The Disappointment Artist (13 page)

Richard Lethem had reclaimed, from the depopulated tableaus of the sixties, his insight into the yearning gravity of inanimate objects. But, having worked from live models for ten years, his brush fixates on bodies. My father had learned a lot, by then, about community, violence, and disease, and about trying to put human flesh and human life on canvas, and discovering how it resists being put there. So every fabulation is run through what he’d found to be the bottom (and top) line: the physical absolutes of human experience. If he’s a surrealist it’s not the drawing-room gamesmanship of Magritte, but of Julio Cortázar and Bob Dylan and early Cormac McCarthy, where a gothic personal phantasmagoria is made necessary by an immensity of emotional response not encompassed by realist methods. The results are some of the least rarified artworks I’ve had the privilege to know.

Have I broken into the studio again, just to neaten up the drips? All this may be no better than a cartoon rendering, a pass with my ape’s bone of language over the impossible intersection of Richard Lethem’s painting and my wishful thinking. The account’s not half full. Where in this is my father’s passion for John Berryman’s
Dream Songs
? Where’s his ritual of finding workmen’s gloves, abandoned in gutters, and pinning them to his studio wall, or gluing them to his canvases? His scattering of well-worn Lightning Hopkins and Elmore James cassettes, his green painting table with its molten Vesuvius pyramids of petrified colors? What’s missing here is only the whole matter: my father in his studio, painting, as he has always been, as he likely is this morning. I’d only need to pick up the phone to find him there. To interrupt him, though I know he’d be glad to talk. See him: my father painting. My father painting, in a converted barn in Maine now, adjusting the space heater, stepping back from canvas to palette table to mix a color, or just to have a look, to see what he’s done, to judge whether the expression on the face of that acrobat or feral goat or Tultepec god (he’s been inspired by Mexican art lately) is just right, conveys the shade of greed or delight he’d intended, carrying the story just that bit further. My father in the studio in a mustard-colored sweater. My father in the studio with a mug of coffee, long since cold. My father in the studio painting. My father in his studio, pausing to read a sonnet. My father in his studio, half finishing a letter to his brother, then picking up his brush. My father, in his studio, layering act upon act, color upon color, practicing his art.

Two or Three Things
I Dunno
About Cassavetes

A man and a woman are walking out of a movie theater. They opened the paper that morning and saw that it was playing—just a single showing, at that run-down, shabby movie theater where nobody ever goes. But this was their chance, so they rushed in and bought tickets, an afternoon show on a weekday. Sat down in those broken movie-theater seats, the two of them the sole couple in the crowd. Though crowd’s not the word for it, the place is empty apart from a few guys sitting by themselves, the type that go to obscure movies in run-down theaters on weekday afternoons. The man and the woman don’t care, they’re excited, so. Lights go down, movie plays, lights go up. Now they’re walking out of the theater.

They’ve just watched a movie by John Cassavetes. I’d say it doesn’t matter which one, but I know you know I don’t mean one of the bad ones we try not to talk about, from near the beginning or near the end of his career. The man and the woman have just watched one of the great ones. You know the movies I mean, the ones that change your life. One you never forget where you were when you saw it first or how it felt to see it, one that made you think:
What the hell was that? I need to see that again!
Who is this Cassavetes?
No, they watched that one they’d heard so much about—the one about the family, the friends, the siblings, the performers, the one about the man and the woman.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Sure, yeah, I’m fine.”

“Nothing wrong?”

“Nope.”

“Because I couldn’t help noticing there was a lot of fidgeting, squirming around in your seat, heavy sighing going on in there. So I was wondering if something was wrong.”

“Okay, sure, but I’m fine, thanks, I’m great.”

“So, wasn’t that amazing?”

“I guess so.” She gave a sort of heavy sigh now, if you were watching for that kind of thing, which he was.

“You didn’t love it?”

“There were a lot of incredible things in it.”

“Incredible is one word. That movie was all about my life and everything I feel.”

“I was a little impatient.”

“I can’t fathom that and I think you were watching it wrong.”

“A lot of it seemed like, I don’t know, actor’s exercises, these endless frenzied reiterations that don’t really go anywhere.”

“It made you uncomfortable.”

“I love you but it made me tired.”

“You resisted it.”

“I love you but I’m sorry I didn’t resist it.”

“Well quit saying you love me because if you don’t love that movie you don’t love me because I am that movie, that movie is me.”

“You’re nothing like that movie.”

“I am inside and if you could see who I really am you would know.”

“Lower your voice.”

“I don’t have to.”

“We swore no more yelling on the street.”

“I’M NOT YELLING ON THE STREET I’M JUST TRYING TO UNDERSTAND HOW YOU COULD SAY THAT MOVIE WAS LIKE ACTING EXERCISES! DON’T WALK AWAY!”

“I just can’t be around you right now.”

