Grief and Unlikely Triumph: The Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

By Gabrielle Guz

(Written in December 2020 for my Independent Cinema Class at Columbia University.)

Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), in Ethan and Joel Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), does not merely exist. That’s, after all, what he signs up for when he chooses to make a “living” out of folk-singing in New York City’s Greenwich Village in the 1960’s. “Existing,” in his mind, implies a kind of settling-down, which would detract from his creative leanings. When his sister Joy recommends him to return to the Merchant Marine to earn some money, instead of wallowing away as a starving artist, he rebuffs the notion, blurting out to her: “For what, just to exist?” However, he can deal with having to traverse from his friends’ couches if it means that he can still perform his heart out at the Gaslight Cafe. But, he is also frustrated with his homelessness and general apathy. Ultimately, it appears that he is stuck in between his wish for a kind of artistically spiritual and economic fulfillment and his resignation. There’s a weight holding him down against his almost irredeemable fate. That weight is unspeakable grief for his friend and musical partner, Mike Timlin, who died by suicide. Caught inside the vortex of that grief, he cannot “live” the way he wishes nor can he eke out a solo career. Until, in his grief, he finds his unlikely triumph by regaining control over his circumstances.

Just as Inside Llewyn Davis is about supposed “failure” of income and, consequently, of the soul, so was the film’s reception met without much success. Having made themselves a household name with previous films like No Country for Old Men (2007) and True Grit (2010), the Coen Brothers’ 2013 film grossed domestically at merely 13 million dollars. It might have had to do with their receiving backing from CBS Films, a mini-major until 2019, instead of Paramount. Scholar Francesco Sticchi, who wrote an article, entitled, “Inside the ‘Mind’ of Llewyn Davis: Embodying a Melancholic Vision of the World,” argues that it’s rather the non-linear or “epic” style and the main “anti-hero’s” seemingly constant defeats or “non-positive” perspectives that could have frustrated the viewers, too (4). But although grief can be drawn out, endless, and deceivingly indomitable, it can also be triumphant. This film, though, tests viewers’ patience.

Sticchi, in fact, attempts to paint, initially, a scenario in which spectators could come to understand Llewyn as more than a non-positive character. Via invoking Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy on the ways one could encounter life’s passions without becoming victims to them, Sticchi imagines that perhaps for even conventional viewers, the frustration with Llewyn’s spirals of failure could be outweighed by their constructivist attitudes towards the film’s sad “mood.” But his acknowledgement that the negative emotions are even more so a consequence of spectators’ impatience with the film’s desaturated, gloomy, bleak atmosphere undermines the deceiving sense of hope that he seems to have for viewers from the onset in productively assessing negative emotions. He continues his argument in an aggravated tone himself, when he claims that “Llewyn Davis is a failed novelistic hero within a failed novelistic plot/world” and that he produces no “catharsis” (2-14). Llewyn, then, seems to experience no progress throughout the film.

To debunk that claim, it is worthwhile to consider a reparative reading, an approach to establishing a heightened critical consciousness that scholar Eve Sedgwick introduced in her book, Touching Feeling. Reparative analyses can apply to diverse material, especially when it even subtly pertains to conversations about mental health and depression. Sedgwick draws a distinction between reparative versus paranoid reading. Though both approaches are not mutually exclusive, the latter, which critics and viewers usually tend to lean towards, renders perspectives anticipatory and retroactive. A reparative reading, on the other hand, offers multiplicity and creativity. Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, Heather Love, who has also been inspired by Sedgwick, says that reparative reading is “enabling” because it departs from the “confidant pronouncements of professional critics” (Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid and Reparative Reading, 235). If the general consensus around Inside Llewyn Davis is that it’s entirely bleak, then in the spirit of Sedgwick, there is room for a reparative challenge.

