Love's Dreams
some false starts on cassavetes
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For the last month I’ve been trying to write about John Cassavetes’ penultimate film, Love Streams (1984), which I watched for the first time on June 19. June 19 is Gena Rowlands’ birthday, which is why I watched Love Streams on that date. June 19 is also the day after the anniversary of my father’s death. At this time of year, the fact of my father’s death permeates everything I do—all of my thoughts—and feels inescapable. I feel like I can’t stop talking about it or thinking about it. A few weeks after the anniversary this mood seems to pass, and I go back to thinking about the fact of his death every now and then. But for a month or so, either side of June 18, the death is constantly on my mind. It puts me into a very particular state: one in which I am emotionally fragile, but with a fragility that is has a kind of openness to it: my defences are down; I am more readily moved to tears than usual; I find detachment impossible and will be readily and easily emotionally manipulated by anything, no matter how sentimental it is. This state of mind is not exactly ideal, but I see it as a blessing in some ways: it allows me to feel my loss more fully, and it awakens me again to the sense of loss which, since my father’s death, I have noticed permeating the world.
I watched John Cassavetes’ first film, Shadows, some years ago. I thought it was good, but after I’d seen it I didn’t think much about it again. I was aware of him of someone whose work I thought I should spend more time with, but I never seemed to be able to find the time or will to do so. While I was living in Berkeley I spent a lot of time going to the Pacific Film Archive. This is a fairly major repertory cinema and (as the name suggests) film archive, which programmes a lot of theoretically and historically informed seasons of films, usually focusing on particular genres or directors. Students can get a semester-long ticket for $40, which means if you go a couple of times a week the ticket has soon paid for itself and you start to feel as if you’re going to see films for free, which I suppose is more or less the case. Since the stipend and small salary I was living on during my time in graduate school was almost entirely absorbed on rent immediately at the start of each month, and because—despite making some very close and important friends in the Bay Area—I was quite lonely there, I spent a lot of time going to watch films at the PFA. I also went to the other cinemas in Berkeley quite often, not infrequently to late night showings of films where I would be the only person in the screen. A few times, at a loss on a weekend, I went to see three different films in the same day. Two or three years of this really changed me from being someone who enjoyed watching films but didn’t really think too much about them, to the person I am today: someone who spends perhaps an inordinate amount of time thinking about and watching films, and, for the last eighteen months or so, writing about films. I suppose this used to be called ‘cinephilia’, but now that word conjures an obsessive and slightly sticky quality which I don’t think quite applies to me. Or which, if it does apply to me, is the kind of thing I’d prefer to shy away from. I’ve never really studied film, other than taking one course, called Comedy and Critique, split between the German department and the Film Studies department. I was planning on writing some of my dissertation on film, but that fell through. So these compulsive trips to the cinema in Berkeley were the formative basis of what has been my education in film.
In April and May 2017, during my last months in the Bay Area (though I didn’t know it at the time), the PFA had a program called “Personality is Plot: The Films of John Cassavetes”, showing most of the films Cassavetes directed. I went to a few of these, but not as many as I would have done otherwise, because my feelings of depression and loneliness in Berkeley had been starting to lift; I was busier than I had been before, and I was starting work on my dissertation. I got to a few screenings: Minnie and Moskowitz (1971) on Saturday April 29, A Woman Under the Influence (1974) either the next day or the following Wednesday, then Opening Night (1978) the Wednesday after that, May 10. I didn’t get to Love Streams, on May 14, the last screening in the series. I don’t know what I was doing instead. But seeing those three films in fairly quick succession was enough for me, and I was fully converted to adoration and awe of Cassavetes. I was glad that I had some time between A Woman Under the Influence and Opening Night so that the experiences of each film didn’t blur into the other, even though in many ways they feel like parts of the same work—a work which exists beyond its individual manifestations in particular films, the work which is Cassavetes’ entire project as a filmmaker, collaborating with the same people working on similar stories, similar situations, using a set of repeated techniques in acting, directing, editing and production in order to develop a very distinctive and—for me—enormously affecting and powerful film style. After watching Gena Rowlands’ performances in these films I felt that I had witnessed something completely transformative for how I might think about acting, about film in general. I felt mesmerised by the chemistry between Rowlands and Cassavetes on screen, in awe of the depths of emotion and pain these films plumbed, fascinated by the way all of these films ended with a high pitch of anxiety and tension before a last minute switch, seemingly out of nowhere, to almost trite happy endings.
