steve buscemi

WARNING – THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR HORACE & PETE THROUGH THE FINALE

I’m writing this a day after the stunning finale of Horace and Pete, struggling to summarize my feelings on the series. On the one hand, this series, oftentimes, didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear. I didn’t get what I wanted out of several plot threads and I never really understood the point of everything. There were unlikable moments and some incredibly challenging pieces of storytelling that are still bothering me today.

That’s what makes this show a masterpiece.

My life couldn’t be more different from the ones lived by all the patrons of Horace and Pete’s bar. I don’t (yet) have any psychotic tendencies. I didn’t knock up my significant other and her sister at the same time. I haven’t had to personally deal with a debilitating disease, and I don’t drink my days away talking about what’s wrong with America in some ancient relic of New York. Yet, like any good piece of storytelling, I saw myself in almost every character in this series. Do I have strained familial relations? Check. Is the past constantly something that weighs on my mind? Yep. Would I ever consider drinking apple juice at the bar, just to fit in? Probably.

There is this gritty, bitter honesty at the heart of everything that we see in H&P that I just cannot shake. Louis, in a really bold move, wrote, shot and edited this thing on his own in secret, delivering to us, his fans, this really nice surprise “slice-of-life” sort of tale about two brothers who own a bar. It’s his baby, and as such there are no constraints. One episode may run for an hour and cost five dollars, while the next may run forty-five minutes and cost two dollars. Louis made the show as a free experiment to take us on an emotional journey. There are some laughs. There are some scares. There are some truly low, sad moments, but they somehow all work together in telling the story of this family and their history.

Much of the comedy in this story is on the cosmic scale. The whole tragedy of human existence is the joke Louis is after here, and that’s no clearer than in the finale where Reg E Cathey’s Harold sums up the story of the bar and Horace’s untimely end at the hands of Pete Ironically enough, that end came by the very knife Sylvia was using to cut limes and offer patrons “more modern drinks”. The symbolism of that knife as a tool into modern times//the future is truly incredible. In a series predicated upon the sins of the past coming back to haunt the characters, this is also the final affirmation that at Horace & Pete’s bar nothing will ever change. Despite Sylvia’s attempts to help her brother Horace grow, and his inclination to probably do so, the bar consumes the brothers/cousins. This whole idea of being trapped by the nature of what you are born into was the show’s point all along. I completely and wholeheartedly understand this sentiment, as I was born into a family business situation. As I get older, I see what that life is, and what it would be for me, and I had some influences who helped me understand that I should be walking a different path. I guess that’s at the heart of why H&P is hitting me so hard: I very easily could have been Horace.

The flipside of this is also the tragic story of Pete. Pete is unquestionably a broken person, something that gets reiterated by the episode ten flashback and abuse we see him subjected to. The dynamics of everything in this story, from top to bottom, are fascinating and disturbing, but never felt fake to me. H&P talks about the things none of us are willing to. I guess that is where the show feels most important and valid. For better or worse, richer or poorer, all of this happened, even though it didn’t.

So, at the end of this, what does this mean for us? What was the point? The point was…tough to discern. For me, this series is all about choices. You aren’t what happens to you, but what you choose to be. Horace and Pete are what happened to them. They are the curators of this stagnant, ugly snapshot of America, and that’s it for them. They are fine with that. For Pete, his own mind betrayed him, so the bar is his one lasting legacy in this world (possibly made worse by the clear abuse his uncle/father put him through). Similarly for Horace, a man who was so unloved in his childhood that he struggled in his marriage later in life, has no scope outside of the bar. His daughter can’t relate to him very well and his son hates him. There is only the bar, the patrons and Pete in Horace’s world. There is only Budweiser on tap. There are always the same barflies that will keep coming back no matter how many times they are thrown out. Horace and Pete, despite their attempts at being happy, are trapped individuals who could never step out and be their own men. Quite literally, the weight of simply being named Horace and Pete is what killed them both in the end (literally for one, figuratively for another).

Therein lies the rub. Pete killed Horace, and Sylvia, the one person whom we assumed would be dead, lives on with the hope of reclaiming her life. The unexpected was always the most intriguing aspect of the series, and to the end CK kept me in the dark at every turn. Up until that final climax, I simply had no clue how things would shake out, and to that end this is a brilliant and essential piece of…well…I don’t know how to categorize this. It’s not TV, it’s a web-series, but it’s also sort of a play, or a movie… Much like his show Louie, H&P is unique and rough, full of promise but also misery. I can’t think of a better way to describe life.