Dust in the Wind: On Being and Nothingness, Courtesy of Netflix

Down in the basement, on the treadmill, the Phantom confronts cosmic questions, which is the only way to keep running.  Netflix provides the magic carpet.

"Inside Llewyn Daivs" is set in the Greenwich Village of the 1960's, the time Bob Dylan, and a lot of others who you never heard of,  tried to find their voices. This is as bleak a picture of a search for meaning, success, significance as anything since "Midnight Cowboy."  Thank God for the cat. Llewyn has got the girlfriend of his best friend pregnant and he has to come up with the money for the abortion, a tall order in his financial circumstances--he is homeless. He shoulders his obligation--he does not shirk responsibility, for the pregnant woman or for the cat he allows to escape, until he can no longer help. But he learns in the end, other people have made their own choices--his former girlfriend chooses to have his child and the new pregnant  woman may be carrying someone else's child. You just don't know in this life what other people are up to. In the end, we get a glimpse of something else Davis does not know--Bob Dylan is in the wings doing something which is again beyond Davis's reach.

In "The Last Picture Show," the big surprise is again about what you cannot know or have not  guessed.  Seeing her cry at the funeral of Sam the Lion, Sonny asks the   rich, beautiful Lois Farrow why she has come. He didn't know she even knew who Sam was, and it's a small, small town. Sam had owned a down and out diner where the Lois seldom set foot.  It suddenly dawns on Sonny  that Lois  is the woman Sam had once told him about. Sam had an affair, in his youth, with a young woman. They stripped naked and  had ridden horses across the water in "the tank," a pond outside of town. Sonny had asked  Sam why he never married this woman with whom he was so obviously still in love and Sam had shrugged and said she was already married. "You were the woman at the tank. The one Sam rode horses with."  Lois looks at him and smiles, "Sam told you about that?" Yes, Sonny says, still astonished these two could have ever been connected, ever found anything in common.  "He was the only man," Lois says, "Who ever knew what I was worth." And you can see that is all that ever mattered to her.

If we are dust in the wind, then the only way to seem relevant or meaningful seems to be from that sort of meaning and connection.

Somehow, as bleak as "The Last Picture Show" and "Inside Llewyn Davis" are, there is that glimmer of hope.