Cassavetes: Misogynist? Alcoholic! Messiah! Genius?

So, I watched Cassavetes’ A Woman under the Influence. I guess now the song by Le Tigre kinda resonates with my own disposition towards him, er, minus the son-of-god reference. I would summarize the plot something like 7th Heaven bad-tripping on LSD: the mental breakdown of a perfect housewife and mother, a savage rupture in the heteronormative script that goes to the heart of the perfect (white) American family romance. This early 70s drama chooses as its focus the dysfunction of a typical lower middle-class family, triggered by the woman’s inability to perform proper wifehood and motherhood. What remains when she is stripped bare of her wifely and motherly roles is the wild irrational, threatening, pathological femininity in need of urgent medical attention. Place the plot in the context of the 70s women’s lib movement, and the meaning becomes almost too obvious. But it’s worth watching, for all its racist and sexist self-gratulatory shoulder pats...

Cassavetes makes a point of having long uncut scenes that really drain the actors dry of their madness improvisation ideas, which leads to a lot of tension and little relief, and to a really engaged viewing – by which I mean, plenty of annoyance and frustration, in my case, a real ‘pfff’-trigger.

Maybe I am obsessed with reading social realities and anxieties into on-screen framings of individual alcohol-induced, pill-popping drama, but hey, we all have our hobbies, and that’s just the kind of thing I like to do on a Saturday evening.