Breaking Out of the Cycle: Llewyn Davis is Left Behind at the End of the Folk Revival

Last weekend, a few friends and I went to see Inside Llewyn Davis. I don't think I'd been to the theater since seeing The Master back in February (after everyone else had seen it), so it was nice to revisit the big screen. And I must say, it was definitely a good choice for a first flick back. The Coen Brothers have brought out their A Serious Man side again, and it's arguably my favorite side of their repertoire. The dark and muted cinematography—beautifully rendered by French cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel in a subtler turn from Amelie and A Very Long Engagement—takes us right back to 1960s Greenwich Village, a tricky but successful feat since the Coens like as much on-location photography as possible. Each character is dispatched so economically, so that every one of their appearances, no matter how many minutes of screen time they are given, evince a deeply believable relationship to the protagonist that is instantaneously recognizable, be it a longtime friend, a fellow traveler, or a tastemaker with the upper hand.

On the surface, the film features the titular folk singer down and out, couch-surfing his way up and down Manhattan, as he fails to jumpstart his career and insensitively steps on the toes of everyone else in his life in the process. Llewyn is lost without the other half of his musical duo: his solo effort hasn't sold any copies, and he is languishing at the darker end of the success gradient than the other musicians in his circle. During the film he strains the relationships he has with his married friends Jim and Jean, also musicians, by not respecting the former and possibly impregnating the latter. He also simultaneously takes advantage of and keeps at arms length the care of his surrogate parents in the film, the Gorfeins, an academic couple on the Upper West Side who treasure their hip "bohemian friend." He even manages to use and disappoint his sister, his only immediate relative in their right mind. In short, in a lot of ways, much his lack of success can be placed squarely on his own shoulders.

Plot-wise, the movie is framed by two stays at the Gorfein's house, two performances at the famous Gaslight Cafe, and one or two (depending on your interpretation of where this lies in the fabula of the film) alleyway beatings. At the beginning of the movie, Llewyn finds himself at the Gorfein's empty house the morning after a rough night, makes himself some breakfast, and takes off with his guitar and bag, accidentally letting the Gorfein's cat loose on his way out. At the end of the movie, he finds refuge back at the Gorfein's house after a bender and wakes up in a similarly empty house, but is sure to leave the cat indoors as he leaves. The film opens with Llewyn's performance at the Gaslight; his performance at the end of the film even features the same closing schtick. And again, Llewyn takes a pretty vicious alleyway* beating both at the beginning and the end of the film. One gets the feeling he has gone through all of this before. Indeed, even borrowing money and couch space is all too familiar to those around him for his behavior to be an occasional occurrence. He is homeless and he is a sponge trying the patience of those around him, and part of his fatigue stems from the fact that even he knows this cycle is not sustainable. After the movie, most of the friends I was with agreed that Llewyn's story was one of self-sabotage.

But I believe that this movie is bigger than just Llewyn. I don't think he's just an asshole stuck in a cycle of self-sabotage. To me, it was clear that the film was chock full of signs that Llewyn was not alone in the muck in which his wheels were spinning. While at fellow singer Al Cody's house, trying to stash his records, he finds a box of Al's own solo effort just as full as his own and sporting eerily similar cover art. Troy Nelson, the perky but perhaps tragically ironic soldier in from Fort Dix, is eager to make it big. His friends Jim and Jean are nominally more successful at drawing a crowd, but near the end of the movie Llewyn learns that Jean sleeps with the owner to earn a spot on the bill. Every wannabe knows where to play, but no one is breaking out of the scene. One of the lessons that stood out to me from these signs is that just because a scene is big or that an artistic revival is in the offing doesn't mean that it will be lucrative in its pure form.

In 1961, the year in which the film takes place, folk music was still, in the true sense of the word, trafficking in known standards and tied to the protest efforts of grassroots movements—from the true folk. To make a famous, 1960s TV-worthy career out of it, the genre would first have to evolve into something more mainstream, something Llewyn's character does not believe in. And it eventually did. But as the style of music evolved and gained popularity during the 1940s-1960s folk revival, the definition of folk music itself widened, from only encompassing traditional music and standards to connoting often original music that used similar instrumental and vocal arrangements and dealt with grassroots subject matter. Being based in 1961, Inside Llewyn Davis is not arbitrarily on the cusp of this push into popular dominance. Many of the big names of the revival (Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez) were big because they were committed to these movements, and while they may not have left the genre after its peak, their fame retreated to the background along with it during the rise of more mainstream work. This is a compromise Llewyn, and many in the pure scene, probably would not have made.

