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The Adventure of Insecurity: The Films of John Cassavetes
Author(s): Ray Carney

Source: The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Spring, 1991), pp. 102-121
Published by: Kenyon College
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RA Y CARNEY
THE ADVENTURE OF INSECURITY

The Films of John Cassavetes
Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth the taking or keeping
if it were not. . . . Onward and ever onward. . . . the coming only is
sacred. . . . Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
We realize this life as something always off its balance, something in

transition, something that shoots out of a darkness through a dawn into a
brightness that we feel to be the dawn fulfilled.
WILLIAM JAMES
IF anyone deserves to be called the father of American independent film-

making, it is John Cassavetes, who died in 1989. America's preeminent
outlaw director defined what being truly independent means. While
Hollywood pursued its perennial quest after ever greater hits, starring ever big-
ger names, financed with ever more astronomical budgets, Cassavetes, the wild
home-movie man, doggedly went the opposite direction, creating small-scale,
personal pictures, paid for out of his own pocket, and featuring his family and
friends in the leads. In a cinematic universe dominated by multinational con-
glomerates devoted to the mass production of mass entertainment, he and his
actress-wife, Gena Rowlands, ran a mom-and-pop operation dedicated to indi-
vidual artistic expression.
Cassavetes did it all, or as much as any one person could. He was a one-
man studio -writing, vdirecting, photographing, editing, and frequently even
acting in his own off-Hollywood productions. In the twenty-seven years sepa-
rating his first film, Shadows (1957), from his last, Love Streams (1984), he com-
pleted eight fully independent features -Faces, Husbands, Minnie and
Moskowitz, A Woman under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie,
and Opening Night, in addition to the two previously named works; and three
studio co-productions - Too Late Blues, A Child Is Waiting, and Gloria (he
was less satisfied with all three of these insofar as he was required to make
compromises in their creation).
102
By any measure, it was an extraordinary accomplishment - a body of
work that one critic has called "the greatest sustained individual achievement
in the history of American cinema." Yet the sad fact is that almost all of
Cassavetes's films are still unknown to the average (or even the considerably
above-average) filmgoer. Over the years, Cassavetes acted in a series of big
box-office productions - from Rosemary's Baby and The Dirty Dozen to
Tempest-in order to finance his own independent work, and the irony was
that he became better known as an actor in those movies than as a maker of his
own. Ignorance about Cassavetes's work is just as pervasive in the film studies
programs of our major universities, where the students and professors have an
equally cursory awareness of his directing.
It is only natural to wonder how a group of films could have fallen into
the cracks so completely, both commercially and critically. Part of the expla-
nation is simply the terrifying economics of film distribution and publicity in
America. Lacking the backing and the budgetary resources of major studio
sponsorship, Cassavetes self-promoted and self-distributed most of his own
work, which means that he actually carried the film cans from city to city try-
ing to convince a distributor to book his movie, organizing small-scale screen-
ings at local theaters and giving interviews to journalists to drum up free
publicity. When all was said and done, with a little luck the movie might play
in ten or twelve cities for a few weeks. All things considered, it's probably not
that surprising that so few people saw most of the films during their extremely
limited and brief releases.
The unavailability of Cassavetes's films on video in America is similarly
traceable to their not being plugged into studio distribution package-deals
(where "ancillary rights" are sold before filming has even begun). Even at this
late date in the video revolution, not one of Cassavetes's eight fully indepen-
dent productions is available in the United States on either tape or disc. Love
Streams was briefly available on tape several years ago from MGM/UA; it
was, however, dropped from circulation after a limited release. Gloria, the only
Cassavetes title that is currently available on tape, was one of the three studio
productions with which the filmmaker was dissatisfied, and Big Trouble, which
is generally available on video and is misattributed to Cassavetes, is actually
not his work.
To make a difficult situation worse, Cassavetes's work fell squarely between
the two stools of American film criticism and viewership -the journalistic and
the academic. Consequently, even when his movies got screened, they often
didn't get reviewed (at least not sympathetically) or couldn't find an audience.
They were too sophisticated and demanding for the Sneak Previews-type
reviewer and audience: the coke and popcorn crowd, the pop-culture trash col-
lectors, the genre-film slummers. At the same time, they were entirely too
shaggy and baggy to interest the high-culture devotees who write and read the
toniest academic criticism. Cineastes who equate art with gorgeous photog-
raphy and literate dialogue will never understand Cassavetes's barbaric yawp.
103
104 THE KENYON REVIEW
The commercial coup de grace was probably Cassavetes's refusal to

become trendy. There are no fashionable themes or movie-of-the-week issues
in his entire oeuvre. His films never punched any of the topical hot buttons
within contemporary film commentary that would have guaranteed them at
least a modicum of general attention. The coincidence between A Woman
under the Influence (1975) and the mid-seventies women's movement -which
briefly embraced the film and helped to make it one of Cassavetes's best-known
works - was entirely accidental, as the filmmaker insisted after the movie's
release. Although there are plenty of strong and interesting women and lots of
men who fight for their lives and honor, there is not a single feminist or Viet-
nam vet in all of Cassavetes's work, no more than there are any of the other
staples of "relevant" filmmaking: terrorists, drug dealers, venal policemen,
greedy capitalists, or corrupt public officials. Unlike the work of Spike Lee,
David Putnam, or Oliver Stone, Cassavetes's films do not offer the sort of
obvious cultural generalizations which elicit knee-jerk journalistic discussion
and debate (and which most journalists equate with artistic importance).
Cassavetes's work does not lend itself to public statements or political
stances because the drama is generated more from contradictions and confu-
sions within a character, than from conflicts between characters. This sets it
apart from the vast majority of American films. With only the fewest excep-
tions, American movies imagine life in terms of a myth with three com-
ponents: Individualism: the plot revolves around a personal quest led by one
main character. He or she acts largely alone, or with the assistance of a few
allies (most commonly, a single romantic partner); Competition: the narrative
is organized around conflicts and confrontations between individuals or between
an individual and an institution; Materialism: practical rewards or penalties
are the outcome of the competition between the opposed characters; fame,
money, power, or sex are the payoffs for the individual's risk-taking behavior.
In short, it is the ideology of entrepreneurial capitalism, a set of assump-
tions which virtually every American feature film internalizes (even those that
intend to critique capitalism). Ostensibly counter-capitalistic films like
Silkwood, Taxi Driver, Wall Street, Working Girl, and The Godfather are as
much in its thrall as blatantly pro-capitalistic ones like Pretty Woman, Raiders
of the Lost Ark, Rocky and Star Wars. A lone individual fights and triumphs
over (or, on rare occasions, fails to triumph over) personal opponents and
worldly obstacles, with the payoff in the form of tangible rewards -ranging
from increased wealth or social status to winning the girl or getting the job
done. It's remarkable how rarely American films deviate from the formula,
and how satisfied viewers obviously are with it. As anyone who has ever sat
through Rambo or Rocky with a large audience can attest, American filmgoers
relish imagining their experience in terms of personal conflicts and confronta-
tions with practical rewards. The nature of American society apparently
predisposes most viewers to imagine their lives in these terms -no matter how
emotionally and spiritually impoverished such understandings may be.
RAY CARNEY 105
Cassavetes's narratives violate all three tenets of this entrepreneurial