“You don’t need to say that please don’t say that hey wait come on don’t walk so fast—”

“Lady, are you okay?” The guy who says this, a large guy who must have been in the doorway of the restaurant, is upon them so quickly they’re both startled and jostle into each other as they halt. The woman pushes herself away from the collision and stumbles for a second and the large guy steps between the man and the woman and puts his hand up like a traffic cop and says again, “You okay?” The woman just shakes her head, no, yes, keeps walking. Big guy walks with her. Man stands watching, arms outstretched though nobody’s seeing him, well, maybe loads of people, now that he’s bothered to notice that the whole street’s full of gawking faces—they were never alone—but not the woman or the big guy she’s walking with. Those two, they just keep going.

I’m thinking about minor characters in the films of John Cassavetes. Take McCarthy, played by Val Avery, in
Faces
. McCarthy’s the one who’s trying to get over with Jeannie (played by John Cassavetes’s wife, Gena Rowlands) when Richard (played by John Marley) shows up. He’s the guy who admits to Jeannie, the tender call girl, that he’s baffled by his own son, a six-foot Dartmouth man in tennis shoes.

Faces
is in one sense nothing more than a flash-frozen record of the condition of the marriage of its two main characters: Richard and his wife, Maria (played by Lynn Carlin). The film presents Richard’s night away from home, and what Maria does while he’s away. In another sense,
Faces
is a voracious ribald mugging of its viewers’ defensive assumptions: assumptions about how much a film is allowed to make them feel about men and women and daily life, about the expression or suppression of passionate impulses in a marriage or in a house or in a nightclub or in America in 1965. It’s also a shattering formal essay in compression and explosion, a mix of sensory overload (“I dream of Jeannie with the light brown hair! I dream of Jeannie with the light brown hair! I! Dream! Of! Jeannie! With! The! Light! Brown! Hair!” chanted, sung and bellowed by the characters until you wish to scream) and deprivation: deprivation of the ordinary consolations available to audience members, who find themselves wrenched into bewildering complicity, forced to stumble in the reeling footprints of the seemingly intoxicated performers.

In the middle of all this, mistaking himself for a player, is poor McCarthy. The guy just wants a night out. Wants, as it will happen, something he can’t quite put his finger on, nor can we, but it comes in the package of Gena Rowlands. And McCarthy doesn’t have any inkling he’s not the main point here. Eyeballs bulging with need and its denial, teeth bared in sardonic self-loathing, he’s gonna get what he wants if it kills him, if it would kill him even to name it. In fact, we can see that Jeannie’s already halfway promised herself to Richard, that she’s readying herself for a rendezvous with Richard even as she wriggles out of McCarthy’s grasp.

When McCarthy and Richard face one another it will be with the horror of mutual recognition, a doppelgänger dream out of Poe or Nabokov: two married guys, two businessmen, mirrored even in their acne scars (and how rare, that facial confession of adolescence, for an actor! How specific that this director chose two pockmarked guys for these parts!). Only their respective styles of brokenhearted swagger distinguish them, only hair-splitting degrees of difference in the hierarchy of the suburban damned.

But Richard’s still offstage, and McCarthy figures he’s the star of the show. Indeed, he’s given an episode of such merciless poignancy that he nearly steals the movie: McCarthy has blundered his way into Jeannie’s boudoir. He and Jeannie have left behind in the living room another couple, who carry on with the insane cavorting which has dominated the film to this point, the rituals of drink and song which seem a barely sufficient stand-in for all human yearning, for sex and conversation, possibly for food and air and water. But McCarthy wants more. He wants contact. And he’s granted it, contact and a bit of grace, even. Jeannie embraces him in tender silence as he spills it out: “Oh, boy, what a life . . . what have I got after all these years? A big house, a kooky wife, and a kid who wears sneakers. I like you, Jeannie. I want you to like me for myself, I’d like to make love to you and know that you like me for my charm, my wit . . .”

Jeannie says nothing. Nuzzles him slightly. Her gift of listening is what she’s got for him. It’ll do, barely. McCarthy has by now gathered that she’s not lending him more than an ear, tonight. So he wrenches himself out of the sacred moment, back into the living room, back into the drunken whirl—but not before disheveling his own hair and untucking his shirt to simulate the grope scene he’s ashamed wasn’t unfolding behind those closed doors. He’s showing off for his buddy and the second girl, pretending he scored, at the small expense of whatever shreds of Jeannie’s respect he hasn’t already torched.

McCarthy, though minor, isn’t half done yet. When Richard shows up, McCarthy’ll insult him, put him in a headlock, and then forge a wheedling, backslapping, faux friendship with him even as Jeannie’s kicking McCarthy and his friend and the other girl out the door. I’m going to leave McCarthy here, though, where I treasure him most, prep-ping himself in the mirror on his way out of Jeannie’s bedroom, mussing his hair, putting on a boorish jocularity to protect himself from himself, from his confession of sensitivity. If you’re like me, you love him. That’s the mystery: I don’t find I want to push McCarthy any harder than he’s pushed himself. I want to console the guy.

