Umm, Shack makes it more complicated than it is. It is actually quite simple.

He is beaten at the Gaslight. Then we jump back a week or so and the rest of the film builds up to that night when he is beaten up. That is ALL there is to it.

shack is wrong (as per usual), he writes two notes (one the first morning of the film, and one the morning of the gaslight fight)

lolshack

Ok I re-watched the scenes and actually both the morning scenes and the Gaslight performance are not IDENTICAL. The timing is a little bit off in moments. The guy who beats him up moves towards him and talks at a little different points than at the beginning. When Llewyn does his little peek-a-boo hello? into the hallway the lighting is different and the cat walks past him maybe 0.05 seconds earlier or something the 2nd time. The scene where the cat wakes him up a little different, the first time it jumps on him then to the window, the 2nd time it's just on him and then he makes a greater motion to wake up. (this could also have happened at different times though - the cat jumps on him, to the window, Llewyn dozes off, then the cat jumps on him again to wake him up) So the Coens were just not rolling back their film reels, which ties into the possibility both nights happened separately and Llewyn is just caught in a circle

However I feel it's still pretty irrational to think that the morning of the Gaslight isn't a repeat but the night is. As mentioned his little hallway hello? peek-a-boo is 99% the same scene, in addition to writing the note (which I made a mistake before: It never shows at all what he writes the 2nd time). I feel like if the Coens wanted to make it clearly a week later than the first time, they wouldn't have made the morning repeat that hard. If Llewyn had walked into the hallway without a hello or had written the note in his underwear it'd have signified a difference. Making it seem like the morning is a repeat when it isn't, is pretty unnecessary. It also just fits the purgatory metaphor to believe they made Llewyn repeat an entire day, instead of cutting a line somewhere in the afternoon where the film starts repeating itself

Also the whole business of the note gets messy if you believe there's two. Basically Llewyn's apology in the first one would have to be for an incident we never saw, despite the film in a Chekov's gun way, making it really seem like it reveals to us "this is what he apologizes for" later in the film when he gets drunk on the Gorfein's floor. Before he writes another note the next day that really looks like the same as the first one. At the beginning of the film he'd have apologized for one incident in the note and for a separate night to the Gaslight owner.

It simply makes the most sense to say we see Llewyn having the entirety of the 24th/Gaslight day twice - Llewyn wakes up, writes a note for being drunk the night before, apologizes to the Gaslight owner, plays and gets beat up. I don't see why people would be adverse to the concept that the film first flashes back from the night of the Gaslight to the morning, then from the morning to a week before. After all, the film goes from showing us "Llewyn was drunk last night" via the Gaslight owner apology and getting beat up, to him then writing a note to the Gorfeins for his condition night before - which is a clear indication we just jumped from night to morning of the same day

You're unique.

I think the chronology is intentionally slightly ambiguous to suggest the eternal recurrence that Llewyn is stuck in. About the two morning scenes at the Gorfeins, I think the fact that in one of them the cat escapes, and in the other Llewyn prevents the cat from escaping suggests that these are in fact two different occasions, where the similarities serve to amplify the aforementioned eternal recurrence, the kind of Möbius strip that Llewyn's life has become.

Shack, you're like that colleague of mine who thinks that Joseph Gordon Levitt's character in Looper is actually the same as the little boy/The Rainmaker/Emily Blunt's son.

or those monsters who believe that mikey is the gorfeins' son

No, because there is no evidence for that

Llewyn apologizes to the Gorfeins for his condition the night before in a note, right after we see how the night before the Gaslight performance he was drunk. That is a clear indication he's writing the note the morning of the Gaslight performance.

That's before considering he peeks into the hallway and says hello the exact same way and writes a note in his brown coat both mornings

So while people can believe what they want, if you guys don't see why there's evidence supporting the "note writing scene" as happening the morning of the Gaslight and later getting repeated at the end of the week as an extension of the Gaslight night repeating, at least for it to be a feasible explanation, I'm sorry but you aren't being logical. The case can be made the entire day is a non-repeat easier than just the night repeats but the day doesn't. By the day starting so similarly IMO it's intended to be an extension of his night also repeating, whether flashback or a separate day

One Shack style theory I always found neat: the idea Woody Allen's character in Anything Else is not a real flesh-and-blood person, but a type of Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come version of Jason Biggs' character sent to right his life at a time of creative and romantic crisis.

Thanks Shack, now I hate Inside Llewyn Davis.

I haven't seen AE but speaking of Allen, me and some reviewer at IMDB are seemingly the only ones who got that To Rome With Love is a supernatural concept film like Midnight In Paris (Rome's magical powers made everyone's fantasies come true), I am still surprised at how little this has been recognized since it is completely obvious once you realize it

Also, have you guys seen the Brick is a time traveller Anchorman theory? http://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/com ... confidence http://whatculture.com/film/7-pieces-ev ... veller.php

omg

Did you guys know that in The Dark Knight, The Joker doesn't even exist in the movie and is merely a demon haunting Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent, and that Heath Ledger isn't actually dead but was actually consumed by the real demon upon which The Joker is based and is now himself a demon haunting a home in Connecticut?

Surprised it's not more well-known.

Speaking of The Dark Knight, it was on TV the other day (duh) and they said that when he blows up the hospital, and there's a delay in the explosions, Ledger IMPROVISED that scene. Which is fantastic.

Well did you know that Pandas make great sushi?

This thread is gold.

I laughed so hard. So hard.

I like this movie. I just reread the last few pages and I'm still not really sure what Shack is arguing happens, but this movie is very good and cool and I have a positive opinion of it.

That he writes the note at the beginning, the morning of the Gaslight performance (the film eventually shows what he's apologizing for when it gets to the end of the week) Still don't know how people can't see this

Because you are on class-A drugs and over-complicating it.

Ok I hate to keep this going but I simply can't believe this isn't getting through

At the end of the film the Coens show us the Gaslighr events that play out the same but not identical. At the end of the film they also show us the morning before his Gaslight performance, which plays no less 'the same but not identical' (the cat wakes him up, he peekaboos the hallway while the cat runs ahead of him, he writes note). In addition every other example of the "repeat day" trope in film or tv has begun with a repeat morning scene. And you're telling me it's crazy to think the morning's near identical scenes are as much a repeat of the night's that same day?

For the record, based on the non identical repeat scenes, I think best interpretation is that he's in a literal metaphysical time loop. But the most obvious interpretation is the entire day, morning and night, is made to feel like a repeat whether it happened or not

shut the fuck up already

How u?