For a condensed (-7,000 words) version of this essay, click here.
"In woman's womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away
." James Joyce,
Ulysses
Inside Llewyn Davis, Joel and Ethan
Coen’s latest mordant exercise of their favorite trope, Man vs. Universe as
Sadistic Yet Impersonal Bastard, follows folk musician Llewyn (Oscar Isaac), a careless and tetchy fellow who can't get a hold of success. Described as
“King Midas’ idiot brother,” where everything he touches turns to shit, his failures might be deserved retribution, or he simply
might be bereft of the necessary tools to connect with people. His prospects and promises are unblossomed and withering, and he submits to “just existing,” relinquishing his dreams.
But
Inside Llewyn Davis cannot be
reduced to the rather unconventional admonition that artists give up. Whatever
Llewyn’s fate, he
must create. His vocation is an imprisonment--and a death sentence.
His lot in life is abuse at the hands of the inscrutable Talmudic God, the recurring Coen character who
haunted A Serious Man, and is
elsewhere referred to in O Brother, Where
Art Thou?, The Ladykillers, and True
Grit, with dream-infecting emissaries like avenging motorcycle angel
Randall “Tex” Cobb in Raising Arizona
and cartel hit-man Anton Chigurh in No
Country for Old Men. The question of Llewyn Davis in this folk era Amadeus (translated: beloved of God) is
the cause for failure—is it from without or, as the title suggests, within?
The Coens again make a world that’s strictly material just as it’s awesomely mystical, a Greenwich Village Ulysses
of Spinozistic Matter-as-God, "Thought"—or the Word—struggling to become
Extension, Flesh, Real, reflected in
the opening handheld image of the singer’s alchemical and technological midwife between the within and
without, a microphone. On LPs, set in motion on their spindles, the Word
becomes Matter, but like the many unpurchased records of Llewyn (and other
struggling artists we meet), this transubstantiation only takes up
space in backrooms, behind coffee tables, and finally the landfill.
“IT WASN’T YOUR SHOW”
Though Inside Llewyn Davis
is set in a terrene world, it suggests a
metaphysics where the Greenwich Village of 1961 is privy to some cosmological
intercession. The creative artist draws his material from the eternal soup,
the likes (and lyrics) of which are removed from his or her own biographical
experiences, extending above an individual and a time. Llewyn’s own definition
of a folk song denotes the eternal, something “that was never new and never gets old." The catchy could-be-hit written by
Llewyn’s successful acquaintance Jim (Justin Timberlake), “Please Mr. Kennedy,”
pleads the sitting president not to launch the John Glenn
Singers into the cosmos, far away from earthbound comforts of a happy home and
family. Jim, with his wife and singing partner Jean (Carey Mulligan), has apparently bridged the divide between creativity and down-to-earth domesticity (aside
from Jean’s clandestine cheating with Llewyn), while still enjoying some success
with an expendable income and a faithful audience singing along.
 |
| Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis |
Jim’s a folk musician who's part of the folk, one of us. Llewyn, restlessly migrating
between couches and asking for money, can’t connect with the folk, no matter
how beautifully he makes an old song new. He doesn’t do harmonies, so he
answers Chicago-based promoter Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham), or at least
doesn’t since the suicide of his partner, Mike Timlin. The title refers to more
than Llewyn’s one solo LP, but also to how there’s just too much Llewyn Davis
inside Llewyn Davis, and through his odyssey we see that he, much as he
dismisses Jim’s song, is the one in outer space, orbiting around and around, a
pre-Major Tom space oddity more hopeless than George Clooney’s astronaut in Gravity. His restless destiny of repetition is to bring new life into the world, dying and resurrecting again and
again with the cruel reminder, like a sock to the face, that “it isn’t your show.” His orbit isn’t just any abstract
circle, but a noose, like the rope Llewyn sings about in the film’s opening
number “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me.” That song fits a sardonic mold that audiences
familiar with the Coens would attribute as droll comedy, but Inside Llewyn Davis is the pair’s most
heartbreaking and dramatic work. Llewyn is alone and plagued with reminders of
death, like Mike’s suicide, strumming along with Mozart’s Requiem after waking up at the Upper
West Side apartment of the Gorfeins (Ethan Phillips, Robin Bartlett), a pair of
married Columbia professors whose décor suggests passion for art and long dead
civilizations, and the fact that his manager Mel Novikoff (Jerry Grayson)
spends an awful lot of time going to funerals (“He likes people,” Mel’s
secretary tells Llewyn, who replies “Fewer and fewer.”)
Living without creating means just existing, and
Llewyn is caught in a bind where artisanship is both an angry rebuke to placid
existence (“Hang Me”’s lyrics: “Went up on the mountain, there I made my stand
/ Rifle on my shoulder and a dagger in my hand”) and the thin strand onto which
he hangs, above “just existing” when he can’t
just “exist.” Too sensitive to life, to just exist amounts to
breathing death for him (“I wouldn’t mind the hanging / But the laying in the grave for
so long”). The gravity pulling him down from the labors of creativity is
something sinister, and the lyrics of departure and mortal intimations throughout
Llewyn’s story nod to a longing for death.
As with other Coen films, multiple screenings of Inside Llewyn Davis open it up, muddying
its seemingly lucid and minimal constitution as an accretion of uncanny
mildew grows through the foggy and wintry dreamscape of Greenwich and the
frosted open road. This song of itself contradicts itself and contains multitudes. The structure is circular and we end up where we began with
Llewyn at the Gaslight Café, a popular venue for folk acts, singing “Hang Me”
and then being ushered into the outside alley where he’s greeted by a tall
stranger who swiftly punches him in the face. This is the same scene, confirmed
by the banter and audience silhouettes inside, but some details have
changed in the last 100 minutes.
In the prologue we only heard the echo of traffic, while in the
final moments we hear Bob Dylan inside performing a song that
closely mirrors the theme of what Llewyn has just sang (“Farewell”). The bar
exchanges between Llewyn and club owner Pappi (Max Casella) are almost
identical, save for, following Llewyn’s apology for his lewd behavior the
previous night, Max not saying “It’s just music” before mentioning Llewyn’s
“friend” waiting for him. The vocal cadences between Llewyn and
the truculent stranger are different, Llewyn this time not having time to
confusedly say “I’m sorry?” before a fist blasts his nose.
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| Ineluctable modality of the visible: the cat in Inside Llewyn Davis |
Are these just the editorial alterations of the Coens’
cantankerous longtime (and fictional) cutter Roderick Jaynes for the dramatic
punchline of Bob Dylan’s entrance as the folk vagabond messiah who will take
off, succeeding as Hibbing-born Robert Zimmerman “inside Bob Dylan” who, Martin
Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home reminds
us, consciously concocted an image like a brilliant chameleon or shape shifter,
while Llewyn Davis, who is wholly Llewyn Davis inside and out, fails? Could Llewyn, had he
been the second act while The New York
Times’ Sidney Sheldon documented this night, been the recipient of Dylan’s
accolades, the infinitesimal factors of fate working out thusly? Is this a
literalization of Jean’s assertion that life for Llewyn will never change
because he doesn’t want it to, or does it point to a Deus Ex Machina, like the
flood in O Brother, Where Art Thou?
or the punishing Book of Job whirlwind and x-rays from A Serious Man? It could be God, but like Inside
Llewyn Davis, both of those narrative events technically have “logical”
conclusions as natural phenomena. The misfortunes of the Coens' heroes set a dialectic of free will and predestination in motion. As Zeus says in The Odyssey, "Ah, how shameless the way these mortals blame the gods! From us alone, they say, come all their miseries. Yes, but they themselves with their own reckless ways compound the pains beyond their proper share."
