faces
everyone say congrats on another cool and normal not at all insufferable post carrie
I know I keep saying that bed crumbs is going to reorg and have more of a structure to it or something, idk, to make it feel more like a disciplined thing and not a series of random dispatches but I’ve been BUSY. “Doing what??? You are unemployed,” you may say. Which, first of all, I am now SELF-employed. Second: I’ve been throwing out one book proposal (lol) to write another that I actually like (lmao) and when I’m not doing that, I’m using the Gena Rowlands retrospective at the Roxy to fill in my blind spots to become a John Cassavetes completist after years of just watching the same few over and over and over again, because if there’s one thing I love, it’s a little recreational a/v project. (I promise I will actually finish this one, unlike The Sopranos, which, for anyone still following, remains stalled out at season 5 episode 12.) That’s where todays’s dumbass “carrie shut up” piece comes from. I swear to god this is the last time for awhile that I write one of these; I’ll be back with some list or something in silly-goofy territory soon.
Giving you the heads up that there are very mild movie spoilers ahead, even though they’re all for movies that are at least 40 years old, so you don’t really have any room to be mad at me for spoiling them anyway, but whatever.
Years ago, before the timeline shifted, the Upper West Side gym I went to on Saturdays was occupied by a mostly senior crowd. I almost looked forward to the time spent dawdling in the locker room after class more than I did the workout itself. I’ve written about this before—the utter joy I felt catching glimpses of the private lives of women many years my senior, hearing them gossip about their exes and their grown children and mutual frenemies. I didn’t really know anyone’s name—they all addressed each other as “sweetheart” or “beautiful” or “gorgeous”—but their faces were always familiar. Those faces, so marked by life, seemed so sure of the power they held. In that space, my youth was worth nothing. I was the invisible one, not them. (Well, save for one time, when one impossibly chic woman singled me out to remark that my face—then all baby fat cheeks and big eyes I still had yet to grow into—was an asset, actually, that would keep me looking good years from now, along with her tips to “always have lots of water, exercise, don’t take the subway, and find a good doctor.”)
They never came back after the pandemic. I think about them once a week as I grab my belongings and dash, no reason to stay any longer than I need to anymore. I wonder what they’re doing. I wonder if they’re okay. I miss hearing their stories. I miss seeing their faces. I probably need to see them now more than I did then.
Here is what I wrote in a since-deleted (sorry, I got self-conscious one night) substack on these locker room encounters in 2019:
I always thought I couldn’t wait to look as old as I often think myself to be on the inside. I often wonder if, once I get to that age where I have lost my muscle mass, I’ll become all skin and bones, reedlike the way I used to be but without as much effort, and have a body that looks as fragile as I sometimes feel. I long for the day to come when I have a mature, wizened air about me, all hollow cheeks and crows feet and a line beveled into my flesh where I furrow my left eyebrow when I’m focusing, a look that definitively states that I have earned my right to be taken seriously. I keep waiting for all the lives I have not yet lived, and perhaps never will, to etch their way across my face. I always thought maybe I’d be beautiful, or something close to it, when I got older. Older women are always more beautiful. Young women are just cute.
I have to laugh. It has been five years and now I have the face I’d always wanted, or close enough, at least. Now, though, I long not to advance time—and definitely not to reverse it—but to pause it. My cheeks hollowing out is good for now, but maybe bad for later; I worry I should have hung onto some of that plumpness a little longer. My eyes are almost always underscored by deep, dark circles, and are beginning to crinkle at the corners when I smile; sometimes I practice my grin in the mirror to see just how much joy I can exude before I won’t be able to stand to look at photographed proof of it later. I have googled “tear trough filler” enough times to log on to my dermatologist’s scheduling portal at least twice a month, only exit out of it because I have also googled the horror stories of messing with that area enough times to scare myself from following through. My bathroom vanity is stuffed full of multiple skincare products to use in the morning and even more to use at night. I wear SPF and hats even when it’s cloudy, I face massage every day, and willingly zap my own face with microcurrents three times a week. I have, on one occasion, paid a comical amount of money in exchange for a minuscule amount of Juvederm injected into the crevasse running from my nose to the corner of my mouth. I have referred to my appearance now as a glow up, as if the difference in my appearance over the past five years was completely natural and normal, a part of evolution, a settling into the face I maybe was always supposed to have. I do not mention that I often feel like I’m not doing enough, even though just maintaining a relatively normal appearance is the outcome of an increasing amount of time, money, and effort. In short: I spent the first two thirds of my life wanting to look old, only to spend the last chunk of it trying to stay the same.
