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This page only
contains excerpts and selected passages from Ray Carney's writing about
John Cassavetes. To obtain the complete text as well as the complete texts
of many pieces about Cassavetes that are not included on the web site,
click
here.
 [Opening
Night] is the other side of A Woman Under the Influence, about
a woman on her own, with no responsibility to anyone but herself, with
a need to come together with other women. [Myrtle] is alone and in desperate
fear of losing the vulnerability she feels she needs as an actress. [She
is] a woman unable any longer to be regarded as young: Sex is no longer
a viable weapon. You never see her as a stupendous actress. As a matter
of fact, her greatest thrill was comfort, as it is for most actresses.
Give me a play I can go into every night and can feel I have some awareness
of who I am, what I am. [She didn't] want to expose myself in [certain]
areas. So when she faints and screams on the stage, it's because it's
so impossible to be told you are this boring character, you are aging
and you are just like her. I would be unable to go on to the stage feeling
that I'm nothing. I think that most actors would, and that's really what
the picture is about. Although she resists [facing them,] Myrtle must
finally accept and resolve the dilemmas which lie not only at the core
of the play she is doing, but which [reflect] the basic realities of her
own existence, from which she has heretofore fled, aided by alcohol, men,
professional indulgence – and fantasy! The character is left in
conflict, but she fights the terrifying battle to recapture hope. And
wins! In and out of life the theme of the play haunts the actress until
she kills the young girl in herself.
—John Cassavetes
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 ....What
sets Myrtle apart from each of the others in the acting company is that
each of them has cut a deal with life in one way or another, while she
refuses to compromise her definition of herself. While they shy away from
emotional danger, uncertainty, or exposure (constantly trying to calm
Myrtle down and talk her out of her distress), she keeps opening herself
up to new and painful personal recognitions. At one point or other in
the film, Kelly, Manny, Sarah, Maurice, and David each tell her a story
about how they have accepted limitations on their definitions of themselves
– made compromises which Myrtle (and her creator) utterly refuse
to accept. As we hear in their weary, resigned, business-like tones of
voice as early as the initial scenes outside the stage door and in the
limo, they are, in their different ways, at this point in their lives,
only going through the motions. They have decided who they are and what
their lives mean, and have accepted the definition as final – something
all of Cassavetes' work is opposed to.
 Director
Manny Victor and producer David Samuels use their avuncular manner, their
male poise, irony, and humor to hold emotions at arm's length. Former
boyfriend Maurice withdraws from emotional vulnerability into cynicism
and disillusionment. Writer Sarah Goode makes another kind of compromise.
She urges resignation and acceptance of old age. Her advice to Myrtle
as an actress – "All you have to do is say the lines clearly
and with a degree of feeling" (which represents the diametrical opposite
of everything Cassavetes believed about acting) – is all-too-clearly
her own defeatist strategy for mindlessly gliding through work and personal
relationships. She has quit living and begun dying. (Cassavetes subtly
metaphorizes Sarah's state of emotional guardedness and withdrawal by
having her hide behind the brim of a feathered cloche in most of her scenes.
Note the difference in the emotional coloring of the few scenes in which
Sarah is not wearing it.) Nancy Stein, the young fan who precipitates
Myrtle's breakdown, has an equally stunted sense of her identity. She
uses her physical beauty and the promise of sex as a way of manipulating
others, rather than opening herself to them in intimacy and vulnerability.
Dorothy Victor is, in a sense,
the most interesting of Myrtle's imaginative alter egos. Dorothy
reminds a viewer of no one more than Maria Forst, the shy housewife of
Faces, who sold her identity out to her husband only to wake up
one day and realize that she had nothing left of herself. Silently, passively
identifying with Myrtle's on-stage struggle (like a reincarnation of Nancy),
Dorothy seems to undergo her own "opening night" in the course
of the film, but even so, it is telling that (like Myrtle's fans) she
lets Myrtle do the struggling for her, living vicariously through
Myrtle the way she previously lived vicariously through Manny.
 Cassavetes
surprised me once by saying how much he admired Meet John Doe.
Capra's darkest and most problematic work seemed a peculiar choice until
I considered how much its title character anticipated some of Cassavetes'
imaginatively fragmented figures. Myrtle Gordon's problem, if one can
call it that, is that she wants to hold onto the fantasy that she can
be anything, even as she is continuously being reminded of imaginative
destinies which time and life deny her. As an actress and a woman, she
wants to keep all her imaginative doors open, even as her past choices
have shut them on her.
Though audiences may not want
to accept it, one of the points of the film is that you can't be
everything – that Myrtle has to let go of some possible destinies
in order to embrace others. She must "kill" Nancy in order
herself to live. She must come to grips with what she isn't and
can never again be,
in order to be what she is. Myrtle fights that recognition. She wants
to think of herself as still sexy and attractive, but she is, after
all,
a woman of a certain age. She wants to feel that she has not closed off
possibilities, that she can still be anything, but she can't. Cassavetes
goes against everything our culture tells us. He reminds us that we can't
be everything if we would be something. We must incur real losses,
real
pains, real failures, to gain anything at all.
 Yet
at the same time, even to struggle with these questions, to fight and
resist them, is to prove that your life is not over, and all of the fundamental
issues are not resolved. Myrtle's triumph is that, no matter what price
in pain and suffering, no matter how many times she is berated, humiliated,
or rejected (as she is even on the next to last night of the film –
in the insulting encounter between her and Maurice in his apartment building),
she won't give up. Her desperation, her excesses, her stubborn refusal
to meet people half-way, to accept their limiting points of view, make
her "impossible," but also make her growth possible. Myrtle
bets her life, which is the only thing that can allow her to save it.
She refuses to exorcise her demons and wash her hands of them (as the
sèance scene metaphorically invites her to) until she has wrestled
them to the death. Cassavetes shows us that it is only in taking our lives
in our hands, in risking absolutely everything – our careers,
our friendships, and our loves – that life-saving truth can ever
be attained....
This page only
contains excerpts and selected passages from Ray Carney's writing about
John Cassavetes. To obtain the complete text as well as the complete texts
of many pieces about Cassavetes that are not included on the web site,
click
here.
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