More than a few impassioned viewers of
Inside Llewyn Davis have been ridiculed for their theorized corollaries, drafting non-sequiturs through meandering movie interpretation.
Inside Llewyn Davis is such an otherwise
straight-forward narrative, beautiful in its simplicity and architectural
execution, that it doesn’t need such elliptical speculation. But, like the
cat’s namesake, James Joyce’s
Ulysses (or like
A Serious Man), the immanent world is
screaming for a transcendental interpretation of events, reading not graffiti on
the restroom tile but Talmudic Book of Daniel writing on the wall. Llewyn has
to smile with
but of course! realization
upon learning the cat’s name is Ulysses, or seeing the poster for
Disney’s
The Incredible Journey
(about three animals using their natural instincts to get home safely across a
vast untamed wilderness) at a local movie house, the same way Stephen Dedalus sees an old milk woman as disguised Athena visiting Telemachus. The catch is that, while like
Scorsese’s Dylan Llewyn has “no direction home,” he’s unable to shape shift and
acclimate through the vagaries of time, his ticking mortal clock grossly off
rhythm
. He's not Dedalus, or even Icarus. He never got off the ground.
The chronology is confused by the film’s structural
design, covering Llewyn’s progress over the course of six days—two of
which might be the same day, suggesting how Llewyn is a creator who can never cross over to his day of
rest. In addition to the loop beginning and end, the moments preceding the
finale are so strikingly close to what followed the opening, with Llewyn waking
up at the Gorfeins’ and the same orange cat pouncing on his chest, that we almost may
confuse these scenes as identical. The earlier wake-up has Llewyn
accidentally letting out the cat, dragging it around Manhattan before losing it; the second time, he aggressively braces the door to make
sure Ulysses stays put. The order of events makes it clear that these are
different mornings and yet, bookended by the Gaslight alley reprimand, there’s
the unmistakable mien of ineffability, the remembrance of jumbled incidents
made more malleable through the emotional onslaught of Llewyn’s unfortunate
affairs as time has lost much of its context (Llewyn notes how his journey
through the week feels a lot longer than it actually was).
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| Ulysses |
The order of
events could be careless screenwriting over-scrutinized by eye-rolling IMDB
goof-sniffing movie culture (if we work out the
math, the day Llewyn wakes up is a Sunday, which doesn’t seem likely as the Gorfeins are giving lectures
at Columbia), or maybe it’s a pathogen the authors have playfully injected into
the film’s DNA, in perfect accordance with their themes. Keeping with Ulysses, the Coens themselves then aren’t
unlike the Creator Stephen Dedalus refers to as “[the] playwright who wrote the
folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two
days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics
call dio boia, hangman god…” The not-so-fastidious-but-awfully-abstruse
God of the Torah is also a frustrated artist uncertain of his creation,
unable to control it and destroying it, then building it again as the same shit
keeps going down. Birth, Death, the Divine, shit and grit, bodies restless and docile,
young and fresh and haggard and corpulent, are all rolled together
in this beautiful portrait of the artist as
not-so-young-a-man-anymore-and-drowning, a hero story about an individual who
suffers and fails so that we can have our immortal Bob Dylans who succeeded. Llewyn is an anti-Gilgamesh who, having lost his soul-mate and Enkidu, strives for an
elixir of immortality and fails.
“EXPLAIN THE CAT”
The Coens have done
something extraordinary, inviting doubt into presuppositions of the narrative
while—ever so subtly—suggesting a Super-Naturalism working through the detritus of Llewyn's journey,
as if the struggling musician has somehow stumbled into another dimension. He's weirdly not unlike those
unfortunate video-makers going in circles in The Blair Witch Project, the trapped vacationers in the Evil Dead movies, or, to name another
frustrated artist whose end throws a wrench into our expectations, Jack
Torrence in The Shining, revealed to
have indeed always been at the Overlook Hotel.
Inside Llewyn Davis
is then an accompaniment of the uncanny to
A Serious Man, where the
stranger at the door is a Dybbuk and is not a Dybbuk, where the conclusion is
both divine retribution and mere chance, and where the story is both a small wry
drama and a cosmic religious riddle. The filmmakers have even written a part
for the Schrodinger cat from poor Professor Larry Gopnik’s (Michael Stuhlbarg)
physics lesson, where the creature is both alive and dead. In
Inside Llewyn Davis, the cat opens a
slew of interpretations prompting us, like Larry,
to probe for meaning when
there may be none. The cat is both
Llewyn’s double (Professor Gorfein’s secretary mishears Llewyn on the phone,
repeating back to him the obvious symbol bait “Llewyn
is the cat” instead of “Llewyn has the cat”) and his opposite
(military fatigued folkie sensation Troy Nelson, played by Stark Sands, remarks
that the cat is “very contented,” antonymous with Llewyn’s state of being). It's also his mute assailant (the mysterious stranger from the alley walks away from
Llewyn, the image beautifully dissolving to the Gorfeins’ hallway, the cat in
harmonious step with the violent assailant, on his way to wake Llewyn from sleep's contentment). “Explain the cat,” Jean demands of Llewyn, and he can’t—and neither can we. The cat is a
mystical interloper, a Wonderland critter Llewyn chases through his trials and
final judgment in Chicago. The cat is lost, recovered, then discovered to be
not only the wrong cat, but the wrong gender (“Where is its scrotum?” Mrs.
Gorfein protests). The “wrong cat” is abandoned and by coincidence possibly
killed by Llewyn, driving home on his cross-country road trip after passing the
Akron exit, while the original Ulysses, like his Homeric namesake, finds his
way back safely to the Gorfeins.
Yet—yet—the first
image we have of the cat is its high-tailed rear end, which, when say compared
to a similar feline that berates Elliot Gould in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, is scrotum-less, while
Ulysses, back at home in Mrs. Gorfein’s arms, has its paw, as if by design,
blocking its genitals. The Coens repeatedly call attention to the mystery of
the cat and its gender (the mystery of reproductive function; and remember that Athena comes to Telemachus in the guise of Mentes, a man--and connected to that the idea that Athena was, as with artistic creation, born from Zeus' mind and not his loins...see, this shit keeps coming and coming), as Llewyn, on the phone with
Mr. Gorfein, twice is corrected after referring to it as a female. Going along
with the treacherous mythopoetic reading of Inside
Llewyn Davis, as pure abstraction the cat—whether belonging to the Gorfeins
or not—is the film’s androgynous and prophetic Tiresias or oracle, skittering
between the world of the living and the dead, which, remembering writers like Thomas
Mann and Yukio Mishima, is where the creative artist dwells, fertile with
creativity yet constantly neutered by failure, reminded of his sterility by
an inability to adjust to the domesticity everyone else grasps harmoniously.