The film opens before anything is seen. Indecipherable chatter and a light guitar strum permeate at first non-diegetically until an image shows; the intertitle [Gaslight Cafe, 1961] cuts to a close-up of a microphone, and the camera, like the sound, wavers for about ten seconds. That mechanical tool symbolizes a mediating role between the chatter and the guitar strum. The converging sounds, in other words, become nearly dialectical. The chatter seems to reach a standstill and the strum grows louder. As the camera pans acutely, Llewyn Davis, whose instrumental and singing voices are transmitted through the microphone, is in charge of the mood in the establishing shot. His countenance is half lit, his eyes are closed, and his first words are: “Hang me, oh hang me. I’ll be dead and gone.” The viewer does understand thus far that the film’s overarching mood is bleak. And the fact that the camera remains on Davis for nearly a minute without a cut, let alone a single hint of his opening his eyes and moving a bit towards the light, proves that he is the kind of character who might be unhealthily attached to sadness and whose sadness is contagiously captivating.

However, on stage, that contagion has a positive connotation. To a first-time viewer yet unaware of Davis’s burdens — his record label cancelling his LP, his rejections and dejections, his sexual affairs and their consequences, his missing out on royalties — he initially appears to be a star in apparent control of the room. Yes, one would think, so what? His first song choice is somber, but perhaps it’s what it needs to be. The audience, which seems to be unblinking, shares in the momentary oneness of his apparent sadness. Perhaps he is trying to let go of something, attempting to be vulnerable, assessing the therapeutic capacity of voicing, through music, his despondency.

Someone like Sticchi could say, though, that the first-time viewer has it wrong. Llewyn, arguably, is only deceivingly in charge of the room. The initial presentation of Llewyn as a struggling character looking for professional and human improvement “generates in the viewer” the very “empathic desire for a major positive change,” something that is ultimately negated by the repetitive circularity of the film’s final sequence (Sticchi, 8). One could say that at the start, the partial lighting focused on Llewyn onstage does not sheerly represent bleakness; it conveys brokenness and loss. Even if he is more himself whilst performing, the source of his sadness haunts him. The aforementioned dialectical dynamic can also be imaginatively self-referential. In subsequent shots, as he yet sits on stage, the camera intercuts in a multi-perspectival fashion at an average shot length of twelve seconds. At once, it appears behind him, then it looks onto him as though itself a spectator in a middle row, until it nears closer to the stage and finally reaches a higher angle, looking down at Llewyn as he goes: “And I’ll be dead and gone.” Llewyn’s inward mood matches the bleak, desaturated outwardness so overtly that it is hard to take the Coen Brothers’ choice of this song for granted. For Sticchi, Llewyn’s self-consciousness, in that way, is nothing short of self-deprecating.

Where, then, does a reparative reader see positive progress in a character like Llewyn who sings about “death” and almost preemptively, though unintentionally, “asks'' for another gruesome encounter? In a subsequent scene, he seems to receive what he “asks'' for when an obscure “man in a suit” beats him up in an alley outside the Cafe. As Llewyn lays there on the cold ground, a paranoid reader sees a hopelessly defenseless man, whose expletives and further derogatory comments (“You yell stuff, it’s a show; it’s not the opera; it’s a baskethouse”) provoke harder hits.

That reparative first-time viewer has it right to an extent less obvious to scholars like Sticchi. The perception from the first several shots that Llewyn is in “control of the room” is figuratively valid. At the end of the film, Llewyn doesn’t continue laying on the ground. He rises. While the film, following the opening sequence, develops through a flashback, and the beginning-end are supposed to be circular bookends, Llewyn Davis’s character does show signs of positive unfolding. At the end, he is much more decisive (mentally) and defensive (physically). Instead of a final “Adieu,” he says, “Au revoir.”

But to comprehend the positive notion behind that final phrase and overall, even if subtle, progression requires an assessment of a curious aspect of Llewyn’s fate: direction. Understanding the so-called catalysts of his positive growth means taking into account two obscure characters whose relationship to each other is antithetical, but whose combination affects and directs Llewyn’s path to healing: the tabby Cat and the “man in the suit.” The thematic connection between them is that, in an opposite way, they symbolize grief. In one of the most dramatic cut-fades in the film, when having beaten Llewyn, the “man in the suit” starts walking away from the immobile camera into a claustrophobic and particularly dark space, his figure transitions into a lighter, but similarly claustrophobic corridor in which a Cat is also walking away from the immobile camera. The difference between the two figures is that the “man in the suit” is walking away from Llewyn and the Cat is walking to Llewyn. The “man in the suit” is grief personified and the Cat isn’t Llewyn but a part of him that he is missing. The Cat is his friend Mike.

