Cassavetes' legacy--or lack thereof

Bastard Hat
    By David Auerbach

The late filmmaker John Cassavetes has a watertight reputation of integrity. His legacy has been certified by at least two songs written about him, one by that renowned institution of liberal self-righteousness, Fugazi. Yet he is less famous for what he did than how he did it--raising money himself, working on miniscule budgets and with maximal improvisation, supporting himself by acting so that he could direct films the way he wanted (films no studio in its right mind would have funded).

And no wonder, because Cassavetes' films are hard to watch: most are plotless, carried only by the actors, who trudge on until the film ends. His films aren't meant to be enjoyed; rather, they're supposed to display that ephemeral quality of insight. But they don't, not for me. Catharsis is a dirty word to Cassavetes--if his characters have a moment of insight, it's only into what the audience has known from the movie's beginning. In Faces, after the novelty of seeing the horse guy from The Godfather fades, there's only the monotony of people breaking down in ways you'd expect.

Cassavetes' films are respectable and unique, and his achievements in the face of indifference are impressive. But he's sadly become something of a poster boy for people too scared to embrace anything close to the mainstream. Boston University film professor Ray Carney, writing for the noted and notably obnoxious journal The Baffler (it can be described as The New Journal as run by Bikini Kill), says that Cassavetes "asks us to think and feel in fundamentally new ways." I wasn't asked--but who am I to question Carney's revelations in the face of these films? Then Carney shreds Robert Altman and Alfred Hitchcock for not asking of us the same thing. I start to wonder if Carney is one of those people who shops at Powell's Bookstore, but would sooner kill himself than enter a Barnes & Noble (Powell's has displayed business ethics as territorial and cutthroat as B&N, just not as rampantly).

Carney cannot shut up about how Cassavetes refuses to offer "easy answers." But Cassavetes' alternative is lockstep characters improvised on top of vague scenarios who surprise us by not acting--not in any consistent fashion, anyway. The technique can work, as it does in Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky (which ironically stars Cassavetes), but for Carney it's less a technique than a polemic. And this polemic boils down to a stridently non-conformist ethos that fits all too well in The Baffler's pages, alongside blanket condemnations of politics, the free market, and culture.

Carney offers us the key to his own monomania by giving us Cassavetes, a quirky director who embodies the principles of indier-than-thouness--a man who made uncommercial, quasi-traumatic films because they were the only ones he could make. Luckily, that's the right kind of film, according to Carney. Altman can make a deviant, surreal film like Brewster McCloud and still be offering easy answers, since he doesn't follow Carney's magic formula.

At least Carney has some cinematic agenda. I fear that The Baffler published him only in an attempt to defuse the cult of personality that was then surrounding Quentin Tarantino. Cassavetes became a hollow idol, nailed to the church door to show how things should be done. The sad fact is that any independent director would have sufficed--Cassavetes just filled the spot where Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, or even Kenneth Anger could have gone.

Likewise, Altman and Hitchcock can be thrown together with Tarantino and Spielberg because they're all on the same side, man. The cultural influences brought down on them by the big studios render their work inherently worthless. This non-conformist self-segregation is nothing new, but with the co-opting of Cassavetes for its cause, we lose one more person to an increasingly dehumanizing movement in which an artist's station in life counts for more than his work.

So what is Cassavetes' legacy? Despite Carney's admittedly good intentions to portray him as a revealer of truths, the content of his films will not live on outside the memory of cinéastes. Instead, he will be only one more name on the roster of the institution of the self-willed "independents." Rather than prize him as a filmmaker who challenged us, or condemn him as one who bored us, we will think of him as a guy who beat the system and played by his own rules--and made, uh, a bunch of films.

Recent Herald Columns by this Columnist:
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• Today's publishers prefer pulp over prose, 2/13/97
• Today's need for old-fashioned cynicism, 1/30/97
• WYBC broadcasts hypocrisy, 1/16/98

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