Cassavetes is film’s Bob Dylan. I mean, it:
Faces
is his “Like a Rolling Stone.” Both of those artworks make a cascading, exuberant attack on the certainties of the audience, both consist of a declaration of revulsion, by the authors, of their subjects (“Miss Lonely” in the Dylan, and Richard and Maria in
Faces
), one which evolves, uncannily, into a declaration of freedom and renewed possibility on those same subjects’ devastated behalves. And both were delivered in the spirit of a deliberate formal blasphemy (by use of excessive length—of scene, and song—and excessive force, excessive bile) against the formats intended, in their day, to contain them.
What’s more, the “social criticism” that underlies both
Faces
and
Shadows
—a social criticism that, as we can see from the more or less contemporaneous art of Richard Yates, Jack Kerouac, Ken Nordine, and the Fugs, was an almost automatic creative response to the American fifties—was as inessential, ultimately, to Cassavetes’s art as “protest” singing is to Dylan’s music,
but equally essential in the development of that
art
. By inscribing provocation as the footing for a relationship with their audience, both Dylan and Cassavetes evolve through social criticism into a vocabulary of emotional defiance, of stances of provocation turned inward.
To go on listing similarities, both Dylan and Cassavetes derive energy from claiming (dubious) membership in a minority of sensitive outsiders, an existentialist identity far more elusive to define than merely “hip,” “avant-garde,” or “leftist.” In making this claim, both of them alienated doctrinaire former supporters like Jonas Mekas, self-appointed guardian of avant-garde film authenticity, and
Sing Out!
magazine and Pete Seeger, self-appointed guardian of protest folk-song authenticity. Both rely on confusing or surprising their artistic collaborators with sudden reassignments (key changes, new pages in the script) in order to overcome recording mediums which tend to freeze out spontaneity. Even the song that plays in the final scene of
Faces
, Charlie Smalls’s “Never Felt Like This Before,” could be seen as a rough draft of Dylan’s indictment: “How does it feeuull?” or “Ballad of a Thin Man”: “Something is happening here / But you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mister Jones?”
John Cassavetes, a writer, crafted language as exacting and persuasive (and funny) in its musical irrationality, its disguised artifice, as anything by Stephen Dixon, Grace Paley, or Don DeLillo (“What did you eat, Ma? You ate fish at Hamburger Heaven? Why would you do that?”). But the films evade capture in nets of language, and, sometimes, in their characters’ inarticulateness, seem
anti
-verbal. Try watching with the picture off: as a purely acoustic experience,
Faces
is pure gibberish and singsong— compulsive unfunny jokes, distorted repetitive song fragments, and hideously banal male pecking-order riffs. The meaning is in the faces themselves, and the stances of the bodies as they reel through these hallways, stances of grief and longing the jokes cover and the bodies uncover. On closer inspection, though, the gibberish is pierced, as if electrified, by lines so nakedly the vessels of pain (“I want a divorce!” or “I thought you were supposed to be saving my life”) that the characters shouldn’t be able to walk or breathe after uttering them, let alone pull the tab on another can of beer and resume their songs.
This is Beckett or Pinter stuff, really. But the material arises out of a laboratory of actorly and photographic experimentation, and is suffused with a fondness for homely gestures of hesitation, of embarrassment. So the craft disguises itself as happenstance disclosure. Though we know better, a part of us thinks it’s all an accident, a documentary glimpse. The artists here have invaded their own privacy, we think, as they invade ours. The same thing that makes it possible for some people to loathe Cassavetes’s actors (and therefore the director who has revealed them to us) causes others of us to sentimentally patronize them in our adoration: They’re too vulnerable to be acting!
We project that same vulnerability onto Cassavetes as an artist when we hesitate to discuss his limitations or compromises, as though he were some species of animal, a beautiful and tender freak set loose in our brutal human world. We kid ourselves that we’re not good enough for him, which becomes a convenient opportunity to refuse to meet him totally. If we can laugh at Orson Welles for his wine commercials and
The
Muppet Movie
, why do we wince at the mention of Cassavetes’s participation in
Big Trouble
or
Whose Life Is It Anyway?
