The Loop

Inside Llewyn Davis, the Cat, and the Cruelty of Almost

A Dossier on Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2013)

A man sings a song in a dark club. He gets beaten up in the alley outside. The film ends. Then the film begins, and he sings the same song in the same dark club, and he will get beaten up in the same alley outside, and the film will end again. Nothing has changed. Nothing will change. The week we have just watched Llewyn Davis live through has not moved him a single inch from where he started.

This is the first unease, and it is structural. Inside Llewyn Davis is a loop. Not metaphorically — literally. The opening scene is the closing scene. The Coens build a film shaped like a circle and then lock their protagonist inside it. The question the film leaves behind, the one it never answers, is whether the circle is Llewyn’s punishment or his choice.

Start with what we know. Llewyn Davis is a folk singer in Greenwich Village, 1961. His musical partner, Mike Timlin, has recently killed himself — jumped off the George Washington Bridge. Their duo album was called If I Had Wings. Let that land for a moment. Llewyn’s solo album, also called Inside Llewyn Davis, is not selling. He has no money, no apartment, no winter coat that fits the weather. He sleeps on couches. He carries a guitar and, for much of the film, someone else’s cat.

He is also, by any honest measure, genuinely talented. This is not a film about a deluded man who thinks he’s good. Llewyn is good. When he sings “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me” at the Gaslight Café, the performance is quietly devastating — tender and weary and completely authentic. The Coens, in conversation with Guillermo del Toro, noted something crucial about Oscar Isaac’s casting: that the contrast between Llewyn’s abrasive, prickly personality and his beautiful singing voice was central to the character. The voice gives you the Llewyn that might have been. The man gives you the Llewyn that is.

This is what makes the film’s unease different from, say, the unease of a Bobby Dupea in Five Easy Pieces. Bobby’s mythology is that he’s too good for the world. Llewyn’s problem is that he might actually be good enough for the world — and the world doesn’t care.

II.

Or does it? This is where the dossier splits open, because Inside Llewyn Davis keeps two contradictory readings alive simultaneously and never lets either one win.

Reading One: The universe is indifferent. Llewyn is talented, sincere, and committed to his art, but talent and sincerity are not enough. Success in folk music — in any art — requires timing, luck, and a willingness to play the game. Bob Dylan, who appears as a ghostly figure in the film’s final moments, had all three. Llewyn has none. He arrives at exactly the wrong moment. He is the man standing on the platform as the train pulls away.

The Coens plant this reading carefully. The audition scene in Chicago with Bud Grossman — played with terrifying economy by F. Murray Abraham — is one of the most quietly brutal scenes in any film about the music industry. Llewyn plays his heart out. Grossman listens. And then delivers a verdict that isn’t cruel, isn’t dismissive, but is somehow worse than either: he tells Llewyn he doesn’t see a lot of money in it. He suggests Llewyn might work as part of a trio. It’s a perfectly reasonable assessment. It’s also the death of everything Llewyn has been working toward, delivered in the flat tone of a man who has heard a thousand Llewyn Davises this year.

Reading Two: Llewyn is the architect of his own failure. He impregnates his friend’s wife. He berates the people who let him sleep on their couches. He screams at Mrs. Gorfein — a kind, older woman — for the crime of singing along to a song that reminds him of his dead partner. He signs away his royalties on “Please Mr. Kennedy,” a novelty song that will almost certainly make more money than anything he’s ever recorded. He is offered a spot in Grossman’s trio and turns it down. He is self-sabotaging with the precision of a man who has practised.

“Llewyn is the cat.” — A secretary’s mishearing, and the film’s most revealing accident

The Coens won’t tell you which reading is correct. They hold both in suspension, like a chord that never resolves. And the discomfort of Inside Llewyn Davis — the thing that makes people watch it three, four, five times trying to figure out what it means — is that both readings are fully supported by the evidence, and they lead to completely different emotional responses. If the universe is indifferent, Llewyn is a tragedy. If Llewyn is doing this to himself, he’s something harder to name.

III.

And then there is the cat.

Joel Coen admitted that the cat was added late because the film didn’t have a plot. This is a disarming thing for a filmmaker to say, and it’s almost certainly a half-truth. The cat — a ginger tabby that escapes from the Gorfeins’ apartment in the first scene and accompanies Llewyn through much of the film — is doing far more work than generating plot.

The cat is named Ulysses. The Coens wait until near the end of the film to reveal this, and the reveal lands with the force of a key turning in a lock. Ulysses, the great wanderer. Ulysses, who spent ten years trying to get home. Ulysses, whose story the Coens had already told once before, in O Brother, Where Art Thou? But where that film’s Odyssey was played for broad comedy, this one is played for something closer to purgatory.

