Let It Run: Machinery in the Mirror in Milton Moses Ginsberg’s Coming Apart

Art & Trash, episode 26
Let It Run: Machinery in the Mirror in Milton Moses Ginsberg’s Coming Apart
Stephen Broomer, February 2, 2024

Memoria hospitis unius diei prætereuntis, the memory of a guest that passeth by. Milton Moses Ginsberg's Coming Apart, a film made at an early height of tension between dramatic storytelling and documental, cinema-verité style, purports to be the voyeuristic diary of Joe Glassman, a diary that at first glance appears to be about secretly recording the encounters he has with women a rented Manhattan apartment, but which on closer examination reveals a more desperate and despairing project, aimed inward.

In this episode, Stephen Broomer unpacks the narrative and visual maze of Coming Apart and its myriad interpretations of the notion of reflection, a film that aspires to self-destruct.

SCRIPT:

Joe Glazer is a psychiatrist who is living in a new apartment under an assumed name. He is the unwanted neighbour of his former lover, Monica, and, it seems, he has moved into this building in order to be near to her, following a period of emotional agitation brought about by the end of their affair. He has taken to filming his life in this apartment, a series of appointments, some spontaneous, some planned. For this he uses a concealed movie camera which he has mounted inside of a ‘kinetic art object’, a mirrored sculpture that sits on his coffee table and that composes a panopticon: it is pointed at the couch where Joe hosts his visitors, but also, at a large mirror that reflects the rest of the room and the unit’s windows that look out on the Manhattan skyline. Despite his charisma, the details of Joe’s vulnerability, anguish, and emotional erosion emerge slowly: these details are casually buried within scenes that are subject to the transfixed stare of the concealed camera. Coming Apart maintains a commitment to this stylistic conceit throughout: it begins with Joe testing the sound and image, and the scenes that follow are strung together with intermittent repositioning of the camera, fleeting moments of direct eye contact between Joe and the camera, flash frames and other material disruptions that serve to reinforce this notion of unadorned cinematic truth, of pure, direct document. This is a style of minimalist, vernacular cinema verité that would become identified, decades later, with the found footage horror film.

In Joe’s opening ‘sound check’, he rattles off a quote from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées: “I am frightened and wonder to find myself here rather than there, now rather than then,” an axiom that is so engrained in him as to come out familiar as a chant, like a half-remembered verse, like a prayer. In this passage, Pascal wondered not only at what aligns a life to an era, but at the operations of a higher being. The question is not only why now and not then, but who has arranged this, by what will am I led, by what hand am I placed? Who put me here? Pascal ends this passage, memoria hospitis unius diei prætereuntis, a quote from the Wisdom of Solomon, “the remembrance of a guest that stays a day,” or “that passeth by,” The glimpse of a life that lingers after death. Joe’s fleeting, rote sing-song is at the heart of the puzzle that follows, for Pascal’s words suggest a man who can’t feel at home in this world anymore. It will emerge that Joe is homeless, in a sense: he has lost his job, he is living in a self-imposed exile, and through the course of all of this deception and philandering, his marriage ends. He tells a lover that he doesn’t live in the apartment, but in a house with his wife; it is only later that this claim becomes suspect.

Coming Apart is not only concerned with narratological puzzles: the apparent minimalism of its composition is complex and demanding. The first visible ‘shot’ presents us with the puzzle of vision at the heart of the film, that of recognizing the illusion of a reflection: Joe and a lover lie in a postcoital embrace, but their images appear also in a small mirror behind them, perfectly recreated, a reflection of a reflection that also becomes a homunculus, and as such, something like a mod, cinematic feedback loop. This is the first indication of the film’s visual deceit: that even a single reflection, given an intent presence, becomes as disorienting as a hall of mirrors. When the image rights itself—with the tiny mirror replaced by a large wall mirror—the composition becomes more coherent but just as metaphorically potent. It is a literalization of Jacques Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage — it is a mirrored stage! — which in turn declares Joe’s apperception, that is, his sense of himself as object. This is what allows Joe to see himself as someone other than who he is, as Joe Glassman, the name he has assumed which summons all of this mirrored glass, which suggests fragility—he is broken glass, and those who touch him tend to get cut—but which suggests also transparency, one quality that, despite his honest and direct manner, he plainly lacks. The encounters he has in the mirror are bizarre, hysterical and painful: with a coterie of women, he discusses divorce, self-mutilation, modelling, bestiality, yet despite this confessional tone, he is mere surface. When he expresses curiosity, it comes parcelled with his dry humour, projecting an affable charm that occasionally snaps. When it does, he reacts with either a sullen silence, sarcasm, or barking rage. His guests are frequently self-dramatizing, performing archetypes: bored Bohemians, reluctant housewives, lonely hearts. Whenever he looks to the camera, the line between man and machine is blurred: the camera has become an extension of this object he sees in the mirror, Joe Glassman, a construction too aware of how little is left to hold him together. The tangled screen direction becomes a powerful, if laboured, metaphor for his condition.