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I miss seeing older faces on screen. Untouched, without even the trace of “good work” for those with trained eyes to discern. It hadn’t really occurred to me to miss this until Thursday night at a screening of John Cassavetes’ 1984 film Love Streams. Sure, here and there I will find reason to lament the current state of appearances. I may be watching a particularly terrible Netflix show and type “[REDACTED] face” in the search bar of Twitter, not with any intent of age or choice shaming, but just looking for confirmation that I’m not the only one distracted by the expressionless, uncanny valley visage in front of me. But it’s mostly only when I’m watching older movies, movies where people still looked like people—crooked noses, unbleached teeth, frizzy hair—that I notice what I’ve actually been missing, and realize how much of what I see on screen today is disconnected from what I see in the world around me.
John Cassavetes loved faces, loved getting in tight on his actors, past the point of comfort for an audience, playing with our desire to look away from such forced intimacy by making the images in front of us too captivating to break our gaze from. There’s that shot of Gena Rowlands in Faces, the one where a single tear streaks down her face, that’s perhaps the most arresting image I’ve ever seen on screen. It’s easy to forget the scene begins close on John Marley, lined, unshaven, greying around the temples, and even easier to see why it’s this image that sticks. Rowlands is young (35), and in the high contrast, grainy 16 millimeter film, looks even younger; her skin is smooth, her bone structure impeccable, her morning-after makeup glamorous. It’s the definition of tragic beauty.
But beauty, to Cassavetes, didn’t always mean young or glamorous. It mostly just meant true. Just because his core company of actors got older didn’t mean he didn’t want us to really look closely at them faces anymore. Tight shots abound in Love Streams, made nearly thirty years after Faces, and watching Cassavetes and Rowlands, then in their 50s, up on the big screen is nothing short of captivating. Both are meant to be a little pathetic: He’s an alcoholic playboy author, at an age where his habit of paying young women to hang around his house and ensure he’s never alone reads as sad. She’s a newly divorced woman, who has spent the past fifteen years or so defining herself in the context of her family, and now, alone for the first time, finds herself without her own individual identity and spiraling out. They’re not supposed to be beautiful, but when I watch them, I catch myself not even being able to blink. It’s a revelation to see their lines, their saggy bits, their hollow parts—every spot that has held joy or sorrow or anger, a late night or cigarette too many, time in the sun and time at the bar, and is marked by it.
We know their lives because it’s written in their faces. We know those people. They’re movie stars, sure, but not movie stars. They’re your mom and dad, your aunt and uncle, your neighbors, teachers, coworkers. It shouldn’t feel profound, but somehow the absence of those sorts of faces in most of today’s films makes it seem so when watching work from the past. How thin the line between us, the audience, and them, the stars, used to be.
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John Cassavetes loved aging. Okay, maybe didn’t love it, but he was certainly deeply interested in it. The concept of getting older makes its mark across nearly every one of his films. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s awkward, sometimes it’s devastating. Sometimes, it’s downright unnerving. Most of the time, though, it’s spoken about as if there’s a promising result waiting for us at the end of the agonizing process. “I like kids,” Cassavetes’ character in Love Streams tells his young estranged son. “And I like older people, ‘cause they seem to have this secret. They don’t need anything. You don’t need anything. You’re innocent, and so are older people. They’re innocent. That’s what I like about them.” If it sounds familiar to viewers well-versed in his films, it’s because he expressed the same sentiment in Opening Night: “You know why I love older people?” Cassavetes’ character—an actor playing a photographer—asks early on in the play being staged within the film. “Because they know everything. But they don’t show that they know everything. I can stand here, I can look at this woman, this old lady, and I can count every wrinkle on her face. And for every wrinkle there’s a pain and for every pain there’s a year and for every year there’s a person, there’s a death, there’s a history, and there’s a kindness.”