It’s as though we’re hurting Cassavetes by knowing he lived in the world too. Really, we’re seeking safety for ourselves. By holding him in a special category, we quarantine the disturbance he provokes in us by thinking it a report from an exotic, who speaks to us through the gates of a preserve given names like “The Sixties” or “Bohemia” or “Cassavetes-land” (John Voight: “Cassavetes is a place”). At worst, the films can be taken as a childish vote for a “freer way of life” as easy to endorse as it is impossible or undesirable to embody.
Then again, what artist have I ever met
totally
? How did that become my insane standard for this art? J’accuse: Cassavetes is implicated in this. By advertising his artworks, in interview after interview, as an ongoing act of human exploration, he raised the stakes of its reception to intolerance of anything but utter rejection or devotion. Furthermore, he did so, cleverly, without claiming to have accomplished anything definite: no certainty of the value of the result, only of the project of
attempting
the result. (“We’re making a picture about the inner life and nobody really believes that it can be put on the screen, including me, I don’t believe it either, but screw it.”) The films scream:
Believe or leave, but don’t make me
justify myself!
This may just be a way of saying, again, that Cassavetes loaded the stakes between his audience and his films, much as he loaded them between his actors and his material (forcing them to work without coherent instruction in order to throw them into their own emotional resources), and between himself and the sponsors of and collaborators in his directing career (by shooting vast amounts of footage, including scenes he’d probably never intend to use, then editing versions of the films that were five and eight hours long, and by offering and then withdrawing versions that were more “entertaining,” in favor of final cuts that were more ambiguous or confrontational, and by creating enemies of critics, financiers, and talk-show hosts). Peter Bogdanovich: “He wanted to be in a struggle.”
It’s easy to be dissatisfied by other movies after watching Cassavetes’s, and to wish other filmmakers had Cassavetes’s adamancy, his rigor, his fluency, his generosity. Yet I think it’s a mistake to think all films ought to be like Cassavetes’s, or to imagine that the films would retain the meaning we cherish without their real-world context of indifference by the majority of viewers or potential followers (and in truth I’m often pained to see traces of his actual influence in the work of other filmmakers).
To speak of form: Do I want to live in a world where every songwriter wants to be Bob Dylan, or every story writer wants to be Raymond Carver or Donald Barthelme (those two different versions of Cassavetean purity: Carver’s authenticity through austerity, Barthelme’s freedom through silliness)? As it happens, because music is less technically resistant to Dylan’s innovations, and prose less resistant to Carver’s and Barthelme’s, than film is to Cassavetes’s, I’ve come closer to living in those worlds than I have to a world where every filmmaker wants to be John Cassavetes. And on that basis I’d have to say, thanks but no thanks. These freak-geniuses derive their energy and meaning from their commitment to excesses which would become limitations in other hands. They, and Cassavetes, need a world of more typical art the way a shadow needs a wall.
To speak of content: If the world were as Cassavetes and his films sometimes seem to imply it simply ought to be—if everyone lived with utter freedom, like Chet in
Faces
, or if our relationships were all as giddily counterclockwise as Mabel Longhetti’s—would Cassavetes’s films even need to exist? Or, maybe I should ask,
could
they? I doubt it, because the world of emotion and impulse needs ground to stand on, and every provocation needs its Mr. Jones, just as every bully needs a victim (Cassavetes: “I feel that the world is very chicken. By chicken I mean that the world is too tight.” Dylan: “The sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken”). We all may sometimes wish to be Mabel Longhetti, but how much do we actually want to be married to her?
Anyway, to ratify only those kooky characters is to overlook the pensiveness in a film like
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
, with Ben Gazzara’s infinitely self-abnegated image of the artist, or of
Husbands
, for all its apparent indulgence of boozy jollity the saddest and least-resolved of the films, or of
Opening Night
, that masterpiece of dissatisfaction. Characters like
Killing
’s Cosmo Vitelli and
Opening Night
’s Myrtle Gordon are people capable of failing to connect or inspire, people capable of inducing and experiencing disappointment, possibly even boredom. If we’re going to give ourselves entirely to Cassavetes’s work, we’d better find a way to be willing to be disappointed in it, and to disappoint it. Sometimes I want to watch something else.
I’m thinking of the minorest minor characters in the films of John Cassavetes, those dented souls littering the edges of the stories. Some of these are given unforgettably colorful turns (and names), like Zelmo Swift, the obnoxious, bellowing suitor in
Minnie and Moskowitz
(played by the same Val Avery that incarnated McCarthy, in
Faces
), or Billy Tidrow (played by Leon Wagner), the hapless victim of Mabel’s excessive adoration at her spaghetti dinner, the one guest at her table who can’t sing, no matter how much she exhorts him.
