JOHN CASSAVETES: Lifeworks by Tom Charity

Author:Tom Charity [Charity, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-85712-841-6
Publisher: Omnibus Press
Published: 2012-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Consider Mabel, packing off the kids with her mother (Lady Rowlands) for the night, a blur of anxiety, agitation and excitement. Already it’s clear that this will be an intensely physical performance from Gena Rowlands: free-wheeling a child’s bike down the driveway, or hopping on the lawn after a sandal has gone astray. Yet what follows is an enforced stasis: Mabel in her large, old fashioned, suburban house, waiting.

The kids gone, it’s clear she doesn’t know what to do with herself. She fools with a box for a minute, claps her hands, mutters something, switches on the radio. Cassavetes’ camera adopts an unusually formal distance, static and locked off, as Mabel stands in the shadowy hallway, alone with her thoughts. It’s a faintly theatrical set-up, and a tellingly rare instance, up to this point, of a Cassavetes character in solitude – one thinks of Maria Forst, putting her house in order for the night before Chet surprises her, or Minnie Moore, again, surprised to find Jim in her home. Here, Mabel is in for a disappointment; her date doesn’t show. A burst water main will keep Nick busy all night. Mabel’s more akin to Reuben Widdicombe, neglected every visiting day in A Child Is Waiting.

It makes sense that Cassavetes found his métier in film-making, the most collaborative of art-forms, because for him, to be alone is to be already a little dead; it’s only in communion with others that we can amount to something. “The nature of living is defined not by money, political power and the like, but by virtue of the fact that we are social beings,” Cassavetes said. 7 He would agree with Martin Buber: “The uniqueness of man proves himself in his life with others. For the more unique a man really is, so much the more can he give to the other.”

Yet there’s an element of denial in such a philosophy, as the maker of Faces surely recognised. In their very different ways, Husbands and Minnie And Moskowitz are explicitly flights of fantasy; with A Woman Under The Influence, a more contemplative artist emerges, readier to confront existential ideas and fears. Loneliness is precisely Mabel’s problem, and this is one of the reasons A Woman Under The Influence had a mixed reception from feminists, who welcomed the film’s implicit criticism of the housewife’s constricted role in society, but not Mabel’s self-insufficiency or her emotional fragility. On the face of it, she’s no feminist role model. For Cassavetes, ‘Women like Mabel can go mad simply because they are isolated in their homes. Mabel must find out what others are thinking just so that she may gain a feeling for life. It is only by interacting with them, by engaging in some sort of a competition with others that she feels alive.’ 8

She wilts some, in her floral print dress, but Mabel isn’t entirely negated in her solitude: the aria playing on her radio is allowed to continue even as night falls around her on the porch;

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