Love Streams

RIP Gena Rowlands

I wasn’t sure which Gena Rowlands movie to revisit after learning that she died. A part of me wanted to watch Another Woman, the late 80s Woody Allen film that I believe is better than Hannah and Her Sisters (even if it’s less iconic). Another part of me was like, do Gloria or Woman Under the Influence—the two performances that garnered her Oscar noms. I settled on Love Streams, mostly because it was the Cassavetes film I remembered least. I don’t know why I did that to myself at 10pm on a Friday night.

Like the best of Cassavetes’s films, Love Streams is a shapeless character study. It meanders and lags (complimentary) as it fixates on a pair of siblings so broken and beyond redemption that at times you wonder what you’re watching them for. Sarah and Robert Harmon (played by Rowlands and Cassavetes) are fucked. She’s a manic depressive who decides to pay her brother an extended visit after a volatile divorce. She’s discovered that her young daughter can’t stand to be around her, so she flees—first to Europe—and then to Robert’s house (Cassavetes actual home).

Robert is or was a successful writer, but we don’t see it. Instead he drinks and put his energy into the women he’s invited to live with him. He almost appears like a larger-than-life cult leader, an overwhelming (albeit handsome) patriarchal force in a house full of lovers who don’t seem to see how empty he is. There’s hope for a new romance with a singer, Susan, but Cassavetes almost sets this up to remind us that there’s no real space for Robert to grow. There’s something that feels eerily terminal about his case, something resigned within him. Surely these are echoes to Cassavetes himself—who’d die of cirrhosis only a handful of years after the film’s release—and it makes Love Streams all the more fatalistic. I’ve rarely wanted to turn away from people more.

Robert, who is forced to spend a day with a young son he’s never met, is immediately neglectful. He lets the kid drink, abandons him in a hotel room while he goes off in search of women, and seems to have no qualms about his absent role in the kid’s life. Sarah is similarly rough to root for her. In an early scene in the film, we learn exactly the kind of mother Sarah is. She drags her daughter to mediation, and exposes her to her vitriol. She speaks candidly to a judge about her marriage, and seems almost gleeful to expose her daughter to her pain. Rowlands is jerky, and plays peaks and valleys better than most, and Sarah is a monstrous force. The judge sees it. Sarah is absolutely unaware of her own emotions and the ones of the people she’s supposed to love.

Robert and Sarah remain opaque to us. There’s never an excuse or trauma we are privy to. We only know they’re trapped in a destructive (and vaguely incestuous) cycle, and for the most part they seem okay with it because they’re in it together. There’s little judgment between the two, and if anything there’s a warmth that’s otherwise missing in their other relationships. Robert is fiercely protective of Sarah, and Sarah in turn seems to be able to ignore her brother’s worst instincts. She buys a bunch of farm animals for him in the hopes that they will give him something to nurture. Eventually, Robert’s home becomes an enabling haven for the both of them, and it’s hard to imagine, even when Sarah leaves after having a dream that seems to restore her sense of balance, that they aren’t doomed.

But through it all, there’s always something to keep watching for. It’s in Sarah mantra, which she shares with a useless psychologist early on in the film. “Love is a stream, it’s continuous, it doesn’t stop,” she says. She’s justifying the extremes of her behavior, but she also gives herself—and us—a reason to continue on.

That’s not to say that Love Streams is a “love conquers all kind of film.” It never quite validates Sarah’s thesis, but it does give us a lens to view the film through. Cassavetes is relentless, never really warming us to either sibling, yet my disgusted pity morphed into an unexpected tenderness.

—

In my own writing, I’ve always been drawn to “unlikeable” characters. It’s been (amongst many other things I’m sure) a fatal flaw as I try and put together projects to sell and make. In an era dominated by a pathological fear of challenging viewers, I’m finding that few people know what to feel about a horrible onscreen person. Their anxiety turns into avoidance. They believe there's no way someone terrible can be palpable to an audience unless you find a way to explain how they got so fucked up. Unless you can convince your audience that there’s some sort of bittersweet redemption on the other side. Don Draper was raised poor and in a brothel. Don Draper learns how to meditate at the end of the series.

I don’t know if this is an unsaid requirement, but it feels like it when you’re working towards something commercial. I’ve just found it impossible to write about shitty people—especially as protagonists of a project—without facing skepticism or pushback.

I recently wrote a half-hour dark comedy pilot about George Santos-type running for office in Miami. I enjoyed writing him. I enjoyed toying with his awful brain and insecurities. I made him hard to like, and to the best of my ability tried to avoid the usual traps. Of course, there are always reasons that people end up how they end up, but isn’t it more interesting to sit with who they are now, and see if you can find something in their behavior to attach yourself to?

I was in a meeting recently, and someone asked—if I could boil it down to one thing—what is a reoccurring theme or idea one can find in my work. I asked my own question. Do you ever have thoughts or desires to do something truly terrible to someone? Like, you know you possess this ability to cause great harm, and sometimes it just feels good to flirt with that. I assumed everyone would agree. They gave me a look, and I had to quickly say that I don’t move through the world trying to hurt anyone. But in my writing, sometimes it’s nice to play out my most destructive, my most hurtful, instincts. I like to write about the monsters in all of us.

I thought about this after watching Love Streams again. Robert and Sarah are rough, and Cassavetes isn’t interesting in giving us relief or justification. There’s no background. There’s no hidden secret available to us. Again, they’re pretty opaque. Yet, if you’re a keen viewer, you to start to soften anyway. Which begs a larger question. Isn’t just being a human being enough to garner empathy?