A Woman Under the Influence (1974) dir. John Cassavetes
A woman slowly goes mad and her family struggles to deal with it.
Watched: 10 May 2019
Rating: ★★★★½
Earlier this year, I saw Hofesh Shechter’s Grand Finale, a post-apocalyptic-esque dance production that has almost nothing to do with this film except for one image that stays with me. There’s a sequence in which the men perform a pas de deux with the dead bodies of women against the music of classical ballet. At the start of A Woman Under the Influence, a man physically supports a drunk Mabel home. He turns it into a dance and tries to make her limbs move with his: a small waltz in the foyer with her draped over his shoulder like an extension of his coat. The theatre laughed. In many ways, a dysfunctional family is like trying to dance with a body that won’t dance back. There were moments, though, when the dead dancers would show signs of life like holding out an arm, as there were instances when Mabel would emerge to clarity. You keep going for that upward motion — that arm, however brief.
The moments that broke me were when the camera would linger on the kids even while the ‘action’ was elsewhere. I started wondering what an entire film would look like from the perspective of those kids. There’s an odd dissonance when you’re a kid in a dysfunctional family in that everything is so charged with fear and anxiety that you know something’s wrong, and yet nothing has ever been right, so the wrongness is normal. Some of Mabel’s mannerisms felt over the top but then I had the jarring thought that perhaps this is what it looks like to people on the outside. People look on and say that those things aren’t normal or okay. And when you’re on the inside, you can’t afford those thoughts — to cope, you have to take each day and disregard whether things should be that way or not. To cope, these are the things you have to do just to get through. You have to watch your mother rage around the living room, your father screaming back just trying to hold everything together. You have to get over your ambivalence towards unreliable parental figures and play the role of a kid to let your dad take you to the beach and get your mother to be exactly that: a mother. You have to coax her into putting you to bed while you tell her you’re worried about her. You have to parent them into parenting you.
The most anxiety-ridden scenes involved the back-and-forth between Mabel and Nick. “Do you love me?” she asks, but it’s not clear who Nick is meant to or wants to love. There’s a part, shot almost entirely in silhouette in the staircase as if in the hidden wings of a stage, when he tries to get her to perform her tics again. Presumably because he can’t recognise this Mabel, this subdued and more “normal” Mabel. He wants her to find the equilibrium between personality and stability. And she tries. “Tell me who you want to be.” Mabel tries throughout to act the part, but her character slips and there’s nothing solid to hold onto. She fails the rehearsal, much less the performance. How thrilled she is to carry out ordinary duties, then baffled to find she’s gotten them terribly wrong. How much of life is just trying to navigate the gap between what you are or have and what you want to be.
It’s that back-and-forth that characterises the anxiety in the film. There’s no one point of tension or resolution — every moment is charged with it, the presence or the promise of it. The kids are put to bed at the end and everything seems to go back to some sort of sanity but they’re going to have to wake up the next morning and do it all over again. Many of the shots are filmed from behind someone or through bits of them (their hair, the gaps between their limbs), or else shoved straight up against faces in cramped angles even though the surroundings were large. So throughout there’s always the sense of what sits outside the frame. There’s a wildness that surrounds the camera, but the camera so intimately closes in on a single experience each time that there’s a constant anxiety of never getting the whole picture and at the same time being so close that it’s impossible to look away. Everything and nothing is hidden. Everything known; nothing understood. Nothing but the desire itself to understand.
And understanding doesn’t arise rationally — the understanding between them is not understandable from the outside at all. For they fall back together, Nick and Mabel. “Do you love me?” He never answers this, but he washes blood off her hand and they don’t discuss it. They rearrange the furniture as if it were any other regular evening activity. The entropy of a closed system tends towards maximum. But on the inside you’d arguably rather have someone match your madness and love the other through it. No one else gets it. As only someone who had been through it could capture it so well. There is so much that I can’t and won’t write or create art about. And I’m sure this would’ve been so difficult but I’m grateful that Cassavetes dared.