ideology. In the first place, his family-centered films define characters not as
loners, but as members of groups. Not rugged individualism and capitalistic
competition, but social interaction and interpersonal cooperation are the keys
to their success. The qualities most in demand are not Yankee ingenuity,
resourcefulness, and ruthlessness, but sensitiveness, responsiveness, and emo-
tional openness. In the second place, Cassavetes's narratives are not organized
around personal conflicts between figures. Characters are not pitted against
each other in tests of strength and intelligence. For Cassavetes, our private
battles with ourselves are always more interesting than our public fights with
others. The wars his characters fight are inward. The important struggles in
which they engage are attempts to understand themselves and their emotional
needs. Finally, characters' successes or failures are not marked in terms of
capitalistic rewards. What is at issue is not worldly success or failure, but emo-
tional exploration and growth. When a figure's quest is for self-knowledge and
self-expression, the only gain or loss that ultimately matters is spiritual.
Accordingly, one can actually reverse the charge that Cassavetes's work
is socially "disengaged" and politically "irrelevant" or "naive." While the other
sort of film, in effect, buys into capitalistic understandings of experience in the
very organization of its narrative (even when it may think it is criticizing it), it
is Cassavetes's work almost alone that offers a profound critique of the
assumptions of capitalism. The very structures of Cassavetes's narratives
implicitly criticize the premise the other sort of film accepts: the belief that we
can be saved and our lives healed by competing with one another and strug-
gling for worldly success. By these standards, Silkwood is a far more conser-
vative film than Faces.
The reason Cassavetes's films don't appear to engage themselves with
public issues is that rather than focusing on the externals of characters' lives,
Cassavetes focuses on how social ideologies affect their hearts and minds. His
films depict the internal, psychological disruptions of capitalism as being
potentially even more disturbing than its external, economic consequences.
Rather than dealing with the economic or social predations of capitalism,
Cassavetes depicts its emotional consequences: the pernicious effects of
bureaucratic organizations of human relationships, the soul-killing qualities of
competitiveness, the way business values distort his characters' understandings
of the meaning of their lives. His movies are peopled with small-time entrepre-
neurs (from Shadows' Ackerman and Too Late Blues's Frielobe to Faces'
Richard Forst, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie's Cosmo Vitelli, and Opening
Night's Manny Victor) who get into trouble by trying to organize their emo-
tions and personal relationships the way they run their businesses.
Asked why he didn't address public themes the way Oliver Stone or Mike
Nichols does, Cassavetes replied: "Why should I make movies about things I
already know? I want to make movies about things I don't understand. And
anyway I want to ask people questions about themselves, not about someone
io6 THE KENYON REVIEW
else."' That suggests a further explanation for why Cassavetes's films were not
understood during his lifetime. His movies ask questions whose answers are
not nearly as obvious or clear as those in the other sort of film. Furthermore,
they force viewers to question their own everyday lives and actions.
Cassavetes's cinematic agenda is a deliberately challenging one. While
most films are content to recycle certain basic fictional formulas, Cassavetes
attempts to teach his viewers radically new ways of knowing-new ways of
understanding themselves and others. His films are lessons in new forms of
thinking and feeling -though what it might mean for a film to be a form of
thought may take some explaining. Suffice it to say that the filmmaker fully
understood that disorienting his viewers, attacking their viewing habits, mak-
ing them uncomfortable might be the necessary first step in this direction.
During the release of Faces, his first mature masterwork, Cassavetes talked
freely about why he expected viewers to resist the film:
The script was structured very carefully to set up a whole new pattern of thinking so that
the audience could not get ahead of the film. Most people think: "Oh, yes, this is what is
going to happen next." What happens with Faces, though, is that [it] really bugs people
because it doesn't fit an easy pattern of behavior.2
In a conversation, he elaborated:
I'm interested in shaking people up, not making them happy by soothing them.... It's
never easy. I think that it's only in "the movies" that it's easy.... I don't think people
really want their lives to be easy. It's a United States sickness. In the end it becomes
more difficult. I like things to be difficult so that my life will be easier.
Faces is an excellent illustration of the deliberate difficulty of Cassavetes's

work. Compared with most other films, the behavior of its characters seems
inconsistent and unpredictable. A character who seems witty and sensitive one
moment is boorish and immature the next. A figure who seems aware of his
faults and foibles in one scene is headstrong and self-centered in another. I
remember the first time I saw the film, and how this aspect of it confused me and
made me extremely uncomfortable. I was denied the sort of intellectual and
emotional comfort that settling back with one feeling about a character allowed.
I liked them, then I despised them. In one scene I admired their intelligence
or sympathized with their predicament, even as I felt on the basis of a previous
scene that I ought to have contempt for them.
Cassavetes springs his characters free from the sorts of intentionality that
most other films, especially mainstream American works, accustom us to. The
chief way we are able to get a handle on characters in most other films is by fer-
reting out a figure's "true intentions." But in Cassavetes's work, intentions
count for almost nothing. They certainly don't allow us to sort out the good
from the bad, the nice from the nasty.
Virtually all of Cassavetes's characters (even the most despicable) have
good intentions. With very few exceptions, they are sincere. They mean well.
RAY CARNEY 107
Like Mama Longhetti (who terrorizes her daughter-in-law Mabel in A Woman