I had made some vague plans with myself to write ‘something’ about Cassavetes and Rowlands, starting from my attachment to the way they looked at each other—something about John Cassavetes’ lips, and Gena Rowlands’ eyes. I didn’t get any further than that. I hadn’t written much about film, or really about anything, and I didn’t know where to start. I’ve written a lot more now, and I still don’t know where to start.
I left the Bay Area on June 20 2017. I didn’t watch any Cassavetes for a while, until I watched The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) on August 12 last year. I enjoyed The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and it reminded me of my sense that Cassavetes is a very important filmmaker for me, and that I hadn’t quite figured out why his films resonate so strongly with me, what exactly it is that I get from his work that I don’t get from anyone else. At the time I misremembered how many of his films I’d seen, and thought I’d seen pretty much all of them in the season in the Bay Area. Or perhaps I didn’t misremember exactly, but nevertheless I exaggerated about how many I’d seen, for whatever reason. Looking back at the film diary from that week, I’m ashamed to find that I made a claim about how great Love Streams is there, even though I hadn’t seen it at that point. I’ll leave you to make up your own minds about my motivations for making such a pointless claim. I don’t know if it was intentional to lie about having seen it, but perhaps having done so unintentionally is in fact worse, belying as its does a habitual willingness to say I’ve seen things (or read things) that I haven’t, for no apparent gain.
For the last month I’ve been trying to write about John Cassavetes’ last film, Love Streams (1984), which I watched for the first time on June 19. When I watched it I was upset, in the midst of the revenant bereavement that comes around that time of year. It was the third anniversary of the death, and this year brought new and complicated elements to the process of mourning. I won’t go into them here. In the diary entry for that day I note that I have tried to watch Love Streams a few times before, but had always given up: I had a pirated video file on a USB stick filled with films that L gave me some years ago, and I would try to watch Love Streams sitting on my bed in California, but would stop after Cassavetes’ character (Robert Harmon) falls drunk down some concrete steps outside Diahnne Abbott’s character’s house. I don’t know why this point made me stop: perhaps because I realised that I wasn’t ready for what Love Streams would show me about myself and my own complicated relation to alcohol (something else that I won’t go into here). Perhaps this is part of the reason why I pretended to myself that I had seen Love Streams when I wrote briefly about Cassavetes last August.
The experience of watching Love Streams on June 19 was an enormously emotional and quite difficult one for me; one which left me reeling. In the diary I wrote about the feelings of shame it evokes and deals with, and about the inarticulateness of my response to it. I wrote:
Love Streams really feels to me to be a film about shame: it conjures up my own experiences with real, deep, horrible shame—the kind of shame that makes you wish you could disappear from the face of the earth. It depicts, in an extremely painful way, the difficulties of being a sibling: the ways in which siblings fail, or refuse, to communicate with each. It’s about the horror involved in the love you might feel for your family, the inescapable, irresolvable, destructive, annihilating, unavoidable conflicts that exist in the structure of the family, as well as the fact that these relationships continue—endure—despite the bad feelings that may underpin them. It is incredible. Afterwards my chest is extremely tight and I feel dazed. I feel like I’ve been through something enormous.
I think sometimes I have a tendency to exaggerate my responses to films in the diary, since the self-inflicted pressure of the format means I need to produce a response to each quickly, without having time for reflection on what exactly I’ve felt. Many films tend to fade to a kind of bland indistinguishable mush a few weeks after I’ve watched them, and in the immediate aftermath I seem to find it easier to write that I felt more than I perhaps actually did, because it is easier to express big emotional responses or high praise than the truth, which is that I think most films I watch are fine, more or less. But reading back my response to Love Streams, I don’t detect any exaggeration. It did have that intense an impact on me.
