Time to take a break from math and physics and discuss a movie. Well, it's related to the subject of this blog, in both the Serious Man and Schrödinger's Cat senses. Because it's related to the Coen Bros messing with our minds (again) again.
The timeline of Inside Llewyn Davis is a lovely Coen Brothers' thought experiment. The last scenes in the movie are the same as the first scenes. There's not a one-to-one correspondence in dialogue, but that's because some sentences are left out either in the first or the last version. The setting is the Gaslight coffeehouse. Llewyn does his time on the stage, one song in the first version and two songs in the last version, but it's the same night in each case. Then he gets whupped up on by the man in the alley, with the last version of this incident showing more of it while also leaving out some dialogue that was in the first version. In the last version, Llewyn says to the disappearing taxi with Elizabeth Hobby's husband--the Arkie who hit and kicked him--in it: "Au revoir." These are the last words of the movie. They literally mean "to the seeing again."
So the end is also the beginning, and it's a Groundhog Day continuous loop of a movie--apparently! There's something else going on with the cat, however. Possibly. The cat first appears in a segue with the man in the alley walking away. The cat, also seen from behind, is walking down the hallway in the Gorfein's apartment on Riverside Drive, where Llewyn is asleep on the couch. The cat wakes up Llewyn by sitting on his chest. We are led to think this is the morning after his gig at the Gaslight and his alley confrontation. But the movie's superposition of the end of the alley incident and the cat walking down the hall--the fading out of the man in the alley as the cat in the hallway fades in--is a clue that something weird may be going on. And it's not until the final scenes that we see what it is.
So timewise the movie really starts with the cat in the hallway. The preview of Llewyn's Gaslight gig and alley scene is just that, a preview. We think we know it's the next morning when the cat wakes Llewyn up (the first time), but further events in the movie point to it being the morning of his gig, not the morning after That's the Coen brothers' time trick number one. The cat then gets out of the apartment door in spite of Llewyn's trying to block it with his foot.
So timewise the movie really starts with the cat in the hallway. The preview of Llewyn's Gaslight gig and alley scene is just that, a preview. We think we know it's the next morning when the cat wakes Llewyn up (the first time), but further events in the movie point to it being the morning of his gig, not the morning after That's the Coen brothers' time trick number one. The cat then gets out of the apartment door in spite of Llewyn's trying to block it with his foot.
The subsequent scenes in the movie lead up to his getting the gig at the Gaslight, and to his staying at the Gorfeins the night before the gig. The next morning he wakes up again with the cat on his chest--the details are different, but it could be thought of as identical to the Gorfein-apartment scene near the beginning of the movie. However, this time Llewyn is able to block the cat with his foot as he's leaving.
So we have a Schrödinger's Cat superposition situation: the cat gets out and the cat doesn't get out. Apparently it's not the same day, but I've gotta look at the movie a little more before I could say that.
Now that I've looked at those scenes again, I have to say: apparently, it is the same day! In the beginning of the movie, we see the note Llewyn is writing to the Gorfeins as he's leaving. He is apologizing for being "a mess" the previous night. In the end-of-movie scenes of Llewyn leaving the apartment we see him writing the note, but aren't able to see what he's writing. However, we know he was a mess the previous night because we see him spitting on the floor at the Gaslight and then heckling Elizabeth Hobby--apparently because he's pissed at Pappi, the owner of the Gaslight, for having slept with Jean. Apparently Jean got Llewyn the gig by having sex with the rather undesirable Pappi.
Here's my best guess on the apparently-the-same-day scenes: this is trick number two. All we are shown is that the experimental set-up is the same, meaning the cat-gets-out morning looks enough like the cat-doesn't get out morning that we can't really say it's not the same morning. The Coen brothers start the two morning sequences with a different cinematic effect, however. Near the beginning of the movie we have the segue of alley scene into cat scene. Near the end, as Llewyn is going sleep, there is a fade out, or fade-to-black. So that we are given a very different cinematic effect of the next mornings' opening scene. It fades in, rather quickly, from the fade out of the previous night. Then we see the "experimental set-up" as it was in the Gorfein-apartment-morning-scenes near the beginning of the movie. Not identical, but a close approximation.