Two developments helped to change folk music into a lucrative art and take it to the next stage of its evolution, and both are present in the film. The first was the willingness of some members of the scene to lend their folk sensibilities to pop music. Jim, Justin Timberlake's character, writes and records the silly pop tune "Please Mr. Kennedy" that strikes all the right notes, name checking the president, outer space, and those rock 'n'roll stutters that are sure to make it a hit. Llewyn is enlisted to help record, but he can't help but scoff at the stupidity of it, and doesn't even bother to think ahead to what royalties he's sure to miss out on as he signs away his rights. While true folk fans might see songs like this as watered down or selling-out, real-life bands like the The Byrds and the Mamas and the Papas took off in the mainstream because of the pop-folk combination. The second development was a willingness to apply folk sensibilities to original music. Instead of sticking to the standards, as beautiful as they still are, artists like Bob Dylan sang their own poetry and simultaneously elevated and blew apart the whole genre.

Thus, it is important that the break to Llewyn's cycle of misery doesn't come from within, as it might in a typically protagonist-centered film, or to even Llewyn personally. As SM so aptly pointed out soon after we left the theater, Bob Dylan's (or more truthfully "Bob Dylan's") appearance at the Gaslight at the end of the film means that the cycle is broken for the whole folk music scene. Bob Dylan's rise to fame killed off the Greenwich folk scene, and whatever hopes the Llewyn Davises, Troy Nelsons, and Al Codys of the world had of making a career out of traditional American songs were effectively dashed. Songwriters and original music dominated the late 1960s and 1970s and the standards receded to cult status. I am not giving any commentary on folk music here; I am a big fan, and I think traditional music is both enjoyable and important. But my point is that I don't think Llewyn Davis was ever going to succeed, and the viewer is there as he finds the end of his rope.

One thing SM and I observed in a discussion about all of this is that the people most likely to make it big were the people less likely to be purists. This is true in the film as it was about the implosion of the folk scene. Llewyn may have put down Jim's ditty, but the audience knows that it might just be Jim and Jean's ticket out of the village and into the family life they want. I think part of what made Bob Dylan so successful was that he wasn't bound to a genre or a style, the music that came out of him went beyond that, reached past folk, and you could hear it. Folk was just a starting point, whereas for Llewyn and many others in the scene like him, it was the goal. There's a line in the film, after Llewyn plays for a club owner in Chicago: "I don't see any money in this." And he's right. The standards are beautiful, but, unfortunately for Llewyn, the scene was right about to come into its own.

When is My Big Break?

So. It's been a while.

I've gotta say, it's been an incredibly hard year and a few months since I moved to New York, and the bubble of lowlights and foiled attempts at success I've been living in have just not been conducive to musing about anything. I've been talking with a few close friends about adulthood, and that I just don't think I'm anywhere near it. Subsistence living, running in place professionally, and being stuck in a big city full of richos has me in a near state of arrested development, and it turns out I'm not alone.

At first I thought this was because of a lack of (trust) funds, especially in the form of my parents' help, but I have plenty of other friends who are fortunate enough to come from certain means but have found themselves in a similar emotional position. Then I thought it was just this damn city. And yeah, that is definitely part of it—the rent is too damn high, especially compared to my midwestern roots and life in Chicago only 18 months ago, and I do strongly feel like I'm bleeding money every time I leave my apartment. But that's not all of it.

In short, I think my despair, and that of some of my friends, is rooted in the fact that our cohort has been profoundly screwed over. Most especially the class of 2008, my class, who graduated the very same summer that the financial world was seemingly collapsing around us, has fallen into a sort of holding pattern from which it feels like we'll never recover. You'll notice I'm using a lot of qualifiers and subjective language, and it is on these conditionals that hinge the bulk of my fears. I am more than willing to allow that one's twenties are supposed to be hard, that these will be the hardest parts of our lives, that we're really "figuring out who we really are." But at this point, I'm 27, and I'm over it. I've learned my lesson; I've done my soul-searching. Where is the reward for all the nail-biting and tears and handwringing over missed bills and rising credit card debt and dignity lost in borrowing money from family yet again? I'm happy to look beyond this to the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, but for some of us there is a real fear that it will never materialize.

All those months of economic uncertainty and hiring freezes represent a lot of lost time for the class of 2008 (and fine, 2009 too), and at times I don't see how we can recover. By the time companies slowly started hiring again, there were at least three classes of newly-graduated job seekers, meaning three times as much competition and a third as many excuses for lack of relevant experience. Sure, many individual hiring managers out there might understand that there was nothing we could have done besides take irrelevant jobs to make ends meet, leave the country, or rack up more debt going to school. But on the whole, we just don't look as good on paper. Even when I have made strides in my own professional career, I find myself plagued by an incredible case of impostor syndrome, and I'm constantly underselling myself.