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| "Where's its scrotum?" |
Llewyn chases and holds dearly onto the cat,
something of Nature though domesticated, but either (a) he has to let it go to
pursue his dream, or (b) it runs away when he’s ready to settle down and “just
exist.” He can fall in love and make love (to Jean and to a woman named Diane
from two years earlier), but the women deny him the role of fatherhood; he can
be invited to dinner at the Gorfeins, with other musicians in attendance, but
awkwardly fumbles in an attempt to make headway in a conversation with a
keyboardist; he can sit with important friends like Jim and Jean at
the Gaslight, but has to ask Jim if Troy Nelson, singing “The Last Thing on My
Mind,” is any good, later looking on befuddled as Troy, Jim, and Jean sing
“Five Hundred Miles” as a perfectly mellifluous trio, the audience joining
during the chorus. The lyrics relate to sadly leaving someone behind, but the whole world—more than just the folk music scene—seems
to be moving along fine without poor Llewyn. As Jean, centered in the frame, begins
to sing her solo verse, the camera takes Llewyn’s adoring point of view, slowly
moving in on her face. Pushed to close-up, her gaze is directed at Llewyn, but as he raises
his hands to acknowledge the connection, the spell is broken and her eyes
flutter toward her husband. Similarly, just when Llewyn is settling down in Jean's apartment and calmly speaks to the
cat (“What’s your name again?”), Ulysses breaks for the open window,
disappearing. Won’t Llewyn be a part of the world—or can’t he? Is he free, or imprisoned by
predestination?
A KOSHER FILM FOR PASSOVER
Peering
beneath the countenance of Inside Llewyn
Davis, invoking alchemy and proclaiming that the Coens have made a picture
about the delivery, death, and redemption of the Word, a big allegory about the
varieties of human existence in its eternal recurrences
spinning around a flat circle (a term now in vogue thanks to True Detective, so I gather from myriad
think-pieces) not unlike the LP of Timlin and Davis’ “Fare Thee Well” that
Llewyn plays before setting out on a Manhattan morning, is trippy stuff, the
respondent eye-rolls perhaps justified had not the Coens executed their film
with such a mysterious consonance and stark lushness, Bruno Delbonnel’s color
palette similar to the “snot-green scrotum-tightening sea” of Joyce, as meanwhile the suffering writer (I), to use Buck Mulligan’s
phrasing, attempts to prove by algebra that Llewyn Davis’ grandson is the
Coens’ grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own cat, or what
have you.
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| The Goy's Teeth: A Serious Man |
But the film is wrought with varying
vectors for asking questions and drawing conclusions. The end credits tell
us the film is “kosher” (just as A
Serious Man assured us that “no Jews were harmed in the making of this
film”), nodding to a holy subtext. The Coens’ Hebrew origins
offer insight to how their work plays out, as unfortunate characters try to
crack the elusive riddle of the Law. The Torah gives us stories but stubbornly evades closure, or the humanistic assurances of
contemporary literature. Readers are left to contemplate the ellipses in the
narratives, though if they think about it too much, like Larry Gopnik, they
risk God’s wrath (or the Twittersphere’s). The Torah gives the Law and stories, but not
answers or clearly defined associations. It's the Hebraic parataxis as opposed to the hypotaxis. The temptation of Eve in the garden, Noah’s rebuke to Ham, the demand
that Abraham kill his son Isaac, or God’s hardening of Pharaoh’s heart so that
more people can be smote, are all nonsensical and demand further articulation (or midrashic method of finding gaps and filling them in). The great Rabbi’s “sage” advice,
appropriated from modern secular culture, is the best we can hope for: when the
truth is found to be lies, and all the joy around you dies – you better find
somebody to love.
Set in 1968 suburban Minneapolis, A Serious Man dives into the problem of
trying to map out the mystery. It offers much delight with “The
Goy’s Teeth,” where a dentist tries to understand why God has sent him a Hebrew
message on a gentile’s pearlies, but the episode resolves like
Dostoyevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor,” a Christian puzzle where the
Inquisitor argues against Christianity
while Christ himself is silent with no fulfilling answer to the questions
of uncertainty. A good man who’s facing a divorce, blackmail, and
some heinous allegations from a tenure committee, Larry struggles to get
answers from three rabbis, and the viewer tries to get answers from the film.
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| Strangers on a train: Darren Aronofsky's "Pi" |
Sundry elements
address themselves simply by their omission, demanding us to keep digging
and reading: Vietnam and the political climate (“the new freedoms,” mentioned
by the sexy neighbor, Mrs. Samsky), the suspenseful geopolitical climate in
Israel,
the storied legacy of anti-Semitism in Minneapolis (so pronounced and
yet segregated within the city, as St. Paul next door was extremely friendly to
Jews), and, most pressingly for Larry (and verbally addressed by his dreams),
the fact that socially respected douchebag Sy Abelman (Fred Melamed) is
“seriously fucking” Larry’s wife (Sari Lennick). The small story of Larry is a
subset of a much bigger story happening on a global—and cosmological—scale. The
“Uncertainty Principle” proves that we can’t know what’s going on, though we’re
still responsible for it on the Mid-Term, and yet somehow the Sy Abelmans of the
world
do know what’s going on—even
though he’s not intellectually curious and just likes to indulge in fine wine,
dining at Ember’s, ruining Larry’s marriage, and writing foul letters to the
tenure committee about Larry.
God speaks through the body with the mysterious Hebrew
letter’s on the goy’s teeth, in Larry’s stomach during a routine physical (the
blerping sound as the doctor applies pressure to the abdomen), the ominous
x-rays that portend his death, and how Larry’s brother Arthur (Richard
Kind) drains his cyst just as he drains his mind into the “Mentaculus” map of
the universe. God is outside and inside, non-matter Pure Thought and grossly
physical, reality a subset of Him. On Larry’s television we see a sci-fi movie
with a great tremulous brain, a religious song Larry’s son is learning for
his bar mitzvah seeming to emanate from it. Trying to discern that sinister
brain, as Hashem is something of a horror-movie villain akin to The Lord of the Rings’ Sauron, destroys
Larry.
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| Matter as subset of God: A Serious Man |
The tree of knowledge, of probing and giving a shit, is
indeed quite damning, and the Coens’ dark observation is that apathy sews the seeds
of happiness; one may be locked in what Kierkegaard calls "despair," but if you can live with it, the Danish philosopher's "aesthetic" stage is the route to take for getting by. Think of Inside Llewyn
Davis’ predecessor, True Grit,
where the need for Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) to get revenge on the
dull-witted man who killed her father results in several more unnecessary
corpses, the death of a beloved horse, a maiming injury to Texas Ranger
LeBeouf’s tongue, and the loss of Mattie’s arm. If only Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) in No Country for Old Men hadn’t given a shit about returning to the
sight of a bad shootout to give water to a dying man;. if only Ed (Billy Bob Thornton) in The Man Who Wasn’t There hadn’t been enticed by “dry cleaning” and
the question of “where the hair comes from”; if only Tom Reagen (Gabriel Byrne) in Miller’s Crossing hadn’t been stirred by his love and loyalties and
just shot Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro) in the head; and, most amusingly, if only the Dude didn’t mind the unchecked
aggression of the Rug-Peers in The Big
Lebowski, he’d still have, um, his car and his CCR tapes. Engaging in the
human condition, as playwright Barton Fink (Turturro) does in Barton Fink, unlocks the “life of the
mind,” thoughts schlepping through discarded brain matter, a fiery
hell revealed to Barton through the serial killer Charlie Meadows (John
Goodman). Barton should just keep his screenplay wrapped in the
conflict of what’s in the ring of his wrestling picture; all else, so the
rabbis remind Larry in A Serious Man,
is frivolous. Forget Vietnam, freedom, Israel, Sy Abelman fucking your wife,
and Hebrew letters on teeth. Helping other people? Couldn't hurt. But play golf! Live life! Just cut the hair! Fuck it,
dude, let’s go bowling!