Then, the cat doesn't get out. But on his way to the Gaslight, Llewyn sees a poster of the Walt Disney movie The Incredible Journey. According to the Wikipedia article of the same name, this book was published in 1961 but the movie didn't come out until 1963. Aha! Or actually, not "aha!" Just another Coen bros conundrum. (If we consider that it could be February 1964 that the movie was playing in NYC, then we have another "three years" anachronism, similar to the Santana Abraxis one in A Serious Man.) Anyway, we can imagine using the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics to say the cat superposition of not-getting-out and simultaneously getting-out divides upon a measurement--a viewing of the cat--into two separate universes. Have fun thinking about that! And also you might think about how Larry in A Serious Man and Llewyn are both in one very real sense serious men: we never see them laugh, except for a little chuckle from Llewyn when Jean tells him he'll have to share the money from his Gaslight gig donations with another musician who's performing. In regards to laughter, the Coens themselves are just the opposite, even to the point of responding to recognition of human vulnerability with laughter. I'm like that, too.
Speaking of vulnerability, we can't forget Mikey's suicide, a specter that haunts the movie, although oddly enough, if you zoom in on the album notes under Mike Timlin's photo (Gorfein morning # 1), the name Van Ronk is shown in the little bit of text that can be seen. However, it's Llewyn himself who is supposed to be a simulacrum of Dave Van Ronk. Also, the fat and nasty jazz musician Roland Turner (John Goodman) claims nobody used the George Washington Bridge for suicide--it's supposed to be the Brooklyn Bridge, he says. But the only suicide I've ever heard of taking place from either bridge (yeh, I'm not really up on that subject) is the one in James Baldwin's novel Another Country. Rufus Scott is a despondent jazz drummer who commits suicide by jumping off the George Washington bridge. The novel was published in 1962. (Hmm.) I read it in 1977 or '78. The only thing I really remember from reading it is the description of one of Rufus Scott's shoes coming off because of the air rapidly rushing by as he is falling
Here's my best guess on the apparently-the-same-day scenes: this is trick number two. All we are shown is that the experimental set-up is the same, meaning the cat-gets-out morning looks enough like the cat-doesn't get out morning that we can't really say it's not the same morning. The Coen brothers start the two morning sequences with a different cinematic effect, however. Near the beginning of the movie we have the segue of alley scene into cat scene. Near the end, as Llewyn is going sleep, there is a fade out, or fade-to-black. So that we are given a very different cinematic effect of the next mornings' opening scene. It fades in, rather quickly, from the fade out of the previous night. Then we see the "experimental set-up" as it was in the Gorfein-apartment-morning-scenes near the beginning of the movie. Not identical, but a close approximation.
Then, the cat doesn't get out. But on his way to the Gaslight, Llewyn sees a poster of the Walt Disney movie The Incredible Journey. According to the Wikipedia article of the same name, this book was published in 1961 but the movie didn't come out until 1963. Aha! Or actually, not "aha!" Just another Coen bros conundrum. (If we consider that it could be February 1964 that the movie was playing in NYC, then we have another "three years" anachronism, similar to the Santana Abraxis one in A Serious Man.) Anyway, we can imagine using the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics to say the cat superposition of not-getting-out and simultaneously getting-out divides upon a measurement--a viewing of the cat--into two separate universes. Have fun thinking about that! And also you might think about how Larry in A Serious Man and Llewyn are both in one very real sense serious men: we never see them laugh, except for a little chuckle from Llewyn when Jean tells him he'll have to share the money from his Gaslight gig donations with another musician who's performing. In regards to laughter, the Coens themselves are just the opposite, even to the point of responding to recognition of human vulnerability with laughter. I'm like that, too.
Speaking of vulnerability, we can't forget Mikey's suicide, a specter that haunts the movie, although oddly enough, if you zoom in on the album notes under Mike Timlin's photo (Gorfein morning # 1), the name Van Ronk is shown in the little bit of text that can be seen. However, it's Llewyn himself who is supposed to be a simulacrum of Dave Van Ronk. Also, the fat and nasty jazz musician Roland Turner (John Goodman) claims nobody used the George Washington Bridge for suicide--it's supposed to be the Brooklyn Bridge, he says. But the only suicide I've ever heard of taking place from either bridge (yeh, I'm not really up on that subject) is the one in James Baldwin's novel Another Country. Rufus Scott is a despondent jazz drummer who commits suicide by jumping off the George Washington bridge. The novel was published in 1962. (Hmm.) I read it in 1977 or '78. The only thing I really remember from reading it is the description of one of Rufus Scott's shoes coming off because of the air rapidly rushing by as he is falling
