1229. “Cold!”
Gena Rowlands in Gloria, dir. J. Cassavetes (1980)
The story: Rowlands plays a practical and satisfied retired underworld consort who, for reasons quite beyond her, is thrown together with a central casting “kid,” chockablock full of all the silent or barely spoken idioms that make him fit for life on the street. And a good thing, too: the kid, through unfortunate accident, is obliged to go it alone, his parent having been freshly gunned down by annoyed mobsters.
So predictable is the story’s move toward Love that it’s hard to disagree—at least at first—with Vincent Canby’s uncertainty reviewing the movie:
Whether or not it’s supposed to be moving, I don’t know. That’s the sort of question that haunts each Cassavetes work. You can never be sure that what you’re seeing is artful or artless.
In the midst of all this confusion, the comic relief featured in the film is more than usually relieving—it actually throws things into relief. Thus, early one morning—like around 8:13 or so, in the midst of a hard to figure out moral crisis—G. R. repairs to a bar somewhere in the Northern, Nether Regions of Manhattan’s Far Upper West Side, in order to collect her thoughts. Such collection requires some potable refreshment. She orders a beer. The bartender, a little snide, a little not, asks her to specify the brand she prefers. Gena, uncharmed by this mildly amused and aggressive interference with her vital cogitation, lashes out: Cold! is her pitch-perfect, moll-superb, sarcastic response. In contrast to the scenes of dumb and ambiguous pain that roll through this movie like all the Refuse of a pre- and post-gentrified New York (the film is not only made in 1980, it is set there as well), such pushback truculence is like a cold bath of clarity: such irritation is the currency of social relations as familiar as the subway line you know in your sleep. If this exchange distracts Ms. Rowlands from her moral meditation on her responsibilities to the kid, it also concentrates it, rendering it, by the force of its contrast, more real to her and to us. If we are inclined, despite Mr. Canby’s creditable doubt, to be moved by the tale of Redemption, surely this inclination to be so moved has something to do with the sight of Gloria getting pissed off in the midst of the scene cast as the moment of redemption.
I do not doubt that “the consideration of death has been always made use of, by the moralist and the divine, as a powerful incentive to virtue and to piety.” But as the author of this remark knows full well, any useful clarity that issues forth from this obscure consideration has roots, as superficial as they are vital, in less solemn annoyances that, dwelling on the surface of our daily business, is thus exposed to all the light of day. It’s like Gena Rowlands in that bar, the darkness of where she has come to rest exposed to a rising sun of an ordinary day that no amount of cigarette haze or window-encrusted dirt can fend off forever. We are accustomed to regard our diurnal actions and affects as matters that arise from and are best explained by dark and deep motives, good, bad or indifferent. But shouldn’t we credit as well the powers of our well-lit surface life as the sometimes antagonistic source and illumination of what lies beneath? Don’t we do our best thinking as much in the midst of “the roaring traffic’s boom” as we do in “the silence of [our] lonely room”?
1. “The consideration of death has been always made use of, by the moralist and the divine, as a powerful incentive to virtue and to piety” (The Mirror 72, January 15, 1780).
2. On the soul as something brought to bloom by pushback efforts to defend the grounds where its garden might grow, see G. Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life.”