As we ask with Larry, “Is Hashem trying to tell me that Sy
Abelman is me, or that we are all one,
or something?”, we now wonder what God is doing “inside” Llewyn Davis and
how we interpret what’s happening. The film (in conjunction with A Serious Man) reminded me of another Jewish filmmaker’s mystical
exploration of the fabric of reality, Darren Aronofsky’s cyber-religious
thriller Pi, about obsessive
mathematician Max Cohen, committed to the belief, shared by the Hasidic Jews
stalking him, that numbers reveal the patterns of the real world; his salvation
is drilling a hole through his brain, relieved from the original sin of
knowledge. Max is repeatedly told to let things go, “take a bath,” and submit to
chaos while the grainy Manhattan reality mixes in overt hallucinations like a bleeding stranger (him)
on the nearby subway platform, a
brain, his brain, lying on some stairs, and a mysterious man staring at him and singing
on a train.
 |
| Jean (Carey Mulligan) |
The “patterns” in the Coens’ film refuses to make the meaning
transparent. In addition to the mysterious presence of the cat (One cat? Two? Male? Female? Double? Opposite? Oracle? Nothing more than a mammal without a single tie to
something Super-Natural?), and the loop structure, there is the question of the
Gorfeins and their relationship to Mike Timlin (subject of the first easily refuted Llewyn Davis internet theories). And why did Mike jump off
the George Washington Bridge (existentially, and when the proper bridge to jump from, everyone knows, is the Brooklyn Bridge)? There is the question of Jean’s pregnancy.
Is Llewyn the father, or Jim? Why does Llewyn capitulate so easily to her
demands to get it taken care of (proof that Llewyn isn’t nearly as much of an
asshole as so many reviews insist that he is)? As she asserts that Llewyn
should never have sex again without “condom on condom,” there’s the hinted possibility
that Llewyn was at least wearing a condom.
In an early Gaslight scene, Pappi says that he would fuck Jean if could, and
then, days later, after Llewyn has procured money for Jean’s abortion, Pappi
happily verifies that he has fucked
her. This rouses Llewyn’s deep-seated resentment and he takes it out by
spewing vituperation at the poor, middle-aged woman on stage, Elizabeth Hobby (Nancy Blake).
Is there any stable reality to graft this film? Has Pappi just slept with Jean this past week
(questionable, as she’s already performed at the Gaslight and Pappi makes it
clear that if you want to play there, you have to sleep with him)? Were Mike
and Jean lovers (or was she his sister)? Indeed, we may also question the
degree of intimacy between Mike and Llewyn, anti-Gilgamesh and anti-Enkidu, who
completed each other in their creative intercourse and procreation (ambiguous sexuality is scattered throughout: in Llewyn's relationship to Mike, Roland Turner to beatnik valet Johnny Five, Llewyn not answering Roland's question, "You queer?" and later Pappi mentioning how a lot of men come to the Gaslight not only because "they wanna fuck Jean" but because "they wanna fuck Jim!"). The Coens’
little movie pointedly resists being an elegiac documentary to the legacy of
its setting, instead telling a story of desperate lostness where simple ins and outs
prompt our uncertainty and question the fabric of the presented reality.
It’s
little wonder that music historian and critic Greil Marcus hates Inside Llewyn Davis, or that Terri Thai,
former wife and manager of Dave Van Ronk (who partly inspired the character of
Llewyn), would write a Village Voice piece pointing out how the film incorrectly portrays the Greenwich Village scene
(it’s a piece penned with such agonizing earnestness that it would fit in
perfectly as one of the Coens’ fake introductions to their published Faber and Faber screenplays). The film’s inwardness expressed cinematically
outward asserts a resolute individuality and detached fuck you to the collective, to connectivity, to the Folk and the Folk
Scene, the hero unable to embrace the Transparent Eyeball but ever-fixed as
Transparent I Bawl, the sad disposition of recurrent failure, hungering to be remembered and rewarded,
to be transcendent and etched on stone, to be at peace, meanwhile making do on a couch.
SANTERIA
Because
of Llewyn Davis’ bad luck, the film earnestly hints that he is literally, in a
Super-Natural way, cursed.
The most compelling of theories regarding
Inside Llewyn Davis involves the film’s
anomalous and off-beat section, when Llewyn, with $200, knowledge that his
ex-girlfriend carried his child to term two years ago, and the ambition to
audition at the Gate of Horn for Bud Grossman, agrees to ride with the gigantic
and flamboyant jazz musician Roland Turner (John Goodman), a drug
addict walking on two canes, accompanied by his marble mouthed “valet,” Johnny
Five (Garrett Hedlund).
 |
| Roland Turner (John Goodman) |
This midsection is marked by unnerving strangeness as three
uncomfortable eccentrics travel through freezing drizzle,
fading amber sunlight, and starry
nighttime flurries stealing visual coherence, as if they were traveling
through a dimensional portal. The
fat jazzman harasses the folkie about his name (“Llewyn” becomes “Lou N.” and “Elwyn”),
ethnicity (Roland calls Llewyn a “flamenco dancer” because of his complexion, the Welsh-named Llewyn asserting his mother was Italian) and the
simpleton “Cowboy Chord” music genre in which he performs. He also insults the
intelligence and lifestyle of Mike, who, it is at this point revealed,
committed suicide. Llewyn, with sizzling rage and sadness, interrupts Roland’s fatuous verbosity, “Would that cane fit all the way up
your ass, or would a little bit stay sticking out?
Roland falls silent for a moment. He twirls the
cane and becomes a demonic harbinger with his response. “Okay. Okay,” he says, and then,
delivered with magnificently eerie cadence by Goodman, continues, “Except threats
and intimidation won’t work with me. You wanna know why? This would interest
you. I studied Santeria and certain other
things that squares like you would call the ‘black arts,’ due to lack of
understanding, from Chano Pozzo in New Orleans. You say you’ll mess me up? I
don’t have to make those childish threats. I do my thing And one day you’ll
wake up wondering, ‘Why do I have
this pain in my side?’ Or maybe it won’t even be that specific. Maybe it will
be, ‘Why isn’t anything going right for me? My life is a big bowl of shit. I
don’t remember it being a big bowl of
shit. Meantime, Roland Turner is 1000 miles away, laughing his ass off. Think about that, Elwyn,” he
finishes, poking Llewyn’s shoulder with the cane, like a wizard's staff. “In this car, bad manners won’t work.”
 |
| Clean Asshole Poems: Johnny Five (Garrett Hedlund) and Roland |
The implication is that Santeria black magic is to blame for Llewyn’s subsequent misfortunes. These misfortunates aren’t out of step with Llewyn's luck preceding
this sequence, but I can’t shake how the whole section assumes the character
of something eerily phantasmic, accented by Delbonnel’s photography. With
Roland and Johnny Five, it’s as if Llewyn has crossed a threshold on this
Tuesday cross-country drive, the film entering a kind of Walpurgnis
Night. Night falls and Llewyn sees red lights of traffic, blurred by
precipitation, like ominous warnings to turn back. Three hours outside of
Chicago, the three men sit at an Oasis restaurant, a preternatural promontory
above the earth with headlights diffusedly blazing below. The awkward banter has finally
reached a trancelike stupor, Johnny Five reciting Peter Orlovsky’s “My Bed is
Covered Yellow” and Roland hissing “Yesssssss” in reply.
