One More Before I Go: Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2013)
A movie about the struggles of a life spent creating.
The saddest thing about Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is how good a musician he is. A tragedy is defined in relation to the hero’s potential—how bad things are versus how good they could be. In every other part of his life, Llewyn’s a disaster. He’s not selling many records. It’s February in New York and he can’t afford a coat. He’s basically homeless, sleeping on the couches of friends and acquaintances who regard him with an increasingly frayed tolerance. And he’s gotten another girl pregnant, Jean (Carey Mulligan), not his girlfriend, but someone who doesn’t even seem to like him very much. She wants him to pay for an abortion, calls him an “asshole” a lot, and maybe she’s right. Llewyn is bitter, he’s envious, he makes things hard for the people around him. Prevailing on their better nature. Losing his temper. Losing their cats.
But Llewyn’s a different person when he’s playing folk music. This is the first Llewyn we meet, actually—the film opens with him singing a set at Greenwich Village’s famous Gaslight Cafe in 1961. We hear first the sounds of a guitar, played in the characteristic fingerpicking style of 60s folk, and then Llewyn’s voice: Hang me, oh hang me, I’ll be dead and gone... He plays and sings with an ease, even a joy, that’s completely missing from the way he carries himself through the world in the rest of the film, when he’s not making music. He closes his eyes as he sings, shakes his head a little bit from side to side, rocks on his stool under a single stage light. He’s in flow, that blessed state of complete immersion in a creative task, when the rest of the world—even the self, the grasping ego—falls away for a moment.
He’s got a great voice, too—pure and smooth and beautiful with just a hint of a sigh beneath it, a hint of sadness. And the audience responds to him. A man forgets the cigarette burning close to his fingers. A woman listens wide-eyed, rapt. And we, the movie audience, are rapt, too. Maybe we even know that the Gaslight in the early 60s was a consequential place, a place where folk music history was made: the spot where Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and Phil Ochs and Dave Van Ronk made a name for themselves. And we think, listening to Llewyn: This guy’s going to make it. This guy deserves to make it.
But then he just…doesn’t.
When I first watched Inside Llewyn Davis, I’d just published a novel, my debut. I was feeling vulnerable and exposed—that’s generally what happens when something you’ve poured yourself into in secret for the past two years goes out into the world. I lived in terror of people reading the thing, of judging it, and of judging me. I also lived in terror of people not reading it, and if I’m honest with myself, they—people—mostly weren’t.
I had an idea that I was supposed to come out big, make the book a success (whatever that meant), then have another success after that, and one more after that. That, the conventional wisdom went, was how a writing career was made. You had to build momentum, then ride it and never let it slow. You had to be a line going up, and up, and up. But my trajectory was flat, or maybe down. I couldn’t tell. I got some decent reviews, even won an award with the book, but the numbers stayed middling, and as I worked on the next thing I was starting to hear “no” a lot—no from the gatekeepers who could put my next book into the world, or not.
I was, in other words, in a perfect frame of mind to receive Llewyn’s story, to understand it, cryptic though it could sometimes be. Llewyn, too, had put a piece of himself into the world, an album with his name and face on the cover, to an underwhelming response. Llewyn, too, was seeing creative peers leap past him, finding success with seeming effortlessness: the smooth and likable Jim Berkey (Justin Timberlake), the contemplative singing military man Troy Nelson (Stark Sands). Llewyn, too, was getting jealous and resentful. And Llewyn’s humiliating trudge across the city, across the country, his constant begging for a place to sleep, for a ride, for a bit of stage time, didn’t feel too different from my own perpetual requests, the humbling constant of a life spent creating things in a noisy world where attention is the rarest commodity: Please won’t you buy it, please won’t you read it, please won’t you give it a review?
But the thing that actually crushed me, the first time I saw the movie, was just how talented Llewyn was. Weren’t we doing good work, Llewyn and me? Didn’t people like us, when they took the time to listen to what we were making? Didn’t we deserve a bit of success? Things hadn’t gone quite the way we’d hoped so far, but maybe our big break was still coming. Maybe it was just around the corner.
The films of Joel and Ethan Coen take place in an absurdist world. They portray a chaotic universe in which the human pursuit of meaning and happiness is ill-fated, subject to chance and misfortune. Life is inscrutable, and people are frail. Sometimes, the films can be cruel—clockwork plots in which human misery is a virtual guarantee, casts in which every last character is an asshole or a fool.
But the best Coen Brothers films have something, in the middle of all the absurdist chaos, that is beautiful. Something worth protecting, something worth saving. In Fargo, it’s Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), her optimism and her moral compass, the life she’s made with her husband. In Inside Llewyn Davis, the pure thing that we want to save isn’t Llewyn, exactly. Rather, it’s his voice. Or, maybe, his potential—his artistic potential, his human potential. And Llewyn is part of what we want to save his potential from. He’s his own enemy.
