Here's this fascinating photo of actor-director John Cassavetes on the set of his film Shadows, in a state of exultation as a jazz musician blows away in the foreground. [1] Does Cassavetes look cool? No! The jazz musician, on the other hand, has the sunglasses, the dark clothing -- and skin. The horn extending from his lips is the coolest accoutrement; were it not there, a cigarette would probably be dangling. The glasses covering the eyes, the horn or cigarette plugging up the mouth, the leather or dark jacket (or pigmentation) protecting the skin -- this is the consistent costuming of both white and black Cool for the last half century. The costuming suggests that the function of Cool is to serve as
armor protecting the body and self from penetration, and that Cool is a form of macho posturing.
[2]
At least since the '40s, when an outsider subculture of bebop jazz musicians defined themselves differently from the "squares" and Miles Davis recorded The Birth of the Cool, "blackness" has had a privileged position in the universe of Cool (Might magazine's Summer 1997 cover story "Are Black People Cooler than White People?" asks a tautological question). This status is a good example of how African-Americans have been, in Barbara Ehrenreich's words, "permanent outsiders who countered their own rejection from the white world by creating their own language and art" (The Hearts of Men, Avon Books, 1984, p. 56). But the shell of that oppositional creativity, the mask that is "emotionless, stoic, and unflinching," is becoming, as sociologists Richard Majors and Janet Mancini-Billson argue in their book, Cool Pose, an increasingly debilitating burden for young black men.
Majors and Mancini-Billson recognize that the cool pose is an adaptive "mechanism used by some black males to cope with the realities of their existence ... to enhance social competence, pride, dignity, self-esteem and respect. Cool enhances masculinity. Being cool also expresses bitterness, anger, and distrust towards the dominant society for many years of hostile mistreatment and discrimination" (Cool Pose, Touchstone, 1992, p. 105). But they, along with Marlene Kim Connor in What is Cool? Understanding Black Manhood in America (Crown, 1995), bemoan the increasing confinement of Cool within a tough street-jacket, which Connor ascribes to "ghettocentricity, a narrower and narrower definition of what it means to be black (p. 156)." This is how, from a contemporary hip-hop perspective, Duke Ellington's tuxes and Miles Davis' suits can look like an attempt to escape the streets and act white.
Nelson George, troubled by an encounter with an upper class Ivy League graduate who affected an inarticulate B-boy pose, asked in Essence (November, 1993): "How do we make non-street style cool for young brothers and sisters?" Festival and Carter G. Woodson Institute guest Robert Farris Thompson traces an "aesthetic of the cool," an ideal of grace, back to early African art and language. Thompson and guest Tim Reid, whose new TV series Linc's offers a wider spectrum of black class roles than Hollywood blaxploitation films can muster, are broadening the ghettocentric definition of cool. (For some healthy culture shock, catch Pam Grier as Foxy Brown on Friday night at Culbreth Theatre and playing a lobbyist on Linc's Saturday morning at Newcomb).
Just as Robert Farris Thompson sees black coolness as embodying an artful gracefulness rather than a tough self-armoring, so John Cassavetes saw something surprisingly different from macho cool in the jazz musician. In the photo, Cassavetes' wide open mouth and chest suggest that he may be mimicking the openness and non-phallic physicality he hears in the music. He stated this feeling directly in a 1984 interview in The Wire: "They have these little tin weapons -- they don't shoot ... The jazz musician doesn't deal with the structured life ..." Like Jack Kerouac and Allan Ginsberg, Cassavetes was inspired by bebop's improvisatory play with musical structure, the spontaneous creativity, the fluidity of movement in response to the environment and the ensemble in the jam session. Kerouac called his jazz-inspired automatic writing "spontaneous bop prosody," and, with Festival guest David Amram, he pioneered the jazz and poetry session that his friends Amram, Ed Sanders and Diane di Prima will renew on Saturday night in Culbreth Theatre.
As Cassavetes scholar Ray Carney points out, the essence of Cassavetes' art has been an effort to burst through all social poses and to celebrate the art of actorly improvisation in everyday life. Characters must be fluid, adaptive to the environment and relationships, and not fixed sets of behaviors and attributes, both in life and in Cassavetes' movies (but not in most Hollywood films, which Cassavetes detested and acted in only to make enough money to shoot his own). And so the film he was making when the photograph was taken, Shadows, which is considered a classic of Beat Cinema, contains a stunning critique of a Beat hipster poseur trying to be cool.