Llewyn and Roland both enter the
lavatory, and while Llewyn sits on the toilet he notices pen graffiti by the tissue roll: “What are you doing?”
There’s a thud from another stall and Llewyn rises to investigate. Collapsed on
the floor and foaming at the mouth, Turner has overdosed. His gigantic and foaming form suggests life reduced to a prodigious tub of guts, the latrine background recalling the
warning of how Llewyn’s life will become a bowl of shit. And yet, with the
nonchalant Johnny Five, Llewyn tries to help and is concerned for this man who
may have cursed him (again: not an asshole).
 |
| The writing on the wall: What are you doing? |
But—“What are you doing?” Llewyn could be the mythic
artisan patron Daedalus trying to fashion wings (recalling the Timlin and Davis
LP, titled If We Had Wings) to escape
the minotaur maze of merely existing—again like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus trying
to find direction in Mr. Deasy’s Hegelian straight line toward One Great Goal
(while Stephen’s story in Ulysses’ 17th
chapter concludes with a circular dot), his pursuit of artistic success not in
congruence with a career but with solving some ultimate riddle of existence and
finding a creative Philosopher’s Stone through the “ineluctable modality of the visible” and spotting the
“contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality” of the universe. Llewyn could be the new
messiah on the “road to Galilee” sung about in “Green Rocky Road,” a Parzival
foolishly stumbling into invisible castles and retrieving the lost grail.
Or, if we believe our eyes and
silence our wandering speculation, he could simply be a guy taking a shit. Which brings us to
THE DIVINE ASSHOLE
That
writing on the wall brings us back to Llewyn’s predicament
as an artist and his function as a man. Jean repeatedly berates him by calling him an “asshole," and then more to the point, “shit”: he is
“shit” and everything he touches turns to “shit.” There’s resonance to these
abundant scatological references, carrying with their stench the fear of anyone
who creates, and alongside that, an anxiety about meaning that soaks through
much of the Coens’ oeuvre. “What are you doing?”
the graffiti, like the gods, are asking. Llewyn is shitting. All his toils,
talents, and worries amount to shit: pulpy, gritty, disgusting waste to be
flushed out to the same sea to which so many of these folk songs aspire, the
great snot-green mother that gave life, on which Llewyn almost sets sail as a
sanctuary from his stunted creativity but never reaches. Replete though the film is in nautical imagery, the ocean is seen only once in the distance. Llewyn is instead left with shit, the output of every
human being that is necessarily repressed from polite conversation (and movies).
 |
| Just existing: Hugh Davis (Stan Carp) |
Llewyn visits his catatonic father
Hugh Davis (Stan Carp), at the Landfall (sounds like “Landfill”)
sailor’s retirement home, speaks to him without hope of reply, and then sings the
old man a lovely sea shanty, “Shoals of Herring.” The performance, where
Llewyn’s words are met with glints of recognition from the old sailor, is
perhaps the most poignant moment in the entire Coen catalogue. The song ends,
and Llewyn looks penetratingly at his dad. “Wow,” he says. What’s happening? Has a breakthrough occurred between father and son, now bound
by their seamanship?
No. The next scene has Llewyn
informing an orderly that his father soiled himself. For Llewyn, “wow” points
not to accomplishment but to excrement.
At my first screening of
Inside Llewyn Davis, I overheard one
respected critic, who otherwise adored the film, mention how this fecal punch-line
counted as the picture’s one misstep. But the linking of feces, arriving at the
most inopportune moment, to deepest human sentiments and relationships carries
something that enriches this story of Greenwich Village and creativity
.
Excrement relates to the raw process of existence: forms animated to life,
eating, digesting, shitting, dying, consumed by nature, and themselves becoming shit. It’s
an unbearable process to embrace, famously recorded in literature
with Gilgamesh looking at the worm emerge from Enkidu’s corpse. The Landfall
experience with his dad gives light to what Llewyn has to anticipate—“You don’t even have to get up to shit,” he tells his sister, Joy (Jeanine
Serralles). The respected but docile father is an omen much as the fleshy
corporeality of Roland is, a man who is similarly zombie-like, aging and
running on the fumes of drug addiction.
Meanwhile, the John Glenn Singers, so cowboy-hat adorned Al Cody (Adam Driver) jokes, are
first going to tour “Uranus,” while Johnny Five, if we can discern his words,
is infatuated with the “Clean Asshole” poems of Orlovsky, Ginsberg’s lover who
believed that the asshole was divine. And when Llewyn explains to Roland’s
snide interrogations that he’s Welsh, the jazz man mentions how a serving of
Welsh Rarebit found himself “purging from every
orifice, one in particular like a fire hose," and snidely asking, “Does everything from
Wales make you shit yourself?” Hugh Davis' reaction to his son's song implies as much. Everything in Inside Llewyn Davis seems to come back to Roland’s “bowl of shit,” beginning
and ending with Llewyn’s consignment to “this cesspool” (sewage drain)
by the back-alley stranger.
And with excrement, there’s Death everywhere, beginning with
“Hang Me, Oh Hang Me,” a prayer to be relieved from the cycle of conceiving,
trying, failing, and forgetting, and lingering with the memory and mystery of
Mike’s suicide. The undercurrent of unanswered expectancy and failure is mortal
insignificance, the futile common denominator of the human body which flashes
out quickly or lingers long past ripening, flesh playing out its final
years as a prison of tissue and sinew, piss and shit.
BIRTH AND DEATH
Even
if it’s only been twice, Llewyn Davis has a
knack for getting women pregnant, ironic for an individual who, if life was
hollowed out to just existing, would rather not be here at all. The restroom
graffiti and the rest-home accident are Providential
messages: stop what you’re doing. Indeed, condom on condom not only for
biological procreation, but artistic creation. The film’s most crucial scene,
at the Gate of Horn in Chicago, pits Llewyn in the presence of Grossman, played
with magnificently restraint by Amadeus’
own patron saint of mediocrities Antonio Salieri, F. Murray Abraham, who casts
cursory judgment on the young man who’s traveled hundreds of miles to make
himself heard.
 |
| The patron saint of mediocrities, Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) in Amadeus |
The context is
important. Llewyn is a man bound to his family only by necessity. Joy--who could be a single mother--is not
pleasant to be around, his father is catatonic, and being that the Davis' house is being sold, presumably his mother has died. Though his early offering as a young artist was for his parents (Joy mentions the EP Llewyn recorded of "Shoals of Herring" at age eight), he struggles to be of the same rootlessness we associate
with self-created mavericks like Dylan. He believes he’s impregnated the woman
he loves (as vitriolic as Jean is to Llewyn, I don’t think we can underestimate
that how sincerely he adores her), but she’s going to terminate the pregnancy
in a few days. The doctor who performs the clandestine abortion has informed
him the procedure will be free of charge because Diane, the old girlfriend from
a couple of years ago who had the same problem, decided to carry to term,
moving close to her family in Akron, far away from the rococo Greenwich scene. The doctor couldn't tell Llewyn, who doesn't have a stable residence.
