Inside Llewyn Davis and the Long Dark February of the Soul

Those of us who live in modern industrial societies are not as divorced from the seasonal rhythms of traditional life as we would like to think. For example, every February without fail I experience a loss of spirit, as winter’s seasonal pall has dragged on to the point of despair. It’s why we have holidays in this time like Lunar New Year and Mardi Gras: we desperately need some light to shine in. It’s also a good time for Lent, as the preceding months have conditioned us to go without.

My solution tends to be to wallow in it and embrace the bad feelings. Doing this instead of ignoring them tends to be a lot healthier, something philosopher Mariana Alessandri recently argued very well in her book Night Vision. Last night I was listening to my Spotify “Winter Blues” playlist and my children were teasing me over my love of “creepy music.” That joke’s on them, since after they went to bed I watched Inside Llewyn Davis, the perfect movie for the long dark February of the soul. It’s set in winter, and I always had a hunch that it was February in particular. Last night my theory was confirmed when Llewyn fills out a form at the recording studio and dates it February 18.

If you haven’t seen it, the film is set in the early 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene. Llewyn Davis is a struggling performer with no fixed address. He sleeps on couches and floors and can’t get any money out of his manager. He doesn’t even have a winter coat and spends the whole film looking cold, both in terms of his body and his soul. Llewyn often acts like a jerk, but the film implies that it’s not his core nature, but that he has been embittered by pursuing an impossible dream. His former singing partner has committed suicide. This hasn’t only hamstrung his career, it seems that Mike was the only other person he could fully relate to. He goes on a harrowing journey to Chicago to audition for another manager, who dismisses him and tells him “you should go back to your old partner.” His old romantic partner tells him she’s pregnant and Llewyn scrapes together money for an abortion, but he then finds out the owner of the club where he plays is likely the father. He decides to quit folk singing and go back to the merchant marine but endures bureaucratic and financial nightmares to do so. His sister seems to hate him, his mother is dead, and his father is in an old folks home with dementia. At the end of the film Llewyn is beaten up in an alleyway after having vented his frustration on another folk singer who did nothing to deserve it. Walking back to that alley we hear Bob Dylan performing, a sign that Llewyn’s version of folk music is about to be eclipsed.

It is a hard movie for me to watch, because more than any other it describes the emotional turmoil of having to give up on your dream. I still keep going back to it because if you have ever had to give up on your dreams, no matter how correct that decision may have been, the emotional fallout from it will last a lifetime. For me, that dream was being a university professor. I actually managed to get a tenure track job after years of back-breaking effort, penury, and spending time in the “visiting assistant professor” mines. For a variety of reasons, it was not something I could continue. By the end, like Llewyn, I had become a bitter, angry, distrustful person. There is a more trusting, optimistic, person I used to be that no longer exists.

The first time I watched the film I wondered why the Gorfeins, an academic couple on the Upper West Side who feed and shelter Llewyn at different times, are so nice to him after he treats them shabbily. This time around I realized it’s because they knew who he was before life beat him down and just feel really bad for him. They remember the person who used to be, and are hoping they can coax him back.

The film also gets at the frustration of giving up on a dream when you know deep down that you could have made it if some things had turned out differently. Llewyn is actually very talented, so it’s not that he just can’t hack it. A truth that so many people are loathe to admit in our “meritocracy” obsessed world is that while almost all people who are successful in the creative fields are talented, so are a lot of the people who don’t “make it.” At one point Llewyn opts for a flat fee rather than a royalty payment for a recording session and then the song becomes a hit. Had he earned those royalty bucks he could have continued to gig and maybe get another break, but that one decision (which made sense in the moment) puts him behind the 8 ball. After he performs for the manager in Chicago he wants to put Llewyn in a poppy Peter, Paul and Mary-style group, which Llewyn rejects as an assault on his artistic integrity. Some of his struggles are beyond his control, and others come from his own bad decisions and obstinancy.

If you’ve had to give up on a dream that you spent over a decade of your life pursuing, one that put you in poverty during prime earning years, you will spend a lot of time second-guessing yourself and remembering those fleeting moments when things could have turned out differently. I still think about decisions I made in grad school about what I researched. I still play out job interviews in my head where I failed to get a callback at schools where I really wanted to work.

The crazy thing is that I enjoy my current job teaching at an independent school far more than I did being a university professor. I am far happier living in New Jersey than in East Texas and far more secure in my employment at a time when colleges are killing their history departments. It is entirely irrational to pick apart the path that brought me here, yet I still do it. I think about a scene in the film where Llewyn is talking to his sister in her working-class Queens kitchen. She basically tells him that he needs to get off his high horse when he tells her he doesn’t want to quit music and “just exist.” He retorts that his father “just existed,” working hard over a lifetime only to spend his last years in a home, shitting himself. (The scene where Llewyn visits him and plays him a beautiful sailor song and his father doesn't recognize him then soils himself is absolutely devastating.)

Leaving academia was the right thing to do, but I too fantasized in my youth about a life that was more than “just existing.” In the long dark middle-aged February of the soul comes the moment when you realize that “just existing” is all the rest of your time is going to be. That might be a dark thought, but just sitting with it for a little bit in this godawful month isn’t such a bad thing, and makes you realize “just existing” is more than enough after all.