I always loved the last scene of Opening Night, the 1977 backstage drama he made with Rowlands about an aging actress who begins to lose her grip on reality, when the audience is made to watch the play within the movie unfold. If I’ve seen the film itself at least a million times, I have watched that final scene on its own a million more. It never grows stale, never feels anything less than electric and free-wheeling and slightly dangerous; I never feel any less in awe of the way the first two-thirds of the film had played aging as a psychological horror, only for it to turn into something resembling comedy at the very end. Then again, it’s fitting: as the critic Thom Andersen once wrote, Cassavetes’ “comedies face up to tragedy and reject it.” I’d argue it’s not just his comedies that do it, but all of his films. And isn’t that a lot like life? We’re faced with tragedy, and we do everything we can to push it away.
In that last twelve minute long stretch of the film, Cassavetes and Rowlands, as their on screen characters, Maurice and Myrtle, playing their on stage characters, Marty and Virginia, banter back and forth about getting older. Rowlands has spent the past two hours experiencing a breakdown brought on by the thought that addressing this very fact for the first time on stage will define her life moving forward; she grows increasingly haunted by her younger self. Now, improvising the entire final act of the play in hopes of finding “something human” within a lousy melodrama, they both lay out their vulnerabilities in a way that they can laugh at. The scene in the play is improvised; the scene in the movie is, too. A common misconception about Cassavetes’ films is that they were entirely made up, but that isn’t so. They’re tightly scripted, save for those rare parts, like this one, that are born out of built-in moments designed for spontaneity. Thus the scene becomes an infinite house of mirrors: you know the characters are putting themselves into the play; you know the actors are putting themselves into the characters. The concerns of Virginia and Marty are the concerns of Myrtle and Maurice, which are the concerns of Gena and John. Even Cassavetes would admit that: “I softened the aging theme because it was all very, very painful and the people I care about were upset by it. I mean Gena,” he said.
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When I was younger and first watching Opening Night, grappling with aging, and my sense of self, seemed like such a faraway thing, nothing for me to worry about for years to come. I get it now: the uncanny feeling of looking in the mirror and seeing the person I once was slipping away, and not quite recognizing the face looking back. Well, actually, not so much not recognizing—the older I get the more I think I live up to the TikTok trend that insists “the oldest daughter looks like a yassified version of her dad,” which makes me so upset that, one, it is true, and, two, that a social media platform has once again told me I have not had a single unique experience in my life. But anyway. It’s a version of myself I’m not always expecting nonetheless.
I am not proud of any of this, though I’m not exactly ashamed of it either. Mostly, I realize how hypocritical it makes me. I used to always half-joke that I know I won’t be at my hottest until I’m in my 50s, but maybe that’s just wishful thinking. This may be my least self-critical era, but I have always had something about the way I look to find fault with, to varying degrees of intensity. I don’t know why I thought getting older would be some kind of magic fix, as if looking different would be different in a way that I liked.
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Myrtle/Virginia finally reaches a conclusion: They’re not themselves. Not the versions of themselves they had always thought they were, anyway. “Okay, it’s definite then. We’ve been invaded. There’s someone posing here as us…There’s one question I’d like answered: What do you suppose they’ve done with us? Do you think they killed us? Do you think they murdered us? Do you think we’re dead? Or, do you think we’re just losing our sense of humor.”
Just like that: tragedy becomes comedy. There’s a little serious introspection built in, of course, but mostly: it’s funny. Why get yourself so twisted up about something as silly as getting older? There’s nothing special or unique about it; it happens to everyone. I’d never do the substance, obviously. (Even if I haven’t seen the film—I don’t care to throw up, thanks—you can bet I’ve read the entire plot summary.) You could not pay me to be 25 again; but now I’m not so sure I’m eager to be 50 yet, either. I know I should be grateful for it, that getting old is a gift, actually, and sometimes I can be, but the platitude still often rings a little corny to me, and that’s okay. But I might as well face it, and live—as Myrtle and Maurice are doing in their gleefully anarchic performance of the scene itself, as Cassavetes did in each and every one of his films—in each moment, until a lot of moments have passed, and I don’t think about them anymore.
Faces and Opening Night are streaming on Criterion Channel and HBO Max; you can also rent them on Amazon Prime or AppleTV. Love Streams is only technically available on DVD or Blu-ray from Criterion but there is a great rip of it on the Internet Archive when it returns from the war (scheduled maintenance) and idk I just kind of feel like John Cassavetes would not mind you pirating his work as long as it meant you saw and appreciated it :)
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