Llewyn is now a father with physical progeny to match his artistic progeny. He’s
made something that might outlast him, a mark on the world, a living being that’s a part of him. And that
same cycle is happening currently with Jean.
Consider the song he chooses to play
for Grossman, a truncated version of “The Death of Queen Jane,” a melancholy old
ballad about the queen, truly beloved by the otherwise infamous Henry VIII, in
agonizing labor. She begs the midwives, and then the king himself, to cut her
open, sacrificing herself so that her baby may live, but Henry will not allow
it: “If I lose the flower of England, I shall lose the branch too.” At
IndieWire,
Sam Adams brilliantly writes of this moment for Llewyn, “
It obviously reflects his mixed feelings about
his (possibly) two children, one alive and unseen, the other unborn and soon to
be dead. But it's also about self-sacrifice, and about how in order for
something new to come into being, something old may have to die first.”
(Michelle Dean, in her fantastic piece, also describes this scene in a
mythological way, also calling Llewyn’s performance a sacrifice).
 |
| F. Murray Abraham as Llewyn's final judge at the Gate of Horn, Bud Grossman |
After
Llewyn sings how the country folk were fiddling and dancing the day the new
babe was born yet how beloved Queen Jane (whose name recalls Jean) was “cold as
a stone,” Grossman promptly says, “I don’t see a lot of money here.” The
curt judgment is utterly final and insurmountably hopeless. After this last chance
blitz through the heartland, suffering the company and curses of Roland and
Johnny Five, abandoning the stray/decoy cat, hitchhiking through sleet and
treading through puddles, and being harassed by law enforcement officials in
train stations for trying to get some rest, the crushing sense is not simply
that Llewyn give up. It’s much graver.
Though
he says that Llewyn’s “not green,” Grossman proposes the young man trim his
beard to a goatee, change his hair, and join a trio he’s putting together—the
description of which matches what we know as Peter, Paul, and Mary. “Do you do
harmonies?” Grossman asks, and Llewyn replies, tremulous and somewhat
defiantly, “No.” He won’t not be
Llewyn Davis. He quickly adds that he did do harmonies
with his former partner. “My suggestion—get back together,” Grossman says. “That’s
good advice," Llewyn says. "Thank you, Mr. Grossman.”
 |
| The sacrifice: "The Death of Queen Jane" |
Behind Llewyn’s gentle
capitulation is something more than an abstract sacrifice found in music, but
real death, the noose of “Hang Me” and “Fare Thee Well”’s observation that
“Life ain’t worth living without the one you love,” Mike Timlin’s tragic leap
of faith and, in this film’s Sisyphus loop, what Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus said was “the one
truly serious philosophical problem,” the intimate question of suicide. Camus
goes on to say, “An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart,
as is a great work of art.”
There’s
no indication, however, that Llewyn has any plans to follow Mike off the
bridge. I imagine he’s marveled by his soul-mate’s leap (and betrayal?), and
what’s left is the powerful longing
for non-being. Llewyn hitchhikes out of Chicago, which hangs in the distance
like the Emerald City, and takes the wheel while the generous young man who
picks him up gets rest in the passenger seat. On the nocturnal road, the
lights of Akron catch Llewyn’s eye. If he could only take the exit, stepping
into the future instead of curling back into the past, like surrendering himself to
the merchant marine again, his father’s line of work. The doo-wop sounds of
Nolan Strong and the Diablos’ “Old MacDonald” pivot the atmosphere even more to
a positive direction home. But Llewyn misses the exit—after
which the familiar but blurry orange shape leaps onto the road, smacking into
the car’s bumper.
Anguished, Llewyn brakes and investigates. We
see the blood on the car and the maimed creature stumble into the dark woods to
die. Whether it’s the cat Llewyn left behind or not doesn’t matter. It’s an
omen that can be interpreted any number of ways. Should he turn back? Should
he, like the cat, give up and die?
The music playing
throughout this moment is a song from Gustav Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, “The Heavenly Life,” describing the sacrifice of a lamb and an ox
while highlighting the release from earthly toil and shortcomings in the
hereafter: “We enjoy the heavenly pleasures / And avoid the earthly things. /
No worldly tumult / Does one hear in Heaven! / Everything lives in the gentlest
peace! / We lead an angelic life! / Nevertheless we are very merry: / We dance
and leap, / Hop and sing! / Meanwhile, St. Peter in the sky looks on.” Again,
the message appears to be, with those lyrics and the creature limping into the
darkness, that Llewyn quit this life.
 |
| "He's adorable": Howie Greenfung |
Llewyn’s life has
always been geared towards creating, but what he’s fashioned is useless and plops to
the ground like shit. The sentiments of childbirth and art run hand in hand, with
Mrs. Gorfein annoying Llewyn with her belief that “singing was a joyous
expression of the soul” (we might wonder about the Gorfeins’ parental
association to Llewyn and Mike, and if it might have something to do with how
they’re a barren couple eager to adopt company so that Mrs. Gorfein’s “famous”
meals can have an audience). But the agon of music, writing, or I imagine child
rearing, isn’t so simple, either alone or in collaboration with a
soul-mate. Llewyn might be recognizing this as he looks at the photograph of
what is not exactly the most fetching or photogenic of babies, the child of two
other Gorfein guests who’ve bridged their surnames, without a dash, to title
the boy: “Howie Greenfung,” a mucus-colored name if there ever was one, perfect
for this little result of two people fusing and procreating. But Howie doesn’t seem too happy to be existing.
“He’s adorable,” Llewyn says, but his glance at the photo
indicates an unfortunate kinship of misbegotten genesis. Solo or in harmony, creating doesn't guarantee beauty. What happened to Llewyn's family? The unmentioned mother, the silent father, the austere (and apparently unmarried) sister raising Llewyn's docile nephew, Llewyn's childhood home being sold with no inheritance for him: the family comes to nothing, like Llewyn's solo craft. The artist’s fear resembles the onanistic Victor Frankenstein, where his fatherly labors give life to something abominable, execrable, and better off dead (not that Howie Greenfung, who will probably see better days, is looking that bad, but you get the general idea).
THE AULD TRIANGLE
After returning
from Chicago, Llewyn resolves to submit to the comfort of the womb, the sea with
which he’s familiar. While dropping off his stuff at Jean’s, she’s gentler with him
and offers a gig at the Gaslight, splitting the basket with another act.
“The Times will be there,” she says encouragingly. It’s possible that she’s sacrificed herself for Llewyn, sleeping with
Pappi to secure him a gig as a token of appreciation for what he's done for her. But he shakes his head.
“I’m out. I’m done. I’m going back to the merchant marine…It’s not going
anywhere. And I’m tired. I’m so fucking tired. I thought I just needed a
night’s sleep but it’s more than that. But thank you for trying. I love you.”
 |
| "Hang Me, Oh Hang Me" |
Tremendously realized by Oscar Isaac, it’s Llewyn’s
most truthful moment, not only because of his quick declaration of love (which
I maintain is achingly sincere), but the fatigue of his labors is
something to which a lot of us find heartbreaking affinity. It's the visage of creative burden. Repeated failure
chips away at indefatigability. The alchemy of creating is hard, just as it’s intimate.
