but its existence. It really did seem as if C.K. was daring people to name the ugliness he was wagging in their faces.