Louise is tense. Louise is horribly anxious. Caffeine stampedes through her veins, and her brain spars feebly with a litany of existential crises.
What sets this mentally maladjusted protagonist from others is Louise’s own internal dialogue – a fierce, distressed whisper. While the world goes on around us, The Louise Log and this little whisper bring sarcastic, nervous insight and hilarity to the most mundane of daily activities.
“Everybody else seems to be reaching their potential. I don’t even have the nerve to wriggle,” her brain murmurs to itself.
“I’d rather live on the verge of a panic attack than stick one toe in the emptiness!” she silently proclaims.
Its creator, Anne Flournoy, does not play Louise, but she is the whisperer.
Flournoy is a filmmaker whose first feature film was showcased at Sundance in the early 80s. After that, she spent 17 years rewriting her second feature. In 2007, she put the fruits of this endeavor on the Internet as a video series – and thus The Louise Log series was born.
Two seasons completed, the series is not in it’s final days crowdfunding Season 3 with the help of loyal and new fans alike.
“The deal with Louise is that she’s real. And although she is afraid of life, she wears a mask to give a sense that she’s got it together. Yet she, like everybody, has an inner track and an outer mask. And to get to hear this inner track, that’s the bonus,” Flournoy said in an interview with WHOA! Network.
Anne Flournoy
The Shorty Award winning Louise Logs has received an immediate, immense following, and has received high praise from other notable creators.
“The Louise Log is brave, funny, real, deep, clever, poetic and original. But mainly it is New York. Interior New York. Smart assed, paralyzing self-analytical neurotic New York. Watch it,” said playwright and feminist Eve Ensler, best known for her play The Vagina Monologues.
The Louise Log wrestles with a very universal, very intriguing theme – the fight for one’s own sanity. As time goes on, and generations pass their psychological baggage onto the next like relay batons, the fight gets trickier and more burdensome. And this is where we find Louise, feeling like an indentured servant, wading knee-deep in a hellish swamp of boring daily duties.
For Louise, the universe is not a cozy place teeming with life; it is a cold, empty place. Motherhood does not provide warmth and connectedness; Her kids are like these strange little aliens, these disconnected entities that represent depletion of energy. Life is not a dream for Louise; it is a nightmare jail cell in which the cold iron bars squeeze and squeeze.
However, as the plot advances, Louise’s thinking becomes crisper. She begins to find ways to harness power. Awesome, comical ways like anchoring herself at a table she likes, grasping its edges, and making decisions and key conversational stands from there. Her transformation from a little deer alone in the forest into a Buddha-in-training is a riot!
The whole thing is like a Larry David house of cards, except Louise doesn’t get to experience the cathartic boil-overs like Larry does. She suffers in silence, her inner tsunami getting just a tad more violent and uncontainable. Which is what makes The Louise Log so entertaining to watch.