under the Influence) or Mister Jensen (the neighbor who precipitates a family
crisis in the same movie), they are trying to do their best for themselves and
their loved ones (even as they may wreak havoc on everyone around them).
Everyone has his reasons (to borrow a phrase from Jean Renoir, whose char-
acters are similar in this respect) -which is to say that behavior is generated
out of sources far deeper than reasons can describe or motives can plumb.
However, to say that characters have good intentions is not to do justice
to their true complexity. In the majority of scenes and encounters, Cassavetes's
characters are liberated from having any definable intentions at all.
Cassavetes's most interesting characters don't have any fixed, predictable, or
static center of being. The films present behavior and expression that stay
psychologically multivalent and irreducible to motives or goals. The first long
scene in Faces is an illustration of that. It involves two middle-aged men,
Richard and Freddy, at the home of a younger woman, Jeannie; they are mak-
ing an obvious sexual play for her. But what makes the moment so strange and
gripping is that, in the first place, Cassavetes suppresses the details of how the
three characters came together and who exactly they are. (Is Jeannie a call girl,
an easy pickup, or a "nice" girl? Are Richard and Freddy married or single,
good guys or con men?) Even more important, Cassavetes leaves entirely up
in the air why they are where they are, what they want out of the moment. (Are
they looking for a one-night stand, or a "meaningful relationship," or just
passing time, or what?)
It is impossible to say. But the crucial point is that Cassavetes isn't Hitch-
cock: clarifying information is not withheld in order to tease the viewer or
stoke up dramatic interest. It is withheld because it doesn't exist, because,
given Cassavetes's view of life, it can't exist. It is impossible to know what any
of the characters expect from the moment or why they are together, because
they themselves don't know. Richard and Freddy don't know what they
"really" want from Jeannie, any more than she knows what she "really" wants
from them. In fact, if they could say, they wouldn't be nearly as interesting
and the scene wouldn't be so fascinating. As Cassavetes once put it:
It's never as clear as it is in movies. People don't know what they are doing most of the
time. They don't know what they want. It's only in "the movies" that they know what
their problems are and have game plans to deal with them.
Cassavetes is interested in bringing forward the vague and the inarticulate

in human awareness. He focuses less on the problems his characters know and
understand than on the hidden confusions in their consciousnesses - confu-
sions that are hidden even from themselves, since if they knew they were con-
fused, they wouldn't be as confused as they are. (To the extent that intentions
may be said to exist at all, multiple and contradictory intentions can coexist in
one figure, and more than that, the intentions which a figure is aware of may
be opposed to those of which he is unaware.)
io8 THE KENYON REVIEW
If the effect of this is not clear, consider Robert Harmon, the lady-killing
central character in Love Streams. He sincerely believes that he opens himself
to the women he surrounds himself with and earnestly tries to understand their
deepest feelings (which he calls their "secrets"), even as the film itself shows us
how he manipulates them, holds them at arm's length emotionally, and refuses
to let them into his life. But it would be wrong to call him a hypocrite, since
after all, he is not even aware of his deception. The important lies in his life are
the ones he tells himself. As the filmmaker once said to me: "Nobody's a
phony, the way they are in the movies. People believe in what they are doing,
even when it hurts them and [hurts] others." Robert's romantic efforts are in
earnest; even as, in another sense, they are not in earnest.
Cassavetes was always more interested in the ways we fool ourselves than
in the ways we fool others. His 1976 film, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie,
presents confusions of feeling so deep that the individual who is ultimately
undone by them is not even aware of them. The movie is about a strip-joint
owner named Cosmo Vitelli who gets into trouble with the Mob and gradually
allows them to take over his life (and his nightclub). But the subtle thing is how
imperceptible the gangsters' triumph over his soul is. As Cosmo struts toward
his doom, he keeps telling himself that he, and not the Mob, is in control. Even
as he lets them take over his life bit by bit, he doesn't realize that he is signing
over to them what even they couldn't have touched without his cooperation:
his definition of himself.
When the film was first released, a number of reviewers objected to the
shagginess of the presentation, the way it becomes impossible to tell whether
(or where) the precise boundary is crossed at which Cosmo has lost the emo-
tional battle with the Mob and given himself away. But that is to miss the point
of the film. The blur of the line is its essence. Cassavetes explores the shadow
line where the deepest emotional sellouts take place-the line where the per-
son selling out isn't even aware of it. The film is a study of the lies we tell
ourselves about ourselves in order to hold onto our pride and keep going in
life. If the slippery path to hell were more clearly marked, Cassavetes suggests,
we wouldn't have such difficulty avoiding it. If Cosmo were aware of his emo-
tional weaknesses and moral emasculation (his need to avoid arguments or
confrontations, his boyish desire to please people and keep everyone around
him happy, his escapist impulses as a Sternbergian artist), he wouldn't be in the
trouble he is.
In comparison with the schematic crises and externalized struggles of
other films (where characters face clear problems with well-defined solutions),
Cassavetes's work explores twilight areas in our lives: subtle self-betrayals,
secret bewilderments, and failures of self-awareness. That is, I believe, what he
was getting at when he once said that contemporary filmmakers must move
"beyond the artificial conflicts of melodrama," in order to define "new kinds of
problems" deeper than those generated by external conflicts. As he said on
another occasion, his films attempt to deal with "characters who have every-
RAY CARNEY I 09
thing they want, but [who] s