Why here, and why now? Why here and not there, why now and not then? Joe’s encounters range from free and quick affection, to rebuffed embraces; a willing partner cries rape because it gets her off; a seemingly willing partner changes her mind, protests, then asks for money, non-consent giving way to prostitution. The world Joe sees through others is a hell of disconnected impulses, stymied desires, dammed-up love and love abused. Joe is misanthropic in the sense that he cares little about the ethical implications of turning his camera on these women. What appears at first to be a shallow, taciturn man collecting evidence of sexual conquests, turns to something far more painful, as Joe’s recordings also become evidence of failed relationships, of his temper, of his manipulation, of his profound anguish. He is a lonely man surrounded by the dried-out bandage of temporary ‘love’. He is a voyeur, but he is not the masturbating voyeur of the sexploitation comedy, that milquetoast flasher in fogged-up glasses, hiding in the bushes on the other side of the window. There is no other side to this window. Joe cannot find a solution to his problems, nor can he even see his problems clearly, without the surrogacy of this device, this candid camera, and even then, does it give him an answer? The great blank question at the heart of Coming Apart is just that: does it help Joe to study himself? What does it mean to meditate in an emergency? And will self-examination ever answer that lethal question, of why now, of why me? What commingling of sperm and egg brought him to occupy these times, which for Joe seem to be profoundly uninteresting times? As the parade goes on, his position as a man out-of-time becomes clear: the only way that this can end is in violence. Memoria hospitis unius diei prætereuntis, the remembrance of a guest that passeth by. Are his recordings a therapy to stitch himself back together, or is Joe the man who left his will on film?

Coming Apart challenges us to take Joe to task for his impropriety: his former patient JoAnn speaks to this directly when they first reconnect, before they become lovers, as she speaks of the temptation to sleep together, and the inappropriateness of doing so in their relationship as doctor and patient. They’re later seen having sex: she looks at him with desire and fascination and he looks at the camera, mugging for it and staring quizzically into it. JoAnn will serve as the central avatar for the audience’s discomfort with Joe: their relationship becomes the central one in the film, their neuroses butting up against each other, her full of unsatisfied desire and longing, him restless and with a seemingly inexhaustible sense of disappointment. They are not looking for the same thing. They deceive each other into looking like what the other needs. His roughness towards her and her tenderness towards him betray this disconnection, this competition of needs. Later, he throws a temper tantrum when she tries to take a photograph of their reflection while having sex, a scene which reveals him to be a hypocrite but also offers a clue to the true purpose of his self-documentation. This is not about spying on women, or collecting secret, personal mementos of his lovers; he wants to be in control of his own image. His records of Joe Glassman are a means of putting back together a man who is coming apart. Many of the women that Joe meets with embody a resilience that he doesn’t share: he’s not resilient. His sardonic detachment distances him from the emotions of others. This will prove his undoing.

Joe’s encounters are transient and one informs another: an early encounter with a masochistic woman, whose lover has burnt a triangular pattern into her chest with cigarettes, anticipates a later encounter, with JoAnn, who he burns with a cigarette against her will. This is the first sign of the violence that will overshadow the remainder of their relationship. Their exchanges tend to be focused on reversals, for example, when JoAnn’s obvious discomfort at a party turns to Joe’s own discomfort, and her amusement, at the revelation that a guest he has been fondling is a cross-dresser. His response to the begging attentions of the cross-dresser shift between pouting and pain and laughter: this range of emotions he performs in the midst of an orgy, a melodrama enacted by the only man in the room who is aware of the camera.

