Sunday, February 02, 2014

The Coens’ First Sequel, and Its Cockeyed Genius

First, a quick folk song:

Be wary, yon traveler
From far and from near
There’s secrets and there's spoilers
Revealed all up in here

When I first saw the trailer to the Coens’ Inside Llewyn Davis, I was struck by certain similarities to their 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou; just like the earlier picture, it looked to be another picaresque semi-musical, and no doubt there would be another excellent soundtrack album following on its heels. Well, this was all a good thing as far as I was concerned; O Brother is one of my favorite Coen brothers movies—heck, one of my favorite movies period—and I was happy to see them go back and pull the same trick again. After some delay I got to see the film, and sure enough I enjoyed it a great deal; I found it engrossing and haunting, like a window into another world. Towards the end there was a particular little moment that made me chuckle, a quick nudge in the ribs, but what it was exactly I couldn’t quite examine, as the story was hurrying towards its conclusion. It got my attention, but then it flew by and was gone.

That night at 2 AM I woke up and suddenly it all dawned on me: what had made me laugh was that it was revealed that the cat in the film was named “Ulysses.” Not very interesting in and of itself, until you remember that O Brother, Where Art Thou is supposedly based on Homer’s “Odyssey,” and in fact the main character’s name is Ulysses Everett McGill. In other words, the Coens made a direct reference to their earlier film.

That got me thinking, there in my bed, and the more I thought the more I realized that Inside Llewyn Davis is also based on the Odyssey, except in a sort of broken, negative way. For example, we do have a Penelope, or perhaps better to say an anti-Penelope, for she is no wife but instead an angry ex-lover. One could argue that she also has suitors like Homer’s Penelope in the form of the men who harmonize with her, as well as the enticing Peter-Paul-and-Mary-type commercial success that will come with that sweetness of harmony. As in Homer, the story ends with an accord of sorts when she does Llewyn a kindness and he confesses he loves her, but in a cruel twist we discover that she has not been faithful like Penelope—or at least she does not have the integrity that Llewyn imagined she had.

There are more upended Homeric familial relations. Just as in the Odyssey, wandering Llewyn returns to visit his father; Homer’s Laertes does not recognize his son at first, and, tragically, Llewyn’s father does not recognize his son at all. There is a Telemachus as well—a pair, actually—but no reunions; Llewyn has the opportunity to search out one lost child but he turns his back on the chance out of fear, selfishness, or general hardness of heart. The other child is unborn and is to be aborted. Interestingly, two of the songs he sings in the film feature or mention children in utero.

The fantastical journeys and adventures are there as well. It turns out that Llewyn is a sailor who has been “all around the world” like Odysseus, though in the present of the story our hero tries and fails to reach the actual sea. A cyclops is met in the form of a larger-than-life jazz musician who sneers at folk music (played by John Goodman, who of course also played the cyclops in O Brother), and in a strange twist Llewyn becomes one of the sirens himself when he joins two fellow folkies in the recording studio to cut “Please Mr. Kennedy,” a novelty pop song which is also an unintentional mockery of protest songs. One could argue that he meets Circe when he is turned into a “trained poodle” at the Gorfeins’ apartment, and there is even a suggestion of a trip to Hades and back in the apparent resurrection of Ulysses the cat.

What does it mean, however, this strange and pointedly willful perversion of Homer and O Brother? The colorful and hopeful world of the first film—a golden age, perhaps—has changed to one that is washed-out, unfriendly and cold. Odysseus gets nowhere; not only does he fail to find any kind of financial success, but he even seems to have been blinded to the very spirit of folk music by his own egotism. He cruelly berates an Upper East Side intellectual when she becomes so moved by his music that she joins in, and when he is presented with the song of a simple country woman he shouts obscenities at her.

By the end of film we realize that Llewyn Davis is in a circular, Third-Policeman-type Hell, and here too there is another correspondence to O Brother, Where Art Thou. In the previous film the hero is pursued by a character who is obviously, if not explicitly, the Devil, a deep-voiced higher power whose face is partially hidden. In Inside Llewyn Davis, the anti-hero has been caught, and the film is bookended by scenes of an intimidating, deep-voiced stranger beating Llewyn in an alley beneath street level, telling him, almost regretfully, that he deserves to be there.

Perhaps it is not just Llewyn Davis that was trapped in Hell but folk music itself? In the film's version of 1961 we see folk music commercialized, parodied, idealized, and gawked at like a freak show. Even Llewyn, its most loyal and ardent prophet, seems to have lost sight of what it really is—a joyful noise that can be sung by anyone, wonderful stories that are handed down from one performer to the next like Homer’s epics themselves. As a final cruel joke, trapped Llewyn catches a glimpse of the great man who will bury him in inconsequence, the true savior, the man who will stride like a giant across the landscape of American music and become immortal.

Maybe someday Llewyn will be free. Or, better yet, maybe someday he will find a home. There is always hope in the Coens' films, despite their black humor. And if there cannot be hope, then at least there will be music.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home