In the month since I watched it, I have been intending to write an essay about Love Streams. This is that essay, but it’s not in the form which I expected it to be. I watched Michael Ventura’s documentary about the making-of Love Streams, I’m Almost Not Crazy, and I bought and read the book Ventura wrote about it, Cassavetes Directs. (This, by the way, is one of the best books about filmmaking I’ve read, though I haven’t read that many). Cassavetes said to Ventura a few times that Love Streams is a dream. I look back at the notes I took and find the idea that Love Streams is a film which is motivated by anxiety, and by the need to act in order to break the spell that anxiety can hold over a person, regardless of consequences. Psychoanalysis seemed to me the place to go to think about anxiety, dreams and love, but I’m not sure if it’s helped me understand what exactly Love Streams has done to and for me at all. I think psychoanalysis has a lot to tell us about these things but I think Love Streams by John Cassavetes can tell us almost as much, and it tells us it more directly, more concisely, and perhaps in a way that is as painful and difficult to confront and accept a psychoanalytic insight can be.
Here are some notes I took from my reading, notes which are a mixture of my own thoughts and ideas from Ventura’s books:
Inner life: impossible to depict inner life on screen. Something about David Smail: shift to conduct rather than narratives about ourselves. We don’t access the inner lives of the characters in Love Streams (or other Cassavetes films): we only have their conduct. But we still invest in them—we like them and dislike them. The unknowability of others’s interiority—self-delusion; tricking ourselves and others. Cassavetes’ honesty. Depth: everyone has depth but it’s not always apparent. Love & unknowability.
Sensing you have a secret from yourself. Psychoanalysis is a way of finding out that you don’t have a secret.
Love is the ability not to know.
In the last resort, we must begin to love in order not to fall ill, and we are bound to fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we are unable to love. (Freud, ‘On Narcissism’)
Shooting in sequence—the relief at the end of the films; the sustained creation of a particular atmosphere in C’s films—this is why they’re hard to start watching but feel inescapable after you make it through the first third.
Cassavetes doesn’t want to understand himself.
“He locks people inside rooms, without special effects, without plot, and almost without a story, without even sex, and examines how they face and/or fail to face each other and themselves.” (Which sounds to me like psychoanalysis)
“That’s why my pictures are so long—hours of beginnings, no endings.”
The accident of why we like (love) what we like (love) is as much a question of ethics as aesthetics. Object choice, accident, chance.
I’m not sure about that last one now. I also seem to have drawn a Venn diagram where one circle is marked ‘dream’, the other ‘anxiety’, and in the middle is the word ‘love’.
From David Smail’s book Illusion and Reality: the Meaning of Anxiety (published in 1984, the same year as Love Streams was made), I copied out the following passages:
The dependence on the other for confirmation renders every relationship in which the other figures (that is, as things are, just about every relationship) fraught with awful danger. ‘Loving’ relationships become secret, undercurrent battlegrounds, in which we stalk each other warily sniffing the atmosphere for indications of rejection. To allow yourself to be loved by another is to put yourself totally in his or her power, to hand him or her the means to your destruction, because, by and large, we love one another only as objects.