I admire many Coen Brothers movies, appreciate their devilish cleverness, but Inside Llewyn Davis is among the only films of theirs that I truly love, for precisely this beautiful acknowledgment of human potential. Who among us doesn’t at some point believe that we’ve got some greatness locked up inside us, some genius waiting to issue forth, if only the world could be kind enough to receive it? I believe it; maybe you do too. (I hope you do.) We carry it around inside ourselves wherever we go, a little bit like the cat Llewyn lugs around Manhattan. It’s a skittish thing, our human potential, easily spooked, small and vulnerable in an uncaring world. The worst thing is to lose it in the cold, to be left behind with only the armor of self we’ve constructed to survive—and if you do lose sight of it for a time the only thing left is to hope that it’s still out there somewhere, that it’s surviving, that it’ll find its way back to you somehow.
That your truest and best self will always find its way back home.
Llewyn bums a ride to Chicago, a pilgrimage to see the manager Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham). Grossman is a star maker—he’s working with Jim, and with Troy—and if he takes Llewyn on then maybe he’ll be able to find the kind of audience he deserves. Llewyn endures misfortunes and humiliations on the journey, but he ultimately finds his way into the man’s office, and Grossman taps his hands on Llewyn’s record and asks him to “play me something—play me something from Inside Llewyn Davis.”
Llewyn does. He takes his guitar out of its case, looks into the middle distance for a long silent moment, then begins to play. And there it is again, the pure thing, the beautiful thing—his voice, singing a story, a sad story. The film cuts between shots of Llewyn and Grossman, zooming in on the older man’s face to see his hushed reaction to the music. This is it, we think. This is the moment when Llewyn breaks through the cold exterior of the grizzled industry veteran. This is his big break.
Then the song ends, Llewyn stops playing, and Grossman gives his pronouncement: “I don’t see a lot of money here.”
I don’t see a lot of money here. It’s a moment most creative people will recognize. It’s the moment of a writer querying an agent or an editor, the moment of a painter showing their work to a gallery owner, a screenwriter pitching an exec, the actor in yet another audition. That moment of great possibility stretching out into the future: the possibility that they’ll love it, that they’ll make you famous, that the creations of your mind, of your heart, will find a true home in the world and your potential will be realized and appreciated.
Then, the reality: I don’t see a lot of money here.
It’s a harsh thing, the creative life. It’s more no than yes, even after you’ve “made it”—whatever that means. It’s absurd and unjust and chaotic, and deserve, to quote another film, has got nothing to do with it. It’s full of humiliations, of surprising misfortunes. Surprising successes, too. My own story, by the way, didn’t end with failure, didn’t end with no—I recently found my way to a pretty exciting yes, a new book, a new chance to spin the wheel and see what comes up this time. But even that won’t be the end of the story. I don’t know how the story ends. I don’t even know if it’s a story.
Inside Llewyn Davis ends, puzzlingly, with Llewyn playing as an opening act for an as-yet undiscovered Bob Dylan. Llewyn’s decided to give up music, go back into the merchant marine, make a living on the sea. He’s playing the Gaslight one last time for the money, so he can get current with his union dues and ship out.
And then Dylan comes on. It’s the final Coen absurdity—like the tornado at the end of A Serious Man. I love it. Strange to say, but I even find a comfort in it, in knowing that Llewyn, all along, was just a bit player in the story of someone else’s success, someone else’s discovery. The creative life has very little resembling logic to it. What happens is, everybody tries, everybody throws their hat into the ring, and who comes out on top is some combination of luck and random chance. Chaos. Some of us—most, probably—will wash out, like Llewyn. Others will find moderate success, put out a few records (or books), maybe make something resembling a career. Some will win the Nobel prize. It’s hard to control it, and it’s hard to even be mad about it, ultimately. What’s the point, when you turn out to have been hustling so close to true world-changing genius all along?
The only thing that matters, in the end, is your own voice, your own spark. That’s the only thing you can truly control. The network of Bud Grossmans, the system designed to turn human creativity into commerce, into money, it’s a decision-making machine—yes to this one, no to that one. But there’s a danger in mistaking the machine’s decisions for wisdom. The machine can reject you, but that doesn’t mean you’re not doing good work. It doesn’t mean that what you’re making isn’t valuable. It doesn’t mean that you’re not valuable. It doesn’t mean the vulnerable and beautiful thing inside you doesn’t deserve to be seen.
I wonder about Llewyn, sometimes. Wonder what became of him. I hope he didn’t stop playing, didn’t stop singing, didn’t stop writing songs. I hope he came back to it, that he returned to the Gaslight for a set every now and then, or at least took out his guitar once in a while, played a few tunes for the other guys on the ship. Kept using that voice. Stopped feeling so bitter about his talent, stopped expecting so much of it.
That’s a lot, and it might even be enough.
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