Filming the Cultural Work of Americana Music: Inside Llewyn Davis and the Disruptive Potential of Nostalgic Sound

Abstract

The Coen Brothers’ exploration of the cinematic and musical past is more than mere nostalgia. The looping narrative structure of Inside Llewyn Davis defies simple assumptions about chronology, moving simultaneously back in time and forward to a different version of the present. Similarly, Americana music points back to a dynamic past that can be the source of various potential futures. The temporal paradox that defines Inside Llewyn Davis allows the Coens to scrutinize the structures and discourses inherent in our understanding of our shared, imaginary musical past. One of these structures is class. By untangling the relationships between the past, class, and the South, the film represents and explores the disruptive cultural work of the type of nostalgia central to Americana music. Thus, the film’s disruption of cinematic time serves to trouble class lines, distinctions, and assumptions, exposing the processes and discourses that make class a structure that seems natural, inevitable.