It’s another realization the film has in common with Peter Schaffer and Milos
Forman’s Amadeus, where Mozart, the
greatest of musical geniuses, is being “murdered” by his composition of the Requiem (which, again, we hear at the
beginning of Inside Llewyn Davis) and
has to tell one of his sponsors, regarding the delayed composition of the
lighter Magic Flute, that it’s done
but still “in my noodle.” Moving Thought to Matter appears sedentary but it’s
exhausting, like the apocryphal notion that Jesus Christ was fatigued after
casting out demons and performing miracles.
Llewyn wants out,
capitulating to life and agreeing to “just exist.” But like gangster Michael
Corleone, just when he thinks he’s out “they” pull him back in. To secure his
place on a sailing vessel leaving Friday morning, he’s forced to relinquish most of
his remaining cash from the “Please, Mr. Kennedy” session for old union dues.
“I’m leaving naked,” he admits, looking at his few remaining dollars but
resolved to be newborn on the ocean. However, hours later he finds out he can’t
set sail because Joy threw out his mate’s license along with his old recordings:
his severance from the omphalos of his existence fittingly disqualifies him
from "existing." Even with his receipt he can’t get his dues back (as with Taxi Driver's pun, the function of "unions" is set against the lone individual). He’s again
penniless, couchless, and driven to the scaffold to play and fail. The cause of
this mishap is terrestrial and logical, contingent on his own carelessness, but
nevertheless the sense is Providential, or as the would-be suicide Salieri
hears Mozart’s laugh in Amadeus,
“That was God—that was God laughing
at me!”
I’ve
mentioned Thomas Mann a couple of times, and though the Nobel Prize-winning German man of
letters (1875-1955), writing about his homeland from the 19th
century European Union (Buddenbrooks)
to the hells of World War II (Doctor
Faustus), is quite removed from the 1960s folk scene, his recurring
themes of the artist and death are in accord with Llewyn. Mann’s lonely
artisans waver uncomfortably between the living and the dead, bourgeois
domesticity and bohemian decadence. In his little known story “The Hungry,”
Mann words the creative individual’s problem through his protagonist Detlef: “If only once to escape the inexorable doom which rang in his ears:
‘You may not live, you must create; you may not love, you must know.’” Or, to quote “Please Mr. Kennedy”: “I
need to breathe, don’t need to be a hero.”
For Mann, the
artist is entangled in a Faustian contract, bestowed to his nature as a child, and he languishes in a
painful apartness from the stream of humanity. Mann’s titular hero (and perhaps
closest of autobiographical alter egos) in Tonio
Kröger attempts to explain himself in a way that’s not dissimilar to
Llewyn Davis and his “cool and finicky relationship with human beings.” “An
artist stops being an artist the instant he becomes human and starts feeling,”
Tonio says to his friend, a decadent “scenester” of sorts, Lisaveta. “Is the
artist really even a man?” he asks. “It strikes me that we artists all vaguely
share the fate of those specially treated papal singers.” He is apoplectic when
reminded of his “calling.” “Don’t talk about a ‘calling’…! Literature is no
calling, it’s a curse—just so you’ll know. And when does this curse make itself
felt? Early on, terribly early. At a time when one should be living in peace
and harmony with God and man. You start feeling marked, in an enigmatic
antithesis to others, the ordinary people, the respectable ones. The gulf of
irony, skepticism, conflict, knowledge, emotion that separates you from other
people yawns deeper and deeper. You’re lonely, and there is no communication
with others. What a fate! Assuming that your heart is still alive enough,
loving enough, to feel how awful that is!...Your self awareness is intensified
because you feel the mark on your forehead among thousands of people and you
sense that it escapes no one’s notice.” Though Llewyn disdains “careerism,” his
motive may be less based on principle than resentment, lacking the tools to
adjust comfortably to this new art haven and utopia of Greenwich like Jim and
Jean or Troy Nelson, who Llewyn mocks by asking if he has “any higher
function.” In the company of artists, Llewyn seems like the only "marked" man. There are so many coincidences that we can accept that there is an Order to the universe, but whatever that Order is, it isn't there to be friendly with Llewyn.
Mann’s
final great artist protagonist, Adrian Leverkühn in Doctor Faustus, makes the demonic pact explicit, the musician’s
journey conjoined with a pursuit of hidden knowledge (Leverkühn resists
studying music as a young man and instead studies Theology). Based on the
apocryphal story of Nietzsche in the brothel, the Mephistophelean bargain for
genius is linked to deliberately contracting syphilis from a prostitute
(something Luchino Visconti incorporated into his adaptation of Death in Venice). Leverkühn is a
marvelous musician, but he cannot get close to anybody, and any attempt at
closeness ends in ruin. He’s damned, his genius amplified by an unquenchable
longing becoming exponentially cancerous. The syphilis infects his body and
brain, and with his public confession comes a stroke followed by a decade of
insanity and paralysis. This “joyous expression of the soul" is a prison sentence shackling together an
individual’s mind and body during a losing wrestling match with the ineffable. Llewyn
Davis’ place is one of utter restlessness, the Mannian mandate for the artist not unlike Scorsese and Kazantzakis’ portrayal of Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, whose
“place is on the cross,” not “with women, with children,” the last temptation
not being, as that film’s controversies suggested, sensual pleasures of sex but
rather basic domesticity, which the readers, listeners, viewers—and worshippers—take
for granted.
 |
| "It wasn't your show." |
After
Llewyn is rejected by “the living” and winds up back on the cross at the Gaslight, his sickness-unto-death is sung by a Clancy Brothers-styled trio of Irish performers. The song is “The Auld
Triangle,” which refers to Mountjoy Prison in Dublin, where a large metal
triangle is repeatedly clanged to waken prisoners (being rudely woken up one of
the film’s most pronounced motifs), in this case foreshadowing an inmate’s
execution. This is when Llewyn learns that Pappi slept with Jean. He drunkenly steps away from the bar and brusquely disparages the folk scene that’s fostered him for so
long, harassing Elizabeth Hobby and her performance of “The Storms Are on the Ocean,” yet another song about leaving
with promises to return. The frustrated and obstinate Llewyn is deliberately
interrupting the circle of there-and-back-again eternal recurrence, forgetting
himself and so damning himself to the same beating the next night from Mr.
Hobby, God’s emissary with the message “it wasn’t your show.”
FARE THEE WELL / AU
REVOIR
“Do you believe in it?” the dying Mozart stops
dictating to Salieri in Amadeus,
wondering about the meaning of his requiem. “The fire which never dies?” “Oh
yes,” Salieri answers. Both God’s beloved and God’s neglected are in similar arks,
offering sacrifices and prayers through their fingertips that likely go unheard
or unanswered, capitulating and swerving through demands that lead back around
to the same troubles. There’s Perdition behind Mozart’s genius, as we see
torch-wielding demons swirling around the hero of Don Giovanni, and in Salieri’s frustration, as he burns a
crucifix and plots Mozart’s death. The same infernal fire scorches—and
drives—the artists of Mann, Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, and myriad mythological
wanderers and messiahs.
 |
| Mozart (Tom Hulce), exhausted, in Amadeus |
Llewyn
Davis is forgiven for his outbursts by both the Gorfeins and Pappi and again he assumes the noose’s hold and sinks into the Sisyphus orbit. The chorus
of his story, as he recognizes the Disney movie poster, is the incredible
journey, departing and dreaming to glide back on the wings of nature “like Noah’s
dove,” as “Fare Thee Well” reminds us. The dove from Genesis flies out from the
ark to find land, returning to Noah twice before being sent out one last
time; he's never seen again, his absence signaling how life on earth can begin. That’s Mike’s
story, who flew away never to return but, upon Inside Llewyn Davis’ conclusion anyway, not Llewyn’s. The opening
song by Timlin and Davis concludes with the lyrics that life isn’t worth living
without the one you love, but Llewyn’s euphonic solo version eschews this and
repeats the first verse, “If I had wings like Noah’s dove / I’d fly up the
river / to the one I love” (though this time prefaced with the warning, “One of
these mornings, it won’t be long / You’ll call my name / And I’ll be gone,”
indicating that Llewyn could just as soon change his mind). By Providential damnation
or defiant choice, Llewyn lingers and languishes, even despising the community
that suffers his tetchiness and lack of finesse. It could be heroic strength in
character with a philosophical amor fati
as he embraces eternal recurrence—or he may instead decay and bloat like Roland
Turner, bitter and supercilious, the breathing omen of ill-worn artistry that
satanically mocks the naïve living.
