Cassavetes and 'Shadows'

Some sixty years ago, John Cassavetes was here, in the streets of Manhattan, filming. From Times Square to the Museum of Modern Art, he showed us the lights and the sculptures and the people of a city that was tilting away from the post-war decade and into the heady years of Kennedys, Kings, and Malcolms to come. Prescient of its place in time, Shadows is the first film John Cassavetes directed and, regarding the version he released in 1959, it is the only film he created that distinctly explores themes of blackness and black identity in an American urban landscape. Too Late Blues, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Love Streams all depict identity and race in different and attention-worthy ways, but none of Cassavetes’ directorial work after 1959 engages with these topics to the same degree or with the same immediacy.

It is also a film to which we can turn in the present, putting our focus on same and similar — more critically contextualized — themes. We are in the grip of ideological division and a persistent call to point out the other, to criminalize the other, and to minimize, mitigate, and incarcerate — or shoot and kill — the other for the very act of setting foot on the wrong street in a town, the very act of setting foot on U.S. soil. The camps are open again, in 2018, and it’s hard to imagine that Cassavetes would believe the United States could look like the one in which we now live.

Given recent history, Shadows is now a film somewhat out of time — not that brutality against the other took much of a break in the mid-20th Century — but it stands as a document, a gorgeous thing, deeply invested in stories about blackness and whiteness. At this moment in history, it’s possible to reassert a place for Shadows among the most crucial, nuanced, and humane stories about race and racial identity. Nuance and humaneness are in short supply, circa 2018; we’ll take every hour with them that we can get.

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Shadows is largely the story of three black characters — Bennie, who runs with a gang of white friends; Lelia, his sister, a socialite in a largely white circle; and Hugh, their brother, a singer struggling with his career. From Manhattan diners to mid-town museums, to expensive apartments, to tenements and downtown music clubs, the film follows this trio’s days and nights, the three characters’ relationships, frustrations, and hopes unfolding in a Beat-inflected, mid-century New York City — a place and moment on the cusp of the crucible decade to come.

In numerous ways, the lives of these characters are steeped in states of apartness. To be black in Shadows is at times to disappear into a crowd, to withdraw into corners, to resist even the most inviting moments of companionship. And to be black in New York City, and in the United States, in the world of Shadows, is to strain against vanishing, to struggle for a spotlight, to strive for time and a voice and a chance to express and create without shackles or the near-certainty of short-shrift.

Experiences of blackness and identity in Shadows are also shaped by the relative lightness and darkness of one’s skin. Bennie, who is black and passes for white — and who, for a time chooses a white identity in the film (Cassavetes explains the dynamic at work, in a character sketch) — spins away in anguish from the people and places around him. We find Bennie jamming himself into corners at jazz parties, climbing up and out of the throng or squashing himself into the far reaches of diner seats, masticating late-night lines until he finally says to a white woman who leans close: “I think I’m caught in this booth.” We can gaze into the face of his anguish in the form of close-ups during an apartment party during which all the details of the black guests Bennie sees are exaggerated in Cassavetes’ lens. Black people’s mouths, black people’s teeth, their lips; Bennie’s hyper-focus finally erupts. He lashes out, striking a woman who’s just said to him, “You really want to join in the party but maybe you don’t know how”. Later, Bennie stands outside a club, the sound of jazz coming through the door. He sings a nursery rhyme: “Mary had a little lamb / its fleece as white as snow / And everywhere that Mary went / the lamb was sure to go.” The refrain resonates with Bennie’s struggle to inhabit an identity, whether to lead his white friends into another alley dustup or instead, perhaps, to join this other party, the one waiting back at his own apartment.

Bennie’s sister, Lelia, is also on a journey, and she also passes for white. Her days and nights at the start of Shadows revolve around intellectual and literary gatherings, apartments full of academics and drinkers and almost everyone in them is white. When Lelia makes love to a new friend, Tony, who is a white man she’s met at one of these soirées, Cassavetes moves the camera from an African mask on the wall over his bed, panning down to the two of them in the sheets. Lelia is crestfallen. She tells Tony that she thought making love would mean, “Two people would be as close as it’s possible to get. But instead we’re just two strangers.” Strangers to each other, in the moment, and soon to be strangers in new ways. When Tony meets Lelia’s brother, Hugh, whose skin is dark, he realizes Lelia’s blackness and his realization is plain to everyone. And so is its implications. The consequences are irreversible: after Hugh sends him away, and after Lelia resists his reconciliation, Cassavetes makes it clear that Tony will find no avenue back to that bed under the mask.

Hugh is a singer in the business of white-run entertainment, struggling with the ways race and identity play into his struggles for a career — whether he gets to become a respected artist or a dressed-up buffoon telling jokes before the show girls come out to dance. Hugh finally shouts out his frustration, arguing with his friend and manager in Grand Central Station as they prepare to leave for another string of fall-apart gigs: “Let’s get the hell out of here, the States,” he says. “We’ll go to Paris…France… Africa!”

Cassavetes provides no neat solutions to these challenges. Hugh does not leave the States; he boards a train for the next show. Lelia dances in the arms of a black man. Bennie, bloodied after a new fight between his group of white friends and a rival group, finally says that he’s giving up on the scene they’ve created. Standing alone in the darkening street, smoking, he becomes a silhouette joining others on the sidewalk, slipping from the focus of the lens.

The director largely disavowed viewpoints on Shadows that foregrounded race, saying in interviews that the film is primarily a story about people and their lives. Some critics have reinforced that disavowal, some have resisted it, but the film itself opposes even its director’s objections. Cassavetes’ exploration, circa 1959, of a subject that envelops us, sixty years after he turned his camera on the streets and museums of New York City, inarguably focuses on exploring race and identity. It is a film that we needed then and it is one that we need now — now, more than ever — a monumental work in this respect, a film that presents dimensions and details of black and white identity in America that are complicated, compassionate, and provocative.

A version of this essay first appeared at OUPblog.