More than five years after all of this, most of my friends have fortunately either found work or graduated from their programs, but there is a profound dissatisfaction or anxiety that I've been picking up from them and feeling myself stemming from officially reaching our late twenties. I'm 27 and will be 28 next month, but while my 30+ year old friends are buying houses, getting married, or even having kids (and some well-faring friends my age are admittedly doing the same), many of my friends from my graduating class are nowhere near that stage in their lives even if they want to be. How can I even think about raising a kid when I can't make rent? How would I fund a wedding when I can't find a steady job? Meanwhile, some of my younger friends have been struggling for what seems like the acceptable amount before landing their jobs and getting on with their lives and enjoying their early-mid twenties. The bigger things are easier to focus on when the smaller matters are taken care of, and vice versa.

I find myself most anxious that the anxiety will never end. I remember being an (albeit hyper-self-aware) angsty teenager and looking forward to being in my 20s when all these feelings and high school drama would finally subside. I want to look ahead to being 30 and knowing more than what I do now, chiefly that things will, on the whole, turn out alright. One thing I have figured out in my 20s is that there will always be problems. I will always find something to hate about my job, there will always be "first world problems." But the peace of mind that can come with a steady paycheck and food on the table is one that I hope will not be lost on me when I finally make it out of this.

Bullitt

The last few 1960s-1970s thrillers I've watched recently have not been what I'd imagined. Marathon Man, The Great Escape, The French Connection all turned out to be much grittier, much less polished than I'd expected from all of the hype. They deserved the praise that preceded them, yes, but it just wasn't what I had prepared myself to see. Each of them was much more present and unpretentious than I'd grown used to movies being. In a way it's great that the accolades accrued over time haven't smoothed their edges or magically updated their contextual charm, but sometimes we (or at least I) forget how impossible it really is for time to do that to a great film.

After experiencing this with countless "timeless" thrillers of yore, thanks to Netflix's ample back catalog, I should have known better than to underestimate Bullitt. It wasn't until a year or two ago that I finally climbed onto the Steve McQueen bandwagon after being introduced through The Great Escape. I'd expected a much more traditional American hero, whatever that means, and I was half pleasantly surprised with McQueen's charm, half wondering what all the fuss was about. The effect was similar as I started watching Bullitt, but it was the film itself that really got me.

The sound was one of the key factors that pulled me in. Music appears out of nowhere as the action ramps up, and then disappears before the climax and the fallout. Much of the film is quiet and dependent on the diegetic sound: breathing, footsteps, live bands, and car engines. I could write a whole thesis on the sound design in this movie, transcribing the notes I couldn't help but jot down throughout, but I'll resist for now. (The fax machine! The car chase! The last sound of the running water!) Needless to say I was little surprised to learn that the film was nominated for an Oscar in sound design.

It successfully won recognition for Best Film Editing, which didn't surprise me either. It wasn't even nominated for cinematography, though, but perhaps the novelty of the camera work is what's most appealing to me — it has aged into recognition, at least in my book. The number of creative angles, especially point of view shots, that punctuate the film (in its silence) were particularly noteworthy. Instead of leaving a scene after the dialogue, the camera often follows important bit players in the drama in its own subtle foreshadowing. What really does it, though, is that the camera is often fixed to one point. Not until eight years later in 1976's Marathon Man would the steadicam change cinematography forever — its fluid movement often taken for granted nowadays — but most films I've seen from before the advent of such equipment skirted around those limitations; they didn't use the fixed camera to the effect I saw in Bullitt. Instead of leaving a cab with our characters, we stay fixed on a bobble-head dog in the back window and accompany it into the car wash, our view of the subject of the scene obstructed by suds, water, and finally hands with buffing towels. At times we stay tight on the rear view mirror during a chase. We ride along inside the car, right beside Bullitt, going up and down the San Francisco hills as the engines hum.

And it was in these moments that I embraced Steve McQueen's character. He doesn't even need Clint Eastwood's steely glare to support his strong, silent maleness. He doesn't yell, he just barely grimaces ( and since he did most of his own stunts, those were probably coming from a very real place). He doesn't tell, he shows in a real way, physically shielding his female companion from harsh realities without a word. Actually, the film itself matches Bullitt's personality closely: a lot of silence, a little bit of a girl, and music only until you need to focus. It's no nonsense just like him. I know it's trite to end an essay with this, but I wish they made movies like this now. The making of this piece of art is so tangible in the result, and it is so well-crafted, yet it's seamless and earnest in its grit like the other movies of its era. Perhaps those palpable feelings can't be recreated today. But we are really missing out.

