On Cassavetes’ birthday

Today would have been John Cassavetes’ eighty-ninth birthday. Born in the winter of 1929, he died in winter, 1989, sixty years into his life, having directed a dozen films that changed the way his audience — and among his audience, many filmmakers to come — experienced human emotion on the screen.

Imagine what Cassavetes could have made throughout his sixties and seventies and eighties. Think, for a moment, on the director, alive and well, writing and making films in a post-9/11 United States, in the eras of Clinton, Obama, Bush, and Trump. Lacking him as a living presence, we can still turn to Cassavetes, however, and in looking back at his works we can find a lens onto a version of the world that, given the recent state of affairs on this planet, we sorely need.

Cassavetes’ films present us with complicated characters that struggle with complicated lives, characters that exist within spaces marked by myriad disconnections and contradictions. However, they not only struggle, fight, and argue but also — sometimes — they stop and deeply listen to each other and to themselves. Even if the characters that fill Cassavetes’ films are prone to bad turns, and they frustrate each other, groping for authority and control across chasms of unresolved behaviors and emotional double-backs — at the core of these individuals we also find depictions of a recurrent urge for understanding, a fumbling for compassion and empathy.

If we set aside, in this essay, the influence of his core crew of actors on this outcome — from Peter Falk to Ben Gazzara, and then others, and then there is the monumental attention that we must pay to Gena Rowlands’ powerful, tragic, fierce, and sometimes broken portrayals throughout his films — in relation to these struggles and urges one way to explore Cassavetes’ films is by giving focused attention to how men treat and talk to each other across the works. Cassavetes did many things as a director, but one thing he did many times was to put his lens on a problematic, multivalent, and expansive male discourse. And from this discourse we can learn. 

We find examples in Husbands (1970). Despite its fractured and problematic bar-table and hotel-room aggressions — and often these are aggressions of men upon women, and of the young upon the old — the film is rich with graveyard conversations about truths and lies, with crowded bathroom-stall fugues about the nature of mortality and the terror of aloneness, and with front-yard wind-ups on the topics of power within families and the authority we confer to our bosses and our paymasters and our partners. All of this is absorbed and stored-up and then finally erupts. They are, often in the roughest of ways, men, these individuals, but we cannot overlook their humanity on the screen, their empathetic cores pushing through barriers. They share weaknesses with one another — and by film’s end sometimes with women as well — and to share weakness, in Husbands, but also across all of Cassavetes’ twelve films, is a discourse of bonding. When we watch men bond, in these stories, what is unfamiliar becomes more well known.

A complicated world of men communicating about ideas and experiencing surprise as the unfamiliar — and the defamiliarizing — becomes more well known is also central to the days and nights of Shadows (1958–9). It is at the heart of its black characters and its white characters as they try and fail (and sometimes succeed) to build and hold onto bonds, for certain, and it is also at the core of another element of the film, one in which the character Tony and his friends race the city’s sidewalks. They play-fight, or they really fight, and they retreat into diners where they restlessly seek the attention of women or girls. At another point in the story, however, in a museum sculpture garden, moving through a world of different angles, of somewhat alien representations and depictions, their actions and reactions are shown in new ways. Some of these Shadows men resist the new — the art is too feminine or it is, as Tom says, for the elite. Others open wider, and the discourse moves in different directions. We should be struck when tough-guy Dennis shouts at Tom, “I don’t know everything!” For a moment, for the two of them, and for us, a conversation between two difficult men can contain at once the object and worth of looking at the unfamiliar — in this case at art — and also the value of acknowledging expressions not immediately decipherable, not intuitively recognized, not quickly categorizable by history, by lessons handed down from the traditional heads of the kitchen tables at which these men were raised … or maybe never raised at all.

We can look also to the discourse between characters in Love Streams (1984). Adding yet another dimension to the way men speak to men in the films Cassavetes made, in an early scene at a cabaret, a man dressed as a woman asks the character Robert Harmon (played by Cassavetes) if he is gay. The exchange is fraught with both confidence and tremulousness. The asker is steady and perhaps gentle, allowing Robert to grapple with the question, his face rippling with nervous energy, with surprise, and with the shy state of his apparent and immediate unsureness. No one is angry. No lines are drawn. Nobody is other-ed. As we saw in Shadows, these moments between men can contain multitudes.

Ray Carney, writing about Cassavetes’ films, ties something akin to this defamiliarized state of mind — what I’m referring to as Dennis’ state of “I don’t know everything” — to larger themes, to what he suggests are Emersonian concepts of a fluid and volatile world in which what we think and feel is always in motion. To proclaim “I don’t know everything” is on the one hand to invite disagreement but on the other it is to demand recognition, to say, perhaps, along with Emerson (and Carney) that reality and knowledge are just snapshots of experiences. They don’t always form full pictures. To say “I don’t know everything” is to court what Ilana Simons refers to as a wiser willingness for vulnerability — an openness to receive that is accessed by a high modality of kindness. “I don’t know everything” is an argument for compassion. It is to make a case for thoughtfulness, especially in moments afire with confrontation.

In a time when we are overwhelmed by confrontation, when we are startled by choruses that once again claim the right to disenfranchise, to detain, to exclude, remove, and ban, and in a time when new authorities smack of old authoritarians, a time of shunners, ridiculers, and of men — yes, almost always men — who wish to squash fluidity and ambiguity, looking at these films of Cassavetes we come upon a way to mark a birthday. We can turn to these stories and these struggling characters for a difficult, empathetic, and multivalent look at how we speak to and treat each other — especially at how men speak to and treat each other, and how they shape words and deeds towards women. On John Cassavetes’ eighty-ninth birthday, pick one of these films and put it on, for that is what he always wanted us to do, and they are gifts that he has given us.

A version of this article first appeared at OUPblog in 2016.