put it, have problems in which "the problem has become what's the problem."
In the service of doing that, it was necessary for him to free his scenes
from the sorts of simplifying dramatic "point" one encounters in conventional
films. When the real events are not external conflicts, but interior muddlements
of feeling, scenes and characters reveal truths between the actions or the lines
of dialogue, in the beats, the pauses, the hesitations, the moments of uncer-
tainty.
Cassavetes's Husbands, a black comedy about three middle-aged men
coming to grips with their own mortality when a mutual friend dies, was
criticized for the rambling quality of some of its scenes. But Cassavetes
argued: "The lack of action was what the picture was about. . . . Sometimes
the guys would just sit there. I mean, [when] somebody dies and it affects you
deeply, I don't know anybody who knows what to do."
To keep a viewer in the fuzzy places, and to keep these places fuzzy
rather than falsely clarify them, it is important for Cassavetes to deny viewers
a privileged point of view on his characters that would simplify or resolve our
understanding of a scene or interaction (just as he denies his characters
privileged insights into themselves or their own motives). There can be no
liberated self-expressions on the part of a character, or absolute knowledge
about a character's intentions on the part of a viewer. Viewers have no source
of knowledge about characters above or beyond the figures' own vexed self-
representations, which never provide direct or easy access to "true" meanings
or feelings. There is neither visual nor verbal presentation of unmediated feel-
ing. Nobody can simply "be" themselves, or unproblematically "express"
something. Every self-expression is socially mediated, emotionally com-
promised, inflected by ulteriority. Arguments, brags, jokes, compliments,
criticisms, even expressions of love all need to be interpreted.
This is one of the most challenging aspects of Cassavetes's work for a
viewer trained by Hollywood films, which invariably provide fairly direct access
to a character's "true" feelings and beliefs - either by simply having a character
say what he or she means, or by presenting the character's feelings in visual
terms: through a point-of-view shot, a mood shot, an expressive lighting effect,
an exchange of glances between characters. In Cassavetes's work, no expres-
sion is transparent in the way such stylistic devices presume (neither to the
characters in the film, nor to the audience watching it). Subjectivity is rejected
as the basis for experience. There can be no direct revelations of consciousness.
In a world in which characters can't say what they are doing, because even they
don't know what it means, all the film can depict is raw behavior.
The irony was that Cassavetes succeeded so brilliantly at presenting the
convoluted complexities of his characters' expressive disarray that most critics
wrote off his work as a mess. He was so successful at freeing his scenes and his
characters' interactions from conventional forms of dramatic shapeliness
(which he called "getting the literary quality out" of the detailed scripts he
I IO THE KENYON REVIEW
wrote as the basis for all of his important work) that critics concluded that his
actors were simply making up their lines and actions in front of the camera as
they went along.
While most Hollywood scripts are written to generate well-turned
phrases and cute repartee as ends in themselves, an examination of
Cassavetes's successive drafts of his scripts demonstrates that his goal was to
mess up overly tidy expressions, to take scenes and interactions that went too
smoothly and rough them up. The expressive clumsiness in a Cassavetes film is
a depiction of shambling purposes and mixed-up goals. His characters' expres-
sions are confused because they are confused. (Though, needless to say, that is
an entirely different thing from their creator being confused.) Their lines sound
improvised because their lives are improvised. Cassavetes's characters don't
know what they are doing until they have done it -and even then they fre-
quently don't know. Gena Rowlands once said that the difference between her
husband's films and others' was that in other movies, characters always look
like they are following some sort of master plan, while in his films they make
up their plans and keep changing their minds about them as they go along.
That should suggest why there is no greater sign of a character's confu-
sion in these films than for him to pretend he is not confused, and no greater
mess he can make of things than to attempt to plan out his life. No characters
get into greater trouble than the ones who think they are in control: In
Husbands, Gus's verbal panache-his promiscuous charm-is an attempt to
avoid emotional involvement with the girlfriend his performance dazzles, even
as he romantically gets in over his head with her anyway. In Shadows, Lelia
uses her dazzling powers of self-dramatization to hold her various boyfriends
at a protective distance so that she can't be hurt, even as she then suffers from
the emotional distance between them. In The Killing of a Chinese Bookie,
Cosmo's pretensions to being calm and poised in front of the various audiences
he performs for are an attempt to deny, even to himself, the troubles that beset
him and ultimately do him in.
Yet having said all of this, it still might have been possible for an audi-
ence to get the hang of these films, if only the filmmaker had made a few explan-
atory concessions to their uncertainty. However, Cassavetes wouldn't present
the truth any less complexly than he saw it. His characters' emotional confu-
sions are buried under so many layers of protective coloration that most audi-
ences and reviewers didn't even know that they were there. Trained by decades
of American movies featuring characters who have destinations for develop-
ment and scenes that lay out a concise course of necessary action, viewers were
bewildered by what Cassavetes offered them. Ten minutes into Faces, five
minutes into The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, three minutes into Love
Streams, it is clear that a significant part of the audience is already frustrated
or confused, and not very long after that, viewers have begun to walk out. It is
telling that, faced with the continuing misunderstanding of his work (and its
commercial failure), Cassavetes, as he got older-like a cinematic Henry
RAY CARNEY III
James -rather than mellowing and trying to make his movies a bit simpler and
more accessible, actually went in the other direction. Love Streams, his final
film, is longer and harder, more challenging, and more provocative than
Shadows, his first. He refused to meet his audiences more than halfway. It was
up to them to come the rest of the distance.
Most Hollywood movie directors want us to settle back and let the experi-
ence wash over us, so we can be taken on a ride, more or less on autopilot.
Cassavetes does the opposite. He asks for, he demands an active, energetic,
problem-solving viewer. He cultivates a virtually adversarial relationship
between the audience and the work. One remembers Emerson's stirring call in
"The American Scholar" to "creative reading" as the only adequate response to
"creative writing." There are few filmmakers who depend more on what Emer-
son calls "the active soul" of the viewer, or who more consistently attempt to
stimulate the viewer into becoming Emerson's "Man Thinking" (where thought
is not a noun, but a participle: not something that can ever be finished and
done, but a continuously required process of invention). Far from letting us
relax and sit back, Cassavetes wants to induce a state of tension that will put us
on the edge of our seats.
This is not the most comfortable position in which to be placed, and it
doesn't take long to calculate its commercial consequences in a society in which
box-office blockbusters, television sitcoms, and other forms of pop culture
command space on the ground floors of our museums and university curricula.
In place of easy listening and lite viewing, Cassavetes offers strenuous acts of
genius that don't lend themselves to mass consumption. The opening of Faces
(in which we don't know Richard and Freddy are married when they are carry-
ing on with Jeannie, and don't know anything about the background of Jean-
nie's relationship to them) and the first scene of Love Streams (in which we
know nothing about the actual relationship of the man, woman, and child
arguing in the hall, but are encouraged to draw false conclusions about it)
willfully frustrate a viewer's rush to judgment.
The goal is not merely for the viewer to entertain a new position,
but-more radically-to abandon all fixed positions whatsoever. He must
learn the limitations of all patterns or categories of understanding.
Cassavetes's screwball comedy, Minnie and Moskowitz, a wacky masterpiece
of jump-cuts, is only the most exuberant example of this cognitive project. The
film is a Calder mobile of slides, twists, and reversals of plot and relationship.
Cassavetes choreographs a bewildering (and hilariously disturbing) series of
miscues, disruptions of expectation, and shifts of tone, putting all of the
meanings in motion and the viewer in motion in frantic (and slightly zany) pur-
suit of them. The viewer is repeatedly expected to come to a conclusion about a
character's romantic status (especially that of a character named Jim and his
relationship with Minnie), only to be forced to recognize that it is wrong, and
have to start over again with a new hypothesis. But the goal is not to replace
old meanings with new ones. The new meaning is that there can be no new
II2 THE KENYON REVIEW
meaning in the old way. In Cassavetes's work, rather than cumulating, suc-
ceeding meanings are orchestrated so as to erase or war with preceding ones.
Rather than adding up, the jump-cuts in Minnie and Moskowitz hack each
preceding understanding to pieces. Meaning is proliferated away from all
static or unifying centers of significance. What he does to his viewers,
Cassavetes does to his characters. One of the generating events in each film is
for the central character to have the rug pulled out from under him or her early
in the narrative-so that the character is suddenly forced to reevaluate all of
the fictions that organized life up to that point. Cassavetes sees such an event
as a portal to discovery. Destabilization is the path to growth. Insecurity spon-
sors creativity.
I take Emerson to be our best guide to this imaginative territory, the
Emerson who writes in "Circles": "The universe is fluid and volatile.... This
surface on which we stand is not fixed but sliding."3 Or the Emerson who
writes in "Experience": "Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is quick-
sand. This onward trick of nature is too strong for us. Pero si muove." He is
still the best theorist of this slippery state of affairs. As he explains in "The
Poet," once we fully acknowledge "the centrifugal tendency of man" and the
ramifications of the fact that "the quality of the imagination is to flow and not
to freeze," we must master a form of speech in which "all symbols are flux-
ional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and good, as ferries and horses
are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead."
At the same time, Emerson had no illusions about how the authentic
poetry of motion would be received. He knew that its uprooting of fixed mean-
ings would be misunderstood. He knew that all but the most "creative readers"
would resist its relentless challenges and disruptions of static understandings.
He understood how hard it would be to accept the state of irremediable
homelessness and imaginative disequilibrium that the art of liquefaction
offers, how uncomfortable it would feel to be put expressively out to sea,
without a chart or compass to steer by. Yet, as the preceding quote from "Exper-
ience" indicates, he knew that our reluctance to accept it doesn't change the
fact that our wished-for "anchorage is quicksand." Putting ourselves in motion
is actually our only salvation. As he wrote in "Circles": "People wish to be set-
tled; [but] only so far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them." The
"Montaigne" essay continues the metaphor: "An angular dogmatic house
would be rent to chips and splinters in this storm of many elements. We want a
ship for these billows we inhabit." That is why, however much we may long for
land values and stable anchorages: "The philosophy we want is one of fluxions
and mobility."
It should be clear by now that I am suggesting that Cassavetes is one of
the poets of vehicularity and transitiveness that Emerson announced. His work
shows us what it might actually feel like to live Emerson's stirring phrases. The
semiotic slippage that creates the comedy in Minnie and Moskowitz energizes
Cassavetes's serious films as well. In the numerous gatherings of Faces, not only
RAY CARNEY II3
won't the various figures sit still long enough for the characters to stabilize
fixed relationships with one another, but Cassavetes's framing and editing of
the shots won't stand still long enough for the viewer to turn the scene into an
emotional still life. In Love Streams, the divorce-hearing scenes and the scene
involving Robert Harmon and the two Las Vegas hookers are virtuosic exam-
ples of the intricately shifting calculus of human relationships on the move.
Cassavetes was always extremely wary of theorizing about his own work.
(Perhaps because to offer an abstract account of a sequence is inevitably to
stabilize the very instabilities he was interested in keeping.) However, on one
occasion, when he was asked why his films were so much harder to watch than
other movies, he offered some theories:
People have said that my films are not easy, that they are not "Entertainment," but ex-
periences you are put through, and it's true.... Other films depend on a shorthand, a
shorthand for living. You recognize certain incidents, and you go with them.... People
prefer that you condense; they find it quite natural for life to be condensed in films. It's
easy for them.... They prefer that because they can catch on to the meanings and keep
ahead of the movie. [But] that's boring.... I won't make shorthand films.... [In my
films] there's a competition with the audience to keep ahead of them. I want to break
their patterns. I want to shake them up and get them out of those quick, manufactured
truths.
The alternative to "shorthand" filmmaking is a longhand scrawl that is

