LET’S STEAL FROM THIS! ‘Llewyn Davis’ and Writing Passive Characters
LET’S STEAL FROM THIS! is a series of pieces looking at what fiction writers can borrow, craftily, from other sources. I will mostly look at television, movies, and comics, though the occasional literary work may sneak its way in, as will a song or two. LET’S STEAL FROM THIS! finds useful inspiration in unlikely places. NOTE: In all LET’S STEAL FROM THIS posts, there will be spoilers. Can’t pick it apart if you can’t get specific.
Over the holidays I saw several movies, but two of them have stuck in my mind more than the others, and for very different reasons: Inside Llewyn Davis and American Hustle. I saw Llewyn Davis first and, as with a lot of Coen Brothers movie experiences, I came away having enjoyed it but not entirely sure if I liked it. But also as with a lot (not all) of Coen Brothers movie experiences, it stayed with me. As the days went on and I thought about it, I decided A) I liked it a whole lot; and B) it had accomplished something very rare: making a passive character the center of a movie, and successfully so. More on that in a second.
[Note: it’s important to tell you that I’m not a Coen Brothers purist. Otherwise, my liking Llewyn Davis would be a no-brainer. But I think they sometimes rely on cleverness in lieu of well-written, full characters — God, I hated Burn After Reading — and where other writers/filmmakers might be insightful they can be merely misanthropic and cynical, which is the basest coin there is.]
The same day I saw Inside Llewyn Davis, I saw American Hustle. I actually ended up seeing most of it twice, as my wife (who receives screeners at the end of the year) fell asleep in the second act. Don’t judge! We started it at like midnight.
American Hustle is the opposite experience of Llewyn Davis. Where the Coens’ movie wants you to walk with it, albeit at a brisk Manhattan pace, American Hustle grabs you by the neck and rams you through its stations. While I was watching it, I was pretty sure I liked it. Then, when it was over and I’d had two minutes to think about it, I wasn’t so sure. Here, two weeks later, having seen it nearly twice, I can’t recall more than 15% of the movie. There was a lot of ’70s soundtrack montage madness. I do know there were a LOT of people holding their own heads while wailing, “What did you DOOOO?!” I remember Bradley Cooper hitting Louis CK with a telephone. I remember “science oven.” I certainly didn’t hate it, but it didn’t make much of an impression on me.
I haven’t seen Inside Llewyn Davis since the one time I watched it, but I could easily list every scene, what happens in it, and why it matters to the movie. If anything, the film has grown inside me, like when birds eat uncooked rice. (That may be a myth, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let Snopes take that one away from me.)
A lot of the reviews of Inside Llewyn Davis, even the positive ones, have expressed some problems with the title character, who they feel is a little too passive for the movie. The New Yorker review spends a paragraph on what it ultimately calls “a lack of energy at the core.” As in: “[…] something in the movie fails to grip, and it has to do with the hero.” But I think that’s kind of the point — Llewyn just wasn’t made for his times — and it’s also why I think Llewyn Davis is so great: It’s a master class in how to write a “passive” character.
I put passive in quotes there because Llewyn, of course, is not a passive character. If he were, I wouldn’t be writing this piece. Nothing kills a story faster than a character who doesn’t want anything, but Llewyn does want things. Llewyn seems passive in that he’s generally, except when yelling, the most reserved person in the film, the least outwardly ambitious. And we’re taught to think of good characters as being necessarily active. My students certainly know my spiel: driven and damaged. But that’s partly what Llewyn Davis is about: coming to terms not just with what you want in life, but with the very idea of wanting something. (And again, here be spoilers…)
Llewyn Davis is a folk singer in the early ’60s, pre-Dylan Greenwich Village scene. He’s surrounded by people — including, later, Dylan himself — who are clearly going to amount to more. So much more. This is a guy with a guitar, a bag, and literally nothing else — and by movie’s end, we have no reason to believe he’ll ever get further than that.
When we first meet him, he’s gone from singing a song called “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me” inside the Gaslight to getting the shit kicked out of him in the back alley. His attacker is exacting revenge for something Llewyn’s done to a woman, but we don’t yet know what. (Llewyn sputters, “It’s my fucking job!” but we don’t know what that means to the situation.) Then Llewyn wakes up on a couch in a strange apartment (one of many in his life), and his story begins in earnest.
We don’t know until the end of the movie — both the “Hang Me” performance and the beating are repeated, followed by Llewyn waking up on the same couch — that the club scenes we started with were a flash-forward. And while it may seem like a framing device, it’s not only never cheap, it’s everything to the movie.
