John Cassavetes, Underrated Surrealist

I was twenty when I ingested most of Cassavetes’s work. (It was a real heavy trip.) Like many young men first encountering his films, I felt like I was being exposed to the raw truth. There was no evidence of staging or phoniness, ingredients that until then I had assumed were necessary to narrative. It seemed that the camera lens had been caked with bullshit all along, and Cassavetes was the only filmmaker capable of scraping it clean. Maybe so. But his truth is no vérité. It’s taken me until middle age (wherein most of his films take place) to appreciate that he was, among other things, a top-notch surrealist. I don’t doubt that every artistic decision he made was deeply felt in his gut, but that gut frequently led him to dissociative fugues and dream logic that could make David Lynch blush. The weirdness is omnipresent but doesn’t necessarily register as such because there are no signposts, and there’s no time wasted acknowledging a “normal” world from which we’ve deviated.

Alone among his films, Opening Night is built on a premise that would seem to beg for a “conventional” postmodern treatment (whatever that is). An intensely acted drama about an intensely acted drama: how blatantly meta! Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) is a star actor apparently suffering a breakdown during the rehearsals of The Second Woman, a play that requires her to face her own aging. Her erratic behavior agitates and frightens the director, the writer, and her costar Maurice (Cassavetes himself) as they struggle to hold the production together.

Now, at the very least, from Hamlet onward, plays-within-plays have provided a vehicle for some useful contrast to and commentary upon the overarching story, but Cassavetes takes none of the bait that any other writer would find irresistible. Indeed, the most extraordinary thing about The Second Woman is that it seems so wildly, unabashedly . . . Cassavetean. It may or may not be any “good”—we experience it only as fractured sketches, bits, and pieces that we can’t even trust are being played faithfully—but its rhythms are unmistakably that of our filmmaker. (And surely not because he, in reality an extremely experienced working actor, lacked knowledge of the fact that most people’s work doesn’t feel like his. I’m certain he had a long list of writers and directors he might have parodied or taken potshots at had he been inclined merely to tell a tale of showbiz.) The Second Woman and Opening Night are all part of the same dream for us.

The final eleven-minute theatrical performance of Myrtle and Maurice as “Virginia” and “Marty”—or is it indeed just Gena and John?—is, for me, one of the great wonderments of cinema. A drunken and deranged Myrtle takes the stage with Maurice for the show’s closing scene, having been hilariously praised moments earlier by a stagehand for being able to walk while so wasted (perhaps the sole laugh-out-loud zinger in the Cassavetes oeuvre). We are acutely aware that, either by self-destructive design or just physical collapse, she is likely to drive the scene off the rails. But it soon dawns on us, watching from beyond the proscenium, that we have no clue what on-the-rails would look like anyhow.

Why has it seemed so surprising, and thrilling, to see Cassavetes celebrating actorly behavior? Himself, his wife, his best friends: of course actors were his people. Yet his life’s work seemed to have been to wrestle with the contradictions of the job. The most naked and direct of creative artists, with only their selves as instruments, actors are also the most duty bound, always indentured to the director, the script, the show. Cassavetes worked hard to remove the crutches and excuses born of their servitude, even as he knew the freedom he offered might wound them (compare Peter Falk’s adorable Columbo to his work in Husbands and A Woman Under the Influence). Certainly no one thinks of his films as entertainment, yet in this scene, driven by desperation, entertainment becomes briefly heroic. I’ve never seen anything else like it: a tightrope act without a net, but also without the rope, or the laws of gravity—only the spirits of the performers precariously balancing upon each other.