There is a classic Antonioni dorsal shot at some point in the movie (that also reminds me of On the Waterfront). I couldn't fit it in here, but I got really excited!

One quick thought about HBO's Girls

So, last night I finished Girls' first season. SM and I had started it while in Minneapolis on a quiet night with nothing else to do but peruse my mom's On Demand offerings. Both of us had pretty tepid reactions to the show. Immediately I could tell that it was of high quality, well made in pretty much every respect. And fairly early on I knew that I despised most of the characters. Which is sort of what you're supposed to think, so I hear. We finished one episode, shrugged, and moved onto the next, more out of laziness than a genuine interest in the show. We burned through the first four episodes.

Last night I finished the remaining 6 episodes. I do have to admit I ended up more invested than I thought I would be, but the bar was pretty low. The characters are still incredibly annoying to me, but that's just it. For me, it's not about the lack of diversity or anything — I completely buy that their entire social friend group is white and privileged and living in NYC-normative bubble — it's just that I think I'm at the wrong age to watch the show.

I'm too old to think about these characters as flawed heroes and view the show as a fun but cautionary New York tale, and too young to think back on the mistakes of my youth and view the show from a wiser vantage point. I realize this is totally on me, totally subjective, but I just relatively recently hit a point in my life when I feel comfortable shedding the social burden of obligatory acquaintanceships and hanging around with people I don't like, and I can honestly say I don't like those characters. I think of myself socializing with them, and it kind of makes me vomit in my mouth, or at least concoct exasperated, end-of-my-rope diatribes for each one of them (except maybe Zosia Mamet's Shoshana). It's just too close to home for me (literally and figuratively) to choose to hang out with these people, and I feel like the closest I'll let myself get is to watch their stories unfold with the same interest I have in thirdhand gossip about people I was annoyed with in high school. I'm mildly interested in a sick way, but I have no desire to get more acquainted.

So the writing's great, the direction is good, the craftsmanship is well executed, but it just features too toxic of a group of girls for me to feel completely comfortable.

Movie Diary: Django Unchained

While in Minneapolis for a week, I was sure to take advantage of the cheaper movie prices in my fair city and check out Django Unchained with some friends. I loved it. I'll just give the grade up front and get to my favorite aspects below: A.

So, maybe my opinion of the film carries more weight because I'm black, maybe it doesn't. But I don't think Quentin Tarantino was overly flippant with the subject matter at all. In fact, I this might be the least Tarantino of his films yet, and I think it's better for it. Outside of some western motifs (Tarantino has claimed that this is not a Western, but a Southern), the film is incredibly unique. Unlike some of his other films (I must say of which I am a fan), there is no list of tropes to check off because this is not an homage. Revenge film doesn't even cut it. It's something entirely to itself, and I don't even know if it can be replicated (and if it could be, I don't know if I'd want to see it).

The film is tight where it needs to be. It's really in three parts: 1) Django (Jamie Foxx) and Dr. Schultz (Christophe Waltz) meet and establish their working relationship; 2) Django is good at what he does, and after helping Schultz with his bounty-hunting, they set off to save Django's wife, Broomhilda; 3) Django saves his wife. It's a three hour movie, but Tarantino is succinct when he needs to be, trusting the audience to understand that parts of Django and Schultz's relationship was necessarily built offscreen, and that Django has eagerly picked up on some of Schultz's influence to add to his own strong character.

In fact, one of the strongest parts of the movie to me was the singularity of Django's character. There aren't only white people to whom we can compare his character; there are other types of slaves, too, who see Django with jealousy, hatred, and fear, and rightly so. If I was a slave and saw Django, a free man on a horse with a gun, I'd think he had a death wish, and I'd wonder who he'd sold his soul to to gain that position. I wouldn't trust him with a ten foot pole. And that's just from the field hands' and Mandingos' point of view. One of the really interesting characters is that of Samuel L. Jackson's head house slave, Stephen, who is simpering and sycophantic and blind to the depths to which his owner's disdain of blacks extends. I've read and heard about the peculiar position of the house slave, about how the close relationships between master and slave were perhaps genuine but could only go so deep. We watch Stephen's devotion knowing that if the positions were reversed, the results would most likely be devoid of his effort and emotion.