There are other instances that suggest that the Cat is Mike. First, that he is the Gorfeins’ cat and that they seem to have an emotional connection to him. Film critic Richard Brody, in his New Yorker article, “Deeper ‘Inside Llewyn Davis,’” even surmises that the Gorfeins might have been Mike’s parents. While there is no clear-cut evidence to that, it is a valid hypothesis, considering specifically Lillian Gorfeins’s choked-up facial expressions when Llewyn rebuffs her singing along to “Mikey’s Parts” during a dinner scene at the Gorfeins’ Upper West Side apartment. As Llewyn becomes more testy, Mitch’s responses (“That’s unfair to Lillian; It’s okay, Lillian”) sound like consolations one would give to deescalate another person’s reactions to a painful emotional trigger. The word “unfair” asks for an elaboration. If the Gorfeins’ weren’t intimately connected to Mike, why would they think it’s “fair” to remind Llewyn of his grief? Asking him to sing appears almost therapeutic for them in memorializing their “potential” son. Given that hypothesis and the fact that the Cat is theirs, too, explains why Llewyn feels deeply responsible when he accidentally lets the Cat escape from the apartment in the beginning of the film. Not only does he want to save the Cat (supposedly the Gorfeins’ only remaining “child” ) but his constant running after the Cat symbolizes his search for a friend, for Mike. The only known name for any Cat in the film (since there are apparently a few) is Ulysses, which, as derived from one of Homer’s epics, the Odyssey, implies a journey home. For after the disastrous Trojan war, Ulysses does venture home entirely uneasily, meeting hardships along the way. So does Llewyn, though the war he is battling is grief.

The Cat (“Mike’s spirit”) is meant to help Llewyn find his way home — that is, away from misery and into a positive rebirth towards what can nurture the void in his soul. “The man in the suit,” on the other hand, leads Llewyn back into his grief. To realize that he must inevitably live between these two forces of “home” and “misery” would become Llewyn’s triumph.

In an interview with film critic Elvis Mitchell, Ethan and Joel Coen attest that one of the questions they wanted to elicit from the viewers was: why does someone like Llewyn, who is genuinely good at what he does, not end up artistically successful? The Coen Brothers had a reason when they looked for someone who was “pleasurable to watch perform.” Lacking talent isn’t the origin of Llewyn’s failure. As Ethan also points out, the very reason why they could have afforded to keep the camera so fixated on Llewyn for a high average shot length is primarily because they wanted to emphasize the character’s talent. It’s that he is stuck in the past (literally re-singing old folk songs he had performed with Mike, like “Fare Thee Well”) that hinders his healing. Music is his source of misery; in it, he is reminded of grief. Ironically, it’s the climactic scene — the Dark Night of the Soul plot point — during which Llewyn, after traveling all the way to Chicago, auditions for producer Bud Grossman when he learns that music isn’t as much his passion but a reflection of an attachment to sadness.

Music speaks forthrightly to him in that climactic scene with Bud Grossman. If music were personified, it would tell him to very crudely “die.” That is, in fact, what Bud Grossman tells Llewyn to do, even if entirely unintentionally, when he says that he sees “no money in Llewyn’s work” and that his greatest suggestion would be for Llewyn to get back with his partner. His partner, Mike, of course, is dead. So, is the implication, in more rational terms, that Llewyn should just quit because he is not going to be successful in the ways that he wants to be artistically? While Llewyn, consciously, in that scene, is still in denial, his very choice of song (“The Death of Queen Jane”) suggests that subconsciously, he understands how music has fundamentally become his enemy. The story behind the death of Queen Jane Seymour, the third wife of Henry VIII of England, is a bit similar to Llewyn’s in terms of working hard to secure some kind of legacy. After trying with most of his other wives to bring a male heir into the world, King Henry VIII finally succeeded when Queen Jane became pregnant. But instead of the happiness his son’s birth was supposed to bring him, Queen Jane’s death from childbirth made the arrival of his son be more so filled with pain than joy. Similarly for Llewyn, his hoped-for legacy is his music, but given that his musical partner is dead, he cannot disassociate music from grief. Bud Grossman’s words, thus, give him a sense of positive clarity. A climactic scene, which was supposed to pull him into music (the cause of his pain) actually pulled him away from feeling disillusioned.

