Dublin Opinion

Si os dan papel pautado, escribid por el otro lado.
(“If they give you lined paper, write the other way.”)
Juan Ramón Jiménez

Stories are not just part of the human condition: stories are what make us human. Our capacity to tell stories lies at the core of all that we are. Without them, we are nothing: mere silence. Without them, we cannot explain, we cannot make sense to another. Stories inform, entertain, destroy, cajole, berate, and love. They do all the things we do, because they ARE what we do.

But for some reason, in this enlightened, scientific culture of ours, we have come to expect stories to have an embedded logic, even though we ourselves have little logic, hovering above none. This quest for logical direction has become the defining object of Western society, and by extension, its culture.

The most recent, and failed, experiment with diversity - postmodernism - “has itself become a universal ideology that kills everything that gives meaning and depth to the life of non-western individuals and societies” (Zardar, 1998). But for all the structure and sanity of at least the mainstream, there is a grotesque void about the truth of the human condition. We remain a mass of contradictions, and a silent one at that.

This preoccupation with logical, and plot-driven, direction holds a strong presence in modern Western cinema, particularly American cinema. Of course, this is not true of every film, or every film maker. There are dozens that embrace our contradictions - that refuse to see in our contradictions a failure to make sense of our surroundings. Instead, they see in them an expression of our very humanity, of that which makes us human.

The “logic” behind storytelling - at least, part of the “logic” - is the fact that there needs to be more than one of us for a story to be told. Stories need an audience. They need not only to be spoken, but to be heard. The logic that drives most stories today, however, is the logic of the market. We tell stories, it seems, so they can be sold. The historical context for story-telling, however, is not the market, but the meeting-place. Story-telling happens because we are social beings - individuals who need one another, drawn by love to each other, by the irrational, the unscientific.

One filmmaker who rejected the market cudgel – although not its dynamic - was John Cassavetes. Born in 1929 in New York City, Cassavetes moved into acting after finishing High School. In 1956 he met and Married Gena Rowlands, an actress who would star in many of his movies. In 1959 he made his first film, Shadows. He spent most of the next twenty years financing his movies through his acting – avoiding the studio system and its constraints. In doing so, he was able to produce some of the most remarkable works in American cinematic fiction – works such as The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and A Woman Under the Influence. He died in 1989.

In putting together this post, I watched both The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and A Woman Under the Influence again, hoping to find a clip that would do justice to them. Of course, I could not, and that is probably the best endorsement I could give. The movies are about complex, contradictory, people, and such people are incapable of being defined by a sound bite. Instead, I’ve put up a clip where Cassavetes talks, and is then quoted – where he gives his ideas on what his movies are about. Not what he thinks movies should be about, but what his movies are about. After all, they’re his stories. The final word.

“Most people don’t know what they want or feel. And for everyone, myself included, It’s very difficult to say what you mean when what you mean is painful. The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to… As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all, we must dare to fail. You must have the courage to be bad - to be willing to risk everything to really express it all.”