The character played by Ben Carruthers, bedecked in black leather and sunglasses, reading Kerouac, and literally a biracial "White Negro" (Norman Mailer's brilliant characterization of the hipster identity) is visibly in thrall to the James Dean rebel teen image. Yet the true Beats were, in Kerouac's words, "mad to live;" only their images were cool. [3] What Beats like Kerouac truly found inspiring in Dean, Brando, and other method performers was the "hot," not cool, vulnerability that they displayed, particularly in the expressive, gestural improvisations that burst through the script and conveyed the actor's frustration with the limitations of words and roles. (Method acting, in other words, is not unlike the spontaneous "riffing" that jazz musicians play off of fixed melodies; Cassavetes deliberately wrote loose, messy, lifelike dialogue and characters to encourage even freer riffing from his actors). In spite of that fieriness so evident in his three featured roles, the "cool" image of James Dean that holds powerful sway over the Carruthers character, Benny, and Dean worshipers still today is the frozen, photographed Dean with his bike, sunglasses, and practiced cool pose. [4]
Ultimately, Benny's efforts to remain invulnerable within his Beat pose are invaded by a beating by other tough guys that he suspiciously seems to invite and blissfully accept when it's over. Kerouac had clarified that he came up with the name "Beat" to signify "beatitude, not beat up. You feel this. You feel it in a beat, in jazz real cool jazz." But Beat meant all these kinds of beats, especially beat up. Beat masculinity is very much about achieving transcendence through embracing the violent Moloch/Control System/National Security State (a new study by David Savran, Taking it Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture, persuasively makes this case). And the rebel males who reflected the Beat rebellion in the movies took their beatings with an uncanny regularity: Montgomery Clift in From Here to Eternity, James Dean in East of Eden, Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, One Eyed Jacks, etc. Even if they acted cool and self-contained, the true vulnerability and permeability of their shells was constantly manifested.
Another "cool" character of the era, currently enjoying a popular revival, was the Swinger. This character's pose was taken apart in the second Cassavetes film screening in this year's Festival, Killing of a Chinese Bookie. The King of Swingers, Frank Sinatra, is in the midst of his own revival (in a career filled with resurrections, it's hard to believe he's really dead). As with James Dean, the image of Sinatra that seems to survive is stereotypical cool -- the hip, tough Swinger. [5] And like Dean, Sinatra was another popular cultural muse for Kerouac (check out The Dharma Bums). Once again, it was the far more complex combination of swagger and vulnerability, masculine bravado and fearful, wounded weakness that his art conveys both in song and on screen, that truly made him inspirational to Beats and many fans. Roger Gilbert has recently written a study, to be published in Frank Sinatra and Popular Culture: Essays on an American Icon by Leonard Mustazza (Greenwood, late 1998), about the outer and inner personae in Sinatra's musical art entitled "The Swinger and the Loser." The article is about the mutability of outside and inside (communicated most powerfully in performances of, naturally, "I've Got You Under My Skin)," conveyed through Sinatra's vocal interweaving of a swinger's belting, brassy tone and a loser's brooding, softer sound. His movie roles are overwhelmingly depressive {"who else has made such a string of bleak, hopeless cinematic statements?" Michael Ventura asked in The Austin Chronicle in June). Take a look at The Manchurian Candidate and From Here to Eternity (where his masochism tops Montgomery Clift's) in the Festival, and then, if you're not already too low, rent The Man With the Golden Arm.
John Cassavetes, I'm convinced, felt an affinity or compassion for Swingers. In Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Cosmo Vitelli's a low-grade Sinatra, presiding over a troupe of sweet but sleazy performers, gambling, drinking, covering up his ties to the Mob with the elegant way he wears his tuxedo and carnation. Cassavetes' film shatters Vitelli's complacency, but conveys a strong affection for its Swinger hero's soul, portrayed so beautifully by Ben Gazzara. In surrounding himself in his movies with a recurring troupe of performer/friends -- Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, Gena Rowlands, Seymour Cassel -- Cassavetes, I've sometimes thought, created independent film's alternative Rat Pack. And in that fascinating photograph, can you see it? Dancing spastically, he's the spitting image of Jerry Lewis, the loser double of Sinatra's much cooler Rat Pack pal Dean Martin. [6]
John Cassavetes had no trouble identifying with Losers, unlike Sinatra, who seemed pretty miserable about the Loser inside. Cassavetes said in The Wire: "I've always been able to work with anybody [who] doesn't want success." With these words, Cassavetes aligned himself with the Beats, and their outrageous escape from the work ethic and the '50s reigning "Organization Man" and "breadwinner" masculine roles. In fact, he joined a tradition of bohemian defiance towards alienated labor from Karl Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue's The Right to Be Lazy through the Hippies, Punks, and, recently the Slackers. Slackers and other subcultures expressing themselves in the underground world of zines, according to Stephen Duncombe in Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture, "give the word 'loser' a new meaning, changing it from insult to accolade, and transforming personal failure into an indictment of the alienating aspects of our society" (Notes from Undergroud, Verso, 1997, p. 21). There is even a zine called Cool Loser.
The proud geeks behind the zines favor irony as their mode of expression: "Irony is one of the ways that zinesters keep the vultures off their culture," explains Duncombe. But irony is in trouble, because commercial culture is happily appropriating it in plenty of ads on MTV and elsewhere. "Alternative" Spin Magazine recognizes the problem on its current cover, when it ironically announces the turn away from irony by the Slacker singer who gained fame with the song "Loser": "Beck Stripped Bare: Fresh Prince of Cool Tries Out That Whole Sincerity Thing."