essentially temporal in its effects. To adapt William James's terminology from
Some Problems of Philosophy, Cassavetes offers us "concatenated knowing"
in place of "consolidating knowing." Rather than rushing to a portable mean-
ing (to what Cassavetes dismissively calls "quick, manufactured truths"), the
viewer is forced to live through a changing course of events. In this view of it,
meaning is always in transition: it lives in endless, energetic substitutions of
one interest and focus for another, in continuous shifts of tone, in fluxional
slides of relationship. For Cassavetes, life is motion, and experience is essen-
tially leaky and slippery. It won't be pinned down. "Life is in the transitions,"
in William James's phrase.4 Neither life's nor art's meanings can be "caught on
to," "grabbed," "held," or "kept ahead of."5
To a viewer accustomed to the other sort of filmmaking, even the most
important scenes and relationships in Cassavetes's work may seem to "get
nowhere," because in Cassavetes's imaginative universe there is really nowhere
to get. There is only a series of shifting positions to be cycled through. In
Emerson's words, "health of body consists in circulation." Now though it
might be thought that if characters and scenes never get anywhere, the films
must be tedious or boring, the opposite is true. Since a scene or a relationship
doesn't exist to lead to something else, a viewer is never released from his activ-
ity of attention. Go out to get a Coke and come back for the next scene, and
you've missed everything. It's pointless for the person sitting next to you to fill
you in on "how it ended," since the scene doesn't exist to generate an end-
point. That makes Cassavetes's scenes as continuously exciting as listening to a