Joe’s film-within-a-film is a search for catharsis, a messy and inevitably social catharsis that draws in unwilling participants as witnesses, objects, and victims: Joe’s search for catharsis emerges in a late sequence in which Joe’s hysterical ranting to the camera is disrupted by mechanical failures and sync schisms. Rip Torn plays Joe as a compromised, sensitive creature, his self-image under duress, his assertions of control, strained, felt through trembling grins, blank stares, bitten fingers. Coming Apart formalizes catharsis by threading the viewer through the eye of a needle, introducing all of Joe’s mannerisms, his hints of unravelling slow to come: the camera can only bear witness to Joe’s cracking front and the fissures of raw feeling that spring up. The formal disruptions, of flash-frames and chemical smears between sequences, out-of-phase audio, hums, and Joe’s own remote-controlled ellipses, reinforce the film’s cinema verité stylization, but they also create a parallel between figure and enveloping form: Joe is coming apart and the film is too; in fact, more than coming apart, neither seems to have been soundly assembled in the first place. Thus the film-within-a-film is a metaphor for Joe’s worsening condition. With Joe’s final attempt to address the camera, these disruptions become an extension of him: in confession he winces in pain, and his furrowed brow, clasped hands, and gestures of grief become a mime act, his speech cut out, a primitive, post-Freudian encounter with image; the talking cure has run out.

Filmmaker Milton Moses Ginsberg made Coming Apart in the immediate wake of Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary, a film that dealt with the ruthless search for unguarded reality through filmmaking. David Holzman was an overenthusiastic filmmaker whose interest was in transforming his life into art while his life fell apart around him, and the character speaks candidly of these details, the loss of his job, the end of his relationship, the likelihood of his being drafted into Viet Nam, and finally, the loss of his equipment and impossibility of continuing, a painful irony that plays as the last diary entry of a doomed man; Joe Glazer’s situation is similar, but his use of the movie camera is different. While both characters aim their cameras inward, and both characters are arguably engaged in therapeutic filmmaking, Glazer is not frank about his circumstances. Holzman is an eager raconteur while Glazer is reluctant. This reluctance seems dignified, despite the themes of voyeurism and perversity: by the final sequence of the film, it seems more like emotional paralysis.

Joe experiences a final gauntlet of confrontations: with his ex-lover Monica, who seems to blame herself for his condition while admonishing him; his wife, who demands a divorce having discovered the extent of his dissociative behaviour, which she also recognizes as philandering; and a very young woman he has had several encounters with, who he confides in about his camera, who is excited by it and who wants to make a movie with him. Unlike her, he doesn’t want romantic or erotic mementos: he just wants to keep making the same movie he’s been making. JoAnn has experienced a parallel decline throughout the film, and their final confrontation is the most anyone will take him to task. In her words, Joe has used her; he has ruined her life; he has brought out her worst impulses, and she has been left loveless, homeless, and exploited. She becomes a voice, and perhaps, an avenging advocate for all of the women in Joe’s film.

Joe does not appear in the final sequence: instead, JoAnn moves through the apartment with a gun, alternately dancing and weeping, consumed with emotion. The camera is set to record in slow motion, and, in slow motion, she loads a clip into the gun, with Joe’s electric blues records eerily slowed into a heavy modal trance. She moves her hands over Joe’s ‘kinetic art object’, the sculpture that contains the camera: she looks into the lens of the camera, but she is also looking at a reflection of herself. When she holds the gun up to the camera, she holds it up to her own reflection. And when she smashes her image, she reveals the camera, still unseen to us. The apperception that Joe found in his reflection, in his recordings, in his new name and new home, gives way to JoAnn’s apperception: the camera now revealed, as a final humiliation, she recognizes herself as object. In an act of rage, she smashes the big mirror, and in doing so shatters our primary vantage point to the scene, a grand break in the composition, like the burning of a frame in a projector, like a lost loop, like the unrolling of a reel to reveal the projection beam. The mirror falls, in slow motion, showing just a little more of the scene than had been visible previously, a boundary broken but also a broadening of the space, inconsequential details that pass out of view. What’s left is a bare white wall. In this moment, Pascal’s question is as true for JoAnn as it was for Joe: why now and not then, why here and not there, and who is to blame?

Whether Joe is dead, or simply gone elsewhere to shore against the ruins of his life, the presence of this woman and this gun and this revelation bears a strong, if ambiguous, implication. Joe had lost something before his filming began: his sense of subjectivity, his ability to identify with himself, with Joe Glazer, his ability to process emotions. His film becomes a tracing of himself, and a surrogate for his own consciousness. Films cannot be assigned human agency: they are constructions, theatre, inscriptions, recordings, they begin and they end. Credits will roll by dint of convention, surely as the lights come up. The implied off-screen violence at the end of Coming Apart is aimed not only among the characters but at the film itself, at the apparatus, at the reel-within-a-reel and the reel in the booth. This ending is more murderous, more suicidal, more apocalyptic than the average film, for films also achieve something else: they create worlds, at times insular worlds that reflect mental and emotional energies, the subjectivities of a given soul. Why here and not there? Why now and not then? Coming Apart is unique as a film that, in its unravelling, commits suicide.