This brings me to another aspect of the movie I really liked. This was not a self-contained romp, unlike Tarantino's last "revenge film," Inglorious Basterds. There is no vanquishing of a mighty spectre, no cathartic killing of Hitler. Instead, a tension permeates the entire film, the knowledge that Django is stuck, that he is one man in the south, surrounded by people who hate him and a society that systematically degrades him. I was constantly anticipating his capture and his murder knowing that that would be it, all they had to do is kill him and it would be over. The reason I think this film did not treat slavery flippantly is that the scale was just right: large enough for us to cheer for the hero but small enough to remember how far-reaching slavery was (and its legacy is). In the end, Django freed only three slaves outside of himself (the two house slaves and his wife, although I guess there's something to be said for what happens to those on the plantation after the end), and he attacked only one plantation. That there were hundreds of plantations and hundreds of thousands (millions?) of slaves puts a strange twist on the ending of the movie for me and effectively ends the fantasy right where it should. There's no "if only" for me, just some badass triumph for a well-deserved character in a complicated and hateful time period.

I will say, though, that I agree that this movie probably could not have been made by a black person now. After all, how many black filmmakers are there, and of them, who is equipped to take on slavery by the horns, without a maudlin or saccharine lens, with an interest in empowerment and complicated race relations outside of a good vs. evil/black vs. white paradigm? I don't think anyone else out there, maybe even outside of the black community, was ready to give this kind of view to the time period. I've always maintained that Tarantino's movies are love letters to his various interests, and I don't think this entry in his oeuvre is any different. It means he treats his subjects with a care and subjectivity that really shows through in his work. He's less advocating for his subjects than he is showing them a portrait of how he views them, in this case strong, singular, taking one fight at a time to battle something much bigger than oneself. Although this film may be less derivative than his others, I think that's a through-line worth maintaining.

Movie Diary: The Master

SM and I finally went to see The Master on December 22, and the wait paid off because we got to see it in 70mm. Needless to say, it was a gorgeous movie, but I would have to say it was not my favorite P.T. Anderson film.

Don't get me wrong, I thought the film was great, but I found myself a bit less enthusiastic as I left the theater, perhaps just be because it was a less obvious character study than, say There Will Be Blood, and more of a theoretical exploration of leaders and followers. I will say that once I theorized a bit, though, I found the premise really intriguing, if a bit hard to grasp right away.

Let me back up and submit what I think the movie is about. Less focused on religious sects or cults than I'd anticipated, I found the real struggle to be the tension between those who lead and those who refuse to be led. The way SM and I discussed it afterward, believers seem to be set on their own spectrums, on which they have two markers connected by a tether. The first marker is their current position; the second marker is the placed where they want to be spiritually; and their religious life consists of striving to get to that second marker. It seems the stronger the believer, the tighter that tether. This might be true for any religion, but it was certainly so for Amy Adams' character, Laura Dern's character, and the other believers in the group: they saw in the distance a goal they wanted to achieve — whatever The Master wanted it to be — and they believed themselves moving their first marker along their tether to it, picking up slack as they went along.

I posit that Philip Seymour Hoffman's character, group/cult leader Lancaster Dodd, is continually moving not his current marker, but his goal marker (according to his prerogative as leader), and thus the goals of the entire believing congregation. If the controversy surrounding a cult or group of believers is whether or not those set goals are legitimate, attainable, and consistent, as the viewer of the film is given a vantage point outside of the group, it becomes questionable whether Dodd's goals pass this test. But to those following him, if they are invested in their own goal marker, they will be invested in him, and vice versa. Isn't this always so for any religion? You must be sold on the goals and believe you are moving forward (despite struggles to do so; the struggle to stay focused on moving forward is always incorporated into religious doctrine) to keep your faith.

Now, Joaquin Phoenix's character, WWII veteran Freddie Quell, is plagued with all sorts of problems, but the one that is most vexing to Dodd's followers is his lack of a goal marker. If the two markers are tethered, Quell's goal marker trails behind him as he moves along. It makes him directionless in more ways than one, but religiously it makes him unpredictable and worse than a skeptic. A skeptic may have their goal marker set in a different place, perhaps more tied down to this world or perhaps more attainable, but it's still there. Freddie, though, isn't even capable of being convinced of the investment, and thus his current marker can run parallel to the others, but to what end and for how long? For Dodd's followers, Quell inspires fear; for Dodd himself, Quell inspires the utmost interest — he is an enigma. While Dodd has ultimate control over his goal marker and may or may not be yanking it around at will or whim, his faithful followers barely deigning to question, Quell barely even knows he has a goal marker to swing around. Quell may be seen as an challenge to Dodd: he may be the most manipulatable one of the bunch, if only he could tie him down.

The cinematography was beautiful, the performances were impeccable, the story was rich, but a bit hard to pin down. I give this movie an A-.