good jazz performance (even the second or the tenth time through). In con-
trast, ordinary films, with their fixed trajectories of build-up, confrontation,
climax, and resolution - more like Burt Bacharach than Charlie Parker - let us
coast most of the time, while we wait for the next crisis or climax to kick in.
The temporal evenhandedness, the refusal to subordinate the individual impulse
to the atemporal architecture, makes these films the Jackson Pollocks of
cinema. (Another aspect of Cassavetes's narrative "over-all" handling is his
democratic equality of treatment of the various characters -his abandonment
of star-system photographic and narrative hierarchies in his scenes.)
Another way of explaining the process-aspect of Cassavetes's work is to
say that significances are not created visionarily, abstractly, or impersonally,
but are negotiated between individuals in particular acts of practical perfor-
mance. One of the reasons Cassavetes's work has experienced so much critical
misunderstanding is that most other American film is predicated upon an
entirely different set of expressive premises. The principal meanings in Hitch-
cock and Welles, for example, are not generated out of the practical interac-
tions of characters. They are brought into existence chiefly through visionary
events: visions experienced by the characters in the film; and visions created by
the director for the viewers of the film.
Pure, socially unmediated subjectivity (rather than impure, compro-
mised behavior) is the basis for expression. The eyeline match and the shot/
reverse shot define the relationship of characters as virtually telepathic.
The expressive close-up registers states of personal emotion liberated from the
mediated messiness of speech or action. The point-of-view shot figures the
directly available contents of an individual's consciousness. Other meanings
are generated by lighting effects, camera movements and framings, editing
effects, musical orchestrations, and the metaphoric inflection of objects in the
setting.
This is the form of cinema that American audiences have become adept
at understanding and American critics extremely comfortable at explicating. It
is the dominant line in American film -carried on today by the vast majority
of mainstream filmmakers (by figures as different from one another as Kubrick,
De Palma, Spielberg, Coppola, and Lynch). In this expressive tradition, mean-
ings are created relatively independently of the particular space and time and
resistance of the actual personal expressions of the individual characters in a
scene. That is why, in Hitchcock's infamous phrase, actors truly may be
treated as "cattle" in his form of filmmaking. They are the more or less passive
recipients of significances imposed upon them and largely generated by the
cameraperson, the lighting supervisor, the editor, or the director, rather than
being the independent originators of their own personal meanings. In Hitch-
cock, a specific camera angle or movement or lighting effect tells us how to
feel about a character or how the character understands his own experience; in
Welles, a tendentious blocking or framing of characters in certain spatial rela-
RAY CARNEY II5
tionships with each other metaphorically communicates their true relationship

or feelings about each other. Meanings are cut relatively free from the ebb and
flow of social expression and practical personal performance.
Such stylistic occurrences presume that states of knowledge or feeling can
be made directly available to viewers (and that they can, in effect, be
weightlessly, painlessly communicated between characters). In Hitchcock, in
particular, to "see" something is to "know" it, and to "know" is to "be."
Nothing could be less like the fragile, vulnerable social negotiations of mean-
ing and relationship that take place in Cassavetes's scenes, where expression is
never unmediated or unproblematic. The prickly practicalities of specific times
and places and personalities can't be transcended or left behind. States of per-
sonal subjectivity are not liberated from the intricacies and obliquities of bodily
and social expression. Meanings have none of the expansiveness, impersonality,
or metaphoric generality of a visionary experience. (That is why, to an eye
accustomed to visionary stylistics, Cassavetes's films look confused and
disorganized. But it is not the mess of unplanned, sloppy work that one is
witnessing, but the mess of life lived without visionary releases and clarifica-
tions.)
While the other kind of film offers us meanings which are static, abstract,
and atemporal, those in Cassavetes's work are continuously subject to loss or
decay in a way that visions, imaginations, or dreams are not. What is brought
into existence in space and time and with the cooperation of other people is
always in imminent danger of being lost in space, time, and social interaction.
It is not too much to argue that Hollywood filmmaking (including the
work of Welles and Hitchcock) is essentially "romantic" in ways that Cassa-
vetes declines to be. Rejecting one of the premises of most post-romantic art,
to return to what might almost be called an Elizabethan (or in cinematic terms:
a Renoirian) aesthetic, Cassavetes tells us that states of consciousness matter
only insofar as they are translatable into forms of practical interaction. Hitch-
cock and Welles tell us the opposite: that the truest part of us can never be
spoken in society, and that our visions and imaginations are the most important
part of us. That is why their characters can communicate with each other
through glances, and why the director can communicate their feelings to the
viewer in shot / reverse shots. Such stylistic devices separate our socially
expressive functions from our private visionary impulses. They elevate the
"eye" above the "I." It is a separation Cassavetes completely refuses to enter-
tain. For him, imagination must express itself in and through social interac-
tion -never as an alternative to it. In his work, pure states of subjectivity are
of no more expressive importance to waking life than dreams. The struggle to
express the imagination in the form of worldly relationships is the greatest joy
and challenge in life. (A Woman under the Influence and Love Streams are the
clearest statements of this credo.)
In Cassavetes's work, not only does the essence of a character not
precede his or her existence, but it might be said there is no essence at all.
iI6 THE KENYON REVIEW
Apart from his or her interactions with a group, the individual has no exis-
tence. One's personal identity is created and maintained in a process of social
negotiation. There is no "essential" self apart from its "accidental" expressions
of itself. We make ourselves up as we go along. As something that must be
worked into existence, the self is always in danger of lapsing out of existence.
In William James's phrase from "Humanism and Truth," one is "continuously
breasting non-entity," and therefore continuously risking slipping back into
non-entity. Ontological slippage threatens many of Cassavetes's most impor-
tant characters: In Minnie and Moskowitz, when various figures start echoing
each others' lines and actions, Cassavetes is showing us how easy it is to lapse
back into being a mere semiotic function of one's environment (or one's film).
In A Woman under the Influence, Opening Night, and Love Streams, Mabel
Longhetti, Myrtle Gordon, and Sarah Lawson each make themselves so
available to other people's definitions of them that they run the risk of giving
themselves away - losing control of any independent sense of themselves. In
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Cosmo Vitelli, in his need to please and enter-
tain the various audiences for which he performs, loses his grip on a self
separate from the various costumes and masks he wears. In the end, he
becomes the master of ceremonies as invisible man: stunningly unable to
distinguish his own needs from those of his audience.
Cassavetes asks his viewers and his characters to embrace a life of
present-tense experience. Like the improvisers who function at the center of
each of the films, the viewer must learn to thrive in a state of perpetual activity,
openness, vulnerability, and exposure -energetically engaged in making some-
thing out of each moment without being able to predict or predetermine the
outcome. The challenges and dangers of this situation -for both viewers and
characters -are obvious. The reward is a state of empowerment in which
meanings are not imposed or received from outside experience, but are actually
made in the course of an active, passionate relationship with it. We become
powerful, temporally engaged, meaning-makers in a sense very close to the one
William James described in "Pragmatism and Humanism":
In our cognitive as well as in our active life we are creative. We add, both to the subject
and to the predicate part of reality. The world stands readily malleable, waiting to
receive its final touches at our hands. Like the kingdom of heaven, it suffers human
violence willingly. Man engenders truths upon it.... For pluralistic pragmatism, truth
grows up inside of all the finite experiences. They lean on each other, but the whole of
them, if such a whole there be, leans on nothing. All "homes" are in finite experience;
finite experience as such is homeless. Nothing outside of the flux secures the issue of it.
The process of breaking free from limiting formulas of response in order

