Outside Llewyn Davis

The Coen Brothers vision of art without solidarity.

The Coen Brothers' 2013 Inside Llewyn Davis presents a folk revival without politics. Set in the early 1960s, the title singer, played by Oscar Isaac, struggles to make his mark in the folk music scene of the day, singing blues and Childe Ballads by day and sleeping on friend's couches at night.

Davis, though, doesn't sing protest songs, and neither does anyone else in his milieu. The left commitments of Pete Seeger or Tom Paxton aren't represented or acknowledged. The movie is a stark and sympathetic portrait of a struggling artist overwhelmed by poverty and indifference. It's also, though, a quietly bleak demonstration of the Coen's own limited vision, in which collective action and political consciousness alike are brushed aside in favor of their standard ethos: shit happens.

Llewyn Davis is most effective, and most affecting, in its portrayal of poverty as a series of cruel, inescapable Catch-22's. Davis desperately needs to catch a break and claw his way out of poverty, but his poverty means that he lacks the basic resources he needs to catch a break. Strapped for cash, he agrees to work on a recording session for a flat fee, without credit or royalties. Inevitably, the song becomes a hit, making everyone involved rich—except for him. Similarly, towards the end of the film he decides to give up his folk singing career and rejoin the merchant marine. But since he's homeless, his license is at his sister's house, and he discovers she's thrown it out.

Isaac, as David, greets each setback with an exhausted air of futile exasperation, which occasionally explodes into self-defeating fury. A wealthy couple feeds him dinner and asks him to sing. The wife joins in on the harmony part, reprising the vocal line sung on record by Llewyn's old partner, Mike, who killed himself before the beginning of the film. Llewyn responds with an angry display of wounded pride and grief which gets him tossed out of the house. After a brutally unpleasant trip to Chicago to audition for a new manager, the music executive tells him flatly that he isn't going to make money as a frontman. He generously suggests Llewyn could be a supporting player in a new group the executive is forming. But Davis turns him down and starts the ugly journey back to New York.

This is where the Coen Brothers lean into the mythology of the struggling artist. Davis is screwed in part because of exploitation; his adorably crotchety record label manager is notorious for not so adorably refusing to pay performers. But many of his troubles come from his own integrity, which is inseparable from his personal unpleasantness. He sneers at pop folk songs, but also viciously mocks an Appalachian performer (modeled on Jean Ritchie) for being corny and unattractive. His commitment to his own vision is narrow, uncompromising, admirably authentic, and isolating.

This vision of atomization is supposed to be realistic—a grim, gritty portrayal of the lonely lot of the artist. In fact, though, Llewyn's friendlessness is the most fanciful part of the film. The character is largely based on Dave Van Ronk, a singer who had limited success, but who was widely liked, admired, and helped along by his peers. Odetta heard him perform and gave him one of his first big breaks. In the film, Llewyn quietly sneers at and envies Troy Nelson (Stark Sands), a lanky, doofy singer who performs on leave from Fort Dix. In reality, that singer serving at Fort Dix was Tom Paxton, and Van Ronk was good friends with him.

Van Ronk's wife Terri Thai in an article for the Village Voice said of the movie with some exasperation, "I knew it wasn't supposed to be about David but used some of his memoir as background and his music as a theme. But I didn't expect it to be almost unrecognizable as the folk-music world of the early 1960s." She added, "There’s no suggestion that these people love the music they play, none that they play music for fun or have jam sessions, not a smidgen of the collegiality that marked that period.”

Thai is especially angry about the treatment of abortion in the movie. Medical interventions to end pregnancy are portrayed as readily available, and Llewyn agrees to pay for an abortion as a matter of course. "The treatment of abortion in the movie as a casual, easily accessible procedure is cavalier ,and I think it's insulting to all the women who had one before Roe v. Wade," Thai writes.

The clumsy and frankly callous approach to the politics of abortion is of a piece with the general approach to politics in the film, and for that matter in the Coen's work in general. Dave Van Ronk was a socialist who often performed benefit concerts, though he didn't sing protest songs. The Coen's and Llewyn, though, have no such commitments, and neither connects Davis' poverty to a broader system of inequality. Inside Llewyn Davis is obsessed with one person's interior state, which means solidarity does not exist, as an ideal or an actuality. The real Van Ronk had friends, and was a member of the IWW—his music connected him to peers as an artist and a worker. Llewyn has none of those resources, which is why he is, and considers himself, a failure.

Llewyn's failure is underlined at the very end of the film, when he hears a young Bob Dylan singing the song "Farewell" in a club after his own set. This scene, the last in the movie, is also the first; the loose plot loops around, creating the sense that Llewyn is trapped in his poverty and in the past, mourning his dead partner and pursuing a dead style, while Dylan's piercing harmonica and voice breaks out into the future.

The movie's tone here is a little unclear. Is the point to contrast the true genius of Dylan with Llewyn's more modest talents? Or is the juxtaposition simply supposed to illustrate that some people are successful, even if Llewyn isn't? Either way, though, the scene once again emphasizes disconnection; Llewyn leaves the club to go out into the alley and get beaten up before he hears much of Dylan's set, and the song plays as an ironic background to his thrashing. Llewyn isn't inspired by Dylan, or curious about him, or really engaged at all. Music is always inside Llewyn Davis; it never lets him reach anyone else.

The Coens are throughout their work fascinated with the isolated individual buffeted by fate. In their first full-length, Blood Simple, the protagonist never learns the plot of the film because everyone who could explain it to her dies before they can; the movie is a kind of joke of enforced solipsistic opacity. Movies like No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading or A Serious Man are similarly about hapless individuals ground up by fate in the form of bad men, bad marriages, bad weather, bad decisions. The world is an inimical place. Shit happens and you're fucked.

Inside Llewyn Davis, though, suggests that it is not the world that is shitting on the Coen Brothers' characters, but the Coen Brothers themselves. The Coens are filmmakers whose work is defined by fruitful artistic collaboration, but here they make a movie which pretends that artistic collaboration and community doesn't exist. Is Llewyn's wintry New York a metaphor for the cold facts of the artist's condition? Or is it so frigid because it is a fantasy of art without politics or other people? There's no harmony inside Llewyn Davis. The Coen Brothers took it from him.

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Still out of town, but I thought I’d re up this piece from my Patreon from years back. Art and solidarity still seem like relevant topics after all! I’ll be back soonish; thanks for reading as always.