Llewyn is the cat. The secretary who mishears his phone message and writes this down isn’t making an error — she’s stating the film’s thesis. Both Llewyn and Ulysses are homeless, wandering, trying to find their way back to somewhere that might not exist anymore. Both escape through doors that shouldn’t have been left open. Both are carried by strangers who don’t quite know what to do with them.

But here’s the detail that turns the knife: there are two cats. The one Llewyn brings back to the Gorfeins, believing he’s completed at least this one small task in his shambolic life, turns out to be the wrong cat. He can’t even return a cat correctly. The real Ulysses makes his own way home eventually — a detail the Coens drop in with the lightest possible touch — and the implication is devastating: even the cat is better at finding its way back than Llewyn is.

And then, on the road to Chicago, Llewyn hits a cat with his car. It might be the same cat. It might not. The animal limps into the frozen woods, and Llewyn watches it go, and the Coens cut away. You will never know if that cat survived. You will never know if it was Ulysses. The film will not give you that.

IV.

The circular structure deserves more examination, because it isn’t just a narrative trick — it’s the source of the film’s deepest unease.

When the opening scene replays at the end, with Llewyn singing “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me” and then being beaten in the alley by a man whose wife he’d heckled the night before, we notice something the first viewing concealed: the scene is not quite identical to how it played at the start. Small details have shifted. We now understand who the attacker is and why. We now hear the song differently, because we know about Mike Timlin and the bridge and the album called If I Had Wings. The same scene, carrying different weight.

But the most disturbing element is what happens just before the beating. Llewyn steps outside, and from inside the club, we hear the first notes of another performer taking the stage. The Coens have said this performer is Bob Dylan. Llewyn doesn’t stay to listen. He walks into the alley, and he walks into the beating, and he doesn’t hear the future happening twenty feet behind him.

This isn’t dramatic irony in the conventional sense. The film isn’t saying Llewyn missed his chance — Dylan’s appearance isn’t an opportunity Llewyn failed to seize. It’s worse than that. The film is saying that the future simply arrived, and it arrived for someone else, and Llewyn was in the alley getting punched in the face while it happened. There is no lesson in this. There is no moral. There is just the loop, and the man inside it, and the door he walked through.

One more thread, and it’s the one people talk about least.

Mike Timlin is dead before the film begins. He jumped off a bridge. He is never shown, never heard in flashback, never given a scene. And yet he is the ghost that haunts every frame of Inside Llewyn Davis. The duo album. The songs Llewyn can no longer sing as duets. The moment at the Gorfeins’ dinner table when Mrs. Gorfein begins singing Mike’s harmony part and Llewyn erupts with a fury that shocks everyone in the room, including himself.

Llewyn’s grief is never named as grief. He never says he misses Mike. He never talks about the suicide directly. But the film is saturated with it — in the songs about loss and farewell, in Llewyn’s inability to function as a solo act that goes beyond professional difficulty into something existential, in the way he treats every human connection as if it’s already a source of future pain. The Coens bury this so deep that you can watch the film twice without fully registering it, and then on the third viewing it’s all you can see.

The unease this produces is not about what happened to Mike. It’s about what happened to Llewyn after Mike. There is a version of this story where grief explains everything — where Llewyn’s cruelty, his restlessness, his refusal to commit to any path forward is understood as the aftermath of losing the one person who made his music, and his life, make sense. The film allows this reading. It even invites it. But it never confirms it, because to confirm it would be to let Llewyn off the hook, and Inside Llewyn Davis is not in the business of letting anyone off the hook.

VI.

Here is what the loop means, or what it might mean, or what it refuses to mean.

Llewyn Davis is not going to make it. The film knows this. The audience, by the halfway mark, knows this. Llewyn, somewhere beneath the bluster and the bile, probably knows this too. The question the film asks is not whether he’ll succeed — it’s whether his failure is noble, pathetic, inevitable, or chosen. And the answer it gives is: yes. All of those. At once. Depending on the angle. Depending on the scene. Depending on whether you’re listening to the man or the music.

Because the music is extraordinary. It is warm where Llewyn is cold, open where he is closed, generous where he is stingy. The songs are the only place in the film where Llewyn is fully himself — undefended, unperforming, real. And the cruelty of the film, the thing that lodges in you and won’t come out, is that being fully yourself in the songs is not enough. The world wants more than songs. The world wants you to return the right cat and not insult your host and show up to the audition with something other than exhaustion in your eyes. The world wants you to stay inside the club and listen to the kid with the harmonica.

Llewyn walks into the alley instead. The loop closes. The song goes on without him.