to learn how to make meanings in a moment by moment activity of improvisa-
tion might be said to be the masterplot of all of Cassavetes's films. They tell his
viewers and his characters alike that only by plunging unconditionally into the
present, to make something of it here and now, may the possibility of possibility
RAY CARNEY II7
be brought into existence. This capacity to hold ourselves open and responsive
to the individuals around us, irrespective of our experiences, might in fact be
said to be Cassavetes's definition of love. In this entirely practical sense, all of
his films are about finding possibilities of emotional spontaneity and suscep-
tibility in a world which relentlessly mechanizes behavior and punishes
vulnerability. This is the lesson that Minnie must learn in the course of Minnie
and Moskowitz. As someone who has gone through disastrous relationships
with men, she has to find the courage to open herself to a new relationship in a
world without guarantees. The doom of characters like Zelmo and Morgan is
that they can't break their patterns. They can't leave their pasts, their fears and
memories behind long enough to make a future possible.
In the dramatic metaphor that informs all of his work, Cassavetes asks
his characters to throw away all of the preformulated scripts of life and
become improvisers of their own identities and relationships. The supreme
challenge with which his work confronts both characters and viewers is
whether they and we are brave enough to throw ourselves headfirst into exper-
iences whose course we can't ever entirely understand and whose conclusion we
can't control.
That, I take it, is the explicit subject of Cassavetes's final film: Love
Streams. It centers on the intertwined lives of two characters: a writer named
Robert Harmon (played by Cassavetes), and a recently divorced woman named
Sarah Lawson (played by Gena Rowlands). In many respects, they are a study
in contrasts. By conventional standards of worldly achievement, Harmon is
wildly successful. He is rich, famous, surrounded with beautiful women, and
apparently able to buy (or take) anything he wants from anyone. Sarah, in
contrast, is almost alone in the world and bereft of friends and accom-
plishments. She has lost everything that matters to her: her previous marriage
has come to a shattering end in a contested divorce, and her one remaining inti-
mate relationship (with her daughter) has come unglued. At fiftysomething,
she has nothing to show for her life.
Yet, underneath their outward differences, Robert and Sarah share a fun-
damental reality: each has been profoundly wounded by life, deeply hurt by
romantic relationships -but the point of the film is how each responds entirely
differently to the injury. In that difference, Cassavetes articulates two con-
trasting destinies for the self.
In response to his pains, Robert flees from future emotional exposure.
He turns himself into a Beverly Hills Thoreauvian, living the Coleridgean (or
Stevensian) dream of walling out social disturbance and withdrawing into a
world of his imagination. In the film's metaphors, Robert attempts to control
life with various forms of scripting and directing-dictating the course of his
relationships down to every movement, line, and beat. He casts himself as the
actor-director-star in a one-man show in which, since he is in complete control
of everything, he will not run the risk of being upstaged or given a bad review.
Even in his most "intimate" relationships, Harmon only cycles through singles
I I8 THE KENYON REVIEW
bars pickup routines and canned one-liners. Cassavetes knew that when faced
with anguish and confusion, like Robert, we are all tempted to pull up the
drawbridge and escape into a Xanadu of the imagination, but he also knew
that the only thing more hazardous to our emotional health than the shocks
and jars of uncontrolled experience is the futile attempt to wall out change and
anxiety.
Sarah is present to remind us of all that Robert has given up. She too has
suffered enormous emotional losses, but her response is the opposite of his. As
she feels herself sinking in the shipwreck of past emotional investments, she
desperately flails out in every direction: initially trying to make her doomed
marriage work and, subsequently, grabbing on to anyone and everyone in
sight to attempt to forge new connections. In the implied images of the film, if
Robert is a Hitchcockian director who story-boards every conversation and
encounter in advance, Sarah is a manic improviser of her own experience,
tirelessly moving ahead bravely and unhesitatingly, trying to make something
of every encounter without predetermining the outcome. Sarah is the ultimate
high roller, betting her life and love on every throw of the dice. As Emerson
wrote of a similar acquaintance of his in an 1853 journal entry: "It is her glory
that she takes her life in her hand, and is ready for a new world [every day]."6
It is not hard to see which figure opens herself to more danger and pain.
While Robert withdraws into emotional safety and self-defense, Sarah lives in
vulnerability and exposure. While he hugs self-sufficient comfort, she risks
repeated insult, humiliation, and failure. While Robert stays calm and cool
and poised in his imaginative tree house, Sarah - off-balance and almost out of
control -lunges across an emotional high-wire without a safety net. There can
be no safety in her life. She risks self-destruction at every turn.
But it is equally obvious which character Cassavetes endorses and which
he damns. Sarah embodies everything that Cassavetes's own improvisatory
imperative joyously embraces. He understands that insecurity is the price we
always pay for being brave enough to open ourselves to uncontrolled exper-
ience. Cassavetes also uses Robert to demonstrate that we cannot ultimately
avoid the complexities of involvement anyway. That is why he has Robert's
son Albie, a girlfriend named Susan, his former wife, and Sarah herself each
briefly break and enter into Robert's island sanctuary. Even as Robert devotes
his life to the opposite premise, the photographic and narrative complications
of Love Streams show us that there can be no real sanctuary from disturbance,
no escape from change. Messy, upsetting, stimulating life will always catch up
with us, no matter how hard we try to frame and organize it as an art work
under glass.
Faced with the inescapability of complication, Cassavetes's glorious
improvisers show us, as Emerson argued in The Conduct of Life, that: "The
only path of escape known in all the worlds of God is performance." (Or as
Robert Frost more wittily put it in "Servant to Servants": "The best way out is
always through.")
RAY CARNEY IIg
The society of Cassavetes's films is a fiercely predatory and power-

