The Obsessed

Pauline Kael reviewed John Cassavetes's A Woman Under the Influence in a yawning rerun where R.D. Laing--that tired old intellectual straw man--is propped up only to be laid flat. Going on nothing more concrete than the fact that "The theories of R.D. Laing, the poet of schizophrenic despair, have such theatrical flash that they must hit John Cassavetes smack in the eye," she proclaims his movie "the work of a disciple." She then criticizes the film for straying from a strict Laingian analysis and plunges in the final stake by rejecting the movie because she rejects Laing's view of society. Kael has simply missed the point. She tries to transform Cassavetes's film into a celluloid peg and cram it into a neat intellectual hole. But the movie doesn't fit and neither does the man. Neither is quite so neat, articulate or peggable.

I tried to do the same thing when I interviewed Cassavetes. Steeped in the Harvard analytical tradition, I wanted him to "name" his movie, that is, I wanted him to take his portrait of Mabel Longhetti--a woman deemed mad by society because she was more loving than she was supposed to be--and place it in some kind of historical framework. It didn't work. The problem was that our minds worked differently; our mainsprings were as different as a housebroken canal and a frenzied torrent.

I think anyone who makes a film is an obsessed person. I'm obsessed by the picture's content, whether this disease of ours can permeate the air, change people, make some imprint. It's something that you don't want to do every day because it is sick. It's like you're on a toboggan and you're going down a hill and you don't give a damn about anything as long as you can do this one thing. We've broken ourselves, broken our lives, gone into debt but that's the least of it. We break all relations, all ties with anyone else and then at the end we'll say, let's never do this damn thing again because it's really killing us. And the minute it's over we can't wait to do it again."

Cassavetes did not skip hot off the pop "victimization" bandwagon, as Kael claims. He's not a John Guillerman or a Mark Robson--the directors of The Towering Inferno and Earthquake, respectively--who each latched on to the season's big destruction bust, star-studding their creations for box office insurance. He just doesn't see films that way.

"The movies are a dark and mysterious memory. They are in every little town and in every eye both the hope and the despair. And they are the chronicle by which we live. Not television. Not books either because books are really much more commercial in a sense. Films cannot be commercial. There's too much effort by too many people involved that have to get along. So if a film comes out and it's good, you know those people had to share."

It can easily be argued that films can be commercial and that television and books are often not, but that isn't the point. The point is that Cassavetes thinks films are not commercial, and, by extension, does not make films with commercial intent. What drives him isn't money; it's his "obsession." For Cassavetes is one of those oddities known as an artist who is often dealt with as such only after the fact--that is, in the mummified context of crusty lecture halls and dusty museums. He speaks not to the mind, but to the gut.

"It's too difficult to start from nothing with an idea and bring it to millions of people where it means something to millions of people. They don't just walk out of the theater and say that's it. They walk out, they're shook up in some sense. I don't even understand the sense that they're shook up in. I demand people to be emotional."

Kael is perfectly right in sensing that "he somehow thinks that Nick and Mabel really love each other and that A Woman Under the Influence is a tragic love story." Perhaps the crux of the movie is the scene where Mabel's husband, Nick, yields to outside pressures and agrees to commit her to a mental institution. Mabel tries to defend herself: "I always understood you and you always understood me--till death do us part, Nick."

Mabel and Nick's world is a simple dichotomy: there are the two of them on one side and everyone else on the other. It is Nick's ambivalence, his teetering between loyalty to convention and loyalty to his "whack-o" wife that is the stuff of Cassavetes's tragedy.

Cassavetes denies any political implications: "I don't think it has anything to do with women's traditional role. It has to do with a woman in marriage or a woman bound by love. There are going to be extreme problems that are very hard to handle and that have nothing really to do with a man. It has to do with your own personal approach to what you want out of your life that you don't need anyone else to handle for you. I don't think there's any set cultural pattern that would tell you when you're in love with somebody how to represent yourself to him."

This is where I lost Cassavetes. Because it seemed to me that their problems lay precisely in their conflicts with "normal" society's behavioral expectations. After all, the official line on civilization is that the society draws the line around the scope of an individual's actions in the interests of order and that the individual must sublimate his or her impulses which threaten that order. Mabel crossed that line by being too open or, as Cassavetes put it: "She had an idea that put her in an institution." As for the way they dealt with each other, society told Nick to commit her, so he committed her. Their problem was not a universal problem of love, as Cassavetes claims, but of love within advanced civilization.

Mabel's inability to defend herself against the people who wanted to commit her has a lot to do with women's traditional role. Mabel couldn't defend herself because she wasn't sure she had all that much to defend. As she says of her children. "The only thing I ever did in my life that was anything at all was to make you guys." Given the classic female yardstick of achievement she was absolutely right. It's no wonder that her first response to the news of her impending committal was "Tell me what you want me to be, Nick. I can be anything at all." Despite Cassavetes's denial of political intent, he says: "The Mabel character has a home and a husband that loves her and everything that would make a person extremely happy by the book, and yet she has this tremendous feeling of worthlessness because he has no place within the framework of this society that she's trying to abide by."

Kael criticizes A Woman Under the Influence for being "entirely tendentious: it's all planned, yet is isn't thought out." Her initial premise is wrong; Cassavetes is no Laingian disciple. Laing's The Politics of Experience is an ode to schizophrenia. He claims that they aren't really mad; but that society is. The thrust of the movie is not, however, to explore the reaches of madness but to scrutinize the problems of a love relationship. To call Cassavetes a Laingian is to assume that he analyzes what he sees the same way an intellectual does. But the only thread connecting his view of society with an intellectual's is the same starting material. An intellectual places what he sees on some historical yardstick; Cassavetes grabs the historical second and expresses it as a universal eternity. While analysing a picture's content allows the intellectual and the artist to compare notes, there comes a point when you have to accept an artist on his own terms. That is, if an artist's work eludes your mind but smacks your viscera, well, then maybe it's time to hang up the old cerebral touchstone.