“Conversation!” Nick Longhetti, played by Peter Falk, commands of his houseguests in
A Woman Under the Influence
. “Weather! Ordinary conversation!” He’s howling like an impotent Prospero in the storm of liquefied emotion that is his family’s life, begging for a taste of the small talk or pleasantry he imagines will vouchsafe the normality—and sustainability—of his domestic arrangement. (Another day at the same table, when he and his co-workers share a spaghetti dinner, he attempts to plug the gap himself with an anecdote so inept that it verges on poetry: “You go for months, you don’t see any kids, suddenly you see strollers, kids everywhere. Must be something in the air.”)

Nick, fighting the evidence that his wife, Mabel (Gena Rowlands), presents in every vibrant, paradoxical, absurdly responsive cell of her body, can’t accept that life is so fundamentally up for grabs, that one moment tumbles upon the next with no sense of accountability to its predecessor, that every social code is up for constant renegotiation, like the stakes at a poker table where the dealer’s called a game of infinity card draw. But also, Mabel sleeps with other guys. This is, weirdly, one of the least remarked-upon aspects of this much remarked-upon film: Mabel sleeps around. We can dwell endlessly on the ambiguities of Mabel’s and Nick’s distress yet somehow flinch from the brunt of Nick’s rage at betrayal. Just when these films have taught us to distrust the obvious, they’ll tease us for overlooking it.

So maybe Nick’s our surrogate, we in our disorientation and dismay at the uncertainties into which Mabel’s directorial style (of her marriage, of her children’s after-school parties, of the expressions that cross her face) and Cassavetes’s directorial style (of his movie, of his actress wife) have thrust us. Except, as a surrogate, Nick stinks. He’s crazy too. He’s screwed it all up, failing to call Mabel and simply tell her he’s stuck working all night and will miss their marital “date” (in preparation for which the kids have been shipped off to his mother-in-law’s). Boorish at best, Nick seems incapable of soothing speech, and instead displays a fondness for jolting Mabel with Popeyeish outbursts. We yearn, as viewers, to leap through the screen and throttle him more times than we can count. So whose side are we on? Those poor kids? Is that how little foothold we’ve got here?

I’m thinking about a minor character in the films of John Cassavetes, a minor character who may in fact be the star (even if he sometimes, in the history of the reception of the movies, declined to show up): the viewer of the films. Cassavetes mostly wrecks ordinary systems of cinematic identification with his characters. On the technical level, this means the near-total avoidance of point-of-view shots, which, traditionally, form the primary language of alliance between viewer and screen actor. In terms of tone, a refusal to commit to comedy or tragedy, faux realism or absurdist farce. In terms of the presentation of the material itself, he withholds those reassuring cues usually given to privilege a character as worthy of our sympathy, and charming enough for us to want to hang out with—the confirming glances of irascible and deferential character actors, the petting of the heads of dogs and babies, the outlines of a reliably beguiling persona. Even more dismaying, at times he withholds vast (yet easily divulged) realms of pure information: who’s married and not, who’s whose brother or sister, whether or not someone’s a girlfriend or a prostitute, or what the outcome of a fundamentally worrisome event (worksite accident, shooting, one-night stand) might have been. The preference is to keep the viewer on his or her cognitive heels, boxing with a flurry of contradictory material.

The paradox of Cassavetes’s style is that while he appears to wreck identification in this way he somehow creates a vocabulary of cinematic experiences impossible to describe except as “personal,” “emotional,” and “indulgent.” Despite the frustrating blockage of our sympathies, nobody’s ever slandered the work as
cold
,
distant
, or
objective
. What Cassavetes has done, rather than wreck identification, is to
displace
it, to an unspecified place somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle between viewer, the viewer’s expectations and beliefs as to what the film ought to be doing, and Cassavetes’s own implied presence as director. Anecdotes from Cassavetes’s sets endlessly underline his own personal presence—his beckoning, cackling, tearful bodily presence behind the lens, often just inches from his performers. His sound men routinely had to erase his own voice from the soundtracks, where he’d intruded in exhorting and provoking the actors. So the exhilarating ultimatum Cassavetes presents is to invest so deeply in his own perilously negotiated viewpoint (as witness, catalyst, exorcist, as grumbling parent and conspiratorial sibling to his actors) that we’re forced to abandon the maps and protractors we’d not even noticed we ordinarily keep between us and an encounter with a film. If this is a poker game, we’re not even sure we can see Cassavetes’s cards, or our own, as we’re asked to place our bet.

We resort to Charlie Parker, the blues, jazz, beatnik poetry, “If you have to ask, you’ll never know,” Miles Davis with his back to the audience (Tom Charity: “There’s a correlation with Bebop here. Like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, Cassavetes could take a standard tune and turn it inside out . . .”), Jackson Pollock, Norman Mailer’s
White Negro
, and the cult of “hip,” all the restless-in-the-fifties romanticism that can seem in retrospect so mannered and indulgent but was in the context of its moment an act, an acting out, likely as necessary as a drowning man’s thrashing to the surface for a gulp of air. If the word
uptight
had never existed, and the world to which it alludes was unrecorded elsewhere, the fabulous evidence of the many species of
uptighteosity
catalogued in
Faces
alone would make the term a necessary invention of social historians wishing to decipher the consciousness of the middle of America’s last century.