A Woman Under the Influence

What is it with Myrtle Gordon anyway? Well, it’s Cassavetes for a start.

Myrtle is an actor more acted upon than acting – she is bent out of shape by the director, the writer, and her fellow actors. Her identity is picked at by the melodrama onstage (a scene in which she is to be slapped is the cause of acute problems) and by the men (not just the men, but particularly the men) around her: the trailer (Opening Night, 1977) captures a little of the latter, with the director’s voice, talking to Myrtle, over images of Myrtle and a young female fan:

“It has nothing to do with being a woman … And you’re not a woman anyway … No, you’re a beautiful woman … You are … I was kidding … You see, you have no sense of humor, I told you that … It’s a tradition, actresses get slapped, it’s a tradition … I love you … I want you to be good … Would I hurt you? … Well then, you’re going to have to let me slap you … It won’t work if you don’t.”

Of course, it has everything to do with being a woman, and everything to do with getting older and damaged. “I’m getting old,“ her onstage co-star says: “What do we do about that?” Myrtle’s first words offstage, over the credits, are: “They wanna be loved … They have to be loved … The whole world … Everybody wants to be loved. When I was seventeen I … I could do anything. It was so easy. My emotions were so close to the surface. I’m finding it … harder … and harder … to stay in touch.” And she wants to find a way to play the part where age doesn’t matter.

“Aging is a serious problem,” says Cassavetes: “It’s a fear. Somebody reaches forty, it’s a bigger fear. They want to be thirty. Somebody’s thirty, they want to be twenty. So they can have all the access to life.”

When a young fan who had sought her autograph at the stage door is run over and killed by a car, Myrtle is visited by the specter of the younger woman, a ghost of illness, a reflection, perhaps, of her younger self. “I’m not afraid of you,” the woman says: “You’re an older woman. You’re frightened. And you’re a coward.” Threatened, Myrtle lashes out with her fists and a bottle, and then she’s lashing out at thin air.

And Myrtle drinks. She drinks hard, and all the time. In the first few seconds of the film she is making her way to the stage and taking a long swig from the bottle. She drinks throughout the film as her identity crisis, our main concern, threatens to take down the play with her. She swallows straight from bottles of J&B that appear to be everywhere, even on stage, and by the end, blind drunk but making it through to the final act, she is accompanied to her entrance by the props man who leans towards her and whispers: “I’ve seen a lot of drunks in my day, but I’ve never seen anybody as drunk as you and still able to walk. You’re fantastic.”

And so she is.