Sticchi would argue that “what was supposed to be the turning point” really led to a “failed performance,” but experts on mourning would object (8). Scholar James R. Hodge, who, in 1972, published an article to the Journal of Religion and Health entitled “They That Mourn,” claims that when bereaved people actually do grief work, they realize that they are in more denial not of merely missing the deceased but of losing a part of themselves in those who passed. Following Hodge’s explanation, even if Llewyn feels sorry for Mikey’s premature death, he also feels sorry for himself, that without Mikey, he is not the same person. An unhealthy pattern that Llewyn practices is similar to Hodge’s idea of “symptom-fixing factor,” where by avoiding the trigger of his pain (music), he receives secondary gains from his pitiable lifestyle, such as the “gratification of dependency needs” (Hodge, 232). It’s only when he gains clarity and decides to shift away from music that he can break the cycle of self-deprecating symptoms that lead him nowhere. It’s himself that he must re-discover.

The film ends the way it begins, elliptically, but there is a major difference: it answers the question wrought from the initial ellipsis. Beaten down, what becomes of Llewyn? In the final alleyway scene, he ironically triumphs. When the man in the dark suit approaches him, the medium-angled long take, where Llewyn faces the camera and the other man partially blocks Llewyn with his back to the camera, suggests that regardless of the fear in his eyes, Llewyn appears much more confrontational than in the beginning. But that is more evident as he attempts to rise whilst the other character walks away quickly. The foggy, wintry feel and the quickening distance between the two characters, as well as the camera’s tracking Llewyn at a low-angle as he walks, even if limping, just to catch sight of the man drive away, points to Llewyn’s metaphorical desire to bid “farewell” to the dark spirit for which the man likely stands. The fact that the film begins with a close-up of a microphone, which helps Llewyn possess control of the Cafe room as he sings, and ends with a close-up of his face bidding a wave to the menacing figure that has beaten him up evokes a sense of a subtle acquisition of control. Grief is his ultimate lesson. It grounds him.

At the end, too, Llewyn does not need to search for the metaphorical “Mikey” either. Ulysses does return home. And Llewyn is also able to keep the Cat inside when he leaves the apartment in the second-to-last sequence. That symbolizes his sense of greater control of his circumstances.

Ultimately, he moves forward.

A.O. Scott, the New York Times film critic who wrote a review about Inside Llewyn Davis the year it came out, pointed out that the Coen Brothers’ main characters are “a gallery of losers, deadbeats, and hapless strivers” and he generally argues that Llewyn Davis is not an exception to that. That surficial understanding should not erroneously write Davis off under merely those descriptors. He is not a loser; he pursues his craft till he huffs and puffs. He is not a deadbeat; he is just overwhelmed with grief, dissociated and unable to connect. He is a striver, though not hapless; he journeys even to the cold, desolating Chicago, to become someone somewhere. Even if without Mikey.

Works Cited

1. Brody, Richard. “Deeper ‘Inside Llewyn Davis.’” The New Yorker, 2013.

2. Hodge, James R. "They That Mourn." Journal of Religion and Health 11, no. 3 (1972): 229-40. Accessed December 4, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27505129.

3. Love, Heather. "TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES: ON PARANOID READING AND REPARATIVE READING." Criticism 52, no. 2 (2010): 235-41. Accessed December 4, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23131405.

4. Mitchell, Elvis. “Coen Brothers: Inside Llewyn Davis Interview,” 2014.

5. Scott, A.O. “Melancholy Odyssey Through the Folk Scene.” The New York Times, 2013.

6. Sedgwick, E. K., & Frank, A. Touching Feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

7. Sticchi, Francesco. “Inside the ‘Mind’ of Llewyn Davis: Embodying a Melancholic Vision of the World.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video (Oxford Brookes University), October 2017.