Ten years ago, Spike Jonze and the Coen Brothers unleashed two men onto cinema: Llewyn Davis and Theodore Twombly. The former (played by Oscar Isaac) was a scruffy, bearded folk musician trying to survive in ‘60s New York’s folk scene, actively burning the few bridges he has left (can he help it?) and falling out of love with his art in the process. The latter (played by Joaquin Phoenix) was a sensitive divorcee at some point in L.A.’s future, wounded by his own skill at fostering intimacy, learning how to love again by falling for a non-corporeal artificial intelligence in his phone. Released within weeks of each other, Inside Llewyn Davis and Her offered a definitive, essentially 2013 dyad on the indie romantic man. But beyond the critical acclaim and awards favor they curried, they may have been the last of their kind.
It’s often lamented that there are no movie stars anymore, but a greater scourge has hit Hollywood, especially in Oscar-nominated dramas: Where are all the pathetic loser leading men? You know the type—they’re conventionally attractive in a windswept scruffy way, but so thoroughly worn out by their own dim prospects, faulty emotional maturity and self-defeating behavior that we can’t help obsessing, idealizing and crushing on them all the way to the Academy Awards. Sure, hot pathetic men persist (they always will), but either their inherent patheticness has been diminished in favor of glamor (Austin Butler in Elvis) or it’s been so comically embellished that they’re not real people (Ryan Gosling in Barbie). Colin Farrell in The Banshees of Inisherin may be our only modern hope.
The true hot pathetic men now largely reside in television, where people like Carmy Berzatto or Kendall Roy can be messed-up, self-destructive and very, very baby to our heart’s content. But what was so special about the double whammy of Inside Llewyn Davis and Her was how organic and unique Llewyn and Theodore felt. Yes, they are perhaps only representative of a subset of white men, and clearly based on specific people who actually lived (Davis is partly based on the autobiography of folk singer Dave Van Ronk; Theodore partly on Jonze after his divorce from Sofia Coppola), but Llewyn and Theodore were so resonant because, beneath their sensitivity and pitiable personalities, they telegraphed clear and vibrant interiority. Ten years on, the question that remains is whether the indie romantic archetype was the best way to explore it.
In most great character dramas, especially the romantic ones, our protagonist becomes fused with the environment around them, and the inner world of our character is reflected in the look and feel of their surroundings. The early ‘60s New York folk scene has already been romanticized to death, but despite the low-lit cafes and fetching fabric clothes, it’s a miserable place in the winter with no fixed place to sleep, supportive community or way to establish your own financial and creative agency.
In a move that almost suggests a muddying of the crisp black-and-white cinematic memory of the conservative ‘50s, everything in Inside Llewyn Davis is gray—gray greens, gray browns, gray skin. Llewyn shambles around brownstones and tenements in a way that doesn’t suggest the world is ignoring his suffering, but (in a perfectly New York manner) sees how he suffers and complains that it’s got better things to worry about. This becomes a cycle: Llewyn hates the world, the world hates Llewyn, and along the way this hatred is passed onto former loves, financial lifelines and his own art. It’s not just the look of Llewyn’s world that’s unaccommodating, so is its conception of time: Inside Llewyn Davis has a mirrored beginning and ending, with the singer assaulted in an alley outside the Gaslight cafe. Llewyn and his environment are in synchronicity, but not necessarily synergy—a side-effect of him putting awful energy out into the world is that it spits it right back at him.
In Her, Jonze’s vision of future Los Angeles is a soft-edged, soft-lit, softboi paradise, a 15-minute city that has magically solved homelessness, poverty and any other societal ill. Theodore writes personalized letters for long-term clients; his work weaves him into the fabric of people’s intimacy. And yet, post-divorce, he’s inescapably lonely.
In the shots of pleasantly crowded public transit, or the placidly calm and just-bright-enough mall at the foot of Theodore’s building, it’s clear that even though this future has solved all pressing political problems, something eats at the heart of its lonely residents—not enough for them to articulate what’s missing around them, but enough to make them feel dispossessed. This is a world you want to step into, but Jonze makes it clear that a futuristic utopia also suffocates the ability to complain, to vent, to be vulnerable and imperfect.
Her’s love story, which pairs Theodore with his sparky new advanced AI Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), is a story of two halves, both of them predicated on Theodore’s vulnerability. First, he pours everything into Samantha; his lovesick vulnerability, which his steely ex (Rooney Mara) severely rubbed up against, is now the framing device for a new type of life to understand human beings. He now navigates the city with an enviable joie de vivre, with a personalized voice in his ear reminding him to be happy, to cherish joy, to express his body in his surroundings.
But as has become so clear recently, an AI is only capable of responding to what’s fed into it, so as Samantha learns to love like Theodore, she passes her knowledge onto the billions of other digital intelligences—and soon he’s the poor homo sapien lagging behind his superintelligent girlfriend who is discovering new definitions of “seeing other people.”
In both films, it’s not just places that are aestheticized, but emotions too. This is the core tenet of romanticization, that experience can take on expressive qualities or even a narrative. Inside Llewyn Davis’ era-appropriate soundtrack serves the same quality as Arcade Fire’s synth-keys hybrid score in Her: Here is a soundscape of melancholy and longing that intentionally undermines its own bitterness by sounding just so darn pretty. Llewyn and Theodore are both lonely men experiencing their loneliness against a very pretty backdrop that both underlines and contradicts their inner turmoil.
The possibility of unlikeability is central to both Llewyn and Theodore: Their behavior is emotionally driven, specific to how their personalities react to being made vulnerable. Llewyn treats the people in his life like shit; Theodore pities himself to the point of irritation. And yet, this seems calculated. The type of indie romantic that audiences were keen to project onto in 2013 had to be flawed, even in a controlled, Hollywood storytelling manner, in order to invite the most relatability. Who hasn’t felt destructive and misguided when it comes to romantic and creative expression, so long as their behavior isn’t too alienating?
A pre-A24 indie-pop audience needed as much opportunity as possible to feel personally, artistically represented on-screen. Combined with Llewyn and Theodore’s coiffed scruffy hair and movie-star looks (plus the fact that they are white, straight men inhabiting worlds devoid of the nuances of queerness or race), and the limits of inviting such specific intimacy are clear.
But in a time when all big films are caked in self-defeating irony, and even the highest-brow American releases arrive with a heightened, detailed awareness of their own limitations, something about the earnest, if limited, romanticism of Inside Llewyn Davis and Her feels charmingly out of place today. The fact that neither 2013 film takes place in the present is paramount: This was a time dominated by the internet, but before it became the intensely parasitic hydro-clusterfuck we now suffer under. By looking back at a musical movement that ultimately only gave a few of its artists a proper legacy, the Coens lament over the missed opportunities of the past. By imagining a future where our need for romance and our love of technology become inseparable, Jonze asks his audience to greet societal change with an open, loving heart. There’s an anxiety to both films, one that acknowledges the imperfections of the present, but not one that grievously, accusingly implicates the audience. Even though one film treated their starring indie romantic much more kindly than the other, Inside Llewyn Davis and Her called on us to feel our way forward through a changing world, making modern romantics of us all. It’s quaint, it’s kitsch—and, looking back, it’s honestly refreshing.
Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.