January 31, 2024

The Morass of Mid Career: Inside Llewyn Davis and Me

Rusty Niall is now hosted on Buttondown instead of Substack.

This essay also contains plot spoilers for the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis.

I first watched Inside Llewyn Davis in 2016 and watched it for the second time last week. For all those years in between, I often found myself thinking about it while never summoning the will to watch it again. I guess one reason why was that it struck quite the sore nerve, being that there were a fair few parallels between the place that Oscar Isaac’s Llewyn Davis was at in his folk music career and where I was in my career as a poet.

There's a scene at the end of the film, where Llewyn steps off stage, chats to the venue manager and then heads outside to where he's been told a friend is watiing for him. The same scene plays out at the beginning of the film, but in this version it becomes more apparent that the singer who follows Llewyn on stage is a young, pre-fame Bob Dylan. During that first viewing, I pictured myself sharing a stage with a young Kae Tempest, Holly McNish or George the Poet and being as wrapped up in my own dramas and delusions as Llewyn was — unable to see the bright future for the art form, a future that I wouldn't be part of.

Inside Llewyn Davis, like many of the Coen Brothers’ films, invites a wealth of hot takes and interpretations, especially in how the beginning and end of the film retell the same events but with a few conspicuous differences. This has led to a number of interpretations, such as Llewyn being stuck in a time loop or even being dead and in purgatory. Anyone that follows my writing will know that I can't resist a juicy hot take but Inside Llewyn Davis is a different beast for me, something a bit more personal. We can all recall a work of art that finds our own suppurating personal wound and scatters a few sodium grains into it.

Inside Llewynn Davis is a film about failure and decline — a whole scene moving on from you and not looking back. Perhaps I was finally able to watch it again because I was now at the other side of my own particular downward slope and was more accepting of the situation than I was when I first watched it.

There are other films about this kind of decline, This is Spinal Tap comes to mind. But Llewyn isn't an obvious object of ridicule like those midlife rockers with vegetables shoved down the front of their spandex leggings. It’s not that he is a terrible singer who creates forgettable art, it’s more that, in the withering words of judgement from folk impresario Bud Grossman (F Murray Abraham), there isn’t any money in Llewyn's solo endeavours and he doesn’t connect with people.

This moment in Chicago when Llewyn pitches himself to Grossman is presented as his last swing for the fences. After an unspecified amount of time surfing on couches, borrowing money and chasing up his own agent for nonexistent royalties, Llewyn has made a few tentative steps towards resuming the merchant navy work that marked his old livelihood and the livelihood of his father before him. In the end, Llewyn can’t even succeed at this, as a communication breakdown between him and his sister results in his necessary working documents being thrown out. By the end of the film he’s back to surfing couches, singing for his dinner and gigging for indifferent audiences.

In the week before his meeting with Grossman, Llewyn goes on an odyssey of sorts and little stories erupt and fizzle out along the way. It quickly becomes clear that Llewyn is a self-centred, noncommittal piece of shit whose melancholy hangdog demeanour is offset by his obvious self regard and self-pity.

Llewyn is a good singer but he’s nobody’s favourite singer. I have the feeling that this is the fate of most artists, professional or not. We create work that is important to us and may cross over beyond those boundaries to others. But in the proverbial occasion of the house fire where only one item can be salvaged — our songs, paintings and slim volumes are ashes in the making.

Some of the most melancholic shots in the film are those of the front covers of folk records. Llewyn and his now-deceased partner pose on the cover of their only album, with mouths wide open and skyward gazes. In Llewyn’s solo album cover he cuts a more louche figure, stood in a doorway casting a furtive glance across a street. Adam Driver’s character Al Cody walks a desert road with his guitar case, the archetypal journeyman. There’s something so heartbreakingly hopeful about all of those covers and I have seen the same heartbreaking hopefulness in the front and back covers of poetry collections and posters for one person shows. The sad thing about the highest point of a career in the arts is that you never know it's the hightest point at the time. The artist often has their eye on the next big achievement and, unaware that this is their big, crowning achievement, they never take a moment to enjoy it.