The problem, as Festival guest Thomas Frank, author of The Conquest of Cool and Commodify Your Dissent! will elaborate in a forum at the Curry School, is that cool rebellion is the fuel that drives advertising and the market economy:
The people who staff the Combine aren't like Nurse Ratched. They aren't Frank Burns, they aren't the Church Lady, they aren't Dean Wormer from Animal House, they aren't those repressed old folks in the commercials who want to ban Tropicana Fruit Twisters. They're hipper than you can ever hope to be because hip is their official ideology, and they're always going to be there at the poetry reading to encourage your "rebellion" with a hearty "right on, man!" before you even know they're in the auditorium. You can't outrun them, or even stay ahead of them for very long; it's their racetrack, and that's them waiting at the finish line to congratulate you on how outrageous your new style is, on how you shocked those stuffy prudes out in the heartland. ("Why Johnny Can't Dissent," Baffler #6, 1995).
Frank will join Roger Ebert, Ray Carney, and Mark Edmundson in a Festival panel Friday on "Hip Irony: The New Geek Cinema and the Curse of Tarantino." A recent article by Ebert contends that the ironically presented violence, racism, and tastelessness presented with some critical and redemptive perspective by Tarantino, the King of Cool Geeks, is getting out of control in the independent film scene. Films like the upcoming Thursday trust "that an audience in the age of irony would find it uncool to be offended."
It may be the right moment to take stock of how we got here, how the independent feature film movement has come to this pass. Let's view this history through the prism of the alternative subcultures that, I believe, help generate independent films and sometimes propel them into the mainstream. The movement, most agree, began with Cassavetes, who sounded off in 1957 on the Jean Shepherd radio show about how he'd like to make a film outside the studio system. Contributions then poured in; hence, Shadows. The "New American Cinema" was born, with Beat and jazz culture features by Cassavetes and Shirley Clarke part of its impressive legacy. Cassavetes begat Martin Scorsese, convincing him to make his next movie after Boxcar Bertha for himself, not Roger Corman. That movie was Mean Streets, whose driving inspiration was not jazz, but rock n' roll culture, embodied by Robert De Niro's character. [7] Punk culture helped produce Jim Jarmusch and the next milestone in the independent feature movement, Stranger than Paradise. [8] The emerging slacker movement helped propel some successful independent features by Linklater, Hartley, Smith, but the full potential of amoral geekdom, carried by an outsized talent who subsumed the lessons of all the independent filmmakers who preceded him, was only unleashed when Tarantino came on the scene. Tarantino raised the stakes considerably and unwittingly brought us the intense need for sensation and profit that is driving "New Geek Cinema."
There is an entirely different lineage that is increasingly forgotten in all the hype about American Independent Film, and it also took off from Cassavetes. Shadows reflected the faith in spontaneity and improvisation that came out of jazz and Beat culture. Still, Jonas Mekas and the emerging artists of '60s "underground film," including Ken Jacobs, Jack Smith, and Carolee Schneemann (whose works are in this Festival) felt that the spontaneity didn't go far enough; Cassavetes wouldn't let his camera be as free as his body in the photo. The underground filmmakers' spontaneity led them to abandon narrative, continuity, feature length, and norms of focus, exposure, and visual legibility; they created the cinematic equivalent of "action painting." They also abandoned norms of propriety and self-censorship, and let bisexuality out of the bottle, to the consternation of the courts. Their movement was dubbed by Jonas Mekas the "Baudelarian Cinema," because of their films' ties to the Baudelarian Decadent/Symbolist poetic tradition.
Meanwhile, another kind of Baudelarian filmmaker countered the fiery passion of Smith, Jacobs, and Schneemann with the minimalist coolness of the dandy. Many have associated Andy Warhol with this archetype (including the band, the Dandy Warhols), described here by Baudelaire himself: "the dandy's beauty consists above all in the cold appearance which comes from the unshakable resolution not to be moved; one might say the latent fire which makes itself felt, and which might, but does not wish to, shine forth." Warhol watched the spontaneous creative and sexual freedom of his Superstar and artist friends (most impressively in his greatest work, The Chelsea Girls, playing on opening night) from a static position that was the opposite of Cassavetes' body's and Ken Jacobs' camera's vitality. It was the ultimate coolness: dead and vampirish (Baudelaire's poem "You Whom I Worship" desires death as "that last coolness which delights me best").
A tradition of experimental filmmaking grows out of Jacobs, Warhol, et. al., and there is much there that is magnificent. But the works do not screen at Sundance, and publicity and exhibitions are rare. If you're interested, you can start exploring from the Flicker website. Meanwhile, Ken Jacobs and Carolee Schneemann still create astonishing works of art, often para-cinematic performances and installations that extend the Beat and jazz traditions of spontaneous art. Meet them while they're in Charlottesville, along with the other great Beat artists and method actors and directors attending the Festival, and re-connect with the glorious traditions that launched Cassavetes' uncool dance.
Cassavetes' Dance
