How Marc Maron Got His Groove Back
While I try never to take for granted the luxury of self-employment as a pop culture commentator by wasting time with pop-cultural products I don't actually enjoy, Marc Maron's podcast, WTF, occupies a position right on the line of acceptable. Cons: Maron is an inattentive interviewer (how many times did Huey Lewis have to tell him that he and The News are celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the release of the Sports album this year? I counted four); he has a tendency to turn the discussion toward himself; he wastes the first fifteen minutes of every episode yammering alone, and though I always fast-forward that chunk, I can never time it out just right to get all the way past the ad for the online sex-toy store. Pros: he gets good guests, many of whom I'll never hear on another podcast or talk show. And while it makes sense for IFC to capitalize on Maron's online fame by building a Louie-esque sitcom around him (much as they built a sketch show around the Comedy Bang! Bang! podcast last year), it's not without risk; Louis C.K. is an almost universally beloved comic's comic, while Marc Maron's podcast persona rests in part on his famous prickliness. So I've had a hard time getting into Maron, his IFC show, and the latest episode might have turned me off it forever.
As our story begins, Marc (Maron, as himself (duh)) tells us he went through all the stages of a romantic relationship, in a single weekend, with a very unusual young woman. It begins when he receives an email from a fan, to which she's attached a photo of her genitals. She tells him they met at one of his recent shows, but he doesn't quite remember; however, when he shows up at a Phoenix Days Inn for a comedy festival and she finds him in the lobby, he's relieved to see that Jen (Nora Zehetner) is super-hot, and quickly agrees to participate in the Sex Fest she has planned for them. It soon becomes clear that she's not just a manic pixie dream girl; she slips him an Ambien, moves into his hotel room after messing up her own, goes nuts when she loses an earring...and yet, since she's so beautiful and their sex is so incredible, Marc is willing to forgive her everything and even, as the episode closes, consider entering into a committed relationship with her.
If this were any other comic's eponymous sitcom, I would probably dismiss the whole episode as a not-particularly-credible wish-fulfillment fantasy. But because it's Maron, I know that this is based on the true story of his relationship with his current girlfriend (or, at least, the woman who was still his girlfriend as of the last WTF I listened to; I'm a bit behind). Even without listening to the self-indulgent mess at the beginning, I know all the beats of their beautiful love story and how closely the episode hewed to them: it even included her interest in true-crime TV. And I spent the whole time feeling protective of Maron's girlfriend (whose name, at least, I've never heard him say).
I don't mean to infantilize this girlfriend, whom I'll call Real Jen for brevity's sake. When you do something like (a) send a crotch selfie to (b) a person as compulsively confessional as Marc Maron, you open yourself up -- no pun intended -- to having intimate details about yourself shared with the general public. But it's one thing for those details to be shared in audio form in podcasts, a media format it's not really possible to consume passively; anyone who happens to subscribe to IFC could have stumbled upon that episode, in which Maron exploited his real relationship, with the addition of re-enacted visuals.
I want to assume that before this episode came to be, Maron ran it by Real Jen to see if it was okay for him to retell their story this way, and that it wouldn't have happened if she hadn't signed off on it. But I've also heard him on enough podcast episodes, both his own and others', to have heard him rue that the things he's accidentally said are going to get him into trouble to be concerned about the process here. Did he let Real Jen read the script, or did he just give her the gist? Did he represent her accurately, or did he make her seem crazier by processing the story through the lens of his experience alone? Is Maron refreshingly candid, or off-puttingly self-aggrandizing? She doesn't have multiple media platforms of her own, so we'll never know.
As a WTF listener, I know that Real Jen has been pressuring Maron to get her pregnant (a project that Pamela Adlon, at least, seemed to feel Maron owes Real Jen, a young woman who works with autistic children, because she's such a good person that she deserves it). But if this is how carefully he treats the story of the start of their relationship, I would hate to see his child's many milestones captured for the IFC audience.