I know this comes across as self-pity by proxy. It probably is. I only wish I’d been able to watch this film around the time I gave up my day job, one I still don’t miss, for a career in the arts. I probably would have laughed at the hapless protagonist with the “that sure won’t be me!” assurance of any young artist at the beginning of a glorious career.

When I finally got round to rewatching the film I did so with a sense of trepidation because the wound that it had so successful prodded during the first viewing hadn’t entirely healed. In an early scene before Llewyn's modest odyssey to Chicago, Troy Nelson (a hokey, amiable singer and serving GI) announces that he’s bringing someone special onto stage. Llewyn grumbles “I didn’t bring my guitar..” before it turns out that the invitation was extended to his friends Jim and Jean. Isaac brilliantly captures that moment where Llewyn shifts from unquestioning assurance to sudden self consciousness, checking nobody picked up on his mistake. This is one of a few moments where the film captures that sense of how a performer functions as an audience member, how they are incapable of letting go of their own personal identity and ambition, to never quite become a part of the witnessing mass.

Another moment I noticed at the beginning of the film was one little sound effect –⁠ the crash of a tray of glasses that punctures the tepid applause Llewyn receives on finishing his song. I recognised a number of gigs in this, all those times when I found myself doing battle with an espresso machine in a cafe or bookshop. The few hundred tipsy architects who talked over my commissioned poem at the opening of a library. That time when I stopped reading a poem in a small festival tent because a horsefly was digging its teeth into my face but I was more distracted by a white woman singing Redemption Song from the stage opposite. The last bit is still a bugbear of mine, a lot of people seem to think that the song is about how mean pirates are.

None of these are as bad as the reception Llewyn receives when he visits his father in a nursing home and plays him a song. Perhaps there is a closure here, that the glory and love Llewyn sought from his audiences was really a search for the love and acceptance of his father all along? His Dad sits silently throughout the performance and shits himself the moment it ends.

The other thing I really focused on during my second viewing was the cat that turns out to be two cats, both ginger but different sexes. On a couple of occasions, a cat becomes Llewyn’s responsibility, once when he accidentally lets Ulysses, a ginger tom, out of the apartment he's stayed the night at. The cat and the apartment belong to the Gorfeins, a cultured, wealthy couple who seem to see Llewyn as their own stray musician to parade before their friends at dinner parties.

Llewyn also becomes the unwitting custodian of a stray ginger that he mistakes for Ulysses later on. This comes to a head when Llewyn is sharing driving duties for Roland Turner (John Goodman), an embittered Jazz musician. After being woken up by a traffic cop for napping while parked on a hard shoulder, Llewyn’s fellow driver is arrested. On noticing that Turner has been in a heroin-induced doze throughout the whole incident, Llewyn decides to abandon him and hitch the rest of the way to Chicago. However, he hesitates on realising that the stray ginger cat, the one that wasn’t Ulysses, is still in the car. Llewyn’s hesitation on closing the door after grabbing his guitar is matched by the cat, who seems to be asking whether she can come too. Llewyn closes the door. If you haven’t seen the film you’ve probably already worked out that things don’t end up working out great for the cat.

If anything punctuates the little narratives at play within Inside Llewyn Davis, it’s the continually missed opportunity. He signs away his royalty rights for what turns out to be a future hit record for an immediate two hundred dollar session payment. Len Grossman offers him a spot in the trio that will come to be known as Peter, Paul and Mary and Llewyn is so focused on success as a solo artist that he refuses.

But not all of these refused opportunities are of the financial or career oriented kind: the closed door on the vulnerable creature left in a car on a hard shoulder with a dozing heroin addict; his moment of hesitation when driving past a freeway exit to the town where the child he recently found out about is living; the constant vitriol that Jean spits at him when it turns out she is pregnant and the child could be his; the moment where Mrs Gorfein sings along to the parts of the song that were once sung by Mike, his deceased singing partner; his choice to continue alone as an artist when invited to try out for a trio.

