Hollywood movie dialogue and the "real realism" of John Cassavetes

Film Quarterly

Volumn 52, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 2-16

  Berliner, Todd ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA WILMINGTON   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 36248997865     PISSN: 00151386     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/1213821     Document Type: Review

References (16)

1. Grover Lewis, Academy All the Way (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1974), 115.
2. Quotations from movies are my transcriptions, unless designated otherwise.
3. Other lines from House of Games with shifting syntaxes include, "Man, you're living in the dream, your questions, 'cause there is a real world," and "You threatened to kill a friend of mine.... Whether you mean it or not, and it's irrelevant to me, because you aren't going to do it." All three lines are spoken as Mamet wrote them in his shooting script. Cf. David Mamet, House of Games: The Complete Screenplay (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1985), 67, 10, and 13.
4. André Bazin, "Theater and Cinema - Part Two," What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 102.
5. Numerous scholars have described Hollywood's "invisible style." For a brief and lucid discussion, see David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 162-64.
6. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 165. Investigating the history of the term "realism" inevitably leads one to a paradox: On the one hand, realism signifies the portrayal of reality as it really is (see the writings of Sergei Eisenstein, Cesare Zavattini, and John Grierson). But, on the other, realism is a form of representation that masks reality in order to give us the illusion of reality (Nichols, Raymond Williams, Richard Maltby): We register something as real because the apparatus for representing it has been hidden from us - realism is a form of deceit. Cassavetes situates himself between these two notions of realism, producing art that is both like life as well as contrived.
7. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Routledge, 1988), 3-11.
8. Emanuel A. Schegloff, "On the Organization of Sequences as a Source of 'Coherence' in Talk-in-Interaction," Conversational Organization and Its Development, ed. Bruce Dorval (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1990), 56-58. In addition to shortening the quotation for convenience, I have altered it some since it appears originally in a technical transcription notation.
9. When I say "Cassavetes films," I am referring to the ones over which he had complete control, not the films he made early in his career for the studios - Too Late Blues (1962) and A Child Is Waiting (1963) - nor Big Trouble (1986), which he directed simply for the money. Gloria (1980) falls somewhere between a Cassavetes film and the other type. "I wrote the story to sell, strictly to sell," Cassavetes said in an interview. "It was no great shakes" (James Stevenson, "John Cassavetes - Film's Bad Boy," American Film 5 [January/February, 1980], 48). But Columbia wouldn't buy the script unless he also agreed to direct it, which he did, after reworking the script and turning the film into something he was willing to have his name on.
10. Judith Crist, Take 22: Moviemakers and Moviemaking (New York: Viking Penguin, 1984), 256.
11. The exchange in the script reads as follows: VITO What a day. Haven't been to the beach without my wife in twenty-three years. I used to live in the water when I was a kid. Fish, they used to call me. I was skinny, see, lips all blue, shaking, looking for girls.... Yeah, my kids are grown now. My son, Marco, is a college graduate. Communist. Couldn't make a living. Too many ideas. Too much reading. I say, let the girls read, they love reading. NICK Okay let's enjoy ourselves, okay? I want to talk to my kids too. VITO Kids - they don't listen. Why should they listen? I never listened. NICK Tony, this is good right here. Let's just plop right here. VITO I'm usually a lot of fun, Nick - right? But to see a guy like that fall and break all his bones - holy shit, what a fall. NICK All right, knock it off, will you? We're here, we're having a good time, we're gonna play with the kids - that's what you came here for. Otherwise, go home. John Cassavetes, A Woman Under the Influence, screenplay (Faces Music, 1972), 89-90.
12. This notion of realism differs from conventional ones, although we can see it as a logical outgrowth of more traditional conceptions. In one of his definitions of realism, Raymond Williams writes: "Realist art or literature is seen as simply one convention among others, a set of formal representations, in a particular medium to which we have become accustomed" (Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society [New York: Oxford University Press, 1976], 219-220).
13. According to this definition, realism is merely a system of representational conventions so familiar that we no longer recognize them as conventions. Though it seems to reflect reality more authentically, realistic art - because it is, finally, merely a representation - in fact comes no closer to reality man other systems of representation. Richard Maltby agrees: "The goal of realism is an illusion. Art cannot 'show things as they really are,' because the 'real' in realism is defined as being that which is unmediated by representation. Since it is outside representation, it cannot be represented: representations can be only more or less inadequate imitations or substitutions for it" (Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction [Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995], 150). Yet once we put as much pressure on the concept of realism as do Williams and Maltby, we are inevitably led to the conclusion that reality itself is not "real" but merely "realistic," since reality is also mediated through representations, performances, scripts and conventions, as well as through our own perceptions, misapprehensions and ideologies.
14. Ray Carney makes essentially this point when he says that the movie complicates "our awareness of both 'reality' and 'acting' so that the terms lose their separateness from each other.... There is no alternative pastoral self underneath all these masks, roles, and postures" (American Dreaming: The Films of John Cassavetes and the American Experience [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985], 250). Carney also writes, "The characters who interest Cassavetes exist only by virtue of their performative capacities, their abilities to play with, and against, the audiences around them" (251). My argument about Opening Night adds to and diverges from Carney's in two principle ways. First, Carney does not recognize the special resonance between the experience of Cassavetes movies in general and the subject of Opening Night in particular. Second, though Carney acknowledges the ways in which people in Cassavetes movies behave like actors (everyday role-playing as the "art" in real life), he does not see the relation between that notion and the notion that improvisation causes actors to behave like regular people (improvisation as the "real" in art). Together these two elements (and the blurring of them) comprise the experience those of us who watch Cassavetes movies expect from them, and together they create the films' powerfully realistic effect.
15. The film's most heavy-handed instance of the paradoxical blending of realities occurs at the New York opening of The Second Woman, when some new actors appear in the movie as theater audience members. First, we see Peter Falk, the most famous of Cassavetes' troupe, standing in the theater lobby. The movie does not name him, but it seems as though Falk has come to see the play of his friend and colleague, John Cassavetes. That notion, however, violates the boundaries of the fictional reality. After the play, Tony Roberts and Seymour Cassel appear and the same paradox arises. Later still, Manny (played by Gazzara) introduces his wife Dorothy (played by Lampert) to director Peter Bogdanovich (played by Peter Bogdanovich), whom Manny introduces by name.
16. It would appear that Cassavetes maintained the same kind of ambiguity on the set that he generated for his audiences and his characters. Joan Blondell said about making Opening Night, "I couldn't tell when the actors were having a private conversation and when they were actually changing the lines of the script" (Janet Maslin, "From John Cassavetes, Tempest in the Theater," New York Times, 1 October, 1988, L15).