Towards the end of the
new Coen Brothers movie, Inside Llewyn Davis, the titular
character, a folk singer, plays a song about seafaring for his
elderly father, who's in a nursing home and unresponsive to the world
around him. After the events of the movie, Llewyn has given up on his
chosen career and is taking his farewell of his father before joining
the merchant marines, his father's own profession. We know from a
previous discussion with his sister that he has a troubled
relationship with his father, whom he has contempt for as a
non-performer who “just exists.” What we're witnessing, then, is
Llewyn's attempt to reconcile with his father and have a moment of
connection with him before he leaves. It's significant, too, that
he's trying to forge this connection through his art, which he's
renouncing. We watch and listen as Llewyn sings the beautiful, moving
song, wondering if Llewyn's music will be able to break through their
estrangement, through his father's dementia, through the barriers of
taste and personality that separate them even as Llewyn is resigning
himself to becoming his father. The elderly man's face changes; there
appears to be some emotion, some struggle in it, though we can't tell
what it means. What will his verdict on the performance be? Then
Llewyn's expression changes and he stammers out "Wow," twice, in shock. Jump to the
next scene, where we were learn in another conversation between
Llewyn and his sister that his father shit himself during the song.
The Sublime and the Scatological
What does this mean? Is
it a statement that art is not powerful enough to transcend all of
those barriers? Is it the filmmakers' verdict on Llewyn's art? The
father's? Is it an absurd juxtaposition of the sublime and the
scatological, art and mortality, with no further meaning? A comment
on Llewyn's egotism even when he seems to be doing something generous
and loving for another person? In any case it seems to be the movie's
most succinct proof that Llewyn is incapable of doing what his more
successful peers effortlessly do: in the language of Bud Grossman,
the Chicago impresario who told him (after another moving
performance) that there's no money in his music, he can't “connect
with people.” It also literalizes the rancorous metaphor of his
friend's girlfriend, who's pregnant with a child who may or may not
be Llewyn's, in which Llewyn turns everything he touches "to shit,
like King Midas's idiot brother.”
The Coen Brothers make
movies that connect with people – both critics and the public –
although oddly by concocting protagonists who can't connect with
people. Or so I've heard. Actually Inside Llewyn Davis is the
first time I've watched a Coen Brothers movie all the way through
since Barton Fink (1991). Jonathan Rosenbaum's review of that
film, as vitriolic as Jean's attitude to Llewyn, so eviscerated the
filmmaking duo for me that it's taken me over 20 years to want to
watch another one of their movies. Ironically, Inside Llewyn Davis
is Barton Fink revisited, and while it's more artful and less
arty than the much earlier film, Rosenbaum's central complaints still
apply: that the filmmakers refuse to commit to any side, instead
condemning artists and commercial impresarios alike as phonies. If
the brothers are fond of anyone at all in Barton Fink, it's
John Goodman's psychopathic, pyromaniac “common man,” with his
furious refrain, “I'll show you the life of the mind!” But
although Goodman seems to have materialized to take revenge on Fink,
the intellectual, political playwright, for his condescending
delusion that he can write about the lives of ordinary people, one
suspects that the brothers are able to get behind him because his
nihilistic viewpoint is where their true sympathies lie. In Inside
Llewyn Davis, that viewpoint is encapsulated by the encounter
between father and son and art and shit in the nursing home.
The viewpoint for which
the Coens seem to have the most sympathy in Inside Llewyn Davis,
however, is the non-human one of the two identical (except in gender)
cats: Ulysses, who starts off Llewyn's adventures by escaping when he
leaves the apartment where he's crashed; and the female cat whom
Llewyn mistakes for Ulysses, who accompanies him on the trip to
Chicago when she's rejected by Ulysses' owners, who is abandoned by
him on the highway, hit by him on his way back in a different car,
and is last seen hobbling into the snowy woods in the middle of
nowhere in the middle of the night. Nothing too bad is allowed to
happen to either astonishingly resilient feline, which somehow makes
the movie feel relatively gentle-spirited despite the protagonist's
ill-luck and ill-behaviour. The Coens may still have contempt for
humanity, but they've found a way to give their movie a heart even
so, and it's a relief for the viewer, as for Llewyn, to be able to
just worry about the cats rather than about the meaning, if any, of
Llewyn's loser life. Cats, after all, don't seem to be troubled by
the fact that they just exist.
The Good and the Great
The other big advance
over Barton Fink is that it's not as simple to dismiss Llewyn
as a phony when several times in the course of the film he treats us,
rather beautifully, to a song. He may be an obnoxious fuck-up whose
career is going nowhere, but he's a talented guitarist and singer who
appears to be fully in earnest when he sings. For that reason, the
movie raises, in Rorschach fashion, many more questions about art and
the artist's life than Barton Fink. I went to the movie with a
musician friend who confidently asserted at the end of it that the
protagonist was “only mediocre” as a performer; most reviewers seem to more or
less agree, with the general consensus being that Llewyn Davis is
“good but not great,” and the movie a parable about what happens
to artists in that category, who are, after all, more numerous than
the great; a minority of reviewers, however, have thought that the
protagonist is obviously talented and merely unlucky.