saturated one. It is a world maximally hazardous to the individual's health,
threatening its figures with erasure or extinction at every moment. Cassavetes
imagines the most arduous possible universe within which his characters must
function. Each individual is continuously tested to the limit of his or her ability.
There is no possibility of pause or relaxation, only a state of endless struggle and
combat. This is undoubtedly the source of the common misperception of
Cassavetes as a bleak, pessimistic, or cynical artist. For a certain sort of
viewer, his world is obviously a horrifying, even a nightmarish one. But, for
Cassavetes the opposite is the case: he relishes the fights and conflict. For him,
his characters inhabit the world of the American dream (in both the positive
and the negative senses of the concept) - a realm of both opportunities and
dangers. The challenges are stimulating and invigorating. Indeed, it is fair to
say that, for Cassavetes the struggle is what makes the glory of the perfor-
mance. Only in negotiating danger is virtue born.
Beyond Love Streams, Cassavetes's two most moving demonstrations of
this conviction were A Woman under the Influence and The Killing of a
Chinese Bookie-the first a positive example of the creative stimulations of
"braving alien entanglements" (to quote Robert Frost again), the second a cau-
tionary tale about the hazards of what James calls "ostrich-like forgetfulness."
In the first, Mabel Longhetti (who is distantly related to Sarah Lawson)
balletically dances her way through circle after circle of familial entanglements
and personal complications. In the second, Cosmo Vitelli (who resembles
Robert Harmon in this respect) demonstrates the dangers of attempting to
avoid life's complexities. Cosmo is a Pateresque or Sternbergian artist who
aspires to use his art (that is, his nightclub and the stage shows he writes and
choreographs there) as a means of escape from the pains and confusions of the
world. He fantasizes that he can run away from worldly problems and take
refuge in the beauty and order of his imaginative creations.
Cassavetes's own career was clearly founded on the opposite of Cosmo's
and Robert's belief. He understood that great art is not an escape from life's
messes and complexities, but a finer embodiment of them, sponsoring a deeper
involvement with them. Our supreme works of art are not hospitals where the
wounds incurred in life's struggles may be nursed and healed, but are the
dangerous battlegrounds themselves, the places where the fiercest wars are
fought. Cassavetes's entire career was devoted to the principle that a film is not
an island of safety and refuge, an imaginative "world elsewhere," but an
opportunity for emotional exposure, a site of supreme engagement with the
disturbances of experience outside the movies.
Cassavetes transports us to the true America of the imagination: a world
in which relationships and identities are up for redefinition; a world of social,
psychological, and emotional instability; a world of frightening openness and
dangerous vulnerability; a world without rest, relaxation, or pause for the per-
former who would meet and master the opportunities it offers.
To adapt James's remarks from "The Absolute and the Strenuous Life,"
the world Cassavetes imagines is "always vulnerable, for some part of it may
go astray; and having no eternal edition of it to draw comfort from, its par-
tisans must always feel to some degree insecure." In pushing the envelope of
our experience into new places, we are destined always to be a little
off-balance -with the edgy anxiety Cassavetes's improvisers display. As James
argues, in this situation it is necessary for the individual to have "a certain
ultimate hardihood, a certain willingness to live without assurances or
guarantees." It would be difficult to find a better description of the strenuous
courage of Cassavetes's greatest and most inspiring improvisers -Lelia, Chet,
and Jeannie (in the films of the fifties and sixties), Moskowitz, Mabel, Gloria,
and Sarah (in the films of the seventies and eighties). Living on "the perilous
edge," they risk everything-but they also put themselves in a position to
discover something. In James's words (from "Pragmatism and Religion"), the
result is "a real adventure, with real dangers . . . [and] with a social scheme of
co-operative work genuinely to be done."
We are far from the camp parody, the aesthetics of kitsch and decon-
structive goofiness, of David Lynch, John Waters, Robert Townsend, and the
Coen brothers. We are equally far from the charming sweetness, polite
humanism, and visionary quietism of Woody Allen, Barry Levinson, James
Ivory, and John Sayles. Cassavetes and James imagine life as being harder,
more frightening, more dangerous, and more serious than these filmmakers
do. But, by the same virtue, Cassavetes and James imagine life's rewards as
being keener as well: they imagine a world in which what James (in Some Prob-
lems of Philosophy) calls "real growth and real novelty" accrue to those
courageous enough not to duck the complexities and challenges of living,
breathing experience-to those who decline to withdraw from the messes of
life as it is actually lived by escaping into jokes, visions, or dreamy states of
good feeling.
There is a parable about being an independent filmmaker implicit in all of
this. Cassavetes's life and work demonstrate what Sarah does in Love Streams:
the joys, the challenges, and the hazards of living on the uncertain, moving
edge of uncontrolled experience. She and her creator show us the consequences
of improvising a trajectory of discovery outside prefabricated systems of
understanding. They illustrate the excruciating, enlivening results of being
brave enough to plunge into life's expressive complexities, functioning without
guarantees, taking real chances and braving real dangers.
The critical abuse and commercial neglect of Cassavetes's work during
his lifetime illustrate the lesson Sarah teaches us in Love Streams: that to live
this way is to risk incomprehension and failure at every turn. To operate with
this degree of intensity, extremity, and exposure is inevitably to appear to
make a fool of oneself in the eyes of the world, and to court dismissal of one's
actions as being half-crazy and more than half out of control. But Cassavetes's
RAY CARNEY 12 I
inspiring career and the careers of his improvisers also teach us something
else-the meaning of authentic American heroism in the brave new world in
which we must all learn to live.
NOTES
'Except where otherwise noted, quotations from Cassavetes are taken from private conver-
sations, letters, and previously unpublished writing. I am deeply indebted to two of the
filmmaker's closest friends and artistic collaborators, Al Ruban and Ted Allan, for making some
of this material available to me.
2Joseph Gelmis, The Film Director as Superstar (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 80.
3Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Emerson are taken from Ralph Waldo Emer-
son, Essays and Lectures (New York: The Library of America, 1983).
4AII quotations from James are taken from William James, Writings 1902-1910 (New
York: The Library of America, 1987).
5What would a film criticism look like that understood this sense of meaning in motion?
One can only surmise that it would look quite different from what is now practiced in so-called
"advanced" circles of film commentary (particularly as conducted by David Bordwell and other
formalist critics). Rather than translating a work into a series of static structures - semiotic con-
ventions, image patterns, and mythopoetic references-criticism needs to find a way to talk about
the ways meaning boils over any attempt to contain it within such abstractions, the ways it slips
out from under our efforts to fix it.
6Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. VIII (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1912), 393.

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The Adventure of Insecurity: The Films of John Cassavetes

Author(s): Ray Carney

THE ADVENTURE OF INSECURITY

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

We realize this life as something always off its balance, something in

IF anyone deserves to be called the father of American independent film-

The commercial coup de grace was probably Cassavetes's refusal to

Cassavetes's narratives violate all three tenets of this entrepreneurial

Faces is an excellent illustration of the deliberate difficulty of Cassavetes's

Like Mama Longhetti (who terrorizes her daughter-in-law Mabel in A Woman

Cassavetes is interested in bringing forward the vague and the inarticulate

thing they want, but [who] s

The alternative to "shorthand" filmmaking is a longhand scrawl that is

point. That makes Cassavetes's scenes as continuously exciting as listening to a

tionships with each other metaphorically communicates their true relationship

The process of breaking free from limiting formulas of response in order

The society of Cassavetes's films is a fiercely predatory and power-

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