“It’s new and it never gets old,” Llewyn Davis tells the audience twice in the Coen brothers’ emotionaly powerful new film, Inside Llewyn Davis. Set in 1961 Greenwhich Village, the film follows one week in the life of Llewyn Davis, a nomadic folk singer who must routinely way his need for money against his refusal to abandon his artistic integrity.
As a film, Davis is the most emotionally connective that the Coens have released. It’s look at parasitic human relationships is more raw than Fargo, and it’s handling of the nomadic lifestyle is more serious (and morbidly comical) than The Big Lebowski. In its protagonist, Davis, the film becomes timeless. While snarky and, at times, unappealing, Davis represents all that we’ve tried to hang on to, but have needed to release. For some, this is bound to reflect major life decisions. For others, it might be a momentary lapse in judgment that led to an altercation or a bit of embarrassment.
At the same time that Inside Llewyn Davis is timeless, it is also about timelessness, or more specifically being stuck in a perpetual present. From Deleueze and Bergson, we learn that the past, present, and future do not exist exclusively. Rather, they are simultaneous, which means that what we consider the present is a combination of what we have done in our past and what will ultimately become our future. More importantly, Deleuze suggests that each period of time is likely to change and be shaped by what we consider our present or “just-past.” In turn, this shaping of time creates repetitions, and while they have minor differences within their occurrences, they are repetitions of similar events. Ultimately, this creates a circuit in which we or, in this case, Davis is stuck until he ceases his shaping of the past and breaks free of the repetition.
Throughout the film, we watch Davis transition from couch to couch or from floor to floor, routinely deemed a bum, lazy, or “Kind Midas’ idiot brother,” but the owners of the furniture on which he crashes, Jim and Jean, Al Cody, the Feinbergs, his sister consistently enable his nomadic behavior. Consistently they berate him verbally, but he often shrugs this off or counteracts it with something sarcastic before he gets to sleep.
Similarly he enables his own poverty, first by sticking with a rather hilarious but obviously incompetent agent (and maybe shyster) Mel Novikoff (Jerry Grayson) and then by refusing future royalties on the song “Please Mr. Kennedy” to receive an upfront payment of $200 dollars. While the poppy, but very catchy, “Kennedy” is a severe departure from the songs that Davis performs with amazing melancholy throughout, we could see his decision to forfeit royalties as a way of mortgaging his future to maintain his present. Unfortunately, his present is destined to repeat because of this.
It’s here that Davis becomes a more complex character than a simple nomad. In this moment, we know his disdain over singing background vocals on a commercial song, but we are also forced to wonder whether he’s just preventing himself from being vacuumed into another circuit, one in which his talent for folk music is suffocated, and he becomes a pop artist – something that has apparently happened to his better-off friends Jim (the almost unrecognizable Justin Timberlake) and Jean (Carey Mulligan).
Jean represents another potential circuit of time inasmuch as she has a fling with Llewyn – despite the vitriol she constantly spews at him – and gets pregnant. The solution here, since she doesn’t know if the child is Llewyn’s or Jim’s, is to abort the fetus. The circuit is presented because of Llewyn’s previous experience with a doctor who has aborted other potential Llewyns. First and foremost, the abortions prevent Llewyn from deviating from his nomadic, transient lifestyle, so like the Man in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” Llewyn is permitted to keep his peripatetic ways. Here, the abortion becomes another mortgage on his future to satisfy his present. In tandem, Jean is allowed to keep hating Llewyn and slathering him with blame for her pregnancy while maintaining her same lifestyle.
The examination of timelessness is nothing new to the Coens who have used it as a narrative element in Fargo and The Big Lebowski. Most interestingly, Inside Llewyn Davis feels like a reinterpretation of O Brother Where Art Though? – which itself was an interpretation of Homer’s The Odyssey. (The connection is better understood when the escapist cat’s name is revealed.) Here, and throughout Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coens examine the circulation of humanity, essence, and art. In all three, we find repetitions, and we see slight differences, but it’s all just a bit of history repeating.