It's comforting, of
course, to think that great artists will always be recognized, sooner
or later; but I don't think we have to take that away from the movie.
What I took away was the rather more unsettling notion that an artist
may be as good as anyone else and yet never become successful.
Everyone knows that the majority of artists are unsuccessful, and not
necessarily because most of the unsuccessful artists are merely good
and most of the successful ones great. First, someone in a position
to help you has to believe, rightly or wrongly, that you're good, or
that money can be made off of you, or both; and then you have to be
able to sustain a career after the first break. It's accepted wisdom
that the wise accept the verdict of those in the industry and quit
when it's clear that they're getting nowhere, as Llewyn does; on the
other hand, it's also accepted wisdom that many famous artists faced
a lot more rejection than that without giving up; then again,
sometimes going on despite years of rejection and failure really
is delusional (compare Burton's Ed Wood).
But the noncommittal
stance of Inside Llewyn Davis undermines an idea about art
that's even more fundamental than the idea that greatness will
ultimately be recognized and rewarded: the idea that we are able,
without any external cues, to tell a good performance apart from a
great one. How, aside from the reaction of the people in the movie,
do we know that the performance we've seen is a great one? And how
often, in real life, are we exposed to new music, or a new movie, or
new book, without any context at all – not a murmur of buzz, not a
glimpse of a review, not a word of reputation? The last time it
happened to me was with Lana Del Rey's “Video Games,” a song that
made me believe I'd discovered a new artist of genius; and after I
went online and read that she was a label-manufactured phony, and
then read all of the stuff about what an embarrassment her Saturday
Night Live performance was, I doubted my impression. I'm often
incredulous at the things that people think are great (especially
premium cable TV shows), but I'm easily intimidated into thinking
that things aren't as good as I think they are, at least if there's
no vocal, influential, articulate minority taking up the cause of
artist or artwork.
So Inside Llewyn
Davis, whether purposefully or incidentally, raises questions not
only about the life of the artist but also about art itself. There's
only one director I can think of who uses performances in his movies
in such a way that the viewer is convinced that the performance we've
witnessed is great even though we're unfamiliar with the performer:
I'm talking, of course, about David Lynch. The two most striking
instances occur in Mulholland Dr., and they are Betty's
audition scene and the Club Silencio performance of “Llorando,”
in which Lynch lays bare the elements that go into making us believe
that a performance is great. Our ability to be moved by the
performance depends on our belief that the singer is, in that moment,
feeling the emotions she's singing about, even though we know that
we're watching a recorded performance and that, even if it were live,
the singer may just be “putting on” the emotion. It helps, too,
that the song is intimately familiar and yet rendered in a foreign
language so that our sense of its emotional power isn't hindered by
the banal lyrics of Orbison's classic pop song. Likewise, in her
audition scene Betty transforms the banal soap opera dialogue and
scenario she's been given into great drama by calling upon her
tortured emotional life and unearthing her dark sensuality. When
Lynch has the singer collapse onstage while her pre-recorded voice
goes on, he calls attention to our assumption that a great
performance means the unveiling of the performer's inner life in
front of our eyes. It couldn't be that the performer is faking, or
miming, that experience. If the most authentic emotion can be faked,
how can we ever trust that we know what's going on inside another
person; and if we can't do that, how can we allow ourselves empathy?
Is performance a window into the performer's soul, or a mask that the
performer assumes?
The Coen Brothers'
interest in performance in Inside Llewyn Davis is very different from
Lynch's in Mulholland Dr. or than Jerry Lewis's in films like
The Bellboy, The Errand Boy, and The Patsy:
Llewyn the loser and failure is not allowed a moment even in dreams
or in a fantasy sequence where his skill as a performer is
unmistakably spotlighted, and his father's reaction to his song in
the nursing home is at a polar extreme from Betty and Rita's tearful, epileptic/apocalyptic response to “Llorando” at Club Silencio. It would seem
that one of the things that Inside Llewyn Davis is about is,
after all, countering the alchemical myth of art: no matter how
beautiful it may be, it cannot transform dementia into lucidity or
estrangement into a miraculous rediscovery of the meaning of home and family, which is to say, the sense of presence.
“It's not opera!” Llewyn shouts at the man who's beating him up
in an alleyway, It's a Wonderful Life style, for heckling his
wife the night before. But when he finds some opera on the radio
while driving home through a snowstorm at night, the gorgeous,
peaceful music becomes the soundtrack to suddenly slamming into the
reappearing cat. The beauty of art offers us no shelter from the demand of other beings that we respond to their needs, or our demands
on them, or from our and their complete inability to meet those needs; nor
does it count as a response, although it may count as an appeal.
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