Cold, embittered, and beset by the weight of his own defeatism, Llewyn Davis stumbles upon a movie poster for The Incredible Journey, and for the first time in his own journey, pauses for a moment of reflection.
In the Coen
brother’s snowy, gloomy Greenwich Village rife young dreamers and melancholy
turns of mind, this small moment of focus on a 1963 (either the Coen’s wanted
to use it too badly, or, most likely, they didn’t notice, but Llewyn’s actually
looking at an ad for a movie that’s two years in the future) Disney animal
adventure is certainly unusual. Maybe it’s just a joke, or maybe the Coens were
just feeling a little nostalgic, or maybe it actually pertains to the very
ideas running through Inside Llewyn Davis.
Is it the
tagline, "nothing could stop them...only instinct to guide them across
200 perilous miles of Canadian wilderness!" or the movie itself that
they were drawn to? Perhaps a little of both. It could be a little
tongue-in-cheek, but front and center on the poster is the cat, which could
serve as a droll acknowledgment of the wild exploits of the unfortunate little
orange-colored pet in this movie.
More
importantly, though, is that tagline. When
the camera cuts to a close up of it, the Coens are clearly giving us a cue that
these words might be worth considering in light of Llewyn’s own journey. The
camera then switches to a shot Llewyn reading the phrase, maybe playing
them in his head and finding some meaning in them in relation to his own life.
It may indicate that Llewyn, enveloped in a cloud of despondence, is going to
find—rather than lose—the determination to succeed. Or it could be quite a bit
darker than that. Llewyn’s narcissism has left him with not much in the world
by way of friends or a home, thus his journey through life is going to be
rough, like the wilderness, and alone, with instinct as his only real friend.
People will continue to offer him their couches and their coats—he’s too
charming and endearing for them not to—but if he can’t even recognize a true
cat, how will he ever recognize value in other people?
This might be
reading a bit too much into such a small moment in the movie, yet when fully
ruminated it makes pretty good sense. The brothers stated that the genesis of Inside Llewyn Davis was formed when they asked themselves why a
folk singer might get beat up outside of a bar. The film opens with Llewyn getting
that fist to the face, and then flashes back a few days in the musician’s life
so the Coens can answer that exact question. Thus the journey for Llewyn is
more psychological than spatial. Though he’s constantly moving about, and at
one point makes a crucial trek to Chicago, the movie’s really an odyssey of the
mind. Llewyn’s world is one where he believes he’s the better musician but
keeps being told that the other guy is actually superior. His egotism is in
direct conflict with the harsh realities of the folk music business, and the
clashing of the two puts him on a downward trajectory leading him to that
fateful night outside the bar. While the question is answered, the movie
doesn’t provide us with any real sense of closure in terms of Llewyn’s actual
life. So when he encounters the Incredible
Journey poster, one gathers that he’s not reflecting on the road he’s been
on, but the one that’s ahead and that the viewer will not be a part of.
It's a little
funny to see Llewyn finally find some truth in...a poster for a kids' movie.
Then again, for a man so opposed to careerism, conformity, and the value of
others as humans, it's probably going
to be things like this that help him get along through his rough and tumble
world.
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