Before
meeting his destiny once more in the alley, Llewyn looks at the young man from
Minnesota singing his own “Farewell” ballad: “Well it’s fare thee well / My own
true love / We’ll meet another day, another time / It ain’t the leaving that’s
grieving me / But my darling who’s bound to stay behind. / Though the weather
is against me / And the wind blows hard / The rain, she’s a-turning into hail /
I still might strike it lucky / On a highway going West / Though I’m traveling
on a beaten trail.” Bob Dylan’s journey, as a man able to wizardly weave
together a mystique and fabricated identity, stealing from his friends and
lying about his origins, will from here connect into the arterial mainline of
Greenwich, the folk scene, and the entire world. The song is less applicable
to Dylan than to Llewyn’s journey westward into midnight, strewn with cautioning
red lights and brittle snowfalls.
Like Harold
Ramis’ spiritual comedy of repetition and an inscrutable Providence governing
time and the weather (and sharing the same “doozy” puddle in which the hero soils his feet), Groundhog Day, Dylan’s song and Llewyn’s story muddy the perspective on who is exactly being
left behind. Though Llewyn appears stuck, he’s the nomad always ecstatic in his
circumlocutions. He’s on a road to nowhere but at least trudging on a path to
somewhere. The rest of the world marks time, gliding smoothly along the
straight line of the future, arrested comfortably in the steady flow of the
ever-present, and being naively present relieves
one from the nightmare of history. Maybe the materialization of Dylan’s music
in the final minutes, when it wasn’t there in the beginning, is another sign
that Llewyn’s time has passed, and it’s time to, um, face the music. Like
clockwork he goes into the alley to confront the shadowy figure, and takes his
punch (this time not saying “I’m sorry?” before the fist collides with his face,
however). Consigned again to this cesspool, he doesn't stay down but ascends through iron
bar shadows and follows his bellicose aggressor, who gets into a cab and drives
off.
Llewyn looks on somewhat wistfully, not saying “farewell” in accord with Dylan but rather
says “Au revoir”—indicating they’ll see each other again. At that quiet
utterance the cab’s wheels screech and turn a sharp corner. The linear
trajectory forward is thwarted and Fate's Emissary will inevitably come around again.
Llewyn’s time line (Timlin) appears sealed, but his stations are a prayer that it be not as
strictly predestined as Nietzsche’s exacting idea of eternal recurrence (the
differences between the Coens’ prologue and epilogue indicate as much), allowing for variations through its infinitesimal complexity congruent to the
Hasidic notion that the Torah’s letters, though containing the future, are
unscrambled in their movement through the present moment. As in song, the Word or prayer lives and breathes. Maybe Llewyn succeeds, maybe
he dies, maybe he "exists" as a sailor, or maybe he hops on that familial straight
line to Akron to see, and even raise, his child The hangman god’s incoherent and uneven folio of this world, where everyone
encounters many lives but always ends up meeting themselves, at least imagines that the rambling and penurious Llewyn Davis can somehow weave through the ragged
floppy eared manuscript, finding himself in us as we find ourselves in him, resting
and paroled through one solitary and satisfactory lifetime from the iron-barred trappings
of his inborn nature, at long last fashioning wings.
*
Recommended Stuff by Some Brilliant Folks Whose Succinctness & Insights I Envy:
Richard Brody, The New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/12/joel-ethan-coen-inside-llewyn-davis-reviewed.html
More Richard Brody:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/12/deeper-inside-llewyn-davis.html
Bilge Ebiri:
Glenn Kenny:
Inside Llewyn Davis was, according to Film Comment’s annual critics’ poll, the best film of 2013, setting
it highly perched with other Coen pictures like A Serious Man, No Country for Old Men, Fargo, and Blood Simple (and, upon cult rediscovery
and reconsideration, the heralded Big
Lebowski). Those modern classics, themselves surrounded by Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton
Fink, O Brother, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Burn After Reading, and True Grit, make it boggling that these
filmmaker brothers, who’ve worked in perfect professional harmony for nearly 30
years, could make a film about loneliness and artistic failure so acutely and
trenchantly, with such feeling and sympathy, Oscar Isaac’s Llewyn arguably being
their most vivid human concoction, and certainly the most poignant.
But Inside Llewyn Davis did not find an audience, failing to connect
with people, and even after winning the Grand Prix at Cannes and sweeping the
National Society of Film Critics, it was startling that such an acclaimed film
from these prestigious filmmakers wound up being shut out of the Academy
Awards’ major categories, especially in a year when there can be as many as 10
Best Picture nominees. Its failure to do so was, so be it, charming to say the
least, in step with Llewyn’s luck.
Llewyn’s counterpoint might
have been Spike Jonze’s Her, the
story of lonely and introverted professional heart-felt-letter writer Theodore
Twombley (Joaquin Phoenix), who’s initiating a relationship with his iOS
system, Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johanson).
Jonze’s picture was on just as many top ten lists, and did manage to secure itself Oscar
attention (winning for its screenplay), and one could wonder if these two
films, which both failed to become box office successes, were adored by the
online universe so well because 20-something and 30-something writers couldn’t
help but see themselves in Llewyn and Theodore. These are both creative
individuals past their prime, detached from the bulk of humanity and existing
inwardly. As Llewyn has his procreative anxieties, so does Theodore, whose last
name has a womb in it (and who strangely has sexual fantasies about pregnant
celebrities), and suggests a certain procreative duality. “Samantha” is not
real, but his ideal projection unleashed and building her own intuition. Inside
Llewyn Davis and inside Theodore Twombley, the world is woven (and in the
latter, even mass manufactured).
The crucial difference is that
Theodore has had self-made stability. He’s unhappy and listless, but, going
through a divorce, he’s realizing that nothing he heretofore experiences will
equal that which has already happened to him. He has a steady job, a nice Los
Angeles apartment, and the means to acquire the most current technology. And he
has a pretty-good-but-eeek date with Olivia Wilde.
Those “best years” remembered
fondly probably haven’t happened to Llewyn, whatever contentment allotted him
at best occurring in brief flashes. I
don’t want to admit that this is why I feel such stronger kinship for him than
for doing-pretty-good-for-himself Twombley, finding Her to be a visually amazing, smartly affecting, rich, but at times
one-note film, but it’s probably the case.
That’s what I got. Now let's eat.