It is not the case that ‘behaviour’, or as I prefer to call it, conduct, cannot be seen as purposive, but merely that purpose cannot be abstracted from what people do. The woman who claims that she really wants to go out shopping when actually she wants to stay indoors is not taking full enough account of her conduct. The only way one can really be clear about what one wants is to look at what one does. Presumably she claims to ‘want’ to go out since that would accord best with what she thinks she ought to be doing, but in making the claim she fails to recognise that in fact being terrified is a very good reason for not wanting to go out, even though not going out has clear disadvantages of its own. While going out would solve some problems (and is therefore to that extent desirable) it would create considerably worse ones, not least of which would be the person’s becoming inundated with fear. There is therefore nothing either shameful or puzzling in concluding that the fact that she stays in suggests that the ‘phobic’ person does not want to go out. Once this is agreed, she can perhaps begin to see that her conduct is not simply crazy or wilfully bad, but actually forms part of a stance she is taking for reasons which are perfectly understandable. We must read off the nature of our desires and purposes from the conduct in which we find ourselves engaged. To do this we need, as suggested before, an attitude towards ourselves of interest, tolerance and concern, in which it is far more fruitful, and indeed accurate, to assume the fundamental rationality of our conduct than it is to anticipate its moral reprehensibility.
From Christian Metz’s book, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier (1977), I copied out two passages:
In short, if a subject is to ‘like’ a film, the detail of the diegesis must sufficiently please his conscious and unconscious phantasies to permit him a certain instinctual satisfaction, and this satisfaction must stay within certain limits, must not pass the point at which anxiety and rejection would be mobilised. In other words, the spectator’s defences (or at least the processes of edulcoration and symbolic substitution which are sufficiently efficacious functional equivalents for them) must be integrated with the very content of the film by one of those happy accidents that also preside over the relations between people and the ‘encounters’ of life, in such a way that the subject can avoid activating his own defences, which would inevitably be translated into antipathy for the film. In short, every time a fiction film has not been liked, it is because it has been liked too much, or not enough, or both.
Discourse about the cinema then becomes a dream: an uninterpreted dream. This is what constitutes its symptomatic value; it has already said everything. But it is also what makes it obligatory to turn it inside out like a glove, to return it like the gauntlet on accepting a challenge; it does not know what it is saying.
Michael Ventura’s book was the most useful thing I read about Love Streams. It helped me to understand the conditions under which it was made: John Cassavetes had been told by a doctor that he had only six months to live before filming started, so he was convinced that it would be his goodbye to the world. I understand something more of the tension permeating the atmosphere on set, the working methods of Cassavetes, the determination to do something worthwhile, genuine, good, and most importantly honest, which pushed his work towards the intensity it reaches in this late work. Reading Smail and Metz—as well as other various pieces I looked at—generated ideas, lines of associations, directions I might pursue. But the more I read for this essay, the further away from my experience of the film I feel myself getting. Looking back over my notes, I’m sure that I was on the wrong path. I don’t want to make a psychoanalytic argument about Love Streams, or, in fact, any kind of argument about it. I’m now wary of damaging the fact of that experience by seeking to analyse or explain it, or by trying to persuade other people to agree with my response to the film. The experience of watching it left me with an inchoate and complicated feeling which at first I hoped to illuminate and clarify through reading psychoanalysis, but the more I read the less I could make the pieces fit together. I’ve written elsewhere about this: returning to elements of my academic training to explain why an artwork moves me, then deciding that if this method would explain anything, it would also in some way damage or erase the feeling evoked by the artwork. I am writing this piece now only in order to free myself of the idea that I should write an essay about Love Streams and psychoanalysis, to be done with it, so I can spend my time more freely on something else, and so I can make the use of the feeling that Love Streams evoked in me in a less exhibitionistic way. So I give up, and I allow the feeling to remain opaque.
That’s not entirely true: the feeling that Love Streams evoked in me is not exactly opaque. It has come into closer focus for me—elements of it have certainly clarified in the last month—but it continues to resist translation into or expression through language. This is because of the precise moment in time that I watched the film, because of my personal situation at that time, and the various states of my relationships with the people that I love. Watching Love Streams acted as a conduit for a number of half-formed and previously unconnected thoughts, feelings, and internal processes which exist entirely in my own head. Sometimes it feels like I know what they are, but that I can’t talk about them. At other times it feels like I have no idea what the film has done for me, that I can’t actually know. Cassavetes said that love is the ability to not know. How hard it is to cultivate and trust that ability; how hard it is to love, without seeking to know.
That was a very interesting read. Thank you!