Looking for Llewyn Davis
In the continuation of my long journey nowhere, New York City has given me something to latch onto: real life
Click here to listen to an audio version of this piece, read by the author.
“I've damn near walked this world around
Another city, another town
Another friend to say goodbye
Another girl to sit and cry
And it's many a mile I’ve spent on this road
It's many a mile I have gone.”
- Patrick Sky, ‘Many a Mile’
“ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE” reads the opening line of Bret Easton Ellis’s magnificent Manhattan memorial, American Psycho, a deranged novel about what happens to you when you believe a little too literally in the gospel of the United States of America. “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE” it also reads on the side of a building at the corner of First Street and Second Avenue on the Lower East Side of New York City, except in this version, it’s scrawled clumsily in white spray-paint, and it’s attributed not to Dante, but to Goethe, wrongly.
Welcome to Manhattan: where we’re trying to pretend it’s 1991, but not quite pulling it off. Anyway, isn’t New York the place you move to with literally not a thing in tow besides hope? I certainly feel I’ve left a part of myself behind somewhere. I feel lighter than ever, totally without the slightest notion of a mooring post, a baggage, a groundedness. Perhaps what is meant by “abandon all hope” leans closer to literalism than its original poetic context would have us believe. In New York City, it seems only prudent to check your plans, preconceptions and pride at the door; to allow yourself to be swept away by the ceaseless tide of nostalgic longing that the city presents to you, at the occasional price of your dwindling sense of self-worth.
Life in this city is preposterous, which is what makes it so insanely real. Everything is so aggrandised, everything so ardently strives to be historic, that you’re constantly referring back to the present moment just to ensure yourself that any of this is really happening. At a two-night-only theatre performance staged in the Sutton Place apartment of a recently deceased fashion photographer, I sat on an 18th-century French velvet armchair watching a troupe of actors I’d never met before perform their contemporary take on Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Sumptuous porcelain vases from the Qing dynasty flanked my seat. As the lights dimmed and the performance played out between walls adorned with Baroque mirrors and caryatids salvaged from the SS Normandie, I indulged myself in a moment of exquisite self-consciousness. This is real, I said to myself. You are real. And this is real.
For the longest time, it seemed impossible that a place like New York really existed at all. Everything I knew of it I’d sourced either from James Wolcott’s memoir, Taxi Driver or Inside Llewyn Davis, none of which seemed to me to take place in anything resembling a real city. Llewyn Davis was the first of these works I encountered, back in December of 2013, ten short years ago. I’ve never quite forgotten the breathless stir I felt seeing Oscar Isaac’s down-and-out folk singer lost in the desolate streets of the West Village some time during the winter of 1961. There I was, 15 years old, hidden in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, not knowing the slightest thing about any Dave Van Ronk, about ‘Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’, about the 1 train or the Caffe Reggio or the American folk tradition. I was taken in by a glittering image.
American folk music is the music of the wanderer. The lost romantic, the loner with a suitcase and a guitar. He who pines for the gentle touch of companionship in one breath, and farewells his own true love in the next. But it’s also the music of the self-conscious wanderer, a performer who buys into the trappings of the folk mystique. Fennario, Sisotowbell Lane – a world of “jovial neighbours” roaming the hills before settling into their rocking chairs “eating muffin buns and berries by the steamy kitchen window”. In creating the world of Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coen Brothers made no secret of their intent to use the aestheticisation of the Folk Movement. “The setting has some emotional charge,” said Ethan Coen in an interview at the SoHo Apple Store a week before the film’s release. “You look at the cover of ‘Freewheelin’ [Bob Dylan]’ and it says something to you. And you can use that. You can harness that, whatever power that has, which is really hard to verbalise – but it has some kind of power.”
For the Coen Brothers’ purposes, “use” is an appropriately mechanical word; but for our purposes, at once vaguer and yet still artistic in nature, it becomes inverted. It isn’t we who use the setting but the setting which seems to use us. Everyone is still chasing after the New York of Llewyn Davis, of Travis Bickle, of Basquiat in Downtown 81, of Bret Easton Ellis, hell, even of Patrick Bateman, because by absorbing us into its irrepressible history, New York City might make us momentarily real in the present. Of course, it’s one of the more potent animating tensions of New York City in 2023 that this plaintive call to be historicised is answered with family-friendly restaurants, morally unassailable advertising campaigns, “seamless user experiences”, and free WiFi powered by multinational banks.
