Is Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Inside Llewyn Davis” the representation of a nightmare, as were David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive”?
Toward the end of the Coens’ depiction of the self-inflicted travails of the working-class Queens folk singer Llewyn (Oscar Isaac), he wakes for what seems to be the second time in the Upper West Side apartment of his Columbia academic friends the Gorfeins, who have treated him more kindly than he deserves. As it did before, the couple’s cat stares at him as he comes to. On leaving, he shuts the door on it, whereas “earlier” he allowed it to escape, his quick retrieval of it forcing him into the only companionship he knows in the film.
On “both” occasions, he heads downtown and winds up playing “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me” at the Gaslight Café on MacDougal Street. It’s the winter of 1961 and Llewyn, clinging to the bleak traditional ballads and shanties he performs so hauntingly, is bound for obscurity — partially through his own intransigence, partially because the Greenwich Village scene is about to be transformed by Bob Dylan’s revolutionary original songs.
The beating Llewyn takes from a gaunt good ol’ boy — a Kentucky-accented phantom protective of folk’s heritage — behind the club after his set replicates the beating he took from him at the start, though the second time round it’s shown from different angles. In his excellent essay on the movie in the current Film Comment magazine, Jonathan Romney asserts that the events that follow the “first” rendition of “Oh Hang Me” are a flashback. Thus Llewyn wakes once at the Gorsheins’ and takes one beating.
The theory is watertight, yet it doesn’t nullify the film’s oneiric logic or the impression it leaves of eternal return. Like Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood) in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes,” he frequently nods off or looks sleepy after taking an early blow to the head, the effect of it blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, straightforwardly naturalistic though most of the movie is.
“Hasn’t everything Llewyn experiences happened before?” New York Daily News film critic Elizabeth Weitzman speculated when we discussed the movie earlier in the week. Her thinking led me to analyze the nature of Llewyn’s labyrinthine wanderings — which take him from alleyways and backyards to gauntlet-like tenement passageways, then on to a hell-and-back trip to the bleak Midwest. (I discussed the film’s topography here.)
The movie is essentially naturalistic but, explaining the title, the tortuous maze Llewyn finds himself trapped in — every blind alleyway a reminder of his destructive obduracy or irresponsibility — is a mythic version of his troubled psyche, the conscious prickings of which he tamps down with self-righteousness, self-pity, sarcasm, and drunken belligerence. It’s no coincidence that Jean (Carey Mulligan), the unavailable folk singer he has impregnated, furiously likens him to “King Midas’s idiot brother” or that the cat is named Ulysses. Jean is Llewyn’s Circe. The drug-addicted old jazz cat (John Goodman), whose blowhard sneers rain down on Llewyn en route to Chicago, is one Minotaur, the music entrepreneur (F. Murray Abraham) he auditions for there another.
Llewyn escapes one and, adhering to his cussed integrity at the cost of advancement, defies the other. It’s hard, though, not to believe that Jean won’t go on haranguing him after the movie ends; there’s an intensity in their relationship that’s lacking from the one she shares with her live-in musician lover (Justin Timberlake). Llewyn will survive his masochistic attraction to her as he does the symbolic “hanging” he receives from the ghostly assailant who mauls him, enabling him to struggle on through the ’60s and ’70s — musical vision intact, fame and wealth elusive. There are hints that his journey into himself has taught him a little self-awareness and that giving up isn’t an option, but that’s as sentimental as it gets.