The Zelmo and Billy sequences, though those characters are apparently damaged by their encounters with Cassavetes’s protagonists, are endearing. Others are more disturbing. I’m thinking of Eddie (Charles Horvath), the American Indian construction worker in
A Woman Under
the Influence
. Eddie has the misfortune of getting in the middle of Nick Longhetti’s bad mood on the construction site the day after Nick has Mabel committed to the booby hatch; he’s sent tumbling down a sandy grade by Nick, whose hand on a guide rope has been made unsteady by his rage. We learn that in the fall Eddie has broken “every bone in his body,” though when we see him back at work, six months later, he’s more or less intact. (By the way, how has anyone ever gotten away with calling these films “plotless”?) You could miss it on first viewing, but there’s a whole Eddie-the-Indian movie tucked inside
Woman
: Eddie’s the same one that Mabel kicks out of her kitchen, and Eddie’s wife is the one who calls Nick “a shit” when he’s invited the whole gang over to welcome his wife home from her institutionalization. Finally, Billy Tidrow and Eddie sit morosely together on the steps of a trailer as Nick rounds up the rest of the construction workers for his party. Eddie and Billy have become the sole abstainers from the nutty cavalcade, having had enough of Mabel and Nick both, no matter what anyone else thinks.
Lenny (Leonard P. Geer), in
Love Streams
, might be my candidate for the most subtle example of this genre of character: Cassavetes’s incidental roadkills. Here, Sarah Lawson (Gena Rowlands again), in a gesture of severely bizarre empathy, buys her brother Robert Harmon (Cassavetes himself) a household menagerie of pets, acquiring them in one swoop: a batch of chickens, ducks, goats, and miniature horses. She also buys a dog—Jim the dog, he’s called. Jim’s got a caretaker, a human friend named Lenny, and Jim and Lenny are plainly inseparable, the deepest of cross-species friends. We feel no doubt they shouldn’t be parted. But Sarah buys Jim the dog. Suffering a divorce herself, she berefts Lenny of his canine pal. Lenny, like Zelmo, like Billy and Eddie, may stand for Cassavetes’s awareness of the sometimes bruising nature of a brush with charisma, possibly even his own, however eccentric and wellintentioned.
I’m thinking, at last, about the characters in the Cassavetes films who may be the hardest to think about clearly, because they swim shrouded in our moonish affection, and yet also strike us as suspicious: those played by Cassavetes himself. I think it’s no mistake that Cassavetes distrusted himself as an actor, and that we distrust him too. The two films which tend to persuade Cassavetes skeptics, and which strike devotees as “most perfect” (and the best entry point for newcomers), are two in which Cassevetes doesn’t appear, even for a frame:
Faces
and
Woman
. The films in which he’s got the biggest roles are more problematic, and usually only favorites of the already converted:
Husbands
and
Love Streams
. Cassavetes casts himself if not as a villain, then largely as a person of dangerous charm and reserve, one who indulges in the feints and masks that other, more heroically Cassavetean characters usually try to see through and strip away. If the films are a long war on self-congratulation, the characters Cassavetes plays are losers, barricaded by guile from what matters most, facing questions they’ve made themselves too clever or persuasive to answer.
But Cassavetes was maybe too prone to easy binaries in his rhetoric of
free versus constricted
, or
spontaneous versus rehearsed
. Beginning with
Shadows
, with its explicit study of the racial politics of bohemia, the films could be lampooned as a kind of valentine to an “other,” more fluent and deep than you, or me, or himself. He’s been praised as “the most color-blind of directors,” but that takes the bait, again, of thinking Cassavetes a kind of
natural
or
accidental
artist, when we’ve agreed to know how fiercely deliberate he was, and never more so than in his casting. To me, then, the blackness of the girlfriends disappointed by Ben Gazzara’s character in
Chinese Bookie
and by John Cassavetes’s character in
Love
Streams
is anything but color-blind. It’s at least as specific as John Marley’s acne scars. By pairing black women with these men who are both surrogates for himself and studies in tragic reserve, he’s surely driving at something. Unless we believe the choice is guilty overcompensation on Cassavetes’s part, it’s an analysis of a guilty overcompensation on the part of those characters—right?