I guess, though, that if you come here looking for Llewyn Davis, you get what you deserve. I quite literally came looking for him one morning in early September, taking the A train downtown to Washington Square Park where I found not Oscar Isaac (A-List) but Michael Shannon (not A-List). Defeated, I forced down an equally defeating lunch of two supermarket bagels and a banana, finally heading back uptown to sleep on the dusty floor of a room furnished only with a dresser drawer and a lamp, in a pre-war apartment co-habitated by three men all over the age of 65. They tell me it’s called “comeuppance”.
When Bob Dylan came looking for Woody Guthrie in the last week of January, 1961, he instead found Dave Van Ronk, the doyen of the early-’60s Greenwich Village folk revival upon whom the Coen Brothers would base their Llewyn Davis. It’s the kind of ironic twist you find in folk music, because the folk song, like Homer or the Sisyphus myth, functions according to a law of eternal return. Inside Llewyn Davis is itself a kind of folk song, forever reverting to where it began. That is the wanderer’s destiny. Even now, having only just moved here, I’m already obsessed by the idea of leaving – of going back to where I came from, of going somewhere new, of returning to New York in 10 years, of endlessly repeating my countless missteps. There has long been within me a desire to strip myself bare in order to attain something higher. Now, every paean to self-abnegation has been sung, and all that I got out of it is an inability to stop moving on from things.
It's melancholic to sense the goodbye inherent in every hello. But that’s how I’ve chosen to live, and the axe falls on nobody but me. The best I can do is to continue to put myself squarely in a scene with affectations visceral enough to momentarily shore up my rapidly depleting sense that any of this is going anywhere. I mean, how can you believe in linear concepts like “career”, “financial stability” or “political progress” in a city where any old walk, on any old day, in any old downtown street could feasibly have you bumping into your future boss one moment before being unceremoniously decommissioned by an out-of-control Chinese delivery driver the next?
Even this piece is a testament to how little New York makes sense to me. “What a weird spot we’re in,” I overheard a girl saying as I stood in a crowded bar waiting to hear the art critic Jerry Saltz be interviewed by the writer Dean Kissick. Her boyfriend just nodded. She kept going, in an English accented vaguely Swiss. “Weird city. Weird country. Weird things.” I couldn’t help but agree. Did I move to New York to manifest the allure of an image I took at face value? The more persistently I ask myself that question, the more firmly I’m convinced that perhaps a considerable portion of my melancholy since beginning a new life here in August is explained by the twin failure of (a) New York to live up to the projection I’d committed upon it, and (b) of myself to so stubbornly continue to expect life to supply me with images ever more beautiful, images I could make good on in the “real world”.
Yes, New York City is an ocean of historical facsimile and aspirational aestheticism, and yes, it will sweep past you. But what does that really look like? From my small, draughty, dirty, patch-painted, spartanly furnished yet exorbitantly expensive room uptown, I think to myself: what could possibly justify this existence? Llewyn Davis is gone, vanished, and never coming back. The world where $30 paid your rent is gone, vanished, and never coming back. There isn’t, and there never was, a Sisotowbell Lane.
But still, in those moments where you suddenly zoom out to find yourself feeling at your 250-year-old velvet seat in an apartment somewhere on Sutton Place South, or overhearing a Swiss girl at an art symposium, there begins to form within you a kind of passionate lucidity which assures you that you’re right where you ought to be. “I often feel,” wrote Dean Kissick in the final edition of his monthly column ‘The Downward Spiral’, “I’ve wasted my life searching for an imaginary bohemia that doesn’t exist anymore and may never have existed. But that’s not so much of a waste of a life; the search for bohemia, like the search for the great beauty, the blue flower, or the hard, gemlike flame, is just a way of chasing after an idea, just a journey nowhere. I have been chasing hazy dreams of bohemia and the transcendental experience for decades and though I have not found either, and likely never will, I do sometimes feel close, I have been able to experience life differently.”
Bohemia, the great beauty, and the journey nowhere: these ideals are not mere history, they are the stuff of real life. And so, in the throes of my newfound lucidity, I’m realising just how much sense those three ideals make. Who ever needed hope, anyway? What passes for our idea of utopia is a noxious fiction to me; I would choose the real world every time.