All of these are moments when love, companionship and connection are offered to Llewyn and on each occasion he closes the door on it in his own insufferable way. When interviewed by The Atlantic, John Goodman hypothesises that Roland Turner is a vision of what Llewyn could become, an embittered, spiteful husk of a human. Llewyn’s motives for turning away from love are plain enough, he still hasn’t come to terms with the death of his singing partner and is unwilling to place himself in the same vulnerable place again.

This unwillingness to accept the love and companionship of humans and felines has crept into his music. Grossman sees this when he says he doesn’t see any money in Llewyn while also saying that audiences connect with the amiable GI, Troy Nelson. Nelson is in many ways the antithesis of Llewyn. He is personable, wholesome and inoffensive while Llewyn is defensive, disillusioned and abrasive. If Llewyn’s performances exude anything it’s a wounded self pity and no audience has time for that. When Grossman advises Llewyn to get back with his old singing partner, not knowing why it isn’t possible, he’s telling him to rekindle that point of human contact, to care for another so that audiences can start caring for him.

One constant between the slightly divergent scene that plays at the beginning and the end of the film is when a vengeful husband (the friend that Llewyn was told was waiting outside) issues a beating to Llewyn in an alleyway outside the venue where Llewyn cruelly heckled his wife the night before. While the man is in no way a sympathetic figure, he has still caught a cab from goodness knows where, kept the fare ticking over while waiting for his quarry before issuing the beating and catching the same cab home.

In the first telling of the scene, the shot dissolves from the silhouetted husband walking away through the alley to the image of Ulysses slinking along the Gorfein’s hallway. I have played this wonderful shot again and again in my head and I’ve grasped wildly at its meaning. They could simply be images of the wheel of karma, the consequences of Llewyn’s actions revisiting him, but they are also symbols of the call to, and duties of, love. The precious little animal life that becomes Llewyn’s reluctant responsibility and the husband who won’t show up to watch his wife’s gig but will catch a cab to the same venue the night after to beat up her heckler.

And so while the film still reminds me of my own mistakes and misadventures on my own merry trail to has-been-hood, I can also look at those little calls to love and companionship and say that at least I didn’t fuck that bit up. That as long as one has found that place of love (that can just as much be a duty to a friend, pet or a community as it can be to a family), one has something of value to share with others. In that sense of connection, any disaffected artist can build something new. There’s always the possibility of pulling oneself out of the morass of mid-career and become a beginner again.

Thanks for reading this

This is my second ever post on my new home of Buttondown. While it’s lacking many of the bells and whistles of the other place, I like how it allows me to focus on the writing. While I’m still bedding down, I feel more able to produce these essays at a faster rate. I have no aspiration to become a content mill, I really want to release stuff when I feel it’s good and done enough but I’m beginning to think that one essay every 7-10 days isn’t too unrealistic a goal.

Another thing that I’m doing differently is that I’m not activating most of the analytics. The only rubric I have is my subs and that’s good enough for me. I have no idea about how many emails get opened, how many clicks each essay gets and how many return visitors I have and that’s fine. I really just want to be guided by the things that hatch in my head and the joy, frustration and satisfaction that the process of creating them brings.

That said, if you really enjoy any of these, you can leave a little comment, I think they’re working now. You can also upgrade your sub to a paid sub and chose the amount you’d like to pay. If times are tight, and I know they are, you can also share these posts with your buddies online and offline. It all helps. Failing all of that, the presence of your eyeballs is still deeply appreciated.

The next essay is already half-hatched in my brain and it’s a bit more joyful than this one, in fact it might turn out to be one of the most joyful things I’ve written. The Niall of yesteryear would be truly mortified to read it. Hope to see you then.

Niall