Two key differences between the night/morning sequences: 1) It’s revealed that Llewyn follows “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me” with “Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song),” a song he’s been hesitant to play, associated as it is with the pain of his former singing partner’s suicide; and 2) We know that when Llewyn says to his attacker, “It’s my fucking job,” it’s no mere throwaway line. He’s spent the entire movie either shrugging off his art or running from it. But here he’s not only defending his art, he’s claiming it. The punchline to that: at the very moment he’s outside surviving a beating, Bob Dylan’s inside, planting his flag. The same Dylan who would raise the profile of folk music for about two minutes before crumpling it up and throwing it away.
What makes me say Llewyn Davis is an active character, versus a passive one? For starters, while it’d be easy to see the movie as a series of unfortunate events that all kind of happen to one guy over the course of a week, it’s simply not true: He made all of this mess.
When Llewyn declines a cut of the royalties in order to get $200 on the spot, it’s not merely a dumb decision. It’s because he needs the money to get an abortion for his friend’s wife — the wife Llewyn may have impregnated. And so it goes with the rest of the movie: Llewyn has created a flock of bad decisions — some before the story’s start, some after — and now they’re all coming home to roost.
Consider Llewyn’s casual direction to his sister that she toss the box of his stuff that’s been sitting around. The Coens don’t linger here and add portentous music, because this is a close-third-person film: Llewyn doesn’t think twice about the box, and we’re not meant to either. Later, after a disastrous trip to Chicago has convinced him to quit music and go back into the merchant marine, he’ll need his old license from that box. The one he told his sister to dump. That trip to Chicago, by the way, is more evidence of Llewyn’s suppressed ambition. His new friend Al mentions a folk music impresario is auditioning big new talent in Chicago, but amid all the success-hungry musicians in his scene, it’s Llewyn who leaves New York to take his shot.
If Inside Llewyn Davis reminds me of anything, it’s Michael Chabon’s novel Wonder Boys. Both take place over a compressed period of time (a week for Llewyn Davis, a weekend for Wonder Boys), both feature lead characters who are stuck in their artistic careers, both feature a mounting and compounding set of problems caused by the character’s selfish decisions. Hell, both feature the lead character learning early on that he’s impregnated a friend’s wife! Llewyn Davis keeps losing and finding and losing his friends’ cat; Wonder Boys‘ Grady Tripp is trying to keep his girlfriend’s dead dog hidden in the trunk of his car. In the end, Llewyn wins a victory over himself while a young upstart is inside, about to snatch away the future. In the end, Grady wins a victory over himself — he gives up smoking pot and vows to marry his pregnant mistress — while a younger, more talented writer takes Grady’s editor.
The difference in these endings is in the authorial intent: In Wonder Boys, the ending’s a kind of triumphant resignation, the passing of a torch you’re no longer qualified to hold, but also being somewhat okay with that; in Llewyn Davis, it’s an ironic — but not meanly so — last little kick from Life to Llewyn. You get the feeling this week of his is going to be a template of sorts for many, many weeks to come — another reason why the Mobius strip structure actually matters here, versus being a gimmick.
Both Inside Llewyn Davis and Wonder Boys would seem to have passive protagonists — each guy seems pretty poisonous — but both stories are about what we think of as passivity. As anyone who knows a hoarder can tell you, the people who seem most passive are actually the busiest of the bunch. It takes real work to pull off the kind of denials of reality that get Llewyn Davis and Grady Tripp the trouble they’ve bought. You could never make that kind of mayhem in your life if you weren’t the one pulling all the strings.
I began this piece by mentioning American Hustle. It makes for an interesting contrast, particularly if you see them closely together. Of the two, American Hustle should have been more the movie for me. I tend to like hyper-driven characters with little self-awareness, and most of the people in the movie, Bradley Cooper’s FBI agent in particular, have that in spades. But in the end it’s an empty experience. Some people did a thing in front of me. There was yelling. There were some cool scenes.
Llewyn Davis, meanwhile, feels at first glance like another Troubled Artist Who Can’t Get It Together, and how many more of those do we need? But this one really is different. He’s not just a guy with sad eyes and a good beard. He’s been invested with interesting, carefully parceled-out details — this person grew up poor, his singing partner killed himself, he’s been around the world on a working ship, whereas most of his peers have merely been to college. And he has real talent. He just has the bad luck to be living in a world that doesn’t really want what he has to offer. Who can’t, in some part of themselves, relate to that?
What to steal from Inside Llewyn Davis: If you have a tendency toward passive characters, or if people tell you your characters don’t feel real enough or participatory enough, look at this movie. It’s okay to write a character who’s not chewing the scenery, but in the end they all have to have the same thing: they have to have something they want deep inside (even/especially if they’re not willing to acknowledge it), and they have to be, in the end, their own worst enemy. There should also be something beautiful about them, even if they’re the lousiest person on Earth. And they should try, at least sometimes.