Inside Llewyn Davis

I have been reading a lot of reviews of the latest Coen Brothers film, Inside Llewyn Davis, which I recently saw myself. And I think everyone has it wrong.

Here are the interpretations I've seen:

1. The Coens are positing that nihilism may be the true nature of the world: everything is chaos.

2. Davis is a failed artist facing the tough decision to change his career.

3. Davis is feckless, irresponsible, and self-destructive.

First, let's clear the field:

1. One element of the film is definitely non-chaotic, and it is the one most crucial element: the music. Perhaps everything other than art is chaos.

2. Davis is based on Dave Van Ronk. The discouragements he faces are largely discouragements faced by Van Ronk himself in his autobiography. And Dave Van Ronk was a successful, not a failed, artist. The discouragements he faced are no worse than the discouragements most artists go through, even the very best. Moreover, we hear Davis for ourselves in the movie: he is quite good.

3. Feckless? Davis shows unusual concern throughout the movie over the welfare of a cat, even when the cat he has charge of is an anonymous stray. Although it turns out she has had sex with a variety of men, any one of whom might be the father, it is the impoverished Davis who takes responsibility and arranges and pays for his girl friend's abortion. He loses his temper a few times; but in a way that seems, in the circumstances as presented, natural and forgivable.

The original.

Interpretations two and three, I fear, are generated by the sadly common human tendency to blame anyone who is obviously suffering for their own predicament. Inside Llewyn Davis is certainly, as everyone agrees, a depressing movie.

But here's what it is really all about: the movie presents the world as it really is experienced by the typical artist, or anyone of an artistic temperament. Hence the title, “Inside Llewyn Davis”: you are seeing the world as the generic artist of the title sees it, from inside his head. And, as Keats once warned, there is no romance there: “the poet is the most unpoetical thing in existence.”

This is not just about how hard it is, objectively, to make a living in the arts. It is about the same for “successful” artists, like Van Ronk or the Coens. To resort to a common idiom, to the artist, life in the streets is like herding cats. Nothing outside of art ever works as it is supposed to. Nobody else ever seems to get the art. Notably, every time Davis performs a song, it is followed by some obvious letdown. Bud Grossman sees no money in it; his father, seemingly unaware, just soils himself; Davis gets called out after his encore and beaten up in the alley. Nobody hears the music he hears.

If that is depressing—well, there is a reason why almost all good artists are depressives.

And these reviews confirm the general truth: nobody seems to get Llewyn Davis.