Am I Or Am I Not Humphrey Bogart?
gender, genre, and agency
Gender and genre: two filmic elements that have evolved in conjunction with one another, with form influencing the kinds of characters represented by filmmakers and the embodied experience of identity changing the structure of film classification. No art is inherently sexed any which way, neither by the gender of its author nor its intended audience. However, pre-existing notions of what defines identity (be it gender and/or race, class, disability, etc.) make up the foundation of gender as filmmakers render it cinematically, and deviance from gendered expectations is a catalyst for drama as old as drama itself. A film like Opening Night (1977) explores this liminal space where gender oscillates under the influence of other determining identities; in this case, the other factor in the permutation is age.
The problematizing of gender plays a crucial role in all three of Linda Williams’ designated body genres: melodrama, horror, and pornography1. In particular, film critics have historically categorized the broad umbrella term “melodrama” as female, even going so far as nicknaming the mode of filmmaking “women’s pictures,” predating more brazenly derisive terminology like “chick flicks.” Whereas weepies face criticism for their “gender- and sex-linked pathos, for their naked displays of emotion,” its two sister genres of horror and porn come under fire for their eros and brutality, respectively.
Enter independent filmmaker John Cassavetes, whose methodology exists mainly outside the aforementioned frameworks. A common source of conflict between Cassavetes and potential financiers of his films was his aversion to sex and violence. His themes of domesticity portrayed with sheer emotional excess are undoubtedly evocative of melodrama, greatly indebted to classical Hollywood filmmaking and cinéma vérité. Still, an intimate arthouse sensibility sets apart his approach as a radical one despite his surface-level conservative aesthetic. “I have to put a rape scene in or a nude scene, or I have to shoot somebody in the face for this film to be ‘good!’ (Carney)2
Though all of Cassavetes’ other feature films only concern themselves with the natural and tangible, Opening Night stands out as an anomaly in this regard. Stage actress Myrtle Gordon witnesses a fatal car accident involving a 17-year-old fan she had just met moments before upon leaving a rehearsal for an upcoming play. Upon hearing the young girl’s age, Myrtle is visibly distressed, prompting the girl to become more upset, claiming that she loves Myrtle before she is ultimately run over in the middle of the street. Without the spectacle of gore, the film relies on Bo Harwood’s chilling score and Gena Rowlands’ virtuosic performance as Myrtle to convey terror.
While Myrtle attempts in vain to process the traumatic event with her colleagues, an apparition of the dead girl starts to haunt her, the flashes of ethereal surrealism accidentally evoking Cassavetes’ contemporary Robert Altman, whose film of the same year 3 Women also features a psychically fractured construction of womanhood.
There is still violence in this world, defined by emotional gravity and ripple effects rather than Williams’ more provocative, “gross” genres. Sex also persists, though our protagonist is more troubled by persistent de-sexing at the hand of those around her. After the accident, Myrtle calls Manny, the play's director, for guidance regarding a scene wherein she is supposed to be slapped by a man (compounded by the fact that the actor playing him is Myrtle’s former lover). Rather than offering an adjustment to the part or counseling her on why this scene is so triggering for her, Manny tells her the following:
There’s nothing humiliating about [getting slapped]. You’re on the stage, for Christ’s sake. He’s not slapping you for real. Myrtle. Ugh, Myrtle. Myrtle, it has nothing to do with being a woman. You’re not a woman, anyway. No, you’re a beautiful woman, I was kidding. Now, you see? You have no sense of humor, I told you that. … It’s a tradition. Actresses get slapped. Do you want to be a star, or do you want to be unsympathetic? It’s mandatory that you get hit. That’s it.
Within a few sentences, Manny dismisses Myrtle’s legitimate concerns with varying flavors of misogyny, simultaneously restricting agency in her position as a woman and an actress and denying her womanhood period. Both he and Maurice, the actor with whom she performs the emotionally loaded scene, tell her that they no longer consider her a woman. The next day, Myrtle crumples when Maurice attempts to slap her multiple times, leaving her writhing on the floor, alternating between sobbing, laughing, and dissociated silence. In addition, she regularly flubs her lines and improvises preferred dialogue instead of playwright Sarah’s script. Despite her constant state of hysterics and inebriation, Myrtle’s directive remains clear: breathing life into a role that feels stuffy and restricting, whether that be the specific role of Virginia or the broader archetype of an aging woman.
Eventually, Sarah is so irritated by Myrtle’s behavior that she demands to have a one-on-one conversation with the actress in an attempt to straighten her out. Sarah presses Myrtle multiple times over her age, insisting that she feels so distant from Virginia because she is not accepting her age gracefully. By doing so, she imposes a narrow experience of temporal womanhood onto Myrtle, which, whether or not truly is the root of her aversion to the play, is an expression of lateral slight by a woman who believes that she, Myrtle, and every other woman are bound by the constricts of time. Later on, Myrtle has this to say on her side of the story:
She's not even like some bum. You know? She's not even a bum. She's not a bitch. She's nothing. She's nothing. I mean, if I play her the way everybody wants me to play her, like some little over-the-hill matron, my career is over. I'm sick to death of hearing how old this woman is. Who gives a damn how old this woman is? Does she win, or does she lose? That's what I want to know.
Interestingly, this pairs well with a statement made by Cassavetes regarding the representation of women in contemporary cinema, “There’s nothing to do with the dreams of women, or of women as the dream, nothing to do with the quirky part of her, the wonder of her” (Carney). Albeit a more romantic outsider take on the matter, there is a consistent theory here, a radical recontextualizing of women’s interiority which he prioritizes over the morose, oft-gender-bound conventions of melodrama while still entirely existing within the realm of heterosexuality; indeed, by this measure, his work functions as a robust queer critique. Sarah also plays an important role here as a second-wave feminist straw-woman, livid that Myrtle does not want to commiserate about their respective ages or take her script seriously. Her presence might be a consequence of Cassavetes’ distrust toward “Women’s Lib,” but the navel-gazing of white femininity is a resonant concept for feminist film scholars to take note of nonetheless.
Opening Night is not a conventional melodrama, and it is even further away from a standard horror or thriller, yet the film expertly dabbles in techniques and themes ingrained to be inseparable from these genres. When the titular evening finally arrives, the film arguably drops its most significant subversion to its body genre parents yet: a (relatively) happy ending. Myrtle goes entirely off-book, instead opting to improvise with Maurice to spectacular results; so spectacular, in fact, she drives Sarah away mid-show. Myrtle has eliminated the ghost haunting her and successfully revitalized the character she played for the audience, directly in parallel to Cassavetes’ relationship with characterization in the face of the Hollywood machine.
Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 4, 1991, pp. 2–13., https://doi.org/10.2307/1212758.
Carney, Raymond. Cassavetes on Cassavetes. Faber, 2001.